The Iranian activist Masih Alinejad legitimized the Iran War with her emotional theatrics. Credit: Getty
It began with The New York Times’s long-time opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof posting on the X app: “I disagree with @LauraLoomer on 1,000 things, but I admire her willingness to rethink Ukraine and go there. One of the things we pundits aren’t good at is admitting when we’re wrong — let alone seeking out information that contradicts our priors. She has courage to do just that.”
This is Laura Loomer we’re talking about, though, not some pundit across the aisle with whom Kristof simply “disagree[s].” She’s the 33-year-old self-styled investigative journalist who, through a combination of incendiary rhetoric and a close relationship with President Trump, successfully polices the MAGA movement. Understandably, she is — or at least, used to be — a long-time enemy of the mainstream establishment.
Loomer has a history of rhetoric that should disqualify her from any favorable mention from Kristof. On Oct. 9, 2023, she tweeted: “The people in GAZA were given plenty of time to evacuate. Israel is going to burn it to the ground today and it will be uninhabitable, which is the way it should be. Watch today for jihadist sympathizers online who cry about ‘human rights violations’ and ‘genocide.’ Those people are terrorist enablers.… If all of the Islamic neighboring nations care about the people in Gaza so much, then they can open their borders and take them. But not even the neighboring Islamic nations want those people. That’s the elephant in the room, right? Nobody wants them because they behave like barbaric wild animals.”
Her posting habits haven’t changed much since. Last month, Loomer tweeted: “Ban Muslims from holding office in America.” Adding, “this time, make it a Muslim Ban as it was intended to be. Not an Islamic travel ban.” And last week, she suggested that she should become Secretary of Homeland Security.
“I promise you I will actually make ICE the paramilitary force it should have always been to round up and forcefully remove jihadist invaders and Third World illegal aliens from our country. I will get the job done.” (The job’s current occupant, Markwayne Mullin, is apparently insufficiently anti-Muslim, having met with the Qataris.) DHS Secretary Loomer’s first order of business would be to send Leftist uncle-nephew commentator duo Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker “back to Turkey.”
In the run-up to the 2024 election, Loomer warned that, should Kamala Harris become president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Among those who rebuked her for her comment was the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called Loomer “toxic.” (As it happens, Loomer has reportedly mused about taking up Graham’s role as national uber-hawk in the wake of the senator’s death.) Or take how, two years earlier, she attended a white-nationalist convention and attempted to appeal to them, notwithstanding their hatred for Jews like herself: “I consider myself to be a white advocate.”
Loomer used to be vehemently critical of Ukraine and its wartime president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But as the Trump administration has changed its position, Loomer has shifted, too — to enthusiastic endorsement of the war. And so, in the latter half of July, she went on a trip to Ukraine and later released a 45-minute, overwhelmingly softball interview with Zelensky. While she was there, a sequence of “respectable” liberals, center-Left and center-Right alike, forgot their misgivings to loudly celebrate her.
On a CNN panel on July 23, a day before Loomer released the interview, the network’s anti-Trump but Right-tilting commentator SE Cupp argued: “If she’s gonna do propaganda, I’d rather it be Zelensky’s version of propaganda than Putin’s.” Cupp, praising Loomer, additionally intoned, “It’s one thing to be a keyboard warrior; it’s easy to say things from the safety of the patio at Mar-A-Lago. It’s much different when you go to a place.”
Erin Burnett, who was moderating the panel (and who herself conducted a more-than-flattering interview with Zelensky back in 2023), then turned to former Obama adviser David Axelrod. Burnett noted that Loomer “had these opinions on Ukraine which were based on propaganda and a lack of any kind of experience there” — before rather quickly listing some of her more controversial comments. Axelrod, in response, opined on Zelensky sitting down with Loomer: “My goodness, the things one has to do to save their country.”
Other prestigious outlets and personalities have also changed their tune on Loomer. Peter Harrell of the Carnegie Endowment said that her ideological shift and her interview with Zelensky were “a powerful reminder of the importance of being open to engaging with people you might profoundly disagree with.” The journalist Eli Lake, writing in The Free Press, hailed Laura Loomer as a “lifelong learner.” Batya Ungar-Sargon, the self-described “MAGA Lefty” who has attacked Trump World racism in the past, amicably interviewed Loomer following her return to the United States. And just this week, Neera Tanden — president of the Center for American Progress, the Clintonian think tank — retweeted Loomer.
