The Wacky Far-Right Influencer Who Caught Trump’s Eye
Laura Loomer has been spewing hate online for years. Now, Trump reportedly wants to hire her.
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Donald Trump is reportedly eyeing a new employee—and boy, does she have a history of spouting her own crazy remarks.
Fever Dreams hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill have been following the exploits of Laura Loomer for years—long before it was reported last week that the former president wanted to hire the anti-Muslim activist in an unnamed capacity.
“I mean this is someone who, in an old interview, said, ‘Yeah, I’m on board with white nationalism.’” Weill said. “I mean, she got banned from UberEats for being too racist… This is not a serious character,” Weill continued.
The hosts speculate that Trump staffers may have leaked the news hoping that the inevitable backlash would convince him not to go through with it—but also note that she does share a lot of views with the former president and the people running his campaign.
“So it’s completely reasonable for me to believe that somebody didn’t leak this and that they’re all on board,” Sommer said.
Then, author and historian Garrett Graff joins the podcast to discuss his new book on 9/11 and the through line between America’s Ku Klux Klan and today’s extreme right-wing movements.
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“It's an amazing trend to watch unfold over 30 years, in part because the far right, very early on… is an early adopter of new technologies. One of the first places that the far right comes together is on an online message board in the early 1980s, when those things were still very, very rare,” Graff said. “Stormfront, the leading white supremacist website, is literally one of the first websites on the internet in the 1990s.”
Plus! A look at the burgeoning right-wing freakout over a relatively mundane policy proposal by the Federal Reserve to create a digital currency.
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
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