The far-right conspiracy theorist has taken credit for numerous high-level firings over what she claims is “disloyalty” to President Trump.
A self-described “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalism” influencer is one of the most influential people in the Trump White House — despite not actually working for the administration. And she’s brought a particularly odious form of cancel culture to President Donald Trump’s second term that’s led to well over a dozen White House and federal employees recently fired for wrongthink.
Laura Loomer, 32, is known as much for her overt racism as her peddling of evidence-free conspiracy theories — such as 9/11 was an “inside job,” the Parkland high school shooting was staged, and Ohio was being overrun by “cannibalistic Haitians” who were “eating people’s pets.” Loomer has been described by many news outlets as a personal friend and confidant of Trump’s, and she’s fond of bragging about the “scalps” she’s collected, referring to the former White House and federal employees she successfully targeted for firing.
James Risen, writing in The Guardian, noted that Loomer’s critics insist “she has just been taking credit for moves that Trump was already planning,” but added that “Trump himself has said he takes her seriously, so it may be more accurate to describe her as Trump’s de facto national security adviser.”
Loomer has also referred to herself as Trump’s “loyalty enforcer,” and she has just added a few more “scalps” to her collection.
The Daily Wire — a right-wing partisan site co-founded by MAGA pundit Ben Shapiro — reported that National Security Agency general counsel April Falcon Doss had previously worked for Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak called her a “transparently partisan activist who has written publicly about her opposition to Trump.” As evidence, Rosiak cited Doss’ call “for Trump to be permanently banned from social media for staging an ‘insurrection.’”
Loomer told The New York Times that she “reposted a tweet that exposed her last week and flagged it for the right people.” Doss was fired last week.
Another civil servant recently “Loomer’d” is Jen Easterly, a former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), who had her job offer to serve as the distinguished chair of the Military Academy at West Point’s social sciences department rescinded by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. Loomer earlier this week called Easterly’s job offer a “vetting crisis” and later boasted that “All Biden holdovers must be removed from the Trump admin.”
Loomer has taken credit for at least a dozen other “scalps” for “disloyalty” — including federal prosecutors, directors and aides on the National Security Council and even Trump’s original surgeon general nominee, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, because of her support for the Covid vaccines that Trump helped bring into existence in his first term.
But one of the most striking Loomer-influenced cancellations is the resignation of Dr. Vinay Prasad from his roles as the Food and Drug Administration’s head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and chief medical and scientific officer.
Prasad — an acolyte of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who made a name for himself during the Covid pandemic by blasting the FDA and other health agencies on social media, podcasts and his blog — was only on the job a little more than two months. But he made his MAHA mark when he overrode the FDA’s vaccine experts’ recommendations on two Covid vaccines, which led directly to the FDA announcing its plan to only recommend Covid shots for people over 65 or with high-risk health conditions.
But Prasad was not spared from MAGA cancel culture, after Loomer dug up some old podcast clips where Prasad was critical of Trump. In a classic case of people supporting the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being shocked that the leopards subsequently ate their faces, the MAGA-friendly and cancel culture-obsessed Free Press (where Prasad has been a contributing writer) published an editorial decrying Loomer’s “shameful smear campaign against our honorable, decent friend.”
Loomer told Politico that she expects “hundreds” more to be purged for disloyalty to the dear leader. And Loomer is soliciting snitches via an anonymous tip line.
“I’m happy to take people’s tips about disloyal appointees, disloyal staffers and Biden holdovers,” Loomer said. “And I guess you could say that my tip line has come to serve as a form of therapy for Trump administration officials who want to expose their colleagues who should not be in the positions that they’re in.”
We’re a little more than one-eighth of the way through the second Trump administration, and one of its defining features is that it is led by astoundingly unqualified people whose raison d’etat is ruthlessly enforcing ideological orthodoxy and slavish devotion to the president, rather than the country and the Constitution.
And whether you previously worked for people Trump doesn’t like, or you told the objective truth about Trump’s attempted self-coup, or even if you previously criticized him before turning MAGA sycophant, your job is not safe from being eliminated at the behest of a person who during the 2024 election made comments about Vice President Kamala Harris that were so unimpeachably racist they even drew rebukes from loyal Trumpists JD Vance and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Trump’s election was widely seen as a rebuke against the excesses of left-wing cancel culture. But the Loomering of the federal government shows we probably haven’t seen the worst of MAGA cancel culture yet.
When the Trump dictatorship decides to reenact the Night of the Long Knives, Laura will be running the show.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, declared that the administration will no longer “tolerate” what he called a culture that makes it “easy to be sick in America.” Framing childhood illness as a failure of parenting and physical activity rather than medical need, Oz linked obesity to national security and warned that industries would be forced to cooperate—or face government retaliation.
Oz—often called a conspiracy theorist who has been widely criticized for promoting “quack” products—appeared to endorse an authoritarian vision of public health, suggesting that under Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Americans would no longer be allowed to remain “sick” without consequences, and threatened industry with demands to either cooperate or face retribution.
He also railed against what he called the “over-medicalization” of American society—particularly among children—but failed to distinguish between conditions driven by behavior and those rooted in biology or beyond individual control.
“You’re diagnosing problems that probably should be dealt with with the parents,” he told Fox News Business, referring to children’s health, “or by going out and playing, or just dealing with issues and teaching kids how to mental resilience [sic].”
