Why Far Right Men Love Laura Loomer
It is so simple: The entire conservative media project collapses when we acknowledge this fundamental reality.
One of my good Catholic friends asked me a great question yesterday that seemed to be worth unpacking:
“Laura Loomer is trying to undermine the pope already. Why is she taken seriously again? People once realized that conservatives are meant to conserve things.”
For those curious to know what the Millennial generation’s second most influential white nationalist, conspiracist, and anti-Muslim bigot (after Stephen Miller) thinks of the Catholic Church’s new leader, take a look:
I responded to my friend with a lesson that I’d learned more than 15 years ago at my second political-media editing job.
“I think you know the answer to that question,” I wrote back. “Because Trump wants to have sex with her. If she were unattractive, he wouldn’t give a crap about her, and she wouldn’t have a fraction of the following she does.”
In my last article announcing my career shift toward investigative journalism, I noted that the late David Horowitz played a foundational role in my career and my ideological shift from considering myself a liberal Democrat Obama voter in 2008 to identifying as a conservative Republican Romney voter by 2012.
Why did I make this ideological shift?
Simply put, it was because the facts and arguments I engaged with over the course of many years persuaded me that there was merit to a number of general, long-term conservative positions which I do still hold:
Hawkish foreign policy in the tradition of the the Cold Warriors who ultimately defeated the Soviet Union
A Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell-style free market economics built on a skepticism for centralized planning
A moderate social conservatism which recognizes the superiority of a monogamous lifestyle to a promiscuous or polygamous one, and the innate value of the Judeo-Christian religious traditions (though I do not share today's Republican disdain for the LGBTQ+ community, and I never have)
And how did I come to embrace these views?
By reading a bunch of books. By considering arguments in serious, intellectual publications like National Review. By diving deep into the tomes of Sowell, Horowitz, literary theorist Camille Paglia, fusionist philosopher Frank S. Meyer, and many others. By trying to understand the threat posed by Islamist terrorists and their nonviolent activist supporters here in America.
My shift came primarily from ideas, with one emotional kicker knocking me into the ideological end zone. The only genuine emotional component to this that I can point to came from my friendship with Horowitz. I came to realize that this famous TV pundit and National Review contributor, who enjoyed talking with me for so long on the phone for reasons that still remain mysterious to me, was actually putting his life in jeopardy by appearing on college campuses to speak hard truths about radical Islam.
This seemed self-evidently wrong: that people should have to worry about going onto a college campus and sharing provocative ideas. It seemed clear which side decent people should stand on and support.
So when I started editing Horowitz's websites in 2009, I understood that I was signing up for a fairly conventional Reaganite Right with a few unique flourishes. FrontPageMag was, in my view, simply a more hawkish, ex-leftist, West Coast-conservative National Review. And now it was my job to take that ethos and give it a makeover for the age of the blog: to take those serious ideas and to use fun, “bloggy” creativity to draw people to dig deeper into those books that had been so formative for me. Horowitz was simply sitting in the William F. Buckley, Jr. chair now.
And when I escaped Horowitz and joined Pajamas Media in 2011, I understood myself to still be doing that same thing - editing a hipper, more badass National Review, filled with right-wing Hollywood screenwriters who would simply hit the Left harder. It was a deep and rich intellectual environment for me, not just a silly blog. The PJ columnists were serious people, getting paid thousands of dollars each month to write a handful of blog posts which I then got to edit. They also contributed to the actual National Review. And I got to work every day with the late Middle East scholar Barry Rubin, learning from him like a professor. I came to regard the years at the Freedom Center as my “Master's in Political Warfare” and then my years at PJ as a "Ph.D. in New Media Troublemaking," as I proclaimed when I would leave in 2015 at the dawn of the Trump era.
Of course, to everyone else it looked like I was just blogging.
Now, looking back on those years, one episode in particular resonates as the dark omen which has now come to pass.
How did we get from a conservative movement during the Bush years, where high intellects like Charles Krauthammer informed the presidential administration, to where we are now, a scenario in which Laura Loomer now seemingly has so much influence that she can get government employees fired? How and why did that degradation happen?
How did it happen that, in 2025, we now have a president famous for pretending to fire people on TV, who has recruited no fewer than 23 Fox News personalities into his administration, and absolutely none of them are remotely qualified to do anything beyond looking attractive and amusing on fucking television?
