Who is Laura Loomer, President Trump's self-described chief 'loyalty enforcer'?

Terry [00:00:00] This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Laura Loomer is a hero in much of the MAGA world. She's an unofficial advisor to President Trump and describes herself as Trump's chief loyalty enforcer, a proud Islamophobe, and a prophet who speaks the truth.

Clip [00:00:18] I'm a very, very aggressive person, which is why a lot of people have very strong feelings about me. Some people like me, some people I don't really think people like me. They either love me or they hate me. It's not like a lukewarm feeling, right? It's not like, oh yeah, I kind of like or kind of don't. People either really like really love me or they just they hate me.

Terry [00:00:38] To those who love her, she's Trump's protector and informs him about conspiracies against him. To her detractors, she's a wacky conspiracy theorist who uses her connection to Trump, as well as her large following on social media and her streaming show, Loomer Unleashed, to have people she accuses of disloyalty fired. It appears she's been pretty successful. She considers herself a journalist, although she doesn't follow journalistic ethics, and what she writes often has a distorted relationship or no relationship with the facts. When many top news organizations declined to submit to the Pentagon's new rule that credentialed Pentagon reporters could only write information that was officially approved by the Pentagon, Loomer was one of the replacements for the reporters who left. She's been banned for hate speech by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but was reinstated on Twitter, now X, after it was bought by Elon Musk. Loomer describes what she does as a selfless act for which she's not compensated. But she has her own company now doing opposition research and other consulting. Questions have been raised about whether her efforts to take down people she sees as disloyal to Trump are being funded secretly by individuals or groups with special interests. My guest, Antonia Hitchens, has written a profile of Laura Loomer titled Laura Loomer's Endless Payback. That's in this week's New Yorker. Hitchens is a staff writer for the magazine. As part of her research, she spent a lot of time with Loomer, including at Charlie Kirk's memorial and at Loomer's home, where she records her video show. Hitchens also interviewed Loomer allies and detractors. Antonio Hitchens, welcome to Fresh Air. Let's start with some of the conspiracy theories that Loomer has promoted.

Antonia [00:02:35] The sort of foundational conspiracy that first drew Lumerin to Trump and her description was that he was, as she puts it, one of the first people to call out that Obama was not born in America and thus should not have been president. And that sorted out for her the sense of being in a conversation or dialog with Donald Trump even before she had had the occasion to ever meet him, just watching him on Fox growing up. She was drawn to his conspiracy that Barack Obama was born outside of America. And that kind of begins for her the sense that there are other, you know, factually loose statements he makes and that she echoes that are really brought into the mainstream.

Terry [00:03:14] One of the things she's known for are very extreme protest actions. That's part of the way she made her reputation and became visible. Describe one or two of her most extreme protests.

Antonia [00:03:27] Sure. So I think we consider Laura Loomer now someone who exists very much online, very much on screens, but there was a time where, you know, she was banned from pretty much any site that would let her post for many years. And so during that time she describes having almost a break with reality where she was driven so insane by not being able to access the internet that she could only protest in person. She often would carry a bullhorn with her, kind of trying to get more attention from people. In one case, after her ban from Twitter came down, they considered her, I think, a dangerous individual who was spreading hateful conduct. She goes to Twitter's offices in New York and chains herself to the door with her bullhorn and remains there screaming for a few hours until police cut through her handcuffs and remove her. And I think for many people that was the first time that they sort of became just even vaguely aware of this person on their radar. For others it was when she stormed the production of Julius Caesar being put on in Central Park. And at that time Donald Trump was being used as a likeness for a Julius Caesar, and she felt that that was gonna open up the question of political violence and whether or not, as she puts it, you know, were liberals then gonna be tempted to try to assassinate the president by seeing a likeness of him stabbed on stage. So she storms the stage, interrupts the production and tries to kind of make the point that she is already protecting this person. And then in another instance she Having been banned from Facebook, having read also Cheryl Sandberg's memoir Lean In, she goes to the Facebook offices in California and sort of tries to insinuate herself into their workplace environment, saying, you know, I'm leaning in, I just want to be here, I just want to be heard. Why don't you want me here? And so I think for a number of people, their kind of introduction to Lumer was seeing these bizarre public stunts that were sort of hard to read.

