This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November. 

It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one).

Trumpapalooza was meant to remind Republicans why they had put their faith in the president in the first place. But it had almost the opposite effect, drawing attention to just how different the man standing before them today was from the one they knew 10, or even two, years ago. He could still command a crowd with his impressions of Emmanuel Macron and his pronunciation of Lenin as “Len-een.” But beneath the cheers, it became clear that the populist fire that once drove the Trumpist insurgencies of 2016 and 2024 had greatly diminished, if not been extinguished altogether. Young conservatives, in particular, appeared to have all but abandoned the project, leaving behind a graying bunch.

Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.

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Trump's Boomer-palooza

By James Billot

Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.

On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech. 

It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. 

Part of their frustration stemmed from the president’s outright denial that anything was wrong. In his two keynote speeches, Trump struck a jubilant tone, celebrating “the most successful two years, financially and every other way, in the history of the presidency.” But it was clear that very few were buying into this narrative. Even Fox’s Laura Ingraham, a longtime supporter of the president, told Trump that he would be “cruising” if he hadn’t invaded Iran, adding that young men were feeling “demoralized.”

They have every reason to be. The same day Trump declared that Iran had been decimated, Tehran-backed Houthi forces seized a major Red Sea port, potentially giving the group greater control over a key oil-shipping route and threatening to destabilize already-shaky global energy markets. Core inflation also grew last month, further squeezing Americans’ finances at a time when gas and food prices were already rising. No one at the convention wanted to talk about these grim developments — it was a convention, not a town hall, after all — and this was about keeping up appearances. 

Still, it was a telling moment on the first day of the convention that young people appeared more interested in sideline remarks from Groyper-courting James Fishback, who lost the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary to Rep. Byron Donalds last month, than in any of the speeches taking place inside the stadium. As he wandered around the arena, greeting fans and even having a tête-à-tête with the far-Right firebrand Laura Loomer, Fishback was trailed by a phalanx of young Republicans hanging on his every word.

“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.” 

This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel. 

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Trump's Boomer-palooza

By Nikos Mohammadi

I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” 

The problem, though, is that the longer these issues are ignored by the GOP leadership, the more space they create for irresponsible actors to exploit them. Israel is the clearest example. In recent years, an overdue conversation about recalibrating US-Israeli relations has curdled into something far uglier on the Right, with the rise of figures such as Candace Owens, Fuentes, and Fishback. Yet this has prompted no soul-searching among party leaders, who refuse to countenance any kind of debate on the issue. Just last night, RFK Jr. randomly pivoted from health issues to praising the Jewish state as a “bulwark of democracy” and “America’s most critical frontline ally.” It was exactly the kind of rote statement that will be clipped, circulated, and mocked among Zoomer circles.

A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.” 

Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”

It transpired that the former Breitbart News journalist, 41, had missed an immigration appointment in July; according to a rather gloating tweet by the Department of Homeland Security, he had entered the US legally in 2019 but had outstayed the terms of his visa. A disheveled-looking Yiannopoulos, to whom time has perhaps not been kind, mean-mugged the camera in an accompanying photograph. With barely disguised smugness, the department wrote: “We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] Home App.” Yiannopoulos may have seen himself as above the category of illegal immigrants he’d spent his career despising; in the end, he was treated just as indecorously as the rest of them. To pour further salt in the wound, the post encouraged other would-be immigrants to seek “the right legal way to live the American dream”; for Yiannopoulos, it appeared, that dream was very much over.

How had this happened? The British agitator’s rise and fall from 2014 was the life-cycle of the alt-Right distilled in one man: he went from shouty grub to poisonous rockstar to a husk tangled in the web of the movement which by now had become the establishment. He had made many enemies on his rise from Telegraph journalist to alt-Right superstar, racking up public feuds with, among many, Ben Shapiro (a “less professionally successful version of me”), the comedian Leslie Jones (he called her “spectacularly unappealing” in a rant that saw him booted off Twitter in 2016), and fellow internet outlaw Azealia Banks, who he had once represented at his refuge-of-the-cancelled talent agency Tarantula Management before a spectacular spat which culminated in Banks presciently threatening: “LMAO now shut up before i call ICE on you and get you deported you filthy migrant”. Yet none of these former sparring partners ultimately did him in. No, the final clobber was delivered by Yiannopoulos’s fellow conservative media darling and former pal Laura Loomer, who claimed his scalp by telling X that she’d snitched about his immigration status to the authorities. 

The pair fell out when Yiannopoulos accused her of having sexually harassed a young male aide during her congressional campaign in 2020 (which Loomer denies). Baby Jane-worthy barbs culminated in Loomer claiming he “was a demonic force” who had called for her assassination and threatened to “throw my bulldog off the balcony”. Now that pooch can sleep soundly in the knowledge that its loving pawrent, whom Yiannopoulos also smeared as Trump’s alleged mistress, shopped this very naughty boy to “Daddy” (as Yiannopoulos called the President). In a final blow that was not a grain of pettiness short of a nanny-nanny-boo-boo, Loomer wrote of the increasingly anti-Israel Yiannopoulos: “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace.” Revenge, served ICE-cold.

The problem with being the Mean Girl of social media — Yiannopoulos has spent years shooting poison darts from the perch of his feared and revered @nero X account — is that the ancient texts have a habit of coming back to haunt you. On Friday the poster AG Hamilton unearthed a gem from the archives: a tweet from last year in which Yiannopoulos joked about the “etiquette” of masturbating at the sight of an ICE raid. It was one of the many approving things he’d said about the agency since it began its crackdown at the start of Trump’s second term; in the end, he looked a wanker indeed. 