Most of the time during those PJ years, I worked from home, first in Sherman Oaks and then in Inglewood, often genuinely working in my pajamas. I regarded this lifestyle as a true triumph, a great professional escape that I had somehow pulled off, against all odds.
See, I didn’t have to put on the suit, go into the office and bullshit with people. I got to stay at home, smoke weed all day, and write wild, experimental blog posts. As long as I continued to generate traffic by posting one listicle after another, I could get away with a lot, including writing openly about occultism in a political context, as I do now. "Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, Capitalist Wizards, and Anti-Slavery Republicans" I proclaimed at the time, as I was developing a book concept along those lines.
However, sometimes my supervisor, the managing editor, and I would carpool into the office in El Segundo, which was located in a tall, fancy tower which our Zany Billionaire Angel Investor apparently kept his other businesses housed in, too. We might go for editorial meetings, to receive some colleague visiting from another country or the East Coast, or to appear on the blog's web-TV sister publication, PJTV. I recorded a number of these appearances, usually little interviews or friendly, low-stakes debates about cultural topics.
One of my motivators to participate in these silly videos was the fact that I wanted to collaborate more closely with our PJTV colleagues in the hope of promoting some of these incredible writers I edited - two of whom I am still working with and now publishing,
and .After finishing the taping one day and before heading back home, I stopped to chat with the executive producer at PJTV, a real nice, friendly guy. It was strange to me that, even though we were PJ the blog and PJ the internet TV station, there seemed to be little cross-over. Only a handful of the columnists also appeared on PJTV. It seemed like a no-brainer for PJTV to take advantage of the huge talent pool I'd spent years recruiting in my effort to grow the PJ Lifestyle blog.
Why hadn't that happened yet? I asked the executive producer. It turned out there were two reasons.
The first is less important in the big picture, but very amusing and still relevant.
The producer told me that our Zany Billionaire Angel Investor, who had pumped millions of dollars a year into these totally unprofitable right-wing media websites, was the sort of energetic entrepreneur who had 10 new ideas each day. Seven were terrible, two were good, and one was genius - but he could never tell the difference between them.
I only had the opportunity to work directly with the Zany Billionaire on a few occasions, but that assessment certainly clicked when I did. I watched as he attempted to assemble his own PJTV show, picking the hosts and the angle of the show whilen creating interactive websites and programs to go along with it. And that ratio of bad/good/genius was there too - most of it was terrible, a little bit was good, and a couple of the ideas could have been fantastic if he'd had the good sense to just focus on them.
But he didn't. He was the typical high-energy entrepreneur in the "Hypomanic Edge" fashion, perpetually flying a million miles an hour and filled with infinite confidence that whatever he was working on right now would change the world. I remember phone calls with him in which he'd just go on and on and on; it was impossible to get a word in edgewise or to tell the Big Man paying my salary that actually, I needed to go.
Perhaps this personality sketch sounds familiar?
Have you ever met someone like this?
Someone filled with energy and innovative ideas that they've used in order to become absurdly wealthy, but now - because of their successes - they’re even more arrogant than ever before, and they just can't hear anyone trying to tell them the truth?
People like this will go and try to run six companies at once, then come waving a chainsaw, ready to hack $2 trillion from the federal budget. And then they cry and whine like a child denied a candy bar at the checkout line when their fuckin' over-valued car company starts sinking under the weight of its CEO's bullshit.
The second secret the producer inadvertently revealed to me is much more important for understanding the transformation of the conservative movement, right-wing media, the Republican Party, and ultimately, America as a whole.
I started telling him about this great team of writers who I had assembled at PJ Lifestyle. In particular, I pointed him to our parenting pieces and homeschooling articles. I told him about this team of "mommy bloggers" I'd grown over the years (back then, that term was just a descriptor, not a pejorative) and whom I had come to adore. I didn't just want these women to succeed on our blog: I wanted to boost their careers more broadly and even see their books in print someday.
And then my heart sank when he asked this question:
"Are any of them pretty girls? That always helps a lot with traffic."
To my eye, these writers were perfectly lovely women, but they were women, not girls: experienced mothers in their 40s and 50s. How they looked had nothing to do with why I chose to publish their writing. They had earned their way like any male writer, through the strength of their arguments, the quality of their prose, and the depth of their research. All of those factors had persuaded me to become a conservative in the first place, and so at a blog and web-TV level, I sought to operate on that same level of sophistication.