Terry [00:05:19] She believes she's some sort of modern day oracle. She wrote, Like Cassandra, the Trojan priestess of Apollo in Greek mythology, who was cursed to utter true prophecies, I have been given the gift of prophecy, but I am a prophet of doom, whose warnings of disaster are condemned and ignored. Do you have any insights into why she sees herself as well? A prophet.

Antonia [00:05:47] I think even to this day, despite her, you know, increased prominence, if you ask her a question, you know, about who is paying her or what her work really is or the nature of her relationship with the president, she often will double back to the idea that all she really is ultimately is a clairvoyant and that she kind of exists in this free form way in society as someone who, before anyone else can parse what's going on. The case that you brought up just now when she wrote that she was like Cassandra, she had stormed a hearing that Jack Dorsey, the then Twitter CEO was testifying in about kind of complaints on behalf of many Republicans and more sort of also far-right figures, that they were being quote unquote shadow banned, which means that their voices were not being directly silenced, but that the algorithm was kind of primed to never have any of what they wrote show up. So they were in effect banned in their view. And so Loomer storms this hearing with Jack Dorsey testifying and she's screaming that if Dorsey doesn't stop these shadow bans against Republicans, they won't be able to speak out in the twenty twenty election will be stolen from them. And you know, this is well before anything happened with January sixth, or even Trump was saying that the election had been stolen. So this notion that years before an event happens, she's screaming about it in the halls of Congress, saying, This will happen if you don't stop silencing us, I think, in retrospect, was cast by her and others as this kind of ability to see the future that led her to believe she was uniquely positioned to not just protect but kind of profoundly understand what the president needs.

Terry [00:07:28] So Loomer ran for Congress in Florida twice and lost both times. Did Trump support her? Were they even in touch yet when she ran?

Antonia [00:07:37] So when Loomer runs for Congress in twenty twenty, she runs in the district where Mar-a-Lago at that time was. I say in the past tense because it's since been redistricted. And so in her telling of that race, the president endorsed her and voted for her. In her second race in 2022, there were sort of a slew of candidates who came about because they were primarying candidates who had not endorsed Trump's kind of big lie about the 2020 election. And so in Loomer's telling of both of her elections, Trump not only voted for her but endorsed her strongly. If you speak to other people who were around during that time, they recall a meeting between the president, Susie Wiles, now his chief of staff, and Loomer's then campaign manager, where she petitioned Trump for two hours to endorse her candidate, Laura Loomer, and he declined, saying that she was too controversial and he didn't want to get involved. Loomer has since taken tweets that the president made about, you know, Laura being a patriot or Laura being a strong person to say that Trump endorsed her, but he never kind of weighed in on her race. But she still began to count him as a really close ally despite you know, what other other stories might say there.

Terry [00:08:53] I told you she said I don't want to say oh President Trump is me or I see myself in Trump, but I do. Every time I listen to him speak, I feel like I'm listening to myself speak to myself. How did she become so obsessed with supporting Trump?

Antonia [00:09:13] I think that in the years when Loomer was kicked off of most of these social media websites and Trump was starting to make this rise, she really began to see her story as deeply, deeply bound up with his, as these two people who were not taken seriously, not really seen as anyone who could be part of the mainstream. In Trump's case, you know later he's also not allowed to post on Twitter. And she saw their kind of similar marginal roles in American politics as not just bound up, but also kind of rising and falling at the same time. You know, being emotionally connected to him, even though for years they weren't speaking. I think this begins in 2014 when Loomer is in college in Miami and she happens to see Trump on a golf course. And, you know, at this point he doesn't have a Secret Service detail, so she gets as close to him as she possibly can and yells, You should run for president, I love you. And they take a selfie together. And to her that kind of kicks off this relationship, as it were, to her that, you know, she understands what he should do and he understands that she has advice to give him that's valid, but it's not clear that there's really any direct communication until they have a meeting together at Mar-a-Lago in 2023 and they've reposted his content, he's reposted her content from time to time, but for me it was just really interesting that an almost decades long sense of kinship was developed based on kind of a one off interaction at a rope line on a golf course.

