Just days after Alex Jones was ordered to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages for falsely claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax and accusing the grieving parents of the slain children of being paid actors, Jones interviewed Republican congressional candidate Laura Loomer on his show “Infowars.”
“They think MTG is dangerous—I can’t wait until you’re in Congress,” Jones said on his Aug. 8 show, comparing Loomer to his frequent guest, the far-right congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Loomer returned the love.
“I look forward to platforming your voice in the United States Congress,” Loomer told Jones.
Loomer is just one of 119 far-right candidates running in the primaries this election season. She earned former President Donald Trump’s praise after her 2020 primary victory in Florida's 25th Congressional District but was solidly trounced by the Democratic incumbent in that year’s general election. She has yet to gain the former president’s endorsement this go round.
Facing off against longtime Rep. Daniel Webster in Florida’s 11th Congressional District, Loomer has painted Webster as a RINO—Republican in name only—and criticized him for everything from his age to his missed votes in Congress. But that’s a distraction from what she really sells: bigotry and extremism.
Loomer hopes to follow the path of extremist candidates like Joe Kent, who earlier this month beat out Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington state, one of 10 Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Around the country, 25 percent of the 119 right-wing extremist candidates identified by the Anti-Defamation League have won their primary races thus far. Running far-right candidates against incumbent Republicans was a strategy laid out by Trumpist strategists like Ali Alexander, the leader of the so-called “Stop the Steal” campaign, who promised to primary any Republican whom he viewed as insufficiently loyal to Trump during the former president’s attempted power grab in 2020.
Webster, for his part, is no moderate; the right-wing lawmaker is the preferred candidate of religious-right groups like the Family Research Council, whose endorsement of Webster cites his voting record on bills dealing with abortion and “religious liberty.” Despite Webster’s conservative credentials, Loomer has lambasted him for missing the House vote on Trump’s second impeachment. She has also outraised him and, according to the Orlando Sentinel, has “a formidable chance of winning the primary.” Whoever clinches the primary on Aug. 23 is heavily favored to win the general election.
Best known for handcuffing herself to Twitter headquarters after she got booted off the platform for her anti-Muslim comments, Loomer has decided if she can’t spew her hate on mainstream platforms, she’d like to spread it in the halls of Congress. And what kind of hate is that?
Loomer has long rallied behind white nationalist figures, spread right-wing conspiracy theories, and promoted disinformation. She proclaimed that she did not care about what happened to Muslims in the 2019 Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, where more than 50 people were murdered by a white supremacist.
In March, Loomer joined white nationalist Jared Taylor’s podcast and told him that she thought her white nationalist views would get her elected to Congress. She switched districts, she said, because Florida’s 11th District has more white people and she could be more honest about her extreme right-wing views. She went on to praise Taylor’s “white advocacy”—the preferred term of white nationalists to describe their efforts to secure a nation ruled by white people.
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Loomer is scheduled to speak at Taylor’s white nationalist American Renaissance conference this November and has promised to speak at Nick Fuentes' far-right America First Political Action Conference next year.
Such promises have brought her the support of other white nationalists. Fuentes thinks white Americans need to be more racist; hates democracy; desires taking away women’s right to vote and calls for “burning women alive more”; wants to turn the United States into a Christian fascist country; and compares himself to Hitler. He offered his endorsement of Loomer last week.
“This would be the first time one of our own got into Congress,” Fuentes said.
“People say, ‘Well, she’s a Zionist, she’s a woman. We don’t support women in office, we don’t support Zionists.’ And that’s true. Her and I disagree on the Zionist issue and on the Israel issue. The way I see it, if she gets elected, she joins 538, 526, she joins 500 and thirty-some other senators and congressmen who are Zionists,” Fuentes said. “But she would be the only one out of 500 and thirty-some congressmen and senators who is going to be fully red-pilled.”
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Loomer—who is Jewish and a woman—doesn’t seem fazed by Fuentes’ antisemitic outbursts or his misogyny. In fact, she expressed her adoration for Fuentes. “I don’t care what anyone says,” Loomer wrote on Telegram. “I love Nick Fuentes.”
She thanked Fuentes for his endorsement, urging him to “Keep up the great work!”
“I would like to reserve the title of #CongressionalGroyper,” she added. (The young white men who make up the white nationalist America First movement refer to themselves as “groypers.”)
On Sunday evening, Loomer joined the “Killstream” podcast, hosted by far-right podcaster Ethan Ralph, whose list of credentials include platforming white supremacists like failed congressional candidate Patrick Little, sharing “revenge porn” of his then 18-year-old girlfriend, and attacking a police officer.
Loomer promised to advance white nationalism and Christian nationalism if elected to Congress.
“I’m a really big supporter of the Christian nationalist movement,” Loomer said. “I’m going to fight for Christians, I’m going to fight for white people, I’m going to fight for nationalist movements.”
“But there is clearly a war on white people, there is clearly a war on Christianity in this country,” Loomer said. “Now, even though I am Jewish, I am going to fight for Christian nationalists. And I find that most of my friends and most of my allies and most of the people I associate with these days are Christian nationalists.”
Loomer shared more of her extreme beliefs in an Aug. 2 Telegram post featuring an article by the white nationalist-promoting website VDARE. The post fearmongered about legal immigration and the racist “great replacement theory”—a belief that white people are being systematically replaced across the Western world by non-white immigrants and Jews.
Sharing a quote from the article, the post read: “One reason legal immigration is particularly dangerous: It is creating an ‘overclass’ of skilled immigrants who will leverage their professional success and financial power to greatly hasten white dispossession, and bring about the Great Replacement.”
Non-white Republicans are also seen as dangers to such white nationalists. The article cites former North Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley as an example of a non-white immigrant who threatens to “accelerate” the “erasing [of] America’s white history.” Like other white nationalists, Loomer advocates instituting a 10-year moratorium on both illegal and legal immigration.
Loomer has the endorsements of key figures in the months-long plan to keep Trump in power, including Trump confidant and fixer Roger Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. She has said that she believes the 2020 election was stolen.
Her 2020 primary victory party featured a who’s who of the far-right movement, including Proud Boys hate group founder Gavin McInnes, far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and organizers of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement Ali Alexander and Stone. Nick Fuentes promises to attend Loomer's victory party should she win again.
Loomer and Webster face off on Aug. 23 in the Republican primary.
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