But I knew clearly what he was talking about: He simply imitated what Fox News had already pioneered over the last decade. Women did not appear on Fox News because they were the most qualified as journalists, commentators, or analysts. No, Roger Ailes picked them for two reasons:
So that right-wing male viewers could be sexually excited by watching beautiful women spout right-wing talking points
So that he in turn could then sexually prey on and harass these women. "Do I want to fuck this woman? Yes? Hired!"
But why should it "help" or matter so much if a pretty girl would appear in a video on a conservative news website? Because hot women who resemble Barbie dolls attract more clicks on a website than conventionally attractive, "normal" women.
And that's what conservative media came to care about most during my years of blog editing from 2009-2015. It was at that time that Google Analytics dropped into our laps. All of a sudden, we could see not just how many clicks each article provoked, but also where the traffic for them emerged. We could then do a bigger analysis of which subjects and headlines inspired the most clicks, thus informing how we would craft future blog posts for maximum emotional impact.
For years, I would build seemingly endless spreadsheets collecting the titles and URLs of our posts. Then I'd spend hours slicing and dicing the data to figure out what I could do as a blog editor to "generate traffic." Or, in other words, what little tricks I could use to emotionally manipulate people to click the headline.
Our Zany Billionaire wanted proof that the website was "growing" and "getting more traffic" than before - the same numbers which Horowitz obsessed over, too. They cared about the metrics, not so much about any real-world changes these websites could have tried to implement or what we were actually saying that generated so many hits.
And the way I provided that growth was with those goddamn listicles that were so popular at the time (thanks, Buzzfeed). Put a number in a headline and offer to rank something, and people just go hog wild. One Top 10 article broken up over 10 pages would generate more "pageviews" (read: ad impressions) than a conventional, serious journalism article split over 2 pages. It didn’t matter that there was a button that would allow the reader to view these articles as a single page. Bafflingly, most people preferred to click through one by one instead.
So what was happening at PJ at that time - the quest to generate traffic and to go viral - was also happening across media in general. And what was always the easiest tool to use to accomplish this?
Sex.
At this point, the Marshall McLuhan quote that "the medium is the message" is widely known, but the meaning is still elusive for so many. The idea is that the technology which transmits an idea will inherently shape how the audience understands that idea.
The conservative movement that emerged during the Cold War, based around Buckley, came together from intellectual magazines, serious nonfiction books, and highbrow PBS shows like “Firing Line.” If you still want to see examples of this endangered species of conservatism, then the closest you'll get is probably the media put out by the Hoover Institution.
But as the Cold War concluded, media technology started changing. Talk radio emerged as the new voice of conservatism in the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh came to eclipse Buckley as the leading voice, and his style of conservatism was inherently shaped by what "drove traffic" on talk radio.
Editor's Note: I grew up hearing a lot of Rush, and I still get flashbacks when I hear that Pretenders song that opened his show! -SS
But let's get fuckin' real for a moment, my fellow conservatives (and yes, I still am one): Rush was not some great intellectual. He was a fuckin' entertainer. He was the first of many in a long line of right-wing info-tainment performers. People listened to Rush not because they were deep intellectuals who wanted to engage with serious ideas. They wanted to be entertained as their ideology was affirmed.
Ailes, who had created Limbaugh's short-lived TV show (on which the talk radio host infamously and unforgivably joked that the teenage Chelsea Clinton was ugly like a dog), simply took this same formula and applied it to 24/7 cable news, merged with the tabloid journalism ethos of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. Only now he had to appeal to the old men listening: He had to provide something that could keep them glued to their seats.
Thus, the leg cam was born. Women’s bodies were positioned like props to titillate old men:
And 15 years after Fox News launched, it had ascended to the position of central and most important pipeline for a conservative media career. You had to appear on Fox regularly if you want to get up there; if you want people to know you.
And as I talked with that producer more than a decade ago, I saw the degradation that was coming. Depth of ideas and strength of argument were not central anymore to conservative argument. They had been replaced with the low-hanging, sour fruit of arousal, entertainment, emotional manipulation, and dopamine addiction.
The Image is what mattered, not the truth.