It’s tempting to see the saga of Yiannopoulos as that of a juggernaut who ran out of road, an open-and-shut case of poetic justice meted against a hateful gobshite. But in truth his rise and fall is more interesting than that: his flamboyant career ultimately indicates the broader health of the alt-Right. In 2016 Breitbart’s star writer, bylined only as “Milo”, embarked on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour of US college campuses — the ragebaiting debate format which would later be imitated by the Turning Point speaker Charlie Kirk. His boss Steve Bannon had just defected to run the Trump campaign; the tour was a victory lap for the mainstreaming of ironic hard-Right populism, whose many viral moments thrilled crowds like Nero’s Roman candles.

At Rutgers University in New Jersey, student libs smeared fake blood on their faces and chanted “Black lives matter!”; right on cue, the Milo fans responded: “Trump, Trump, Trump!” At DePaul in Chicago, no-platformers stormed the stage and grabbed the mic; hundreds of supporters then marched on the university president’s office. This gave him plenty of set-ups for stylish jabs — when one black student said she’d been “silenced for 200 years”, he quipped that she looked remarkably young. At UC Irvine in California, he arrived on stage in a “stunning burqa thot outfit”; protesters were handed dummies. The Breitbart write-up included a “get the look” postscript: “Combat boots by Diesel, $175. Sunglasses by Gucci, $225. Fishnet stockings: model’s own.”

These stunts were bellwethers for the pyrrhic culture wars of Woke 1, in which expressing heterodox opinions bore the same moral penalty as mass murder. Punchlines could be seeded by simply being outrageous enough. You could set your watch to audiences’ objections — the mantras they’d repeat, the pompous debate-society tactics they’d employ. This was something Kirk would come to leverage in his own campus debates, with liberal opponents never seeming to grasp that by engaging with him at all (or trying to no-platform him) they’d already stepped on the booby-trap. This is also the “gotcha” choreography of today’s X, where the nastiest comeback wins; for all this week’s sniping from poasters delighted at Yiannopoulos’s downfall, it bears remembering that this was a format which he created. In many ways his enemies on the Left and Right were doomed to speak in his language. 

But the Regina George of the alt-Right was always going to be burned in the end. The heyday of the Dangerous Faggot tour — in many ways Yiannopoulos’s apogee — was followed only a year later by those pedophilia comments which would see him booted from the line-up at CPAC and dropped from his $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster. He also resigned from Breitbart. His career since 2017 has been a shadow of its former glory, as Trumpism’s one-time favorite court jester settled into life as a fringe internet figure, converted to Catholicism, renounced his homosexuality and worked on Kanye West’s turkey of a presidential campaign (it has been suggested that Yiannopoulos was en route to Ye’s New Orleans concert when he was arrested). Being in the wilderness was rough; in 2019 he complained that “microscopic [Telegram] followings like 20k are not going to sustain people like me” and that “I can’t put food on the table”, describing himself as a “social media refugee”. 

Having toured the country as a “faggot”, his new life as a “100% sodomy-free… ex-gay” was a particularly inglorious chapter. He reported that he had come to regret “mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party”, and was seemingly doing penance by hawking statues of the Virgin Mary on a Christian teleshopping channel — and by announcing plans to open a conversion-therapy clinic in Florida. Yet he has never quite managed to convince in his new ultra-trad packaging. In a manner which must infuriate him, his arrest was digested by X as a scrumptious chapter in a classically gay internet saga, with snark from George Santos (“I’m the new Alfa [sic] Gay conservative in town”) and others (“Grindr profile vs IRL” read one caption comparing images of Yiannopoulos in his bleach-blond prime and in last week’s dour mugshot). 

As things stand he’s back in Britain and back on X — and being relatively good-humored about his deportation. But his reputation as a rebellious princeling will be difficult to salvage now that he has, in the words of Musk, “become meme” by being hoisted by his own pro-ICE petard. It seems unlikely that he will fade away entirely. X is behaving like a classroom of children whose naughtiest constituent has been sent outside: they simply cannot wait to see what happens when he comes back. And with Reform and Restore looking to sweep the next election, now is perhaps a favorable time for the prodigal son to return. Yiannopoulos has carved out a distinctly Yank brand — noisy rabble-rousing may prove terribly impolite in the stuffy halls of Westminster — but this may help him at a time when British politics seems to be mutating into something more brash and populist. What happens in America has ripples in Britain, and Tommy Robinson’s recent ascent — the far-Right activist has spoken at the Oxford Union and gained elite international backing from figures including Elon Musk — suggests greater appetite than ever for the previously unsavory fringe. 

What is certain is that this embarrassing chapter will not convince Yiannopoulos himself of his own inadequacy. It is said that when Nero hesitated to knife himself to death, he cried: “What an artist dies in me!”, so convinced was he still of his extraordinary talent. Two millennia later, his X namesake and comparable braggart is surviving the latest of several political suicides, brought low by a system for which he was the greatest cheerleader. Any other flower would wilt in the heat of such crushing irony; this weed looks sure to find a way.

To get a sense for this, consider the fates of Taylor Lorenz, Boots Riley, and Zohran Mamdani: three figures with large footprints on the Left who’ve recently come to realize that hell is other Leftists, to adapt the famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit.

Lorenz, a journalist-influencer hybrid — a kind of reverse Joe Rogan for people who never took their masks off — championed extreme Covid lockdowns; fangirled after Luigi Mangione, the alleged insurance-boss assassin; and left The Washington Post after the paper investigated her for sharing an Instagram post calling then-President Joe Biden a war criminal. Filmmaker and musician Riley’s latest movie, I Love Boosters, is such a work of agitprop that even an outlet called Communist Revolution described as “communist propaganda” — and “weak sauce” at that. Mamdani, of course, is the self-avowed democratic socialist governing America’s largest city. None of the three, in short, could plausibly be mistaken for a centrist.

Yet all three have been hauled before the People’s Court of Posting: a stateless, leaderless online tribunal whose function is to prosecute everyone — no matter how radical — for insufficient radicalism, invariably ruling that lo, the accused comes up short. It’s more proof that whatever Stephen Miller is currently cooking up to do to “radical-Left terrorism” from inside the Trump administration, it isn’t, right now, the most effective force degrading the American Left. The Left is doing that to itself.