Terry [00:10:48] Trump offered her a job and had to rescind the offer because of objections from his own staff at the White House. Do you know what the objections were from his own staff? So I think.

Antonia [00:11:00] Carries on until even today when you hear that, you know, Loomer is despised by everyone in the West Wing, except for the president in the Oval Office. That starts out even before this job offer when in 2022, around the time of her race, you know, she's getting in fights at Mar-a-Lago, she's alienating other Trump-backed candidates. She's saying that the Republican Party needs a hostile takeover. She's not willing to make nice with any of the kind of coalition builders who are needed to be brought into this America First movement to bring them to actual electoral victory. And so I think she's seen as this really toxic kind of dead weight around the neck of the party that would be better to do away with. And Trump, you know, is willing to take a meeting with her and to say, you're fantastic, you should work for me, but I think the staff immediately walks it back saying this person will be nothing but a liability and has caused you already kind of a host of problems you may not know about in your own movement. In this second administration, I think to many loyalty would be described as kind of competence and falling in line and not speaking out against the president because they feel that the first term was so stymied by these kind of wars happening in the open between different factions and leaks and sort of general turmoil. So the most loyal allies Trump has, you know, if you think of Susie Wiles is just as he calls her the ice queen, basically. In Loomer's conception of loyalty, loyalty means it's like a different kind of love almost. Like even to call out someone who you love to tell them in public that they've failed you. Increasingly Loomer feels completely free to criticize Trump, the object of her greatest affection, to tell him, you know, you shouldn't have the Syrian president of the White House when you make a post about radical Islam, you don't have to use the word radical. She's almost taken to like she has more expertise somehow than even the person she most cares for. And I think that's what in many corners of Washington has led to her being seen as a liability because she feels willing in a climate where there's meant to be no dissent against the president, as he says to Congress, no dissent, just vote for what I like. Here's an outside advisor who's willing to say, You're doing it wrong, listen to me. It's the randomness and the kind of willingness to see something on the internet that might pique your interest that most closely describes the way in which they interact. There's no no sense of a formal role or even the formal rhythm to the way in which the conversations take place and they're both very cagey about even kind of putting any specifics to the nature of when or how they're in touch.

Terry [00:13:46] She takes credit for having a lot of people in government fired. And maybe she should take credit because it seems she makes a statement about them being disloyal to Trump and then the next day they're gone. Who are some of the people who she takes credit for getting fired?

Antonia [00:14:05] So in early April, after Loomer meets with the president in the Oval Office, he immediately dismisses six members of his National Security Council, as well as General Timothy Hawke and his deputy Wendy Noble. Hawke was the head of the National Security Agency at that time. And those are because of connections she imagines are too profound between those individuals and Mark Milley and James Clapper, who had been kind of linked to criticizing Trump. And in the aftermath of that meeting, I think what we see for the first time is Loomer taking credit for firing more than seven high ranking national security officials with no clear reason behind these sort of vague, specious allegations of just general disloyalty. And so I think that's when she begins to really be able to present herself as someone to be scared of, because if you know, if Loomer thinks you're disloyal, then that could be something that becomes actionable.

Terry [00:15:04] Is there a fear in Trump's White House that Say anything negative about Laura Loomer?

Antonia [00:15:12] You will be fired? I think what's so interesting here is that depending on who you ask, she's either this completely extraneous, random, nuisance figure or someone to be truly frightened of. And I've definitely come to believe that there are people who were preemptively not hired because of different accusations she had either kind of in the works that she was going to make or that she had already made and was threatening to take public and I wouldn't say fear so much maybe as vexation from a managerial perspective of is it really worth this whole boondoggle for us to go through what's gonna be online mess when we could just hire somebody else. And so that I think kind of sense of someone looking over your shoulder and the kind of mild paranoia you get from that is more the more the impact than, you know, real fear.