And now, here we are in 2025. We have a president who does not care about competence or character in who he has positioned in the most important roles in our government. Apparently we have an electorate who doesn’t care either. He wants people who can make him look good on cable news. That is the primary fucking criterion.
So because he places that value above all, it informs the way in which he processes all information. Something vapid from a "pretty girl" that makes him feel good is going to make a greater impact than an uncomfortable, entirely true fact presented by a mature woman.
Our presidential administration, and the "MAGA" movement supporting it, are thus inherently based in bullshit at their foundations:
Shipping immigrants off to El Salvador or Libya without due process does not inherently make anyone safer.
These ridiculous tariffs do not actually fix any existing problem, nor do they create greater prosperity for anyone.
Transgender members of the military do not in any way harm the strength and preparedness of our armed forces.
And everyone knows that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. does not believe in germ theory, right?
Just as everyone knows that Kash Patel has suggested in his role as FBI director that the UFC come in to train agents? Gee, maybe he got that idea from all the UFC fights he's been attending with that antisemitic Hollywood has-been, Mel Gibson?
And how about this DOGE bullshit, eh? Two trillion dollars cut from the budget? Yeah, GTFO and back to your absurdly overvalued car company, Sissy SpaceX. The amount actually cut is so small it's humiliating and whether these decisions equated to baby or bathwater is anyone’s guess at this point.
But you know what? All images and false idols ultimately collapse, and the true ugliness comes to reveal itself. That is just beginning now with this Trump regime guided by the racist Stephen Miller, but we can see it too in Laura Loomer's own face, and in the faces of so many Trump-orbiting women now named as self-afflicted with "Mar-A-Lago Face:"
“She did it to herself, though, so it’s OK to laugh at it.” - Comedian Amber Ruffin
Here's another tale from right-wing world that I wasn’t planning on telling today, but now I may as well:
I left PJ in 2015 to join start-up book publisher Liberty Island. A year later, I also joined the Middle East Forum, where I researched and wrote about Islamist groups, particularly the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
During that time, I went to report on a protest at a March 23, 2019 CAIR event in Los Angeles featuring Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Loomer took the occasion to - what else? - make a narcissistic spectacle of herself.
She rented a hotel room across the street from the CAIR event and hung big banners from the balcony that said “CAIR HATES JEWS” and “ILHAN HATES ISRAEL,” which, unlike most of Loomer’s proclamations today, were at least factually accurate statements.
When she appeared among the protesters, they chanted "Loo-mer! Loo-mer! Loo-mer!" in the same inflection the audience used to on “The Jerry Springer Show” back in the ‘90s. (Oh God, am I fucking dating myself here or what?)
And Loomer was hot. I saw her in person only a dozen yards from me and took the two pictures below. At first I suspected that she might become the Millennials' Ann Coulter, a take-no-prisoners troublemaker fighting the Left and the Islamists. I appreciated her darker, almost goth vibe:
But I never made an effort to connect with Loomer, even though I'd worked in the counter-Jihad space for a decade by then. She just seemed a bit off somehow, and in the years that followed, we saw her hate crack wide open as her counter-Islamist activism revealed itself ultimately as a mere facade for virulent, violent anti-Muslim bigotry:
And now you can see it in her very face:
I'm sorry, I'm going to say it: She looks awful now. She has had so much plastic surgery that she looks like a cartoon character. And yet, she’s done that because that's what men like Trump and Loomer's legions of social-media fans find hot: a woman whose natural beauty has been pushed so far that it horseshoes back into ugliness.
And in that disturbing Loomer face, we can see a symbol.
She is who conservative media chose to become.
She is who today's video-based media has empowered.
She is the new Statue of Liberty, standing upon Liberty Island, not welcoming as refugees flee tyranny and anarchy around the globe, but instead pointing the planes filled with un-convicted prisoners to El Salvador, Libya—even Ukraine was floated by the Trump regime as a place to send unwanted immigrants. Miller, Trump, and Loomer hate brown people so much that they want to ship them into ongoing war zones to die.
The conservative movement that I joined because of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan, who spent their lifetimes working to liberate the Soviet Union, has now become the literal, exact opposite: a cause which seeks to ally with authoritarian regimes and which openly suggests shredding the constitution in service of “mass deportation” fantasies.
So what now? Where do we go from here?