He warned of risk factors that “cause an obesity epidemic that now prevents three quarters of young men from entering the military,” a questionable claim, and said that this “crisis” is “rolling up towards the older ages.”
“There’s a reason we’re twice as obese as [our] European counterpart countries, we’re ten times more obese than Japan: we’ve made it easy to be sick in America. And this president and this Secretary of Health, Bobby Kennedy, they’re not going to tolerate it anymore,” Oz declared.
Warning that he and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, “are the tip of the spear,” he threatened “to make sure that we get industry to work with us, or we’ll be coming after them.”
Dr. Oz has a history of linking healthcare policy to politics.
In 2022, during his failed senatorial campaign, Oz said he wanted abortion to be between a woman, her doctors, and local political leaders.
More recently, Oz has said Americans must “earn the right” to be on Medicaid, and said current Medicaid users should “prove you matter.”
Critics, meanwhile, blasted Oz’s latest remarks.
California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom responded, telling Oz, “You just stripped 17 million people of their healthcare.”
Dr. Rachel Bedard, an internist, geriatrician, and palliative care physician, wrote: “Stop being sick, Americans. They aren’t gonna tolerate it anymore.”
Anthony M. Hopper, who teaches healthcare administration, noted, “You know … We would be a lot healthier (in the future) if we spent more money on medical research.”
Retired professor MA Rasmussen wrote: “So you guys are OK with the gutting of the EPA, an agency created to protect us from polluted air & water & the Labor Department which enforces worker safety rules? I guess so. You’re all into blaming the individual rather than corporations or agribusiness or bad public policy.”
Watch the video … at this link.
An Iran-linked hacking group has threatened to release a batch of emails it said it has stolen from President Donald Trump‘s longtime aides, including adviser Roger Stone and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
Reuters reported Monday that a cyberattack group that hacked the president’s campaign in 2024 claimed it had roughly 100 gigabytes of emails it could leak.
The hackers, operating under the pseudonym Robert, did not provide information about the content of the emails or when they plan to release them, according to the news agency. The group previously released some emails in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election last year.
In online chats with Reuters, they said they also had emails from the accounts of Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan and Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who it was revealed was paid $130,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement about an affair she says she had with Trump.
A “hostile foreign adversary is threatening to illegally exploit purportedly stolen and unverified material in an effort to distract, discredit, and divide,” the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said late on Monday.
https://www.newsweek.com/iran-hackers-threaten-leak-trump-emails-2092864
California’s two U.S. senators demanded on Wednesday that the Trump administration stop using personal data of millions of Medicaid enrollees — including their immigration status — as part of its sweeping deportation campaign.
In a letter to top administration officials, Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla expressed alarm over an Associated Press report last week that detailed how deportation officials had obtained the sensitive data over the objections of career health officials. They wrote that health officials needed to stop sharing the information and that the Department of Homeland Security should “destroy any and all such data” it had obtained.
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The AP reported that CMS transferred the data last week to DHS officials. Internal CMS records obtained by the AP showed the Medicaid agency fought the request, arguing that sharing the data would violate rules and federal law. Trump appointees overruled them, giving CMS a 54-minute deadline to share the information with DHS, according to emails obtained by AP.
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“We are deeply troubled that this administration intends to use individuals’ private health information for the unrelated purpose of possible enforcement actions targeting lawful noncitizens and mixed status families,” the senators wrote.
Vaccination experts recently fired by Donald Trump’s administration sounded the alarm in a Monday editorial, saying they were “deeply concerned” by the actions of a US health secretary known for his vaccine skepticism.
Last week Robert F Kennedy Jr dismissed all 17 members of a key advisory committee, accusing them of financial conflicts of interest.
Two days later, he announced the appointment of eight new members, including several vaccine critics, such as a biochemist who became the darling of the anti-vax movement.
A federal judge ruled Monday it was illegal for the Trump administration to cancel several hundred research grants, adding that the cuts raise serious questions about racial discrimination.
U.S. District Judge William Young in Massachusetts said the administration’s process was “arbitrary and capricious” and that it did not follow long-held government rules and standards when it abruptly canceled grants deemed to focus on gender identity or diversity, equity and inclusion.
In a hearing Monday on two cases calling for the grants to be restored, the judge pushed government lawyers to offer a formal definition of DEI, questioning how grants could be canceled for that reason when some were designed to study health disparities as Congress had directed.
Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, went on to address what he called “a darker aspect” to the cases, calling it “palpably clear” that what was behind the government actions was “racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community.”
After 40 years on the bench, “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young added. He ended Monday’s hearing saying, “Have we no shame.”
https://apnews.com/article/nih-research-trump-cuts-dei-rfk-4fec9f308f3ff427185a12e88f260c81
In his confirmation hearings to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya pledged his openness to views that might conflict with his own. “Dissent,” he said, ”is the very essence of science.”
That commitment is being put to the test.
On Monday, scores of scientists at the agency sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled the Bethesda Declaration, challenging “policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”
It says: “We dissent.”
In a capital where insiders often insist on anonymity to say such things publicly, 92 NIH researchers, program directors, branch chiefs and scientific review officers put their signatures on the letter — and their careers on the line. An additional 250 of their colleagues across the agency endorsed the declaration without using their names.
The letter, addressed to Bhattacharya, also was sent to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH. White House spokesman Kush Desai defended the administration’s approach to federal research and said President Donald Trump is focused on restoring a “Gold Standard” of science, not “ideological activism.”
