Laura Loomer, mean tweets, and a controversial drug
FAR-RIGHT ACTIVIST LAURA LOOMER is more powerful than ever, wielding her 1.7 million-follower X feed like an internet-honed axe around Washington.
The general counsel for the NSA? Fired after being targeted by Loomer. A Biden alumna with an appointment at West Point? Booted after Loomer criticized her as a holdover from the prior administration.
But with that additional power has come some additional scrutiny. And bruised egos. Now some of Loomer’s erstwhile political allies are starting to wonder if there might be a hidden hand behind some of her most influential denunciations. Over the weekend, several prominent pro-Trump figures accused her of working on behalf of Big Pharma.
The firing in question involves last Tuesday’s ouster of Dr. Vinay Prasad as the head of a key treatment-approval division of the Food and Drug Administration. Prasad’s criticism of pandemic measures had made him a hero in Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement. After Loomer accused him of disloyalty to Trump—even claiming that Prasad had admitted to having a Trump voodoo doll—Prasad resigned his position to avoid becoming “a distraction.”
But several figures on the right noted that Loomer’s attacks on Prasad also came amid a high-profile struggle between Prasad and Sarepta, a Massachusetts-based drug manufacturer, over the company’s treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Prasad was a longstanding critic of the FDA’s decision to approve Sarepta’s drug, Elevidys. That clash hit a new level last month after three patients—two of whom were taking Elevidys, and one who was taking a related treatment—died of what appeared to be acute liver toxicity. The FDA put Elevidys’s clinical trials on hold.
Then on Monday, shortly before Prasad resigned, the FDA reversed itself and said patients who could walk could still receive the drug, saying one patient’s death had been unrelated.
Loomer’s critics on the right saw the clash between Prasad and the drug company as clearly related to Loomer’s posts.
Kevin Bass, a prominent right-wing critic of the pharmaceutical industry, tweeted that Sarepta had “used” Loomer as “a plant to oust FDA official Vinay Prasad.”
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, a hero to skeptics of the medical establishment for his early COVID skepticism, highlighted Loomer’s attacks on Prasad and wrote that the pharmaceutical industry “taught its critics a powerful lesson” by pushing him out.
Ned Ryun, a popular conservative activist, tweeted that Loomer was “completely nuts” and accused her of taking a payment from Sarepta:
The fact of the matter is you got funded by Sarepta Therapeutics to take Vinay out; probably thru a middle man for deniability but still pharma money funding it all. The reason I find this and you so loathsome is that this behavior is the antithesis of the MAGA and MAHA movements.
Sarepta didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Loomer likewise didn’t respond to a request for comment. But she did post on X that “Big Pharma didn’t pay me to do anything.”
“I don’t work for Big Pharma,” Loomer wrote. “I’m a loyalty enforcer.”
As for Ryun, she had some choice—though not entirely convincingly—words, saying he should spend the weekend with his family instead of accusing her of pay-for-play.
ACCUSATIONS OF PAY-FOR-PLAY are fairly common within MAGA world, where people accuse one another of being agents of powerful interests all the time with little evidence.
While there’s no proof that Sarepta was paying Loomer (directly or through an intermediary), there is plenty of evidence that she stretched some of the case in her campaign to oust Prasad. Take Loomer’s claim that Prasad talked about having a Trump voodoo doll: The full context of the audio Loomer cited shows that Prasad was speaking rhetorically in the voice of an imagined angry liberal rather than as an actual voodoo practitioner.
This isn’t the first time Loomer’s sudden interest in a topic has led people to accuse her of aligning with big business. Back in May, I wrote about how Loomer had a newfound passion for the obscure issue of Venezuelan oil production—taking a side that coincided with the interests of some American energy giants.
After Loomer targeted surgeon general nominee and Kennedy ally Casey Means, Means’s brother, Calley, suggested that Loomer’s X feed was on rent to the highest bidder.
“Just received information that Laura Loomer is taking money from industry to scuttle President Trump’s agenda,” Means said, later adding that raising questions about loyalty to Trump had become an easy way for pharmaceutical lobbyists to take out appointees.
It’s difficult to gain insight into how exactly Loomer’s prolific X-posting operation works. But lawyers for HBO, of all places, may soon have a chance to get an inside glance.
Loomer sued HBO and late-night host Bill Maher in October on the grounds that Maher’s claim that she and Trump were sleeping together had impeded her career.
Loomer has already deposed Maher, and pushed—so far unsuccessfully—to get permission to publish the deposition video.
But such a push for transparency in the case could backfire. Loomer has been cagey in the lawsuit about what her damages might be, and as of last month had declined to offer HBO specifics on lost income or her allegations that Maher’s show had made her into an outcast in Trump world—something that would seem to be at odds with her current influence.
On July 17, the judge in the case ordered Loomer’s team to provide HBO with much more information about the sources of her income and details of any meetings or communications she’s had with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. And while those documents won’t be made public unless they make it into a court filing, it may be a roundabout way for the rest of us to finally know what’s behind the current Loomer boomlet.
The plight of Kash Patel’s girlfriend
BEFORE BECOMING FBI DIRECTOR, Kash Patel helped fuel right-wing demands for the Epstein client list, claiming that the FBI held much of the evidence.
But now, Patel’s attempts to help the Trump administration close the book on the Epstein case are imploding. And his much-younger girlfriend is paying the price. To wit, she is now on a media tour insisting she isn’t a Mossad agent.
Patel, 45, has been dating country singer Alexis Wilkins, 26, for two and a half years. Wilkins also engages in conservative commentary, and once worked for conservative YouTube operation PragerU.
That’s where the trouble begins. Once Patel began to insist that the FBI had no more information about Epstein’s crimes or death to publish, online conspiracy theorists began to accuse Wilkins of being a Mossad honeypot who seduced Patel to keep him in line on behalf of Israel, as part of an Epstein coverup.
Wilkins is a Christian American, and not Jewish or Israeli. So, what’s the basis for this accusation? Well, the key piece of evidence has been that PragerU CEO Marissa Streit once worked in the Israel Defense Forces as an intelligence officer. That’s pretty thin gruel, but it’s been enough that Wilkins had to go on Megyn Kelly’s show on Thursday to insist that she isn’t a honeypot spy.
In her telling, she just met Patel at a party in Nashville and their relationship bloomed from there—no Mossad necessary.
“We both are very patriotic, so obviously there are things there that we both agree on,” Wilkins said, in front of a hyperpatriotic backdrop that included American flags in milk jugs and a display of challenge coins and other vaguely military-looking knickknacks.
Wilkins said that her family has been targeted by conspiracy theorists—or, as she put it, practitioners of “vigilante research.”
Unsurprisingly, Wilkins didn’t mention that her own boyfriend had fueled those same Epstein conspiracy theories for years.
As for her favorite quality about Patel? His honesty, Wilkins said.