On Laura Loomer and the Cruelty of Fake Concern

Three people were murdered at the Islamic Center of San Diego. Shot while going about their lives. Investigators confirmed what was already obvious: hate rhetoric drove the killers through that door.

Laura Loomer wanted you to know she is worried about the safety and well being of Muslims.

Not a paraphrase. Her words. “I think it’s time to make sure Muslims are safe.” She opened with it. She closed with it. “Let’s make sure Muslims are safe. Send them back to the Middle East.”

There it is. The full sentence. The complete thought.

Safety, she explained, means deportation.

Every Muslim in America, removed. Sent to “fully Islamic societies” where they can pray without “triggering Americans into psychosis.” Triggering Americans, she elaborated, because Muslims are “invasive species” disrupting “non-Islamic habitats.”

Three people were just murdered and she is writing about invasive species.

She did not call for the respect of Muslims nor the horror of the teenagers who opened fire before killing themselves.
She called for the removal of Muslims from the United States. For their own protection from a country whose citizens, she implies, cannot be expected to restrain themselves from shooting people at prayer.

TThis is what bullies do. They don’t attack the strong. They don’t stand in the open and make their case honestly. They wait for the wounded, walk into the wreckage, and announce that the victims brought it on themselves. They dress hatred in the language of logic. They put a smile on eliminationism and call it common sense. They are never, at the moment of their cruelty, anything but calm..

Loomer is calm. She is always calm. She watched children on medical visas arrive from Gaza — wounded children — and called them “Islamic Invaders” to be “rounded up and deported.” The State Department subsequently suspended those medical visas. She took credit for it. She called Islam “cancer.” She called Muslims “savages.” She describes herself, proudly, as a “proud Islamophobe.” She says it with the satisfaction of someone who has decided that honesty is a virtue, so long as the honest thing is hatred.

She transfers the moral weight of a hate crime onto the community of the victims. The shooters were not the problem. The presence of Muslims is the problem. The problem, conveniently, can be solved by giving the shooters exactly what they wanted.
She is not alone in this. She is just the shrillest voice in the chorus. Some far-right members of the GOP conference in Congress have created a so-called “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” and Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly defended Islamophobic remarks by members of his conference.

Loomer describes herself as a “proud Islamophobe.” She argued during the 2024 election that a Kamala Harris win would create an “Islamic caliphate in this country.” She has called Islam “cancer” and Muslims “savages.” She has applied this framework to every act of violence she can reach, regardless of the facts.
After the Manhattan shooting that killed NYPD officer Didarul Islam — a Muslim immigrant murdered by a man whose note referenced football and brain disease — she called the shooter a “Free Palestine low IQ black jihadi” and declared she did not feel safe with Muslims holding office in America.

After the Minnesota legislative shootings, she accused the Democratic governor — who was on the shooter’s own target list — of orchestrating them.

After Brown University, she falsely named a Muslim student as the shooter. The facts in each case were wrong. She continued ranting anyway.

Every shooting is a fresh occasion. Every body is a new argument. The conclusion is always identical.

This is not ideology. Ideology requires conviction. This is appetite. The appetite of someone who has discovered that there is an audience for cruelty, that the cruelty is most effective when it wears a reasonable face, and that the weak and the grieving make the easiest targets. You cannot fight back when you are burying your dead. You cannot demand a correction when the lie is already traveling at the speed of a social media platform with 1.7 million followers.

She knows this. The smugness is the tell.

Despite holding no official government role, Loomer has influenced the Trump administration from the firing of national security officials to the suspension of medical visas for wounded Palestinian children seeking treatment in the United States. She took credit for the visa suspension. Trump has called her a great patriot.

You cannot fight back when you are burying your dead. You cannot demand a correction when the lie is nearly policy.

That is the specific horror of what we are looking at. This is not a provocateur performing for clicks at the edge of the conversation. This is a woman with the president’s ear, who watched three people get murdered at a mosque, and whose immediate response was to argue — with a straight face, in the language of solicitude — that the solution is to empty the country of everyone who prays the way the victims prayed.

So let us be precise about what Laura Loomer’s patriotism really is. It’s standing over the bodies of three murdered Americans and arguing that the solution is to deport everyone who prayed beside them. It means wrapping mass expulsion in the language of safety. It means never having the honesty to say what you actually want, because what you actually want is monstrous, so instead you smile and call it mercy.

Three people are dead. She is not mourning them. She is using them.

That is not courage. That is not conviction. That is the oldest and smallest move in the thug handbook: find someone already down and suffering, and kick.

She is not worried about Muslims. She simply finds them more useful exiled—or dead—than defended.