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By Andrew Marantz
On Tuesday, District 21 of Congress in Florida, where President Donald Trump now lives legally and where he recently voted in the mail, held a number one election in Congress. The four-term incumbent, a 72-year-old Democrat named Lois Frankel, easily won her number one. On the Republican side, however, there was a commotion. The winner, with nearly 20 percentage points, was Laura Loomer, a 27-year-old woman whose online crusade page describes her as a “conservative investigative journalist” and “an unwavering supporter of President Donald J. Trump.” As the returns arrived, heaped tons of Loomer fans (internal and unmasked, of course, sticking them to libraries and endangering themselves) for a noisy victory party at a Palm Beach Hilton. Milo Yiannopoulos, a professional troll and a failed Half Internet celebrity, served as m.c. Also attended did Roger Stone, the well-known “dirty scoundrel” politician who was convicted of mendacity investigators about the links between Trump’s 2016 crusade and Russia. Stone, whose 40-month criminal sentence was recently commuted through the president, described Loomer as “someone who fears nothing in his defense of the United States” and “the Joan of Arc of the conservative movement.” Then an E.D.M. the anthem rang (“You’re falling, but I probably don’t fall/I’m titanium”), and Loomer took the stage.
Laura Loomer is an American-style paranoid conspirator, a boundless guerrilla war of Internet culture, and a nightmare appearance of our existing, long-term politics. It is a virulent and unrepentant Islamophobe, a characterization that requires situations only to assert that “Islamophobia” is an oxymoron: a phobia, by definition, is an irrational concern or hatred, and perfectly considers its antipathy towards the entire bureaucracy of Islam. Rational. I know because, for much of 2017 and 2018, I have reported on the lax association of idiots, fanatics and web-conscious criminals known as alt-right. Meanwhile, I spent dozens of hours with Loomer, dining at Katz’s Deli, before attending a Yiannopoulos e-book party at the Bowery; driving a shotgun in Loomer’s car from Washington, D.C. to New York, while denouncing, almost without interruption, the betrayal of the “deep state”; visiting her sad apartment in Westchester to interview her as she recovered from a nose operation. Technically, Loomer does not identify himself as a far right, because many prominent figures on the right of choice are anti-Semitic, even neo-Nazi, and Loomer is Jewish. In many other respects, however, the description is appropriate. He was continually telling me that “Muslims are the ones who have a genuine privilege in this country,” that “Fox News has been absolutely absorbed by liberals” and that the Trump administration was too weak to face imminent threats like mass migration. socialist indoctrination and the global spread of Sharia law. Given the Republican red meat theaters that have become common in Florida – Ron DeSantis, the governor, recently compared his hasty reopening of schools to the command raid that took Osama bin Laden; Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida’s first district mocked the pandemic by appearing on the floor of space in a fuel mask; it’s hard to believe how local Republicans can become more caristic. The answer, unfortunately, is Laura Loomer. “Big Laura,” Donald Trump tweeted wednesday. “You have a wonderful possibility in front of a Pelosi puppet!” Many trump parties in conflict have made apparent criticisms that it was unseemly for a sitting president to congratulate a woman who called Muslims “savages” and who spent months trying to discover that the mass shooting in Las Vefuel was a false flag, but it had no effect.
On its crusade site, Loomer boasts that it has been “banned on almost all social media platforms, adding Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Lyft, Uber Eats, PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, Medium, TeeSpring and even Chase Bank”. She says the bans are acts of political retaliation “for being the voice of the silent majority and, above all, for being an unwavering supporter of Trump.” That is not true: each and every platform banned it for an express post, regularly an Islamophobic explosion, which violated one or more of its terms of service, but it turns out to have been an effective political gamble. In some circles, a vote by Loomer was interpreted as an opposite vote to online censorship. “I never violated his terms of service,” Loomer said when he was contacted to comment. “Twitter hates Jews”). One night in June 2017, Loomer crushed a “Julius Caesar” performance in Shakespeare’s Park by broadcasting the disturbance live on Periscope. . She was accompanied by the police, who took her to the police station, searched her and let her go. Soon after, I met her for a hamburger, at which point she was already fashionable on Twitter. “Honestly, conservatives don’t have freedom of speech in this country,” he told me. She then apologized from the table for receiving a call from one of Sean Hannity’s producers, who invited her to appear on Fox News. Loomer had relayed his own act of civil disobedience and had reaped the benefits of the trick without even having to spend a night in jail. Still, she’s already introduced herself as a victim.
I’ve wondered if I pay too much attention to other people like Loomer. If what they were looking for was the press, wasn’t it my informative component of the problem? I tried not to forget that the genuine subject of my writings was not Loomer and his acolytes, in keeping with it, but the attention structures that had allowed them to sneak into the vanguard of the American public square, in short, the damn incentives. of the social Internet. Within a few years, Silicon Valley disruptors had reshaped our entire data eco-formula, reconstructing it around the polar star of emotional engagement. What was once a complex and deeply flawed formula, the fourth power, more or less, had begun to become a Darwinian struggle in which only the fittest memes survive. Platforms have generated certain types of content, one that is designed to impact, excite, radicalize, stick to our screens, and, so, that’s the kind of content we got.
Those who can simply take credit for the existing mechanisms of social media, whether outraged entrepreneurs like Loomer, and much wealthier entrepreneurs, such as Mark Zuckerberg, avoid discussing this depressing state of affairs with wonderful specificity. On the other hand, they sometimes resort to summary discussions about principles as noble as freedom of expression. There will be a crazy stripe, they say: it is the inevitable value of freedom. But none of this was inevitable. Our attention-striking economy, like our business economy, has been built through other people, through us, and its existing contours are the result of thousands of individual choices. Just as our business economy has brought us to the breaking point of climate collapse, our social media economy is accelerating our political collapse. Occasionally, a social media platform will suspend one of its allocous high offenders, but it’s usually too little, too late. Before Loomer was “the most banned woman in America,” she was extremely profitable online, running every day to retain visitors. Before being expelled from social media, she used them to gain an influence that would not otherwise have been possible. The Loomer district in Florida is blue, sometimes called the “safe democrat” district, but now we want to know that nothing is safe. Negative partisanship, the same force that encouraged Loomer supporters to threaten to get coronavirus at this Hilton on Tuesday night, can also push it to victory in November. If she doesn’t win, other congressional candidates, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon’s senior in northwest Georgia, actually will.
In 2017 or 2018, when I remembered why I chose to integrate with the worst people on the Internet, I couldn’t have imagined that Loomer would soon be within a margin of error to win a congressional seat. Even through the judgment of those around me at the time, his behavior was unusually strange, his temperament unusually erratic; if I had been asked to guess which of my characters could succeed in genuine power, their call would have been near the back of the list. But I underestimated the severity of the underlying structural problems. As long as we don’t deal with these problems, whether it’s in our online economy and in our lives, as there’s still a difference, things can get worse.
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