This week:
- Laura Loomer vows to harass Dem lawmakers if she wins congressional seat.
- QAnon grifters making big money.
- Portlanders worry about Proud Boys rally.
- No Flat-Earth yoga for MAGA conference.
Since getting the boot from Twitter last fall, anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer has tried various schemes to get her account back, including chaining herself to Twitter HQ and making a late night visit to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s house.
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Now that those methods failed, Loomer is doing the obvious next thing: running for Congress.
Loomer launched her bid against Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) late last Friday, saying she was running because Frankel hadn’t helped her get her Twitter account back.
Loomer’s motivations for kicking off a longshot bid in a heavily Democratic district became even clearer in a fundraising email she sent out this week. In a grandiose letter to her fans, Loomer imagines using her congressional bid to get back on Twitter — and, once she wins, using her position to harass Democrats in Congress’s members-only elevators.
Under Loomer’s 4D-chess legal theory, you see, Twitter and Facebook can’t ban you if you’re running for office.
“I can’t wait to see the reactions of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey as they have to reinstate a ‘dangerous individual’ to their platforms,” Loomer writes. “I can’t help but laugh as I think about it.”
Incidentally, far-right activists in the United Kingdom had the same theory earlier this year, and turned out to be extremely wrong. Twitter-banned right-wing characters Tommy Robinson and “Sargon of Akkad” ran for office, with their fans convinced that Twitter would have to give them their accounts back. In the end, that didn’t happen.
Even if she doesn’t get her account back, though, Loomer has big plans for Congress. She claims she’d use her congressional privileges to confront Democratic members of Congress on-camera, in the process she’s dubbed “loomering.”
“When I win, I plan on being the same Laura Loomer but with a Congressional hall pass,” Loomer writes. “Democrat members will have to create a ‘Loomer Alert’ system to avoid me!
“You can probably see me now entering the members-only elevator with AOC . . . and my cell phone. As a citizen, I’d get arrested. But with that gold ‘member’ lapel pin, they can’t stop me!”
Incredibly, Loomer has already been endorsed by one member of Congress, fringey Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).
But Loomer, who has called for American Muslims to be banned from holding office or working in law enforcement, may be too extreme for even some on the right — Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth sent a tweet urging his fans to donate to Loomer’s campaign, but later deleted it.
On Thursday, Loomer urged her fans to tune into her appearance with conservative Florida talk show host Joyce Kaufman. Instead of praising Loomer, though, Kaufman begged her to drop out of the race.
“This would not be what I think you are the most-valuable-player in,” Kaufman said.
Portland residents and police are warned about the potential for violence at two duelling political rallies on August 17, including one hosted by a Proud Boy and former InfoWars reporter.
Sad news about yoga at this year’s ultimate MAGA event.
Last week’s Right Richter covered October’s American Priority Conference, where former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was set to appear at the same event as Flat Earth yoga teacher David “Avocado” Wolfe. I took the presence of Wolfe, who opposes vaccines and believes mushrooms came to the world from space, at an otherwise run-of-the-mill Trump conference as a sign of how much the internet fringe is bleeding into regular Trumpworld.
Alas, as Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt reported on Wednesday, Wolfe has mysteriously disappeared from the conference’s website.
Some people are making serious money pushing QAnon. In the latest example of how to profit from a ludicrous, dangerous conspiracy theory, a mysterious QAnon blogger recently pulled in six-figures from selling a book explaining all of the QAnon “clues.”
Anonymous QAnon blogger “Neon Revolt” is one of the conspiracy theory’s most prominent boosters, known for lengthy, indecipherable threads that are a lot even by the standards of QAnon-world.
Earlier this year, Neon Revolt asked their fans to contribute to an Indiegogo crowdfunding page for the creation of Revolution Q, another book promoting QAnon. Neon Revolt initially wanted $25,000 in donations, with the book costing a whopping $25 a copy.
That sounds like a lot of money for a book summarizing QAnon posts and other assorted message board nonsense. But the fundraising has been staggeringly successful — the anonymous blogger has raked in $158,610, making more than six times the initial fundraising goal for the book.
It’s an eye-popping total for a book about a completely fake internet theory, and a good reminder that it doesn’t appear the money train will end anytime soon.
After all, the theory got a boost from the Trump campaign itself this week with a new campaign ad that prominently featured QAnon signs. It was not clear whether this was intentional, but for Q believers it’s all part of the plan.
This post originally appeared in Right Richter, a newsletter by Will Sommer. Subscribe now to see what's happening in right-wing media from the safety of your inbox.
