Far-Right Nutjob Laura Loomer Spews Hideous Lies About Gabby Giffords

Right-wing conspiracy theorist and failed politician Laura Loomer launched a despicable attack on Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and his wife, gun violence survivor and former Representative Gabby Giffords, on X earlier this week.

Loomer, without evidence, cruelly accused Kelly of writing a post on his wife’s behalf from her account endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, claiming that Giffords—who was shot in the head in an assassination attempt 13 years ago—is “brain dead” and “certainly isn’t tweeting on her own.”

This wouldn’t matter much, as Loomer has engaged in white nationalism and Islamophobia before, but she is also a favorite of Donald Trump Jr., who has touted Loomer as a possible White House press secretary if his father gets elected in November. Trump Jr.’s opinion seems to carry some weight in his father’s political decisions. He reportedly pushed his dad to choose J.D. Vance, who’s friends with Don Jr., for a running mate.

Giffords was shot while holding a campaign event in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. The bullet passed through her brain, and yet today, though she has some difficulty speaking and walking, she is able to conduct interviews. She even campaigned for Harris in Pennsylvania on Thursday. Needless to say, she is not “brain dead.”

Loomer has been banned from various social media sites in the past, only to be reinstated on X when Elon Musk took over the site. She’s not likely to face any consequences for this post, although it probably won’t help her standing in the Republican Party, where even some of the MAGA faithful aren’t big fans.

J.D. Vance thinks the “QAnon Shaman” would be “a fun guy to have a beer with.”

In a recently resurfaced speech from 2023, Vance said that Jacob Chansley, more popularly known as the “QAnon Shaman,” should have gotten a lighter prison sentence since he was only “walking around the Capitol.”

“It was a crazy guy with, like, the bullhorns … he looked like he’d be a fun guy to have a beer with, right? The Q shaman,” said Vance.

Chansley received a 41-month prison sentence in November 2021 and was charged with obstruction of an official proceeding. He was released early from federal prison and sent to a reentry center in March 2023.

Following his prison sentence, Chansley indicated he was interested in running for Arizona’s 8th congressional district seat, but he missed the deadline to get enough signatures.

One Republican actually has met up with Chansley. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she was “honored” to meet the QAnon Shaman back in December 2023 at a Turning Point USA event.

“When I spoke with Jake, he is remarkably positive, happy, forgiving, and determined. Most people would be crushed and forever destroyed after being treated so horrendously by the media and their own government, but not Jake,” Greene wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Maybe the three can grab a beer together?

The far right is zeroing in on its new attack on Vice President Kamala Harris: She is somehow solely responsible for the U.S.-Mexico border. 

On Thursday, House Republicans approved a resolution slamming Harris as the “border czar” and condemning her handling of immigration. The resolution, authored by Representative Elise Stefanik, passed in a 220–196 vote. 

“By every metric, Kamala Harris has failed to secure our borders, instead advancing far-left Democrats’ failed open border policies and the needs of illegal immigrants over the safety of America,” Stefanik argued on the House floor. 

Six Democrats also voted for the resolution: Representatives Yadira Caraveo, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Mary Peltola, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez—all of whom have also been critical of President Joe Biden’s border policies. Davis has since endorsed Harris. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the measure “fake and fraudulent,” since Harris was never appointed as a so-called “border czar.”  

But that hasn’t stopped Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and their allies, who are eager to find a way to successfully attack Harris, from pushing the term. 

During a rally Thursday in North Carolina, Trump insisted Harris “was the border czar, but she never went to the border.”

“As border czar, Kamala threw open our borders and allowed 20 million illegal aliens to stampede into our country from all over the world,” he said.

This is false. CNN pointed out in a fact-check that Harris did go to the border as vice president. Further, the total number of border “encounters” since February 2021 adds up to about 10 million, and an “encounter” does not mean someone was let into the country. 

That night, Trump’s former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed on Fox News that Biden had personally dubbed Harris the border czar. But the clip she showed to prove her point didn’t actually include Biden using the term.

Vance has said the vice president failed as “America’s border czar” and claims she “supported abolishing ICE,” something Harris has never floated. 

Let’s dispel this myth that Harris had been put squarely in charge of the U.S.-Mexico border. While it is true that in 2021, the vice president was assigned to lead a limited effort to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, Harris was not by any means in charge of the border. 

A new poll found that a whopping zero percent of Black voters in Michigan plan to vote for Donald Trump, despite all of the former president’s underwhelming attempts to shore up support in that state.

A survey of 600 likely general election voters in Michigan, released late Thursday by WDIV Local 4/Detroit News, found that zero African American respondents said that they supported Trump, while 82.1 percent said they supported Vice President Kamala Harris.

While President Joe Biden was reportedly experiencing a loss of support from Black communities, it certainly doesn’t appear that Harris will face the same difficulties now that she’s taken over the Democratic ticket. Of course, Trump has done plenty of things to dissuade Black voters from backing him in November, in just the last month or so.

In June, Trump held a campaign event at a Black church in Detroit that revealed itself to be a blatant stunt. The campaign boasted 8,000 attendees in a space that could only seat a few hundred. At the event, which was meant to shore up his support among Black voters, roughly half of the attendees were white, WDET’s Russ McNamara noted. After Trump’s church stunt, the former president ran across town to give the keynote address to his real base of white nationalists at Turning Point’s “The People’s Convention.”

Trump has repeatedly overstated his support among Black voters, who he claimed were abandoning Biden in droves. He bragged about the formation of a group called Black Americans for Trump—but he failed to mention that at least three of his new endorsers were on his family’s payroll.

Trump also found himself under fire for a remark he made in the first presidential debate about immigrants taking “Black jobs,” which had many asking, what exactly is a Black job?

One of the lead authors of Project 2025, the disturbing blueprint for a potential second Trump presidency, has close ties to a controversial international Catholic group, Opus Dei.

The Guardian reports that Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, receives weekly spiritual guidance from the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., led by an Opus Dei priest. He attends the institution weekly for mass and religious guidance.

In a speech last year at the CIC, Roberts echoed some of the same extreme measures that the Project 2025 manifesto is infamous for, such as outlawing birth control, and called on conservatives to adopt “radical incrementalism” to achieve their policy objectives.

Opus Dei has been criticized as radical, cultlike, and secretive. The organization was founded in 1928 in Spain to combat the anti-Catholic left in the country, and was later granted special rights and privileges by Pope John Paul II to respond to the rise of progressive liberation theology in Latin America. Opus Dei does not believe in the separation of church and state, seeing a symbiotic relationship between the two, and its American adherents view the United States as the last stronghold of Christianity.

Roberts’s ties to Opus Dei don’t end with the CIC. He founded a school in Louisiana, John Paul the Great Academy, that recognizes the organization’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, as its patron. He also was involved in an Opus Dei–affiliated high school leadership program in Austin, Texas, and has spoken at other Opus Dei-linked schools.

Roberts isn’t the only leading conservative close to Opus Dei, either. Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society co-chair who has led the conservative takeover of the judiciary up to the Supreme Court, is also linked to the CIC, even accepting an award from the organization in 2022. In his acceptance speech, Leo praised the center and called his political adversaries “vile and amoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots” influenced by the devil.

Donald Trump and the GOP have been trying, unconvincingly, to distance themselves from the radical Project 2025, and now comes the news that the 900-page document’s leading author also has ties to a powerful religious organization opposed to the separation of church and state. Leo’s involvement only appears to be stronger evidence of the conservative movement seeking to impose a radical religious agenda if Trump wins the presidential election in November.