Terry [00:16:07] Now Loomer says she doesn't get paid for being Trump's loyalty enforcer. She just wants to do everything in her power to support him. She also has a business doing opposition research where you dig up dirt on your opponent, and she does other consulting too. Some people wonder who is actually funding her work and if some of the things that she says she's just doing out of a passion for Trump's, you know, beliefs in his presidency, is she really getting paid? Criticize certain people. And those funders are secret.

Antonia [00:16:48] Soon as I started reporting on Loomer in Washington, I would hear every day she's getting paid and everyone is working with her and everyone is compromised in some way because Loomer is in the orbit that is now necessary to use when you want to influence the president. And so I could kind of carried that through my reporting as much as I could and of course if you can't confirm something it's not true. So I had laid out as much as I could about just what I knew about where it seemed like she was being influenced or compensated and she had always said to me when I would bring up these questions to her, I'm not a lobbyist, I'm a clairvoyant and you know, the implication that her work was about anything other than purity and love was really insulting to her.

Terry [00:17:36] You also raise the question that some people have raised. If she wasn't getting compensated, why would she care so much about Hewlett Packard's acquisition of Juniper Networks? I don't even know what Juniper Networks is, but why i is that suspicious?

Antonia [00:17:52] I think you have someone who for years is posting out of real passion and with a really intense frequency and volume about a number of different things. The specific niche interests that lobbyists and consultants and lawyers care about, and they weren't phrased in the terms of, as you say, almost kind of jargon level. And so you see those kind of creeping into these posts about how wonderful Trump is. And there's a point at which I think people start to wonder when did the original Laura become the kind of Laura who was working for a number of different interests and weighing in on, as you mentioned, the HPE Juniper merger.

Terry [00:18:35] Are the questions about funding related to the opposition research that her company gets paid for? Are there questions that the line is crossing between the opposition research she's getting paid for and the things that she's saying in support of Trump?

Antonia [00:18:55] I think what's notable is how porous the barrier is between all of these things, you know.

Terry [00:19:01] And I should mention here too that, you know, a lot of politicians have opposition research to use against their opponent. So opposition research is nothing new and n n no longer considered a radical thing to have, but it's a question of what you do with that information.

Antonia [00:19:23] Especially when it comes to lobbying. If you register with Farah as a lobbyist, it's clear why you would advance a certain position and it's because you are a lobbyist for a foreign government. I think in the past there would have been no reason why someone posting online all day from home would be subjected to the same kinds of disclosures as a lobbyist in Washington going to a steakhouse. But as one of Loomer's allies put it to me, you know, if Laura posts online and nearly two million people see it, including her following in the US government, and then their position is changed based on that, that's not lobbying. Lobbying would only be if she had taken a meeting officially that she had acknowledged took place between, you know, a member of Congress after meeting with foreign government, and so it's not as though she's skirting any requirement that her position would impose on her. She's just existing in a new kind of nether world of everything is allowed.

Terry [00:20:24] So you l learned a bit about her childhood and what her early life was like. Her parents were Republicans. Were they active in politics?

Antonia [00:20:36] Loomer told me that her parents were quote unquote registered Republicans, I think as a way of gesturing it, a certain kind of down the line we vote for whoever is on the ballot in Arizona, but not especially engaged in, you know, going to protests or anything like that. She describes her own evolution as, you know, having nothing to do with the way that she was raised, more having to do with kind of a reaction to what she saw as overly progressive values being imposed on her in the setting of her prep school and then also in the setting of her university.

Terry [00:21:10] Loomer told you that she has a brother who has schizophrenia and at age twelve that her father enrolled Loomer and her other brother in boarding school because their parents were afraid that home could be an unsafe environment. Was that because of her brother's mental health problems? Like do you know what made home unsafe?

