Professional provocateur Laura Loomer, 29, is making her second run for Congress against incumbent Rep. Daniel Webster and another challenger, Gavriel E. Soriano. Now living in Lady Lake (she told the Orlando Sentinel she’d move if she wins the primary), Loomer first ran in 2020 in the 21st Congressional District against Democrat Rep. Lois Frankel, who beat her by 20 points. Loomer was going to try again in the 21st CD, but since the West Palm Beach district — home to Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago — is heavily Democratic, she changed her mind in September and switched to the more reliably Republican 11th CD.

Loomer has yet to hold any public office, but she has parlayed her stints at Project Veritas and InfoWars, her association with the Proud Boys, her aggressive interview style, fondness for attention-grabbing stunts, and belief “in freedom of speech and speaking the raw truth, the unfiltered truth, it doesn't matter who it offends” into a national platform. She recently broke with Gov. Ron DeSantis over his new law prohibiting peaceful protests in front of private homes — a reaction to pro-choice supporters protesting in front of Supreme Court justices’ homes — denouncing it on Gettr as a “violation of the First Amendment” and “unconstitutional.”

She’s been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and political adviser Roger Stone, who tweeted an offer to freeze his sperm in the event she wants to have his baby because he is childless, and “the freedom movement needs future warriors.”

Meanwhile, Aymann Ismail of Slate attributes her success to “the trick of making her ability to repel people into a reason for others to tune in. Her success, though, is less about how cleverly she manipulates media than about how far someone can go as an unrepentant bigot right now.”

While she told the Sentinel she’s not “anti-Muslim,” she’s described herself as a “proud-Islamophobe.” She called Islam a “cancer on humanity”; Palestinians, “not legitimate people”; opposed “Muslims and Jews ‘mixing,’ including through marriage” and producing children; said that that Muslims should be barred from public office; and called for a “non-Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.” Steadfastly pro-Israel, she’s described Jews, who work on behalf of Muslims, as “not really Jews.”

Loomer is also an unapologetic white nationalist and vehemently anti-immigration, making statements like:

• “Over time, immigration and all these calls for diversity, it’s starting to destroy this country.”

• She called the Tops Supermarket shooting in Buffalo a “set up” by Democrats to bolster their theories about the domestic terror threat from white supremacists.

• In response to news that, as of July 2017, more than 2,000 migrants perished trying to cross the Mediterranean, she tweeted, “Good. [clapping emoji] Here’s to 2000 more.”

Her campaign material states she’s pro-life, pro-gun — though she is flagged in the National Criminal Instant Background Check System as not cleared to carry a firearm herself — and a proud Trump loyalist, spreading the Big Lie that the 2020 Election was stolen.

Like Trump, she’s prone to exaggerations and partial truths. For instance, it says on her campaign website that she studied broadcast journalism at Barry University in Miami Shores, and that she graduated as valedictorian. It’s unclear if she did graduate, let alone as valedictorian. According to news reports from 2015, she was suspended several weeks before graduation for pulling a Project Veritas sting operation on her professors, recording them without their consent and manipulating the footage to make it appear as if they and the university supported ISIS. One professor filed a criminal complaint, later dropped. In her memoir, Loomered, Loomer writes that the university expelled her, but with the help of a Project Veritas-funded attorney, she was able to graduate, and the university mailed out her  diploma. Barry University would not confirm or deny Loomer’s graduation or valedictorian status to VoxPopuli. During her Windermere Town Hall July 28, we asked Loomer for documentation that she graduated college and was valedictorian. We have yet to receive it. We'll update this page if we do. 

Loomer’s antics and hate speech led to her losing social media access and being booted from Uber and Lyft, Paypal, Venmo, GoFundMe, Medium; even CPAC rescinded her press pass for its annual event in 2019. Being “the most banned woman in the world,” is a huge part of Loomer’s brand. It’s built into the title of her memoir Loomered: How I Became The Most Banned Woman In The World (Bombardier Books). (“Loomered” is what she calls her aggressive interview style. She's trying to make “fetch" happen.)

But she's left out key details. The lawsuit she mentions on her site against Google, Twitter, Facebook that “made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court”? The High Court declined to hear it. In her lawsuit against the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the court ordered her to pay more than $124,000 in court costs and attorneys’ fees after being pranked into believing the advocacy group had single-handedly gotten her banned from Twitter.

Twitter has refused to reinstate her account, but Loomer actually does have a social media presence: you can find her campaign on Facebook and Instagram, and on YouTube where she has 87,000 followers.