In July, Lorenz claimed that “33,000 people are canceling me” after she criticized Minnesota’s AI nudification law, which prohibits the use of technology for faking sexual images of people. This week, she drew more backlash after discussing how she uses generative AI to work more productively. Reasonable people can debate whether journalists should use such tools, but posters in a Left-leaning subreddit called her “deeply unwell mentally” or claimed, “either she’s in a psychosis, or she’s been bought.” Lorenz then complained that the online Left spends its time “dog-piling everyone who doesn’t comport with their extremely narrow social media-driven worldview,” calling the culture “absolutely deranged” and its practitioners guilty of “no moral consistency on any level” and a willingness to “lie all day about anyone they don’t like.”

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The Me Decade — 50 years later

By Ryan Zickgraf

Her realization has impeccable comic timing. It was only last year, when Mamdani rode the subway without a mask during his mayoral campaign, that she accused “a lot of DSA leftists” of hating disabled people, women and LGBTQ people — an extraordinary moral indictment to build out of one politician’s naked face, especially years after universal masking had ceased to be a remotely plausible public policy. Now she has discovered the downside of ruthless purity testing: administer it often enough and, eventually, somebody administers it to you.

Just ask Boots Riley, who has been an outspoken communist since before many of his ultra-Left online trolls were born. He fronted the radical hip-hop group The Coup through the Clinton years and spent a memorable evening on Politically Incorrect a quarter-century ago patiently explaining Marxism to a smirking Bill Maher. When a clip of that appearance resurfaced this week, Riley observed that the old Right-wing gotcha — if you make money under capitalism while opposing capitalism, you are a hypocrite — was now being repeated by “supposed Left online people.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In one discussion of Riley’s films, a critic argued that he “does not have to make a movie that costs 20 million dollars” — a reference to I Love Boosters — if he really opposes capitalism, dismissed his work as a “million-dollar vanity project funded by the billionaires [Riley] claim[s] to hate,” and concluded that anyone who repeatedly makes choices that perpetuate capitalism is, whatever he calls himself, a capitalist.

This is a wonderfully efficient definition of capitalism, because it makes every person currently alive guilty of it. If Riley proves that longevity confers no immunity from such intramural attacks, Mamdani demonstrates that neither does victory. Conservatives regularly roast the New York City mayor, but some of the heaviest fire still comes from socialists for whom gaining power represents less a triumph than a dangerous ideological compromise.

A recent feature essay in The Drift on New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is a nuanced account of a socialist organization’s growing pains in power. But it also doubles as a field guide to how the ultra-Left cannibalizes its own successes.

NYC-DSA boasts 15,000 members and genuine victories: a Big Apple mayor elected from among their own ranks, a rent freeze instituted, and a near-sweep by DSA candidates in the June Democratic primaries. Even so, as French documents, much of the chapter’s energy still gets consumed by warfare waged “in Signal chats, in polemics posted on niche websites, and, inevitably, on X.”

A leadership reshuffle got branded, seriously, a “coup.” A dispute over home-health policy occasioned comparisons to slavery. A national leader of the dominant Groundwork caucus dismissed his internal critics with a line that deserves to be engraved somewhere, describing “an antagonism that attracts the cynical, the burnt-out, the oppositionally defiant, and the unsatisfiable” — arguably the most accurate description of Left Twitter ever.

DSA’s own Liberation Caucus, a — sigh — Marxist-Leninist-Maoist faction operating inside the very organization that helped elect him, published one member’s description of Mamdani as “ZIOhran”; another called him “a traitor and an opportunist” over his perceived moderation on policing and Israel. The Trotskyist paper Workers Vanguard ran a piece headlined, with admirable bluntness, “Want Socialism? Fight Mamdani!,” accusing the mayor of backing “scabherder” Gov. Kathy Hochul during a recent nurses’ strike, and closing with: “Expel Mamdani! Socialists stand with the workers and oppressed, not scabherders and pigs!”

This isn’t an argument against criticizing politicians, artists, or journalists merely because they belong to the same broad political family. A movement that can’t criticize its leaders soon becomes a fan club. The problem is what happens when every honest disagreement over tactics, language, art, or policy becomes a referendum on personal character. The defendant is never merely mistaken but corrupt; never simply compromised but bought; never insufficiently radical but secretly reactionary. The overriding impulse is the avoidance of contamination.

I have experienced the smaller, less glamorous version of this as someone who writes occasionally for Jacobin, a premier Left outlet. Of course, no journalist is above criticism, but nothing matches the venom my own occasional writing generates from my fellow progressives. I’ve been called fascist, racist, Zionist, reactionary, and, most damningly of all in certain corners of the internet, a Jacobin writer. The abuse rarely engages with anything I have actually written, and it rarely tries to persuade anyone; it’s ambient, repetitive and exhausting. It’s a kind of ideological carbon monoxide that doesn’t kill anyone but saps and smothers energy and genuine critical thought.

It’s the kind of noxious atmosphere that helps explain why Bluesky is dying. Conceived as the progressive rescue boat from Elon Musk’s X, it increasingly resembles a lifeboat whose passengers spend their days deciding whom they will cannibalize first. Slate conceded that “the best Bluesky can replicate is a hellish, inescapable, never-ending version of 2016.” By June, the platform’s mobile application commanded 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide, a 27% tumble from its previous year, even as the total number of active participants has withered by over 50% since the high-water mark following the election.

The platform did not invent the Left’s appetite for schism, but it has distilled it into something close to its purest form: a politics conducted almost entirely through denunciation, in which the easiest way to demonstrate your virtue is to expose someone else’s insufficient supply. That may provide a brief dopamine hit, but it cannot build a durable coalition. Any movement large enough to matter will necessarily contain hypocrites, eccentrics, sell-outs, moderates and people who sometimes say stupid things online. It will also contain people who disagree.

