Laura Loomer Must Not Go Unpunished

As the dust settles on the Brown shooting (and Brookline MIT professor murder), an event that will take months—if not years—for our small, tight-knit community and city to process, daily life in Rhode Island’s capital city is picking itself back up for a slow return to “normal,” and whatever that entails in the current administration. Of course, not all of us had the time to grieve and process these events—just the day after the shooting, rogue agency (and gestapo wannabes) ICE was back conducting its illegal kidnappings on Chalkstone Avenue.

Even during the shooting and ensuing manhunt, however, our community had to endure the “new normal” of political discourse in the United States. As we faced this uniquely American tragedy, so too did we have to face the American right’s dual conspiracy and hate machine turn upon us. Of course, some of these were to be expected: calling Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez—a 31-year on the force “cop’s cop"—a DEI hire, painting centrist Providence Mayor Brett Smiley as a woke leftist radical on account of the fact that he’s gay (especially infuriating considering the left’s long and continuing history of organizing against Smiley in Providence). However, what was uniquely nefarious was the targeted doxxing and hate campaign against a Palestinian student (hereafter, “The Student”) at Brown by right-wing provocateurs and conspiracy theorists eager to use our tragedy to their own political gain.

Right-wing actors claimed, among other things, that the shooter yelled “allahu akbar” before opening fire in Barus and Holley; that a trans Muslim Palestinian was responsible for the shooting; and that the “woke” Brown administration and City of Providence were deliberately suppressing information and withholding camera footage to protect this student and not appear unwoke. These claims were, of course, ridiculous for many reasons, not the least of which being that they were completely unfounded and lacking any evidence whatsoever. But that didn’t stop people from amplifying and spreading these racist lies further.

As a standard precautionary measure, per the student’s attorneys, Brown removed pages with their information from the website for Center of Middle Eastern Studies. However, the right and their followers seized upon this as “evidence” that the student was responsible, or at least involved—rich, considering they were the ones who led to this measure being taken at all. Up until the discovery of the gunman’s body in a storage unit in New Hampshire, these baseless claims continued to snowball across Xitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Comment sections on posts from Brown, Providence Police, and various political figures in Providence contained multiple comments such as:

This is not even beginning to unpack massive threads and boards of conspiracy theories on Xitter and Facebook. And despite the fact that these comments dox an innocent student, and the fact that the shooter has been found, Meta has allowed them to stay—even after multiple reports.

This conspiratorial mindset is a unique kind of rot that has infected the far-right for years has begun to permeate greater American society—as Current Affairs puts it, the “Decay of the American Brain”—and it has increasingly real consequences. The Student “received non-stop death threats and hate speech” while living through the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting, a campus lockdown, and a shooter at large.

Of course, these mass hate campaigns cannot happen without their leaders, the mouthpieces who spew these vile, racist lies to platforms of hundreds of thousands (to even millions). In this case, it was infamous Islamophobe, white nationalist, and unofficial advisor/loyalty enforcer to the President, Laura Loomer, who started these claims almost immediately after the shooting as campus was still on lockdown and victims had yet to be identified.

Loomer has made much of her recent career on these false, trigger-happy claims to serve her agenda. Reading her Wikipedia page and history is enraging and sickening, especially considering the worst consequence she has ever really been dealt is being banned from rideshare apps (well justified over her tweetstorms against Muslim drivers) and a brief misdemeanor arrest. She was one of the primary megaphones for the Springfield, Ohio pets conspiracy; claimed that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz ordered the assassination of Melissa Hortman; and claimed transgender people carried out the assassination of fellow right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk and must be ostracized from society, among many, many other claims.

At Brown specifically, we know where Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian rhetoric leads: in November 2023, we experienced another tragedy of gun violence that rocked our community in the shooting of of another of our classmates, Hisham Awartani, and two of his friends in Vermont while on Thanksgiving Break. Nor is it the first time a Brown undergraduate has been wrongfully accused online of committing a horrific act on terror. We must not let Laura Loomer go unpunished for her latest bout that will undoubtedly sow mistrust, division, and hate in our small state, or invite other actors in to carry out her worst desires (given her response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, she would probably revel in it).

Of course, this is complicated by the fact that Rhode Island does not have a doxxing law, and while many poor-written anti-doxxing laws can potentially endanger first amendment rights, the lack of any law leaves little resource for The Student and any other community member who may be targeted by Loomer or other conspiracy theorists in the future. The Student, does, however, have a strong case for defamation, and the state could potentially pursue obstruction charges against Loomer (the former, if Alex Jones is any indication, could prove useful in deplatforming).

Whatever legal avenue chosen, Laura Loomer has run her conspiracy racket without consequence for far too long, and the buck must stop here. We must not let any other tragedies be used to spread vile, racist lies in service of the far-right agenda Loomer follows. But until there is any semblance of justice brought against her, the best I can recommend is quitting or limiting the use of Xitter and Meta platforms until they work to stop these doxxing campaigns (which, given their recent rightward turns, is likely never).