Laura Loomer, Lifelong Learner

Laura Loomer’s headline-generating visit to Ukraine is a perfect bookend to the Donald Trump era. That epoch began with a moral panic in liberal America about Russian influence over the 2016 election. Ten years later, one of the Trump movement’s leading influencers is warning about the poison of Russian propaganda.

For Loomer, this is quite the change of heart. She had once accused President Joe Biden of funding “Nazi death squads” in Ukraine. And she had even contributed her own writing to Russia’s state-run network, RT. Today, she gushes about the heroism of the Ukrainian people and the land’s natural beauty.

“I think a lot of people don’t want to admit when they are wrong; it’s not exactly a comfortable thing to do. It’s also hard to do,” Loomer told me in a telephone interview from her hotel in Ukraine Tuesday. “I take responsibility for the content I consumed. Looking back, I consumed a lot of content that was clearly propaganda. I see now how RT has become a full-time clipper account for the woke reich,” she said. “It made me reevaluate some of the content I have consumed on RT.”

The news here is not the realization that Russia’s state-run media operation is a lie factory. Rather, it’s that Loomer has now accepted that America is itself in an information war, and many foreign actors—Iran, Qatar, China, and Russia—are fighting to influence American opinion.