On Friday morning, Laura Loomer woke up early and took a Metro-North
train from West Harrison, New York, where she lives, to Manhattan. She
made her way to Central Park and secured a second-row ticket to that
night’s performance of the Public Theatre’s production of “Julius
Caesar.” Then she walked around the Upper East Side for a few hours,
stopping to get her nails done (color selection: Blue My Mind). Loomer
is twenty-four. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, she worked for
Project Veritas, the right-wing sting operation run by James
O’Keefe.
Operating undercover, she performed various stunts—for example, on
Election Day, she appeared at a polling station wearing a burqa and
asked for a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Two weeks ago, Loomer
left Project Veritas for the Rebel, a video-heavy outlet based in
Canada. (From its About Us page: “We don’t just report the news, we
participate in it.”) After a few years of anonymous work, she was eager
to find the spotlight.
When Loomer entered the amphitheatre and took her seat on Friday
evening, she saw Jack
Posobiec,
a friend and fellow pro-Trump activist, sitting two rows back. To avoid
attracting attention, they communicated via text message. “Are you here
for the Cernovich contest?” he wrote, referring to the social-media
activist Mike
Cernovich.
“Just stay tuned,” she responded. The previous day, Cernovich had issued
a kind of challenge grant: he would donate a thousand dollars to anyone
who disrupted the play. The production presents Caesar as a Trump-like
figure, and depicts his violent death; Cernovich argued that, if such a
depiction was a protected form of speech, then a protest against it
should be, too. (Loomer admires Cernovich, but she claims that she had
the idea to protest the play before he did.)
In Act III, Scene I, as Caesar was stabbed, Loomer started a Periscope
video on her phone and strode toward the stage. “Stop the normalization
of political violence against the right!” she shouted. A few members of
the cast, prop knives in hand, broke character and walked toward her.
“We’re not promoting it,” one actress said. “This is ‘Julius Caesar.’ ”
“Shame on the New York Public Theatre for doing this!” Loomer continued.
“You guys are ISIS! CNN is ISIS!” Security officers led her out of the
amphitheatre, and the audience cheered. Then Posobiec stood up and
shouted, “Goebbels would be proud!” He, too, was removed. The play
continued, with this line: “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead! Run
hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.”
Loomer, standing in the park just outside the amphitheatre, kept
live-streaming on Periscope. “Shame on all of you!” she shouted. A male
couple passed by, walking hand in hand. “Shame!” Loomer screamed in the direction of the theatre*, her voice cracking. “Shame!” One man turned to the other and asked, “Who is
this crazy bitch?” Loomer didn’t seem to notice. The police arrived and
asked her to place her hands behind her back. “I’m not resisting,
officers,” she said. “Unlike the left.”
The police took Loomer to the 19th Precinct station house, on East
Sixty-seventh Street. As she was booked and fingerprinted, the hashtag
#FreeLaura started to trend on Twitter, and two Web sites began
soliciting donations for her legal defense. Loomer was charged with
misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct, and was ordered to
appear in court in August. By midnight, she was released from police
custody. In the lobby of the station house, she delivered a “press
conference” straight to her iPhone camera. “I’m not apologizing,” she
said. “Honestly, I would do it again.” She claimed that reporters were
waiting for her outside, but added, “I’m not going to be giving
interviews today.”
Thirty minutes later, I met up with Loomer at a restaurant a few blocks
from the station. She was at a table with Posobiec and Franklin Wright,
a member of a “pro-Western fraternal organization” called the Proud
Boys,
whom she had hired earlier that day to act as her cameraman and personal
security detail. “In the police precinct, a bunch of the cops were
pulling up articles about me on their phones,” she said. “One of them
told me, ‘We’re not supposed to say this, but we support what you did.’
”
Posobiec and Wright ordered cheeseburgers; Loomer ordered a bowl of
chili. There was silence as they scrolled through their Twitter
timelines.
Sean Hannity, of Fox News, had tweeted approvingly about her, and she
soon booked an appearance on his show. Laura Ingraham also tweeted her
support, adding, “How many wd storm stage if ‘Obama’ was stabbed?” (In
2012, a Minnesota production of “Julius Caesar” did feature the
assassination of an Obama lookalike, sparking no comparable outrage.)
Posobiec noted that a thousand-dollar donation to Loomer’s defense fund
had just come in. He added, “You’re the No. 4 trending hashtag
right now.”
“Amazing,” Loomer said. “Can you screenshot that and send it to me?”
“Of course,” Posobiec said. “You think this is my first day on Twitter?”
Loomer noticed that Ben Shapiro, a conservative columnist who opposed
Trump during the 2016 election, had begun to argue that her action was
not consistent with free-speech principles. “This obnoxious stupid
snowflake crap is no better than the protesters who try to block college
speeches,” Shapiro tweeted.
David French, another anti-Trump conservative, joined in. “Who is this
guy French?” Loomer asked. “Is he a liberal?”
“He’s National Review,” Posobiec said.
“Oh,” Loomer said, rolling her eyes. “Who gives a shit about him?”
“They’re just jealous, man,” Posobiec said. “Ben Shapiro never even
supported Trump. Just tweet at him, like, ‘Et tu, Brute?’ ”
“I was not blocking anyone’s speech,” Loomer said, her voice rising.
“The play didn’t stop after they made me leave. If anything, I was
increasing the amount of speech!”
Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who lost credibility with many
right-wing activists after making a Heil Hitler-esque hand gesture while
celebrating Trump’s election victory, began to criticize Loomer, also on
free-speech grounds. He promoted a counter-hashtag: #LockUpLaura.
Loomer, who is Jewish, workshopped several possible rejoinders to
Spencer, tweeting the ones that got the best response at the table. “You
can't stand the fact that a Jew is in the spotlight,” she tweeted. Then,
looking up, she asked, “I’m thinking of saying ‘1939 much?’ Or should I
go with 1945?”
Posobiec, finishing his burger, said, “This is gonna go down as the
greatest production of ‘Julius Caesar’ in history.”
Loomer nodded. “I redefined Shakespeare tonight,” she said. “A lot of
people are doing great work from behind a computer screen, but I’m proud
that I actually had the balls to show up and do something.” By the end
of the night, she had gained twenty thousand Twitter followers and had
received nearly ten thousand dollars in online donations. The
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt has argued that “Julius Caesar”
should be read as a cautionary tale about the unforeseen pitfalls of
political violence. But Loomer provided several rationales for her
actions: that she had merely used words, whereas the left engages in
actual violence; that she felt it was her patriotic duty to stop the
play, which was “a form of terrorism” that would “bring us closer to
civil war”; that the Public Theatre is “aligned with ISIS, politically.”
The only incontrovertible fact was one that she never uttered aloud:
that the stunt would do wonders for her personal brand.
A server approached the table. “I couldn’t help overhearing—what exactly
did you do tonight?” she asked.
“I protested a play that was encouraging violence,” Loomer said.
“How, exactly? Did you do it before the play, or wait until after?”
“No, during,” Loomer said, her eyes cast down at her phone.
“Oh, O.K.” the server said. “Can I get you guys anything else?”
*This post has been updated to clarify that Loomer was shouting at the theatre.