Nor is this an exclusively American disease. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched Your Party last year amid hundreds of thousands of expressions of interest from voters desperate for an alternative to Labour. A year later, thanks to vicious infighting, Your Party became No One’s Party. The Greens initially appeared to be the beneficiaries, but they, too, have already demonstrated the Left’s remarkable capacity to turn political momentum into an internal disciplinary hearing.

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The ‘woke Right’ is nothing new

By Sohrab Ahmari

To be fair, the far Right suffers from a nearly identical affliction. MAGA’s online fringe hunts RINOs (“Republicans in Name Only”), fantasizes about Maoist-style purges of liberal institutions, and insists that Nazi jokes remain jokes even as the jokers enter Republican politics and win jobs in the administration. Extremely online politics, Left and Right alike, increasingly resembles two rival cults, each certain the other represents the real existential threat, while both spend the overwhelming majority of their energy excommunicating their own. The American far-Right influencer Laura Loomer is now claiming credit for Friday’s ICE deportation of the British far-Right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos — which is taking intra-party cancel culture to a wild new level.

None of which means Stephen Miller’s threats to progressives are empty theater. The White House consigliere really did vow, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” a “vast domestic terror movement.” It is worth remembering, too, as that grim anniversary approaches, that eight Prairieland defendants were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison after an anti-ICE protest turned violent. An actual crackdown is afoot, and it deserves to be taken seriously by anyone who cherishes civil liberties.

But if the Trumpians were smart, they would turn their detention centers into a convention of likeminded radicals with free Wi-Fi. What would ensue would be not unlike Sartre in No Exit, in which three sinners are put in a locked room waiting for the instruments of torture, only to realize none was coming; they themselves were each other’s affliction. So it goes for the likes of Lorenz, Riley, and Mamdani.

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.” 

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The uniparty media’s pro-war twins

By Nikos Mohammadi

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 S.E. 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”?

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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.

“Kamala [Harris] leaning all in on starting many new bloody wars in the Middle East,” wrote Stephen Miller on X, adding in a different post: “Kamala’s closing pitch: INVADE THE MIDDLE EAST!” And again: “Trump will end and prevent war in the Middle East.” Laura Loomer — the 9/11 truther and Mar-a-Lago regular — warned that a Harris presidency would not only saturate the White House with the scent of curry, but risk triggering “WORLD WAR III.”

Yet MAGA today is arguably the most hawkish faction on the American scene. Its ideologues — not least Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer — braid a run of unrelated conflicts, foreign and domestic, into a single struggle against what the administration calls “Third Worldism”: a nebulous enemy category encompassing Iran and the Eurasian great powers, Latin American Leftists and drug-traffickers, Somali migrants, and the Zohran Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party.

The bitter truth, especially for those of us who once saw promise in conservative populism, is that the movement was always structurally vulnerable to this turn.

Eighteen months in office, the second Trump administration has waged a full-on war with Iran, while largely abandoning the diplomatic track on Ukraine. Team Trump, moreover, has racked up various “smaller” interventions: regime change in Venezuela (and, perhaps soon, Cuba); bombings in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Ecuador; and a lawless campaign of strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that has killed more than 200. 

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The triumph of Lindsey Graham

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How did we get here?

Part of it has to do with the nature of the Republican Party and its mighty donor class. The “restraint” faction — conservatives who advocate a lighter footprint abroad, or who insist that Washington conserve scarce resources for the rivalry with China — locked down many national-security jobs in the new administration. But assistant secretaries of this-and-that don’t write checks, and they can’t get the commander in chief on the phone the way, say, Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress and pro-Israel mega-donor, can.

Then there is GOP coalitional politics. The South has been a party stronghold since the 1960s at the presidential level and, since the ’90s, down the ballot. As blue states and cities have declined, the region has drawn people, capital, dynamism, and, with them, political power. As the writer Michael Lind has noted, the South is also home to a more martial culture than much of the country (the late Sen. Lindsey Graham was no aberration).

Florida, especially, exerts an immense gravitational pull. It is no accident that Loomer — who has recently emerged as a champion of Ukraine after years of disparaging the country and its cause — is Florida-based. So are a host of other hawkish voices: The Babylon Bee, the satirical-ish evangelical magazine; the podcaster Dave Rubin; and many smaller stars in the pro-war constellation. And that’s not to mention Florida’s Cuban-exile population, whose omni-hawkish worldview the GOP must serve to win in the Sunshine State. For many of these figures, the “war” is one long front stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, and from thence to the Caribbean. 

But the deepest factor is ideological. Populism, almost by definition, needs an enemy — a “hegemonic formation,” as the Left theorist Chantal Mouffe puts it, against which to organize mass political energy. During his first presidential bid, Trump aimed his followers’ oppositional energy mostly against the bipartisan elites who had plunged America into pointless forever wars in the Middle East, while abandoning the working class to the vagaries of corporate globalization.

All along, though, there was another side to Trump and MAGA — the one whose critique of porous borders, a perfectly legitimate populist issue, veered into talk of immigrants as “rapists.” Beginning in the first term, as Trumpism was translated into governance, the economic populism mostly fell by the wayside. His sole legislative achievement back then was a tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. This partly owed to Trump’s own plutocratic instincts, and partly to the familiar personnel and sheer inertia of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Right’s best-organized institutions set about healing these ruptures — refitting populism to the old agenda of oligarchic economics and pro-Israel hawkery. The National Conservatism conferences, Project 2025, and the like: in retrospect, all served this purpose.

