Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer announced she is taking a “brief hiatus” from her Loomer Unleashed podcast just hours after a Trump administration adviser exposed her for being paid to post some of her manic, hateful content.
It all started on Thursday, when Alex Bruesewitz, who is behind much of Trump’s digital media strategy, took aim at conservative social media influencers following the GOP’s massive midterm election loss.
“Believe it or not attacking Democrats over their relationships with a streamer (Hasan Piker) wasn’t an effective hit,” Bruesewitz posted, not mentioning Loomer by name. “GOP candidates probably shouldn’t take messaging advice from fringe right-wing ‘influencers’ moving forward.”
Loomer took the bait.
“But they should take their advice and meetings with @TuckerCarlson instead?… It’s completely reasonable for people to be appalled with Democrat candidates campaigning with a guy who said America deserved 9/11. Hasan Piker regularly makes comments in support of jihadi groups,” she wrote. “What wasn’t helpful was your friend Tucker Carlson essentially endorsing Abdul El-Sayed over Mike Rogers and using his show to tell people to not support Rogers just a few weeks out from an election. But we all know you will never condemn your buddy Tucker.”
“Laura, you are basically the Republican version of Hasan Piker. Democrats over the years have attacked Republicans for affiliating with you. Those weren’t effective hits either,” Bruesewitz replied. “Voters simply don’t care enough about ‘influencers’ or streamers. lol”
Loomer took offense to that, claiming that she was not an influencer and criticizing Bruesewitz for his association with Omeed Malik, a conservative venture capitalist and major Republican donor.
“I’m a journalist and an opposition researcher Alex. What are you? What is it that you do for Omeed Malik exactly? He’s a Muslim right? Half Iranian and half Pakistani if I’m not mistaken,” Loomer fired back. “Is that why you have such an issue with the things I say about Islam?”
“Okay lol. But is it common for journalists to get paid for their opinions and tweets?”
“You say ‘Okay lol.’ Not sure why you are laughing. I recall last year your company X strategies reached out to me asking me for help. Do you deny that? What is so funny? I guess I don’t get the joke,” Loomer said, admitting that she was indeed paid to tweet. “You loved sharing my journalistic reports during the 2023/2024 DeSantis-Trump primary too. What changed?”
“No I don’t deny that. I’ve paid you for tweets before. I haven’t for at least a year though,” Bruesewitz wrote back. “I also know you still get paid by others for tweets so I do think it’s fair to refer to you as an ‘influencer.’ What percentage of your tweets are paid for?”
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Hours later, Loomer announced a “one to two month show hiatus.”
i really don’t know much about hasan piker, but fucking hell he is really living in their domes rent-free.
Piker is very much “new media”. He’s been caught saying things that can be taken out of context and was burned by right wingers for it. I might not agree with everything he says, but he’s definitely not a terrible person either.
Why does this platform glaze Hasan Piker so hard? LMAO it’s so gross. He’s a fucking look at me. He doesn’t stand for anything but money.
You know, I don’t think it actually does. Every time his name comes up, people just pop out of the woodwork to cry about how terrible he is, usually without a shred of evidence (lil clips don’t count). It kept happening so often that I decided to just watch some of his content and make up my own mind. And you know what’s fucking wild? Everything I’ve seen shows me he’s a reasonable person.
I did the same. Not a fan of how loud and chaotic he runs his stream with popup graphics, sound effects, chat roll etc. but that’s fine not everything needs to be to my taste. From what I saw he seems to use a bunch of sarcastic and inflammatory comments to make his points which opens him to being clipped out of context. Kind of fits into the “you’re not wrong, you’re just being an ass” category to me which I also think is fine. Even the whole 9/11 comment thing is understandable. I feel like it’s widely accepted that 9/11 was a consequence of the US’s worldwide aggression and heavy handedness with Piker’s comments reflecting that sentiment in an insensitive way. How many Iranians do you think are out for blood after having a girls school blown up let alone all the other shit going on?
This platform doesn’t glaze him, there’s just about an equal amount of people that say they like him as say they dislike him in every thread/post he’s mentioned as far as I’ve seen.
What makes you think he stands for nothing but money?
He’s also an influencer. Just random bozos with marketing skills getting millions of followers to do nothing but film themselves collecting their own farts and huff them from a plastic bag.