She describes herself as a “white advocate” and “proud Islamophobe.” She boasts her bans from apps ranging from Facebook to Uber and even Chase Bank as badges of honor. And for several years, Laura Loomer, a controversial former congressional candidate, has had the ear of President Trump. Yesterday she apparently shared with him that six National Security Council officials were disloyal. Then he fired them.
“I am a Proud Islamophobe”
President Trump is certainly not one to shy away from controversial figures in American politics. From Breitbart founder and former advisor Steve Bannon to current deputy chief of staff and anti-immigration crusader Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s political assets has been an ability to simultaneously cozy up to extremists while maintaining a layer of plausible deniability.
For example, in 2022, Trump downplayed a Mar-A-Lago dinner with controversial rapper Ye and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, describing the meal as “quick and uneventful.” But his association with Loomer has drawn condemnation from many within his own party, including far-right allies such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who condemned Loomer’s “rhetoric and hateful tone” last year. Even so,Trump has exhibited little desire to pull away from Loomer’s influence. The strongest condemnation of her words came last September, when he described Loomer as a “free spirit” in response to criticism of their associations.
Loomer ran for Congress twice, in 2020 and 2022, in Florida’s 21st and 11th electoral districts, on a hardline anti-immigrant platform that included a ten-year moratorium on legal immigration. During her second campaign, Loomer attended a gathering of white nationalist activists at the American Renaissance conference, sponsored by the magazine of the same name.
Rachel Carroll Rivas, the interim director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, notes the unique space that Loomer has operated in during her decade-long, somewhat untraditional rise in American politics. “She started out, very early on, as a candidate, it gave her an air of legitimacy.” Unlike Fuentes, who has operated primarily as an open extremist on the fringes of the online right, Loomer has presented her extreme ideas as coming from a former congressional candidate, attempting to situate herself within the window of “acceptable speech” within the Republican party.
Islamophobia and Xenophobia, however, have played a role in 31-year-old Loomer’s career since her early days as a student activist. In 2015, Loomer was president of the Young Republicans Club of Barry University in Miami Shores, FL. The then 21-year-old activist joined forces with James O’Keefe’s controversial organization Project Veritas, which has been accused of secretly recording and deceptively editing conversations with Democratic activists and other groups perceived as being on “the left,” for the purpose of stirring up controversy and ultimately defunding these organizations.
Loomer began working with Project Veritas after she filmed a conversation with Barry University administrators, pretending to start a pro-ISIS group on campus. Claiming the video showed the university was unbothered by the idea of a pro-terrorist student organization, the publicity stunt resulted in her suspension from Barry for recording an individual on campus without their consent. Loomer would ultimately graduate from the university, and in 2016 she filmed another video with Project Veritas, this time wearing a burqa and asking for a ballot under Huma Abedin’s name in that year’s presidential election.
Loomer’s near-decade of anti-Muslim activism has become a cornerstone of her political brand. Describing herself as a “white advocate” and “proud Islamophobe,” Loomer was banned from both Uber and Lyft in 2018 after a tweetstorm complaining that she was unable to find non-Muslim drivers on the apps. Loomer has called Islam a “cancer on humanity.”
Did Laura Loomer Get Six NSC Officials Fired?
In the early days of Trump’s second term, Loomer has resurged due to reports alleging that Trump’s recent decision to fire six officials from the National Security Council was a direct result of a meeting with Loomer, in which the firebrand laid out a list of “disloyal” officials.
Trump, for his part, has downplayed Loomer’s role in the firings, saying that he listened to Loomer “like I do with everybody. I listen to everybody and then I make a decision.”
Loomer, however, has embraced her role in the narrative, posting on X that the fired officials were “disloyal people” who “played a role in sabotaging President Trump.”
Is Laura Loomer Jewish?
One aspect of Loomer’s background can seem unusual, given her open ties to white nationalism. Loomer is Jewish. This begs an obvious question: What could lead a Jewish woman to openly share space with neo-Nazis and identify with the white nationalist cause?
“The hard right civil and anti-human rights community is not made up, in any way shape or form, by a majority of people who are Jewish,” says Carroll Rivas. “The movement is majority white, male, and either majority christian or christian-identified.”
Still, a number of high-profile, right-wing members of the American Jewish community have found themselves on the fringes of anti-Muslim activism.
In 2017, Laura Loomer was one of multiple anti-muslim activists appointed as “Shillman Fellows,” named for Trump activist and Cognex CEO Robert J. Shillman. Shillman, who is himself Jewish, has funded right-wing activists and projects around the world. In 2018, he made significant donations to Tommy Robinson, who cofounded the far-right and anti-Muslim English Defense League. In the United States and Canada, Shillman has funded both Project Veritas and Rebel News (both of which have worked extensively with Loomer.) In the Netherlands, he gave six figures to Dutch Party for Freedom leader and far-right politician Geert Wilders.
The Shillman fellowship is sponsored in part by the Horowitz Freedom Center, founded by David Horowitz, a vocal leftist in his youth who began a rightward conversion in the 1980s.n 1986, he published an essay for the Village Voice titled “Why I am No Longer a Leftist” (a refrain that echoed by Dave Rubin in a 2017 Prager U video titled Why I Left the Left.) In the 2000s, Horowitz reinvented himself further as an anti-Muslim activist. He has supported conspiracy theories that former President Barack Obama is Muslim, the Palestinian people as “Nazis,” and claimed that “80 percent of American mosques” are “filled with hate against Jews and Americans and Democrats,” along with efforts to overturn the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Horowitz has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-black movements.”
“These are communities that are, from the outside, pitted against each other. And this is the case for so many communities that are in many cases fighting for legitimacy, power, representation, economic access,” says Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center. She notes that the conspiratorial thinking that drives both antisemitism and Islamophobia is something that anybody can fall into, and cautions against making a particular example of the Jewish community.
And on the provisional acceptance of Jews and other minorities in white nationalist spaces, Carroll Rivas encourages people to keep Martin Niemoller’s famous poem “First they came…” in mind. “Everything I’ve seen over the years, looking at these movements, is that they discard their own folks, left and right. They’re happy to push folks out as they get closer to their ideological victories.”
No doubt, Laura Loomer is counting this week’s firing of high-level members of Trump’s security team a win.
Top image credit: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)