An example is MAGA’s treatment of Big Tech. The populist problem with Big Tech had once been its overweening market power and lack of accountability; but slowly that objection morphed into decrying the use to which the firms put that domination: namely, promoting “wokeness.” Once Elon Musk owned Twitter, renamed X, the lopsided power he exercised over the platform ceased to be a problem at all. And where the MAGA Right had once faulted the “pro-war uniparty” of the Bushes and the Clintons for diving head-first into Mideast quagmires, the rhetoric shifted beginning in the second Trump administration: the sin now isn’t the breaking of nations, but bothering to rebuild afterward or pretending to care about democracy in Muslim lands.

I encountered a version of the latter firsthand, while profiling Pete Hegseth, the then-newly confirmed secretary of defense, aboard his plane on a visit to migrant-processing operations at Gitmo. He and his closest aides were keen to have me know that Hegseth is a former soldier who had learned the lessons of the post-9/11 wars. At the time, I took this to mean opposition to ill-defined missions and overreach abroad. In fact, it meant no longer bothering with even the pretense to moral universalism that had guided the earlier conflicts. Now we just blow stuff up — this, it turns out, is the “new” in the “New Right.”

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If this newly reconstituted Right isn’t in the business of doing real populism — if it indeed enjoys the backing of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Musk — then against whom can it organize its energies? Already, in the early 2020s, one could see the pseudo-populist elements of the Right road-testing “woke communism”: a category that framed the assistant professor scraping by on $30,000 a year as a subversive “elite” (while Musk came across as a subaltern hero).

More recently, the Right has settled on “Third Worldism” — a term that appears no fewer than 40 times in a new State Department document on “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism,” which elevates the puny and faltering Havana regime into a powerful enemy state that could endanger the American way of life at any minute.

The Third Worldist menace is vaguely brown, vaguely communistic, and much easier to “do” something about than confronting the internal contradictions that wrack working- and lower-middle-class America. To deal with Third Worldism abroad, you don’t have to marshal bills through Congress and strike careful compromises with Democrats. You can just fire off missiles — foreign and defense policy being the area in which the president and the executive branch enjoy a near-unchecked latitude, at least as the Constitution has been interpreted for the better part of a century. 

And it can justify a lot: brutalizing migrants almost as enemy combatants, calls to denaturalize the likes of Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar, a grinding, aimless new war in the Persian Gulf — all while covering over the failure to shift the immigration system to a skills-based one, say, or to renew the industrial base.

There is only one problem. Taken to its logical terminus, this ideological agenda will bring the United States much closer to a total conflict — World War III, if we must use Trumpy language — than anything contemplated by even old-school hawkish strategists like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Max Boot. Let alone that warmonger of Miller’s and Loomer’s 2024-era nightmares — Kamala Harris.

No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries. 

Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.

Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public. 

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Loomer’s life, though, has been characterized by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fueled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.

When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.

Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologizes when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labeled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.

Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”

Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalization of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.

Loomer reveled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.

“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks. 

Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.” 

But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”

Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. 

Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.” 

All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command center for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learned from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.

Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponized opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.

Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart. 

“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RFK? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.

She will even criticize the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”

Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless. 

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But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.

Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”. 

Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”

Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.

I used to think that this character was a staple of fiction because he was too ridiculous to exist in real life — but that was before I became aware of Laura Loomer. Loomer is a 31-year-old self-described “investigative journalist” who rose to a narrow sort of fame as the architect of political stunts that combine the ethos of Project Veritas with the subtle elegance of MTV’s Jackass. Her first foray into the genre was a video in which the then-21-year-old Loomer secretly recorded herself asking authorities at her university for help forming a student organization in support of ISIS.

The video itself caused little stir, because it wasn’t actually all that exciting — but it did get Loomer suspended and charged with a third-degree felony for recording someone without his consent, which is pretty much typical of her oeuvre.

Over the years, Loomer has periodically broken into the mainstream news cycle with some stunt which is ostensibly meant to own the libs, but which so invariably backfires that it’s hard to believe she isn’t doing it on purpose. Like any self-respecting buffoon, Loomer’s various attempts at political engagement — from storming the stage of a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, to handcuffing herself to the door of Twitter’s headquarters, to her two failed runs for electoral office — tend to draw less attention to her cause, whatever it is, than to Loomer herself, squawking with righteous indignation as she’s escorted out by security guards.

The thing is, this was fine. You might not like Loomer (indeed, most people — even those on her side — seem not to be fans), but like the Wile E. Coyotes and Cosmo Kramers of the world, she was doing her part to keep the cultural ecosystem in balance, even if it was just by acting as a living signpost for the place where absurdity tips over into irrelevance. It takes all kinds to make a world, after all, including the buffoons — who are harmless enough, as long as they keep to the sidelines, where their antics may make for an entertaining spectacle but they can’t hurt anybody but themselves. In the circus of American politics, people like Loomer were understood as one of those novelty acts you’d find in a dilapidated tent furthest from the midway, hanging out in between the guy who bites the head off a live bat and the off-duty clowns smoking cigarettes in their underwear.

At least, that was the understanding. But lately, one can’t help noticing that Loomer seems to be getting awfully close to the political mainstage, and awfully cozy with some of its biggest players. Loomer has not only been the subject of approving commentary by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X, where she has upwards of a million followers, but Donald Trump himself welcomed her to the White House earlier this month — not just as a supporter, but as an adviser. Loomer reportedly waltzed into the Oval Office bearing a list of National Security Council members who she identified as insufficiently loyal to the President; some days later, several of those same officials were fired.

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Trump claimed that the proximity of these two events was a coincidence, which seems unlikely, but also doesn’t really matter. The extent of Loomer’s influence is for other people to debate; what’s inarguable is that she has been an unwavering supporter of Trump’s political agenda for over a decade, and that for whatever reason (but probably that one), he likes having her around. And in this, Loomer’s White House welcome is also emblematic of a broader feature of the second Trump administration, which lately seems to double as a jobs program for the kind of troublesome person whose antisocial tendencies would ordinarily disqualify them from working at a Cinnabon, let alone in a position of government authority.

