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Welcome back to False Flag! Sometimes I think back to right-wing activist Laura Loomer’s panic over being banned from Twitter in 2018. She told me at the time that she thought her life was ruined, then launched a string of stunts that made her radioactive even in the wilder corners of the right—handcuffing herself to a Twitter office building and getting arrested at Gavin Newsom’s mansion while wearing a sombrero.
Somehow, Loomer went on to become a shadow member of the Trump cabinet. She has ousted officials and blocked Palestinian children from receiving medical treatment. And now, she’s managed to spoil a classified meeting Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) planned with staffers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Warner said it was shut down after Loomer posted about it on X. She told him to “cry more” and called him a “bitch.”
While Loomer’s influence in the administration is clearly on the rise, today’s newsletter isn’t about how online right-wingers like Loomer influence Trump, but rather about the president’s standing in the right-wing media world where Loomer resides. What I discovered is that while Loomer may be making inroads with Trump, others are making preparations for life when he’s no longer president.
What you’ll see below is just a preview—to unlock the full newsletter, and to enjoy all our other subscribers-only content, sign up for Bulwark+ today:
–Will
Right-Wing Media Starts Treating Trump Like a Lame Duck
The president isn’t ruling out a third term. But some in the MAGA media ecosystem are looking beyond him.
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Right-wing media is moving on from Trump
Donald Trump proved his doubters wrong Tuesday by appearing at a press conference to demonstrate that he is still, in fact, alive.
But while the debate over whether the president has a pulse was firmly settled, a more consequential fight over his future relevance has been picking up steam. And it’s being waged most prominently in Austin, Texas, where InfoWars chief Alex Jones and his employee and surrogate son Owen Shroyer have turned on each other over how much their far-right, conspiracy-addled outlet should align itself with Trump.
The immediate cause of the surprising feud was Jones’s habit of interrupting Shroyer’s own show, War Room, and telling him what to cover. Last week, Jones stormed onto the set once again to loom over Shroyer and tell him, essentially, to cheer up about the state of the country under Trump.
The clip makes for uncomfortable viewing. Shroyer, probably InfoWars’s most famous host after Jones, looks at his boss like a barely tolerated drunk uncle. Bizarrely, as the pair glowered at each other, InfoWars production staff played videos on the backdrop behind them that included footage of dams exploding and an attractive Russian woman in heels getting stuck in the mud. That last video was apparently cribbed from YouTube account “Russian Girls Stuck,” which caters to some, shall we say, specific adult tastes.
The tension becomes too much and Shroyer storms off the set, after which Jones finishes the show and lies to the audience that Shroyer had a “medical emergency.”
On Monday, Shroyer announced that he was quitting InfoWars and launching his own online show. That set off a wave of the kind of explosions we’ve come to expect from Jones, who on Tuesday compared Shroyer to an ungrateful baby and himself to the mythical Roman wolf on which Romulus and Remus suckled. The quotes are equal parts vivid, disturbing, and remarkable:...
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