By Jeffrey Blehar
Friday, September 13, 2024
As a general rule, I prefer to ignore repulsive
internet cranks and lunatics until forced by events to take notice; Greta
Thunberg barely interests me anymore, and Tucker Carlson morally and
intellectually wrote himself off with his Russia trip — until his transparent “Nazi-curious” antics got entangled with a
presidential race and forced us to pay attention to him for a minute longer.
But now I guess I have to talk about another despicable internet nutjob,
because Laura Loomer is making real news now, not merely “extremely online” news.
It is incredibly difficult to do proper justice to how full-tilt insane and
repulsively cheap Loomer’s entire public adult life has been, and to recount it
would be to list one shockingly vile or comically stupid act after another.
So let’s do it! Loomer is but one representative of an
entire toxic ecosystem of online fanatics known for their alt-right
associations, contempt for the truth, and undying loyalty to the person of
Donald Trump. Loomer herself is completely a product of the Trump era: In mid
2017, she invaded the stage to protest a performance of Julius Caesar in
New York City where Trump was portrayed as Caesar, and she became a viral news
story for it.
She has been on a nonstop quest for online relevance ever
since, and has dived happily into the filthiest toilets of right-wing politics.
The spread of pure misinformation and paranoid conspiracy theories has
historically been her bread and butter. The idea of 9/11 being “an inside job,”
which Loomer has endorsed (of course), is only the beginning of
it; in 2018 she repeatedly claimed, Alex Jones–style, that the victims of both
the Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Tex., mass school shootings were in fact
“crisis actors” staging an assault on gun rights. (She also averred that the
2017 Las Vegas mass shooter was in fact an ISIS plant and the truth was being
covered up — a conspiracy theory she fought with fellow lunatic Jack Posobiec over for proper “credit.”)
The bans she accumulated from nearly every social-media
network during the Trump administration are what she uses to portray herself as
a truth-telling martyr, but martyrs tend to suffer for worthy causes, not get
banned by Uber and Lyft for going on 24-hour social-media rants about “not
being able to find a non-Muslim cab, Uber or Lyft driver.” And she didn’t
really believe in her own martyrdom, either — she instead used her various bans
to stage attention-seeking publicity stunts. Hilariously, in September 2018,
she interrupted a House hearing to complain about Twitter “and Jack Dorsey
influencing the election,” complete with a selfie-stick to tape herself, and
was instantly
auctioned off to Capitol police in real time by Missouri Republican Billy
Long.
You can gauge the seriousness of her protest by noting
that after her Twitter account was banned in November 2018 she wore a yellow
Star of David — subtle imagery, that — and handcuffed herself to a front door of Twitter’s NYC headquarters in protest —
not doors, mind you, but a single door, so she could hold a bullhorn. (Instead of
actually blocking the ability of people to enter or exit the front door of the
building, she allowed them all to walk by her as she stood there shrieking at
them like a moron and taping it all.) In other words, she represents everything
most loathsome about the fringe Right: their contempt for the truth, their
comical self-promotion, and their continued assault on simple decency.
And the reason everybody is now writing, alas, about
Laura Loomer — the New York Times, CNN, Axios, NBC News, etc. — is that she has found her way into Donald
Trump’s direct orbit. She is now routinely attending campaign events, traveling
as closely with him as his actual managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, and
making people question who is really in charge of this race. (The answer
remains Donald Trump, whether to the White House or wrack and ruin.)
It’s not just uptight bluenoses or elitist scolds who are
infuriated about Loomer’s visibility in the Trump campaign. Her rhetoric —
always foul and shot through with bigoted overtones — has amped itself up to
blowout levels in recent years, culminating
in a tweet just last week that shocked even people accustomed to her foul
rants:
If Kamala Harris wins, the White
House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via
a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their
feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that
nobody will understand.
And now — with perfect timing! — Loomer is out on the
trail with him, appearing at all his public events in his private entourage.
Are people in MAGA world concerned? Look, when Marjorie Taylor Greene — a woman not exactly known for her
timidity or fealty to good taste — has to come out and denounce your rhetoric
as a “huge problem” that “doesn’t represent MAGA,” you know that a severe
public-perception problem exists, not one simply ginned up by a partisan media.
Every reader can see the photographs of Loomer attending (and attending to)
Trump at every event recently, and it’s impossible not to wonder what sort of
poison she’s spouting behind the scenes, given what she has so willingly said
publicly. Yes, we all know why the media are “flooding the zone” with coverage
on this, but “Trump associates closely with infamous internet psychopath” is a
story worth covering.
But not even necessarily because of Laura Loomer —
forever the least important part of any news story she is involved in — rather
because she is a symptom of Trump’s disease, not the source of it. It is folly
to blame Loomer for Trump’s poor debate performance, for example, or for his
inability to keep his eye on the ball in any major situation. (Trump blew his
own convention speech without help from anyone else.) The person to blame for
that is Donald Trump, who remains exactly the same candidate he has been
throughout all nine years of his official Republican political life:
emotionally and intellectually incontinent, and forever uninterested in the
difference between loyal employees trying to save him from himself and
attaboying toadies.
I doubt that the presence of people like Laura Loomer
within his closest circle is an accident. Trump knows by now the kind of people
he wants surrounding him (see: Roy Cohn). And the reason Trump prefers mindless
flatterers and psychopathic attack dogs to sober and loyal employees is because
Donald Trump does not want to be — and cannot be — saved from himself.
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