Consider former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who is currently serving as the Secretary of Defense despite allegations of sexual assault and a documented history of problematic day-drinking. His own mother even called him “despicable”. Or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who went from conspiracy theorizing about vaccines and leaving bear carcasses in public parks to heading the Department of Health and Human Services. Consider the Department of Government Efficiency, run by an intemperate billionaire whose hobbies include space exploration, internet trolling, and impregnating his female followers for sport — or the official White House X account, which currently appears to be run by a 12-year-old edgelord who someone hired directly from the bowels of 4Chan.

Some of this is not new. Trump has always attracted a coterie of loyalists as ridiculous as they are devoted, from Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell to that guy who sells pillows on infomercials. But the people who surround the POTUS now are something more than mere fans: this is a professional coalition of the aggressively undignified. Many of them hold positions of authority within the Federal government; some of these no doubt have top-secret security clearances.

Most important, all of them occupy a position, official or otherwise, that was previously held by someone significantly more competent — and this is perhaps the biggest difference between Trump’s first and second terms. As chaotic as that first term was, it was at least somewhat mitigated by the comforting sense that the President’s advisors were serious people, even if the president himself was not, and that they would form a protective barrier between the country and its impulsive Commander in Chief.

Today, the serious people have left the building; in their place, the President has sent in the clowns. And even if you believe (as I do) that this is a problem but not a catastrophe — that the Constitution was designed to withstand precisely the sort of assault represented by someone like Trump, and as such will always be more powerful than any one tyrannical executive’s desire to subvert it — it is nevertheless true that things feel different. A White House full of sycophantic buffoons will necessarily lack the gravitas of one that is buffoon-free, and the downstream effects of this on the culture and discourse are already observable.

Clearly, not everyone is bothered by this. For Trump’s most fervent supporters, a world in which the official White House account tweets Studio Ghibli memes of deportees weeping in handcuffs is just another encouraging sign of the much-heralded vibe shift — even if one can’t help but notice that the only thing shifting is the proverbial face-stamping boot from Orwell’s 1984, from the Left’s foot to the Right’s. As such, those in favor of our new authority figures tend to respond to criticism with the same dismissive scorn as the most sanctimonious scolds of the woke era: we’re trying to change the world here, and you’re complaining about the tone? As the meme goes, what did you think Making America Great Again looked like? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

And yet the tone, the vibe, the fundamental dignity of the office, are all things that matter. And not only that: this is the one sphere in which the American president enjoys virtually limitless power — where he can hold court like a king. The Supreme Court may constrain Trump’s ability to make policy or issue orders, or a successor may reverse them. The culture, on the other hand, has no such guardrails for those politicians who are capable of corrupting it.

It’s unsettling to realize what this may portend for the next four years — and how much the workings of our government rely on the willingness of officials to honor not just the letter of the law, but all the unwritten social norms that signal politeness and the intention to play well with others. And while Congress can decide who gains admission to the president’s cabinet, it gets no say over who sits at his lunch table. Trump can fill the seats next to him with fools and flatterers; he can invite the Laura Loomers of the world to picnic on the White House lawn every weekend. He shouldn’t, of course. But he can. The uncomfortable truth is that the Constitution has nothing to say about decorum, except insofar as it enumerates the freedom of the American people, including the president, to be as indecorous as they want.

And while I’m not personally ready to panic about this, I also understand why some people are. Donald Trump may not be able to destroy the country, but he can definitely transform the milieu in which we conduct our national business for the worse; he can definitely drag the discourse down into a mire of vulgarity until the only people still willing to engage in politics are the ones who love to roll around in the mud as much as he does. American democracy is resilient. Our social norms, on the other hand, are only as durable as people’s willingness to sustain them — and once shattered, they aren’t easily replaced. And it is this, the replacement of propriety with coarse buffoonery, which I suspect will be the true legacy of the current president. I also suspect it will be a regrettably durable one.

That Laura Loomer and Melania Trump should be two of the most important women in Trump’s orbit, though they have barely anything in common, is one of those odd realities of the Trump phenomenon. Each woman represents something essential about Trump’s 2024 campaign, and together they embody the past — and possible future — of his movement. While Laura is the keeper of the MAGA diehard flame, Melania is the inscrutable key to Trump’s life outside politics.

First, Loomer: the suspected source of Trump’s ludicrous “they’re eating the cats” claim during the recent presidential debate. The 31-year-old provocateur has made herself a crucial figure in Trumpworld to the chagrin of nearly everyone apart from Trump. She had travelled with Trump on his plane to the debate, and the following day was among his entourage to the 9/11 memorial for the yearly remembrance service despite being a 9/11 truther. The day before the debate, she had tweeted about the rumour regarding pet-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and so speculation soon began that she had helped plant the idea in Trump’s head.

Loomer is a quintessential MAGA character who gained notoriety for being shocking even by the far-Right’s standards. A self-proclaimed Islamophobe and “white advocate”, she’s been banned from nearly every social media platform for various bigoted remarks and provocations (though she’s been back on X since its sale to Elon Musk). In 2018, she chained herself to the Twitter headquarters in New York in 2018 in protest of her ban. She’s run for Congress in Florida twice; in 2020 she won the Republican primary in the district she was contesting.

“I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer told The Washington Post earlier this year. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.” She had lost 25 pounds, she told the reporter, in an advance effort to look good for the communications job she hoped Trump would give her. She is the kind of wacky hanger-on that the pros around Trump have been trying to get rid of for years, never quite succeeding. While Trump’s top campaign officials reportedly blocked his effort to give Loomer a campaign job last year, they haven’t been able to keep her away from the man himself. Trump has always lacked quality control when it comes to his friends and advisers. He’ll listen to anyone who says the kind of things he likes to hear. And he seems to have no intention of distancing himself from Loomer even though almost-equally-hardcore MAGA luminaries including Marjorie Taylor Greene have condemned her. Trump told the press earlier this month that Loomer was a “free spirit” who he couldn’t control.

