U.S. President Donald Trump congratulated anti-Muslim hatemonger Laura Loomer over Twitter last night for winning the Republican primary in Florida’s 21st congressional district. Ironically, Loomer is banned from Twitter, but she likely heard about the tweet anyway, thanks to Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican who’s endorsed Loomer and her hateful ideology.
Trump’s interest in Loomer may seem natural because the district she’s running to represent includes Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. But the president would probably be interested in Loomer anyway, if only because she’s an extreme figure who’s called Muslims “savages,” has said Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to hold office, and previously called Islam a “cancer.”
The 27-year-old Loomer has been banned from almost every major tech platform in recent years, including Twitter, Uber, and even the t-shirt company TeeSpring. Trump often whines about how “conservatives” are supposedly censored on social media sites, though he rarely explains precisely what kind of conservative he means. By endorsing Loomer, Trump is making it very explicit that he believes companies like Facebook are discriminating against bigoted people spouting hate speech.
Loomer is perhaps best known for chaining herself to the doors of Twitter’s New York headquarters in 2018 after she was banned from the social media service and she tried to get arrested at Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s house in 2019, though the police didn’t actually remove her. But the list of companies that have banned her for far-right extremist views is extensive. Loomer lists a dozen bans, seemingly as a point of pride, in the promotion of her book Loomered, including:
- Uber
- Lyft
- Uber Eats
- PayPal
- Venmo
- GoFundMe
- Periscope
- Medium
- TeeSpring
Yes, TeeSpring, the custom t-shirt company has banned Loomer, by her own admission. It’s not clear what got her banned, but we do know the reason behind many of the other banishments from social media. Loomer was kicked off of Twitter, for instance, because she continually spouted hateful rhetoric about Muslims.
“Someone needs to create a non Islamic form of @uber or @lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver,” Loomer tweeted on November 1, 2017.
That particular tweet was got her banned from Uber and Lyft as well, according to NBC News, though her rants against Muslims continued for years, including several attacks on Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar.
“We need some patriots to rise up and protect our Constitution so we can prevent the establishment of a caliphate,” Loomer wrote in an Instagram post in early 2019 attacking Omar before Loomer was banned by the platform.
Instagram and Facebook didn’t ban Loomer until May of 2019, when she was booted along with people like InfoWars founder Alex Jones, and former Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopolous. Loomer has been friendly with both men, two icons of the edgelord wing of the Republican Party.
“Leave it to Muslims to ruin everything. People can’t even enjoy #Halloween without those savages f**king everything up for everyone,” Loomer tweeted on October 31, 2017.
The asterisks in the word “fucking” were her own, hilariously enough. Loomer didn’t want to spoil anyone’s virgin eyes, so she took it upon herself to censor her own hate speech to take out expletives.
“How many more people need to die before everyone agrees that Islam is cancer & we should never let another Muslim into the civilised world?” Loomer tweeted in October 2017.
Now that Loomer is officially running in a congressional race, many Trump supporters are calling for Twitter to reinstate her account on the social media site. Not doing so, they argue, would be denying a politician the right to speak on a platform used by millions of Americans.
Laura Loomer is now the Republican nominee for Congress in the 21st Congressional district in Florida.
Twitter CEO @Jack should reinstate her account.
— Mike Coudrey (@MichaelCoudrey) August 19, 2020
Loomer has been banned from real world events as well, including the Conservative Political Action Committee’s conference in March of 2019 after she was allegedly harassing journalists. She was also banned from Shakespeare in the Park in New York during a stunt in 2017 where she stormed the stage to protest an adaptation of the play Julius Caesar that presented a caricature of Trump in the leading role.
Fox News had her appear on the channel, of course, to whine about how unfairly the world was treating Trump, even though it’s common for Julius Caesar to be cast with stand-ins of current world leaders as an update to the play. President Barack Obama got the same treatment in 2013 during a staging of the classic in Minneapolis.
Loomer, who’s done work for far-right conspiracy theory websites like Project Veritas and InfoWars, has raised over $US1.1 ($2) million for her election campaign, according to the Washington Post, and her electoral efforts are being managed by Karen Giorno, a former advisor to the Trump regime.
Loomer will face Democratic Representative Lois Frankel on the ballot November 3. And while Frankel is considered the favourite, everyone knows that 2020 has thrown all the normal rules out the window. The pandemic is a wild card that could keep plenty of people at home on Election Day. And with the Trump regime actively sabotaging the Postal Service, who knows how many mail-in ballots will truly be counted in a place like Florida?
Loomer is such a bigot that she can’t even order Uber Eats right now, but she might become an actual U.S. Congresswoman if she gets the chance. Even some Trump supporters, like radio host Erick Erickson, think that’s absolutely bonkers. But this is the reality we’re living in now. Anti-Muslim bigots like Laura Loomer and proud conspiracy theorists from the cesspools of QAnon seem to be the future of the U.S. Republican Party. And everyone who enabled Trump in the lead up to his 2016 election is to blame.