Antonia [00:21:34] Lumer describes a very chaotic and in her telling, sometimes violent environment in which her brother's outbursts consumed the household. And so her father, as she tells it, felt most comfortable sending his other two children to boarding school to be able to focus on the one child who was in need of more care and then also in Laura's telling to sort of protect her and her other brother from that environment. And so they go off to this school in the Arizona Desert where she describes an intense feeling of isolation. There was a curfew for phone calls, there was no internet, there were very few people there. And I think to me it sort of conjured the initial sense of being cut off from the world, from her family, even all these years before she's really cut off from the internet, and I think describes kind of almost like a almost a continuation of the sense that she's just completely cast out on her own with no way of accessing conversation. So

Terry [00:22:36] We know that Laura Loomer was asked to seek therapy. Mental health therapy. In twenty twenty, Karen Giorno, who was a Trump advisor who had led Trump's Florida operations through the twenty fifteen primary, she was tapped to run a congressional campaign for Lumer. And she accepted, Giorno accepted under the conditions Loomer agree not to lie about other candidates, meet with a psychiatrist once a quarter and stay on her meds. What what do you know about that?

Antonia [00:23:12] So I think this has been something that Loomer always phrases in such different terms from those who speak about her. Loomer describes a sense of being driven basically to the point that she snapped after she was banned from social media. And in that time period she is doing cocaine a lot, she threatens to drive her car off a cliff. It's a period which she describes as, you know, incredibly riddled by anxiety and depression, and a sense of what she later goes on to say PTSD, which she sought therapy for. Her campaign manager, however, describes being asked to run this race for Loomer and having an intense skepticism of her, partly for her fringe views and partly for the sense that she wasn't calibrated to kind of run a campaign in public and comport herself in the manner that, you know, you'd want a candidate to be able to you to, but Jorno imposes the conditions that you brought up. And Jorno then, in her telling, by the time Laura runs the second time in 2022, had stopped honoring those conditions. And that was kind of the beginning of her divorce from any notion of being brought into the party because she would lash out constantly at all other Republicans and even different operatives who have gone on to work in very high ranking roles in the White House. I think she put them off intensely during that period of possible intense distress emotionally or, you know, possibly just a personality that is at odds with group work. What were her first contacts with the right? When Loomer was in college at Barrie University in Miami, she starts to carry out these kind of quasi political stunts. And she's invited to a conference hosted by David Horowitz, the conservative writer at the Breakers in Palm Beach. And at that conference she recalls meeting James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, the kind of undercover sting operation that will Take videos of people without them knowing to then, you know, in many cases show a sort of hypocrisy of liberalism, to summarize it broadly. And Loomer's first contact with the right, I think is in these fringier circles of people like these Veritas operatives, who then she seeks out saying, I want to work with you and I want to by then she's been loomering people. She describes wanting to conduct her own kind of public humiliation stunts, but in the context of an official job. And so she starts working with O'Keeffe's organization to, for example, go around New York City in the aftermath of Eric Garner's murder by doing things like filming his family undercover in a taxi, getting them to say that Al Sharpton, who's organizing the protests against Garner's murder, is all about the money. So we see her coming into politics not through any traditional kind of desire to be in electoral politics, but much more the kind of rabble rousing, out in the open, stunt based politics that has come to color much of what the right is good at doing. And deceptive.

Terry [00:26:30] Project Veritas was famous for people going undercover, wearing disguises and falsely representing who they were, you know, videoing with hidden cameras responses to the Project Veritas questions, then taking them sometimes out of context and spreading them online to get those people in trouble, to get the organizations in trouble. And there were organizations that were liberal or supported abortion. I think Planned Parenthood was one of those organizations, right?

Antonia [00:27:08] I think it's the beginning of seeing Loomer publicly distort and recast truths to represent the truth that she wants to put forth when we see her carrying out these stunts for Veritas, which as you mentioned, has a very specific world view. She's trained in that kind of guerrilla warfare.