That Loomer could have inspired the massive flap about the Haitians in Ohio is of a piece with Trump’s long-standing modus operandi. He has always repeated half-baked rumours he hears about or sees on Fox News, no matter how sketchy the source is. The Loomer incident is a reminder of how close Trump remains to the milieu that gave him his political start and that he’ll never really abandon; in many ways, Loomer is the “ghost of Trump past”. Her brash world of Right-wing media injected Trump into the political conversation more than a decade ago, laying the groundwork for his 2016 campaign. Trump’s authenticity in this regard lies at the core of his political appeal. Unlike his rivals with their focus-grouped talking points and triangulated statements, Trump says what comes to mind, much like how his fans might act if they were in his position.

But this election has revealed the cracks in Trump’s say-anything approach. When Kamala Harris said in the debate that “bored and exhausted” supporters were leaving Trump’s rallies in droves this year, she had a point. There’s a tediousness to Trump’s rallies nowadays, and those rallies are taking place less frequently too. There’s something missing. Harris has reset the dynamic of the race; while before, polling showed Trump dispatching the feeble Joe Biden, now it shows a dead heat. Trump may really lose.

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Kamala Harris, triumphant cat lady

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From the opposite corner of Trumpworld, another of Trump’s key women has been piping up after a long silence. The ever-mysterious Melania had so far been a non-factor in this campaign, shunning the trail and maintaining her froideur even through the Republican National Convention, when the candidate’s spouse would normally speak. Melania had seemed happy to remain behind the scenes in this election in both word and deed.

This is now changing. Next month she’ll release a memoir, Melania, which she has been promoting in a series of videos on X. In one of these gauzy black-and-white clips, she speaks icily to the camera: “As a private person who has been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to clarify the facts.” In another, she described her past nude modelling work as part of the “timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self-expression”.

But why is she speaking now? And will there be any juicy revelations in the memoir? Probably not, though her husband joked about it in a recent rally in New York state. “I hope she said good things about me”, he said, encouraging the crowd to buy the book, but “if she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and say don’t buy it”. In all likelihood, Melania will say little directly about Trump at all. But her re-emergence in the waning days of the campaign is a reminder of the very real possibility that Trump will lose to Harris, freeing Melania from another term in DC. She’s perhaps the “ghost of Trump yet to come”. The memoir appears to be an effort to carve out her own space apart from Trump — or at least, maybe, prepare for a post-politics future. She’s selling a “collector’s edition” of the memoir for $250 on her website.

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The mythical masculinity of Donald Trump

By Frederick Kaufman

Melania has always been something of an awkward figure in Trumpworld, the bombshell Slovenian model who found herself dragged to the White House to be First Lady of the United States. By all accounts she’s a genuinely shy person who would rather lead a quiet life tending to her son, Barron, who is now a student at New York University. She lingered at Trump Tower for months before moving to Washington after Trump won in 2016, and her efforts as First Lady were generally half-hearted, like her “Be Best” anti-bullying campaign. Apart from a few moments of defiance — most memorably, wearing a “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket to a migrant child detention centre — her aloof posture lasted throughout Trump’s term in office. But the occasional disclosures she has made have been intriguing. In a statement released after the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania in July, Melania emphasised her husband as a person, not a political figure. “A monster who recognised my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion — his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration,” she wrote. “The core facets of my husband’s life — his human side — were buried below the political machine.” Though Melania has never seemed to like Donald much, she does know him in a way that few others can.

Trump told an interviewer on Sunday that he won’t run again in 2028 if he loses this election. It’s a rare and telling admission from a man who has spent four years fervently denying that he lost the last election. Sooner or later a post-Trump future looms in American politics, and the contrast between Melania and Laura illustrates the forked road Trump himself will face. On the one hand, becoming a martyr among the Loomers of the Right-wing media; on the other, retreating to his pre-presidential life as a golfing TV celebrity with a model wife.

But her card wouldn’t work at the cashpoint either. She tried another one. With the same result.

Laura opened the banking app on her phone. It said only ‘error’, then automatically closed.

She finally abandoned her shopping and went into the nearest branch of Santander. There, the counter assistant seemed just as mystified. After about an hour of waiting, though, Laura was called through into the manager’s office.

“I’m going to read a statement out for you,” the manager said. “But I’m not going to be able to answer any of your questions after that.”

He read out:

“We have locked your bank account. We can’t give you any more information. We might be in touch in future with more information. But we don’t know when that might be.”

Could she have her money? No.

But how was she supposed to get home? After all, she lived eight miles outside of Leeds, and now she had no bus fare. Apparently, this was not the bank’s business.

This low-rent version of The Trial went on for another three weeks. Frequently, Laura would phone up Santander customer services. She’d be put on hold for ages. Then the phone would just go dead. She wrote to Santander to complain. They wrote back: they weren’t interested in her complaint and wouldn’t be taking it any further. Meanwhile, her rent, standing orders and Direct Debits stacked up, the late fees and penalties mushroomed around them, as life tumbled towards chaos.

Nearly a month on, she received a letter from Santander:

Under the terms and conditions… we can withdraw banking facilities at any time, and in line with company policy we don’t give further details.

The account had been closed. Without apparent irony, the balance had been appended as a cheque.

‘Laura’ could be any of us. But she is also Laura Towler, one of the founders of Patriotic Alternative. Towler is a sort of next-gen BNP type, a net-savvy white identitarian who campaigns against mass-migration, and occasionally winks to her Telegram followers about ‘you know who’ (they know alright: The Jews). It would seem that Towler had been expelled from Santander for her views. But in line with the bank’s conditions, this has not been made clear.

