Laura Loomer waits at a “Demand Freedom of Speech” rally in Washington, D.C., in 2019.
Photo: Stephanie Keith / Getty Images
Laura Loomer waits at a “Demand Freedom of Speech” rally in Washington, D.C., in 2019.
Photo: Stephanie Keith / Getty Images
Photo: Stephanie Keith / Getty Images
Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (AP) – A far-right Republican candidate excluded from social media sites because of her racist, anti-Muslim rhetoric is celebrating a number one victory in florida Congress as she assumes her role as an outsider in the general election of a Democratic district that President Donald Trump calls home.
Holder Lois Frankel, 72, has been a political figure for decades in the Palm Beach County district, where the Republican who opposed it in 2016 lost 27 percentage points.
But that didn’t stop Laura Loomer, 27, from claiming her resounding victory over five other candidates on Tuesday in the Republican primary. Loomer won 43% of the vote, or 14,500 votes out of a total of 34,000 votes cast.
“We ARE THE CULTURE OF THE ANULATION IN IT,” loomer wrote on Parler, a Twitter-like right wing where she describes herself as the “MOST INTERDITA WOMAN IN THE WORLD.”
Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago is in the neighborhood, tweeted his congratulations Wednesday morning: “All right, Laura. You have a wonderful chance to do with a Pelosi puppet,” he wrote, referring to the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.
In fact, the odds are serious Loomer.
The candidate “is a kind of celebrity in far-right circles, which would possibly have helped her in her primary, but is not a competitive district in the general election,” said Kyle Kondik, editor of the University of Virginia Policy Center. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton won the district in the 2012 and 2016 presidential election with about 20 points, Kondik noted.
According to federal records, Loomer raised $1.1 million for his grand crusade, a he plentiful sum for an oppressed opponent. He’s got about $200, 000 left lately. Frankel raised about $866,000 for this crusade, however, with the money left over from past elections, his crusade is over $1 million. Frankel, who opposed a political newcomer in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, won 75,000 votes, or 86 percent of the 87,000 votes cast.
The licensee said Wednesday that despite its demographic and financial advantages, Loomer is being taken seriously. He noted that another conservative brandon, Allen West, had won a run for Congress in this domain in 2010.
“We even learned this year that no one can take his re-election for granted,” Frankel said. “He’s raised a lot and he’s getting a lot of attention.”
At a party to Loomer’s victory Tuesday night, the guest list included a true who is who of the right-wing provocative figures, according to The Palm Beach Post: Roger Stone, whose criminal sentence of mendacity to Congress was recently commuted through Trump; right-wing spokesman Milo Yiannopoulos, who was fired through Breitbart’s online page in 2017 after praising gay pedophilia; and Gavin McInnes, the founder of Proud Boys, a men’s organization that describes itself as a “Western chovinist,” but was considered a white nationalist organization through the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Lois Frankel doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to push Laura Loomer back,” Stone told the crowd, calling Loomer the “Joan of Arc of the conservative movement.”
Given Loomer’s national profile and that of local Trump ers, “It would have been unexpected if I didn’t win the Republican primary,” Kevin Wagner, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, said Wednesday.
But the same points that led to his big win will make it difficult to win in November, he said.
“You’ll have to convince the independent, democratic electorate and it’s going to be difficult,” he said.
Loomer has been expelled from Twitter, Facebook, Lyft and Uber after years of selling incorrect information and anti-Muslim rhetoric. On social media, Loomer has published conspiracy theories and incorrect information about Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Somali American elected to Congress. Among them was the false claim that Omar and other Democrats were conspiring to institute Sharia law in Minnesota.
In the most recent news, Loomer falsely met suspects as Muslims or immigrants. In a tweet, he asked his members to set up a “non-Islamic” shared transportation business because he did not need “another Islamic immigrant driver.” Uber and Lyft banned Loomer in 2017.
In a 2018 crusade for Florida Democratic Gov. Andrew Gillum at a synagogue in Broward County, synagogue staff asked Loomer to leave because he had interrupted Gillum’s previous occasions. When she refused, the staff asked the police to escort her. He shouted that his remedy was as if the Nazis were chasing the Jews from synagogues. Internet videos have gone viral.
Twitter and Facebook spokesmen told The Associated Press on Wednesday that social media platforms are not intended to reintegrate Loomer now that she is the Republican candidate for a seat in Congress, as some of her supporters have done.
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Associated Press Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California; Amanda Seitz in Chicago; and David Klepper in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.