Those who have followed my years of laying out a “Psychedelic Zionist” approach can probably guess.
“The God of Israel is a God of the Desert. If you Want to Speak with Him you’ll have to go to the Desert,” Andre Gregory’s John the Baptist told Willem DaFoe’s Jesus of Nazareth in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” my favorite film and the inspiration behind our publishing company’s name.
Pick up your Bible.
Open to the Book of Exodus.
Our God calls upon all of us to pick up our staff, to invoke Moses and even become him, and to confront the Pharaoh and demand he Let Our People Go.
Stephen Miller, Laura Loomer, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Bobby Kennedy, Karoline Leavitt, Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and YOU—especially fucking YOU, Mike Huckabee, you false prophet and fundamentalist pagan idolater—the God of Israel demands that you Let His People Go.
And who are His people?
We are all His people. And in oppressing the lowest among us, in sticking them on shelves in that CECOT concentration camp, in inducing asthma attacks in a Turkish college student in retaliation for co-writing a mild anti-Israel op-ed, in snatching away medicine and aid from the poorest around the world, you are oppressing Him.
“What you do unto the least of me you do unto me,” Jesus said in Matthew 25:40.
To the Pharaohs running our federal government, to the third of the electorate continuing to follow these neo-fascists like slaves and psychopaths, I am going to warn you now what is going to come again.
There will be ten plagues.
They will mirror the same plagues that brought down Egypt's Pharaoh more than 3,000 years ago.
As the God of Israel brought down the 10 idols of Pharaoh, He will again bring down the idols of our age that are oppressing his people.
Prepare yourselves.
So to return us to where we began, understanding now why too many people choose to respect the rantings of Mar-A-Lago-Face-Masked Loomer, perhaps it’s worth concluding with the last line of my friend’s lament:
“People once realized that conservatives are meant to conserve things.”
We should consider for a moment the campaign slogan that Trump appropriated from Reagan and that has come to symbolize his whole cult of personality:
Make America Great Again, what we now call “MAGA.”
During my years as a conservative activist, I was not trying to make America great “again” because I already regarded our country as the greatest in the world. And why is our country so great?
Because our Constitution is the best. We have the best form of government ever imagined into existence.
Everything that we ultimately are as a nation comes down to the fact that this document written as the basis of our government at the end of the 18th century has not only managed to still function but has fueled the rise of the wealthiest people and most powerful military force ever in human existence.
Our nation is great and will remain great provided we continue to do one thing: protect the fundamental moral principles of the Constitution of the United States of America.
And President Donald John Trump has now made explicit that he does not know if he needs to uphold the Constitution:
It’s a scary time now in which the president and his minions seek to overthrow centuries of American constitutional order.
But the truth is that I ultimately remain very optimistic that we’re going to get through this. Trump, Loomer, and Miller are going to fail.
Why?
Because they all are just too fucking stupid to accomplish anything near what they want to do. Just as Sissy SpaceX belly-flopped on DOGE and retreated back to his car company with his tail between his legs, so too will the same ultimately happen to everyone else who made the massive mistake to lasso themselves to this MAGA movement.
Who knows? Maybe they really are too stupid to accomplish anything worthwhile. But they were smart enough to get elected. Count your blessings in that you have elections every four years, no matter what. As per Musk, what do you care? He's going to be on the first rocket to Mars where he will populate an entire world with his own mini-me's.
It astonishes me how many people are comfortable embracing soothing falsehoods.
As I often say these days, is it better to be right? Or to feel like you're right, even when you're wrong? If it's better to be right, you need to be comfortable with uncertainty, with seeking out errors in your perception, with challenging your existing beliefs when they cannot explain new evidence.
One of God's names, perhaps the most important one, is "Truth."
****
Sadly, this also helps to explain the rise of the world's Loomers. I think it was Eric S. Raymond who would often make the point that if certain truths are deemed bigoted to say out loud (for example, that CAIR is hostile to America), then the only people who will dare to speak the truth will be bigoted people (like Loomer). If so, then people seeking out the truth will be drawn to the bigoted people, and not knowing the difference, will become steeped in bigotry.
In a weaker form, this applies to the rise of Trump himself. He was the only national politician willing to take on the problems that others have been ignoring for decades, and that was because the cocktail-party set decreed that it was rude to actually address our problems.