Terry [00:27:28] So after a successful stunt for Project Veritas, she takes a Veritas camera and uses it to troll her own college by talking to administrators and suggesting that the college start an ISIS club, which is sympathetic students in support of the Islamic State. Tell us more about that stunt and what the outcome was.

Antonia [00:27:54] Sure. So I think fresh off of what she would cast as a victory in New York with Project Veritas, she returns to her university kind of armed with this camera and with this I guess you could call it skill set that she wants to start using on her own. She secretly records these interactions with administrators who are, as university administrators can be wont to do, kind of patiently and slightly indulgently humoring a student's idea for a club that is meant to be sympathetic to ISIS, and you know, they're kind of pushing her to make it more about you know humanitarian work in the Middle East, and these long interactions are captured on her secret camera leading to her expulsion. However, what's unsuccessful at her university is in fact very successful elsewhere, and James O'Keefe begins to replicate a very similar version of that script at other universities around the country. And so when a different Veritas operative is implementing that script at Cornell, it becomes sort of a newsworthy enough moment that Sean Hannity features it on his show and Trump watching Hannity then, you know, in twenty fifteen, not having yet announced his run for president, faxes James O'Keefe and says, Why don't you come and meet with me? You know, I like what you're doing. And they meet in Trump Tower and discuss that and other things. And Loomer in her telling was invited to that meeting with the president, but could not attend because she was way late in Florida with paperwork to do with her expulsion. And so although she couldn't come to the meeting, she felt already like, you know, I'm on my way. I'm going to be soon someone who not only interacts with Donald Trump, but goes to the Oval Office and she recalls thinking this before Trump has even announced his run.

Terry [00:29:42] Talk with her. You spent many hours talking with her.

Antonia [00:29:45] It's the experience almost of talking to the internet. There's no sense of the kind of normal cadence and rhythm of conversation and back and forth I think is interrupted by the sense that one, she was banned for so long that she's almost breathless trying to get in everything she wants to say, as though there's kind of like a hangover from all the years when she couldn't speak. And then also everything is cast in this kind of very heightened, intense way of things that are trending on the internet that to the untrained eye to someone without a cell phone don't even have the kind of currency or intensity of the way she's speaking about them, so it can be incredibly disorienting. Can you describe her home or is that

Terry [00:30:31] too personal for her that you don't want to talk about? C I'm just wondering if it offered any insights into her lifestyle or personality.

Antonia [00:30:41] So Loomer conducts most of her work from home where she has her rumble studio set up in a converted bedroom. But once the lights go off in there, the rest of the home is just a normal home. It's not kind of dressed up to be the home of a prominent figure in American life. There are four dogs who are created to eat dinner so they don't fight over each other's food. There were dog gates on most of the rooms to make sure the dogs were off the furniture. The furniture had blankets on it for the dogs. There's a home gym where she can walk on the treadmill while taking long phone calls, but her professional life very much takes place across the backdrop of a a pretty casual domestic setting. Of her

Terry [00:31:24] Four dogs she named Lumer. It sounds a little odd for Laura Loomer have a dog she named Loomer and have to say like sit Loomer or whatever she says to the dog. Do you know why she named her dog Loomer?

Antonia [00:31:42] Having spent a little bit of time with her, it seemed so obvious that she would name her dog Loomer. I was almost surprised the others weren't named Loomer, but they came pre named because they were rescued. Why are you not surprised? She's not subtle in the intensity with which she wants to cast herself as the main character in her life. Having another creature in your home with your same name wouldn't be destabilizing so much as I think comforting.

Terry [00:32:11] So one of Laura Loomer's platforms now is her show on Rumble, which is called Laura Loomer Unleashed. Her show started in a very unusual way. One episode that I was watching had an over twenty minute long section at the very beginning with the caption Standby. Do you have any insights into why her show starts? With a standby for over twenty minutes where all you see is images of her at home and in various places. Like why not start the show when the actual show starts?

