Antonia Hitchens

by the time Laura runs the second time in 2022, had stopped honoring those conditions.

And that was kind of the beginning of her divorce from any notion of being brought into the party, because she would lash out constantly at all other Republicans and even different operatives who have gone on to work in very high-ranking roles in the White House.

I think she put them off intensely during that period of possible intense distress emotionally or

you know, possibly just a personality that is at odds with group work.

What were her first contacts with the right?

When Loomer was in college at Berry University in Miami, she starts to carry out these kind of quasi-political stunts.

And she's invited to a conference hosted by David Horowitz, the conservative writer at the Breakers in Palm Beach.

And at that conference, she recalls meeting James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, the kind of undercover sting operation that will

take videos of people without them knowing to then, you know, in many cases, show a sort of hypocrisy of liberalism, to summarize it broadly.

And Loomer's first contact with the right, I think, is in these fringier circles of people like these Veritas operatives, who then she seeks out saying, I want to work with you, and I want to

By then, she's been loomering people.

She describes wanting to conduct her own kind of public humiliation stunts, but in the context of an official job.

And so she starts working with O'Keefe's organization to, for example, go around New York City in the aftermath of Eric Garner's murder by doing things like filming his family undercover in a taxi, getting them to say that

Al Sharpton, who's organizing the protests against Garner's murder, is all about the money.

So we see her coming into politics not through any traditional kind of desire to be in electoral politics, but much more the kind of rabble-rousing, out-in-the-open, stunt-based politics that has come to color much of what the right is good at doing.

And deceptive.

I think it's the beginning of seeing Loomer publicly distort and recast truths to represent the truth that she wants to put forth.

When we see her carrying out these stunts for Veritas, which, as you mentioned, has a very specific worldview.

She's trained in that kind of guerrilla warfare.

Sure.