Laura Loomer Attacks “Welfare Queen” Elon Musk as MAGA Feud Continues

Laura Loomer still isn’t done with Elon Musk.

Appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room, the anti-immigration activist on Monday torched the billionaire as a “welfare queen” and technocrat with outsize influence on U.S. politics thanks to his ongoing relationship with Donald Trump.

“If you have a bunch of tech bros with billions of dollars and direct unfettered access to the vice president and the president of the United States, and then they are also very cordial with our adversaries as in China and Iran—we see that Elon Musk is having these meetings off the books with Iranian officials, with Chinese officials—what does that mean for us?” Loomer posited.

The self-described “white advocate” has been in a social media brawl with the Tesla CEO for the last week over Musk’s ardent defense of the H-1B work visa program, which he claimed offers a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S. Far-right opponents of the immigration program—and Musk’s position—claim that the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies to hire American labor.

In several posts, Loomer accused Musk of having “bought his way into MAGA,” claimed he was a pawn of China, and said that the “divorce” between the “stage 5 clinger” and President-elect Donald Trump was on the horizon.

That was apparently enough back talk to strip Loomer of her verified status on the site—a loss that, for her, warranted a public appeal to Musk to reinstate her blue check. Loomer has been banned from practically every other social media platform for her incendiary and violent rhetoric.

The H-1B visa program has an annual cap set by Congress, admitting 65,000 foreign workers per year. In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 700,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S., according to data from the American Immigration Council.

The German government has accused Elon Musk of using his platform X to influence their election.

“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” German government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann told reporters on Monday. She added that Musk is free to opine on German politics: “After all, freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense.”

“Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is will lose,” Musk said in response on X, referring to current German chancellor and center-left Social Democrat Olaf Scholz.

Musk has been making his support for Germany’s right-wing, anti-migration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party clear for weeks. Earlier this month, the billionaire wrote, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Last week, he wrote an opinion column in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper endorsing the party, calling it the “last spark of hope.”

“The AfD, even though it is described as far-right, represents a political realism that resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are ignored by the establishment,” Musk wrote. “Portraying the AfD as far-right is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!”

The paper’s head opinions editor resigned after this was published.

Musk was also extremely influential as an advocate for President-elect Donald Trump this election cycle, and will likely continue to be as he co-leads DOGE with Vivek Ramaswamy.

As for Germany, the results of his meddling are still unknown. Their election will be held on February 23, 2025.

In the wake of his death, hundreds of obituaries have memorialized President Jimmy Carter as a devoted and disciplined public servant. President Joe Biden, who was the first senator to endorse Carter’s bid for the White House in 1976, described the 100-year-old Democrat as a man and politician who “embodied the most fundamental human values.”

But few eulogies for the one-term Georgian have underscored his firm moral positions on U.S. foreign policy, which effusively torched both parties for transforming the United States into what he once described as “the most warlike country on earth.”

Here are some of his most powerful quotes:

1. “A superpower not only should be the top country as far as military power is concerned, which we’re going to continue to be, but I think that the American superpower goal should be to be the champion of peace, and to be the champion of human rights, and to be the champion of the environment, and to be the most generous nation on earth,” Jimmy Carter said in 2015, later highlighting that the U.S. had been at peace for just 16 of the 242 years that it had existed as a nation.

2. “There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently,” Carter told The Independent in 2004, long before most of the political class dared criticize the U.S. invasion. “That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington.”

3. “We cannot be peacemakers if American government leaders are seen as knee-jerk supporters of every action or policy of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment. That is the essential fact that must be faced.” Carter wrote those words in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, criticizing Israel for failing to end its occupation of Palestine, its apartheid system, and its pursuit of punishment of Palestinians.

Facing intense backlash from right-wing Israel pressure groups, Carter doubled down, arguing that balanced debate on the two nations was “practically non-existent” in Congress and the executive branch, and accused American leaders of being in Israel’s pocket.

Despite direct orders from President-elect Donald Trump, some House Republicans appear to be teeing up to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Trump voiced his support for Johnson Monday, just two weeks after the speaker went toe-to-toe with several House Republicans outraged that he had offered a lengthy bipartisan bill to fund the government. And despite Trump’s endorsement, not every Republican is following his lead.

Representative Andy Biggs was the latest to signal a reticence to follow the president-elect’s marching orders. During an interview on Fox News Monday, the Arizona Republican said that he wasn’t in the bag for Johnson, yet.

“I haven’t publicly or privately committed yet,” said Biggs. “I do want to speak with the speaker just to see what his plans are, because there are some issues that I think need to be worked out, specifically dealing with the budget issues.”

Representative Thomas Massie doubled down on his opposition to Johnson in a post on X Monday, reckoning back to another unpopular House speaker Trump once championed.

“I respect and support President Trump, but his endorsement of Mike Johnson is going to work out about as well as his endorsement of Speaker Paul Ryan,” Massie wrote. “We’ve seen Johnson partner with the democrats to send money to Ukraine, authorize spying on Americans, and blow the budget.”

Beneath his statement undermining Trump’s judgment, billionaire technocrat Elon Musk replied, “You might be right, but let’s see how it goes.”

Massie wasn’t the only one to bring up Ryan. Representative Victoria Spartz demanded Monday that Johnson outline how he would follow Trump’s agenda to the letter before she could deign to support him for speaker.

“I understand why President Trump is endorsing Speaker Johnson as he did Speaker Ryan, which is definitely important. However, we still need to get assurances that @SpeakerJohnson won’t sell us out to the swamp,” she wrote in a post on X Monday.

Spartz sent Johnson a list of demands, including a request for “unbiased ‘non-swamp’ professionals” to help her do her job. The two are expected to discuss the list at a meeting Monday.

Steve Bannon thinks that Americans deserve reparations for having to coexist with immigrants on H-1B visas.

“We haven’t fought these battles over years and years and years to allow American citizens of every race, ethnicity, religion, be gutted by the sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley,” Bannon opined on his War Room show Monday morning. “David Sacks, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk … there’s no reform. We want it gone.… We want reparations for the tech workers that you stole their lives.”

This is another installment in the current schism between the “America First” MAGA faithful and the tech-world MAGA plutocrats who want more high-skilled immigrants. Former presidential candidate and current DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy started the fire last week by declaring, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” asserting that it was American culture that was leading CEOs to look elsewhere for labor. This talking point was parroted by Elon Musk and other right-wing techies, inviting a MAGA backlash that even included Nikki Haley, the torchbearer of the old GOP establishment who was vanquished by Trump earlier this year.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley wrote. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

This anti-H-1B energy has culminated in Bannon’s calls for reparations, something usually invoked for African Americans historically disenfranchised by slavery and racism.

“We’re gonna get H-1B visas out, root and stem, and all the workers you brought in. Just like we’re deporting 15 million here, we want them deported, out,” Bannon said later in his show. “And give those jobs to American citizens today … we demand they get reparations. You stole from them.”