Antonia [00:32:51] Loomer has been very much keen to articulate to me over the course of my time reporting on her that she is a one woman show. She has no one working with her. She has a Capitol Hill correspondent who's in Washington kind of occasionally loomering members by just jumping out from behind a pole or something. And then she has a team of producers remotely who help her with, you know, the lights for her show and her at home studio. But Loomer Unleashed is very much a it's a Laura production. And so there's a sense of kind of nonfinito ragtag, I'm pulling this together myself, to her content, which I think, you know, tonally bears some resemblance to the long screeds she posts on Twitter. I think there's a style to them that's not polished and that's part of what draws in some of her support.

Terry [00:33:44] Were you surprised that Loomer agreed to be profiled by you for the New Yorker? She may perceive as a very liberal publication.

Antonia [00:33:55] By the time that the New Yorker wanted to profile her, and I went back and looked at the recollections I had already from the times over the past eighteen months that my life had intersected with her, I think what surprised me was that she became a figure who would be worthy of a New Yorker profile. When I first saw her kind of in the flesh, she was, you know, storming into restaurants, filming people, she was chasing Frank Luntz to his car, asking him about Nikki Haley. She was traveling with Trump to his debate in Philadelphia. I think as the months went on and she became this figure who shows up in the Oval Office and takes credit for firing a dozen of national security officials, it was more about squaring that person I'd seen running through Iowa with no clear role, was someone who had developed for herself at least enough of a sense of a role that there was enough to write about. So I think she was flattered in some ways by being seen as having any stones left to turn over. Both Trump and Loomer, who accept many interviews from what is seen by them as unfavorable media, they still understand the kind of validity to continuing to push their position on even outlets who they think are incapable of seeing the truth for what they know it to be.

Terry [00:35:14] Do you know what it was like for the fact checkers to fact check this story and w what the most difficult part was?

Antonia [00:35:21] I think the experience of any subject for a New Yorker profile dealing with the fact checkers is very intense because you're being asked, you know, what time was it when you remember getting your divorce papers or you know, having to reconstruct on this almost min molecular level these details of your life. I think in Loomer's case, she was really grateful for that process because she feels that she deals so much in the same realm of looking for truth. And she feels that she's been so maligned by every force in society who's never asked her what's true. And so to have someone call her up five times for an hour and have her reconstruct these almost mundane details of her existence that put to her for many years, except maybe the New York Times at one point briefly. I think it actually was an experience she found to be generative and that, if anything, led her to think perhaps there was some dignity and truth even in journalism coming from a very different tradition from the one that she's created for herself. You know, she would say to me often over the course of our time together, why is it when you do something it's seen as kind of this public service exposing or truth and if I do it it's seen as Laura Loomer's a national security threat. And it was attention in how she saw herself and I was never able to align with her version of what she saw herself to be doing, but I think when she was asked in a pretty deadpan way by fact checkers how she conducts her life, she felt that she was being given a very straight chance to explain what it is that she does.

Terry [00:36:57] Antonia Hitchens, thank you so much for talking to us. I learned so much from your article. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Antonia Hitchens is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her article Laura Loomer's Endless Payback is in this week's issue. This is Fresh Air.

Terry [00:00:00] Documentary producer and director Ken Burns came to prominence thirty five years ago by presenting on PBS a massively popular multipart nonfiction series called The Civil War. His latest effort, a six part series co directed by Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, will be shown Sunday through Friday on PBS. It's called The American Revolution, and our TV critic David Biancoli has this review.