By a strange coincidence, in the same month, the same thing happened to Mark Collett, her Patriotic Alternative co-founder. Only, Collett doesn’t bank with Santander — he is with HSBC. Somehow, the same thing also happened, in different countries, to Europe’s leading young white identitarians: Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner.

Coincidence abounds in the modern world. Last year, on the other side of the Atlantic, various alt-ish-Right figures who banked with JP Morgan Chase woke up on the same morning to find that they no longer banked with JP Morgan Chase. They included the chair of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, former InfoWars staffer Joe Biggs, Project Veritas associate Laura Loomer, and Martina Markota, a Trump-supporting performance artist.

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Of those four, it’s the other Laura whose case drives home the full capriciousness of corporate power in a networked age. Loomer styles herself as the “most banned woman in the world”. In addition to Chase, she is banned from PayPal, from VenMo, from The Cash App, Airbnb and Instagram, from Lyft, Uber and UberEats, from the blogging monetisation platform WordAds and the t-shirt print-to-order site TeeSpring, from Twitter and Facebook — obviously — and from any one of a half dozen other platforms for digital congress.

Some of these bans are strongly self-inflicted; controversy is her currency. She got booted from Uber in 2017 after ranting about being unable to find a taxi driver who wasn’t Muslim in Manhattan, in the hours after the NYC terror truck attack. Twitter banned her in 2018, after she laid into Ilhan Omar, the Muslim Congresswoman, claiming, scandalously, that Omar was part of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed”, and ”women are abused” and “forced to wear the hijab.” Later that month, wearing a gold ‘Juden’ star (Loomer is Jewish) she handcuffed herself to Twitter HQ, to protest the decision.

But many of those bans are mere cascade effects. TeeSpring works with PayPal. PayPal had already declared Loomer an unperson, and thus they informed TeeSpring that they would have to stop supplying her. Ditto Venmo and The Cash App.

You don’t want to mess with the people who make the widgets that undergird the financial system. In 2018, in response to activist pressure, MasterCard began choking off various far-Right and internet Right figures. That in turn meant their often lucrative Patreon accounts were cancelled: YouTube ‘Classical Liberal’ Carl Benjamin lost $12000 a month. Now, in a post-Covid world, where we’re often being told that cash is no longer acceptable, some are also being told that electronic banking is no longer for them. It’s an interesting crossroads.

The likes of Towler might be distasteful. But if that alone is the bar for the arbitrary exercise of power by, say, the PR department of NatWest, then all kinds of people — from Cat Bin Lady down — stand to be unpersoned.

Right of admission is always reserved — we all know this — and you might say that these examples are just the market at work. Except that some things are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they’re not so much markets as the thing that you need in order to use a market.

In the dying days of Gordon Brown, an attempt was made to guarantee every citizen’s right to a current account. It was quickly shot down by the Big Five banks (after all, it wasn’t as if they owed the government any favours). A decade on, that tide is further out than it has ever been.

In the banking system’s capacity to disable the individual without pro-actively doing them harm, there’s an echo of the elegance of the Chinese government’s social credit. “There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to. What’s really scary is there’s nothing you can do about it,” was how Liu Hu put it — a Chinese journalist, who ran afoul of social credit in 2019. But perhaps Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ episode would be a more apt comparison. In our hemisphere, that kind of deletion is done more cheerily, coated in the veneer of freedom of choice and association, by PR and HR, not by the grey monolith of The Party’s star council.

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How we bend the knee to our HR overlords

By Aris Roussinos

Increasingly, we allow our corporations to police the soft boundaries of acceptable speech and thought, from Sainsbury’s rejection of ‘racist’ shoppers to the Yorkshire Tea wars to Tampax’s latest bloodbath.

Ironically enough, the license that companies now take as part of their remit is a perfect mirror image of the Cake Problem: the oft-rehashed libertarian thought experiment, over whether a fundamentalist Christian cake-maker should be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding. When US Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was posed the question in 2016, he said that they should — and added that he would equally require a Jewish baker to make a Nazi wedding cake. The underlying principle is one of neutrality. Where two belief systems clash, if they remain polite and cooperative, shouldn’t the public still retain an underlying right of service?

Evidently not.

Another great thought experiment dawned in August of last year, when Laura Loomer stunned the Republican establishment by winning the GOP primary for Florida’s 21st Congressional District. The 21st is West Palm Beach, where Mar-a-Lago lives. Trump himself has already cast his vote for her.

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Clearly, Loomer’s campaign has been adversely affected by her various bans. At the time of her deletion, Loomer’s tweets were getting 150 million impressions a month. As she puts it: “They just assume that people can afford TV, and that they’re not going to get all their information through social media.”  She might have wingnut tendencies, but Loomer is also half of the choice for voters in the 21st District.

This year, “in the interests of transparency and fairness”, Twitter has given every single candidate standing in the US election a blue-check verified account. So, when she won her primary, she applied to have her accounts reinstated.

No dice. She can’t get on Big Social, the broadcast networks are ignoring her, and her opponent, Lois Frankel, won’t even say her name, let alone debate her.

Should she win — still a long shot — Loomer has sworn to spend her time on Capitol Hill breaking up the tech giants’ monopoly. So couldn’t it be said that they’re acting to titrate their own legislative environment?

F.A. Hayek, and his prophet on earth Margaret Thatcher, saw the market as the best bulwark against tyrannical state power — that by pulling lots of little levers every day with our cash, we’d effectively be voting, in a constant dialogue of mini-democracy. It was only towards the end of their regime that the Thatcherites began to realise that some things — from trains down — remain public utilities in spirit, no matter who runs them.

As the Hunter Biden story still freezes the New York Post’s Twitter feed, it seems the power of the corporate lever-pullers to mould the outer edges of democracy is as strong as it has ever been. We can vote with our wallets, sure. But what if the scope extends way beyond a single product line, into an entire kind of product, or the social architecture that makes products possible? What if the lever-pullers are our wallets?