Loomer is far from the only unhinged character feted by respectable liberals in recent months. Her coastal-cosmopolitan mirror is Masih Alinejad, another online activist and self-described journalist. Born in Iran but based in New York, Alinejad has made a career, partially bankrolled by the US government, in being an Iranian emigre who says precisely the right thing from a feminist perspective for Western hawks.
Alinejad’s first New York Times op-ed appeared in July 2018. Bari Weiss, then an opinion editor at the paper, enthused on Twitter: “Her name should be known by anyone who describes herself as a feminist.” Alinejad returned to the paper of record in January 2026 — to make a human-rights case for war with Iran. Lamenting that Trump hadn’t yet bombed her home country, she concluded, “inaction has a body count.”
Regardless of what she’s talking about, Alinejad’s dominant mode is theatrical. We’ve seen her weep with joy on the city streets over the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We’ve also seen her in a bathing suit doing a cold plunge alongside a man to demonstrate that she couldn’t legally do the same in Iran. These are perfectly understandable reactions for a woman who has suffered under the Islamist tyranny of the mullahs. The problem is that her dramatic mode of expression is used to legitimize a massively unpopular war, which has plunged Washington into yet another Middle East quagmire.
When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, she took to Weiss’s CBS News to sarcastically offer him a spot in one of her “safe houses” — she claims to have been targeted by the Iranian regime, and to be under constant threat of assassination. Recently, she threw a fit about her Citi Bike not working, because Mamdani would rather arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than see to basic services functioning. Never mind that the Citi Bike program is privately operated by Lyft and therefore doesn’t fall under the mayor’s purview. And she’s unabashed by her errors: she went on Persian-language media in the aftermath of the US attack on the Minab girls’ school that claimed 175 lives, to recant her support for the war. “It’s obvious I’ll sometimes be wrong,” she said in Persian.
Despite such incoherencies, Alinejad gets invited to places like the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she broke into song (poorly), supposedly to test whether any men in the crowd would get “aroused.” Women in the Islamic Republic are not officially allowed to sing solo in public. This was intended to be a demonstration of the evil of the Iranian regime, which is understandable, but all Iranian men seemed to fall into the dragnet of her condemnation. “Men are the problem,” she said and pointed to her co-panelist, the Iranian-born Leftist essayist Arash Azizi (an UnHerd contributor). Azizi had suggested that Iran should not be kicked out of FIFA over the country’s restrictions on female spectators at sporting events. “These are the men in my country. My women go to stadium; they get killed,” Alinejad said.
Both of these activists, Loomer and Alinejad, are often ridiculous in their self-presentation and sketchy on their facts, so why do respectable news organizations champion them, and what does it say about American liberal institutions’ claims to “respectability”?
The mainstream is being especially kind to Loomer right now. The AP, which is supposed to be a neutral news wire, spoke to Loomer in a Kiev bomb shelter, a story that made its front page on July 26. “Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged,” was the most critical note in the AP’s report — referring to how, when Loomer initially arrived in Kiev, she posted, “One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here.”
The AP should have also acknowledged that Loomer’s defense of Ukraine is at least partially on racial grounds: she believes in a “based” Aryan Ukraine in opposition to an Asiatic, Eastern Russia. Loomer’s original tweet about there not being “a single Muslim” in Ukraine made oppositional reference to an old Putin remark from 2015, that “Islam plays [an] important role in Russia.” But the AP left that out, only focusing on the comfortable pro-war-with-Russia crossover.
Ukraine does have a native, Muslim minority in its Tatars, and the drone factory Loomer visited there, pledging to “kill Russians” in honor of Sen. Graham, is owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov, in case his last name doesn’t give it away, is a Muslim. Loomer appeared to be unaware of the connection.
One possibility is that the people who work for news organizations, all products of America’s liberal class, are either subconsciously or knowingly reinforcing Washington’s overarching view of the world. Loomer is now saying what we like, so let’s boost her. Take, once more, CNN. This was the network that, during Trump 1.0, ran ads about how “this is an apple,” no matter how many people “scream ‘banana, banana, banana’ over and over and over again.” The implication being that MAGA — those low-class news-questioners — wanted you to believe the apple was a banana.
Nine years on, “banana screamers” who advance US geopolitical aims appear to be better than those who don’t.
The “centrist respectability” was always a lie. Because their interests now align, Loomer, like Alinejad before her, gains the endorsement, however uneasily or cheekily, of the US liberal establishment. It would be difficult to provide a better example of unquestioning adherence to dogma. Geopolitics trumps all.