David Bianculli [00:00:28] By focusing on the American Revolution, Ken Burns is revisiting some very familiar territory. His long and impressive filmography includes a history of the Congress and biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. He's done deep dives into American military conflicts, including World War II and the Vietnam War. And throughout his career, he's developed and perfected the tricks of his particular trade. The evocative use of music and quotations from speeches and correspondence, the use of actors to read the words of historical participants. The zooming in and out to reveal key details in period photos, and the painstaking attention to sound effects from birds to bullets to help bring those images to life. All of that knowledge and all of those gimmicks are utilized in the American Revolution, the new PBS six part series about the founding of our country. It's an exceptional work. The American Revolution is written by Jeffrey C. Ward, who wrote the Civil War and many other Burns documentaries, including the ones on Congress and Thomas Jefferson. And its co directive did by Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, both of whom have worked with Burns for years. But the American Revolution presents a challenge that even the Civil War did not. No photographs, period. To compensate, Burns and Company use war reenactors and place them in the actual historical locations. On many, let's say most documentaries using a similar technique, the effect can be cheesy. But in the American Revolution, the directors avoid showing the faces of the actors reenacting battle movements. Instead, parts of their bodies are shown in intense closeup, a bandaged hand here, a muddy boot there. Elsewhere, in an approach that borders on pure art, the directors use drones to capture the action from high high above. It's unusual and beautiful. Battles are the surprisingly dominant ingredient of this six part series. The American Revolution goes into more detail about individual battles than I ever learned in my own American history classes. But new and vintage maps clearly animated to show troop positions and movements make it all very clear and very vibrant. The actors quoting from the historical participants and the historians interviewed to comment on the action do the rest. In their various war documentaries, Burns and his team always have focused as much on the ground troops as on the generals, often much more so, telling their story from the bottom up rather than the top down. The American Revolution does both. We hear important observations from George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, but also from Native Americans, revolutionary women, enslaved people, and others not always given voice in such narratives. In addition, the program's historians make us think differently about the history we're witnessing. In the colonies, those who were faithful to the crown were called loyalists, and those against them called themselves patriots. This series humanizes both sides and also explains why some native tribes, including the Shawnees, sided with the British in hopes of protecting their own lands. The program even looks at old events in a new way, as when historian Maya Jasinoff reacts to the story of a loyalist who was dragged from his home by patriots and tarred and feathered.

Clip [00:04:10] Tarring and feathering is something that has come down to us as an almost kind of comical thing because you see these people with chicken feathers on them. This is hideous stuff. Boiling pitch. Is poured onto somebody's skin. The burns are unbelievable. And it's all part also of a kind of spectacle of violence that is a really important part of this. And this is why the feathers are put on in part. It's that you're trying to humiliate and shame the victim.

David Bianculli [00:04:50] Peter Coyote, the actor who has narrated many Ken Burns documentaries, does so again here. He's got a great voice for it and leans into all the difficult place names and people's names with confident authority. At one point, I suspect he even has fun reading a particular passage. It comes in episode five, right after the awful winter at Valley Forge. General George Washington has decided he must train his remaining exhausted troops to a higher level. Over the course of this series, we learn many new things about familiar names, like Nathan Hale, Paul Revere, and Benedict Arnold. But the name Coyote mentions here was new to me.

Clip [00:05:32] Washington wanted every man in his newly reorganized army to undergo formal military training, to end what he called the confusion that had too often undercut its performance on the battlefield. The man he picked to oversee that task was a newcomer to America. Friedrich, Wilhelm, Ludolf, Gerhard, August, Heinrich, Ferdinand, Von Steubert.

David Bianculli [00:06:00] The sheer number of the battles and the details about them attest to how hard our ancestors fought for the notion of a federalist society. At the end, the American Revolution reminds us that the quest to maintain that society and to strive to achieve a more perfect union is far from over. I'll end the way the series does by citing Alexander Hamilton.

Clip [00:06:24] Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an unprincipled man would mount the hobby horse of popularity and throw things into confusion. In a government like ours, he would write, no one is above the law.

Terry [00:06:42] David Biancoli reviewed The American Revolution, a new documentary series by Ken Burns. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, my guest will be Ethan Hawk. He's starring in two new movies, Blue Moon about lyricist Lorenz Hart, and the horror movie Black Phone Two. In the streaming series The Lowdown, he's a small time investigative journalist constantly getting into trouble. We'll talk about his movies and his life, from his years as a teenage film star to today. I hope you'll join us. Keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanishewski. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Annory Baldonato, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chalinar, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C. V. Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shurok directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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