FARA

I first met Laura Loomer in the New York office of Project Veritas. She was blonde then, feisty, smart and ambitious. She was also fearless. Because of her outspoken views regarding the dangers of radical Islam – views that I largely share – her career as an investigative journalist and advocate was severely hampered. She became possibly the most censored woman on the planet; forbidden from placing her warnings about Sharia law and radical Islam on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Even Uber banned her. In 2020, Loomer decided to make a valiant race for Congress against Democrat incumbent Lois Frankel in an overwhelmingly blue Florida district, which happened to include Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s club and winter residence.

As the latest special counsel files new charges against former president Donald Trump, it’s beginning to look like legal crusades in America are more important than political ones. Locking up one’s political opponents is the sort of thing they used to do in Ukraine, after all, or the totalitarian state of which Arthur Koestler wrote in Darkness at Noon. Just a few years after claims of Russian collusion with the winning candidate of America’s 2016 presidential election were debunked, it is ironic that a Russian’s critique of our political culture nearly half a century ago captures our current predicament so clearly.