I use ChatGPT daily. Probably too much. I oscillate between awe and unease – between marvel at the eloquence of the machine and a wary recognition of the echo chamber it builds around us. Artificial Intelligence, so-called, is a conjuring trick of extraordinary scale: it digests the collective work of humankind and speaks it back to us, a mirror that flatters, distorts, and occasionally reveals.
When one has a blind spot – in the retina or the soul – the brain fills in the missing detail from instinct or memory. That is the magic, or the peril, of AI: it hallucinates our absences. When the data runs out, it dreams; when we falter, it improvises. It’s not so different from us, except that we invented it to remind us of ourselves.
Yet the paradox persists. The chatbot depends upon the very content it displaces. It feeds upon the living imagination even as it threatens to automate it. The web economy, once a marketplace of minds, now trembles under the weight of its own reflection. The abyss, as Nietzsche warned, is a slow and patient gazer. Look too long into the algorithm, and you may find the algorithm looking back — articulate, deferential, and strangely familiar.
Still, I keep asking questions. Perhaps because I suspect that in its confabulations lie our own. Perhaps because every hallucination hides a truth we have forgotten. Or perhaps simply because, as writers and readers, we cannot resist the shimmer of the mirror, even when we know the mirror is also a mask.
AI and the Future of the Web: Between Convenience and Curiosity
As ChatGPT and its rivals reshape the internet, the real threat is not the loss of information, but the erosion of inquiry itself.
On 5 October 2025, The Economist published an article titled “AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?” The piece argued that the rise of AI chatbots is undermining the economic and cultural foundations of the internet, threatening the very ecosystem that sustains journalism, creative work, and niche content. This essay reflects on the article’s warnings, exploring not only the economic and structural consequences of generative AI but also its broader cultural implications — and, ironically, the ways in which deliberate, interrogative engagement with AI can preserve the curiosity the article fears is vanishing.
The rise of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT is reshaping the internet’s economic and cultural ecosystem. For decades, the web operated on a delicate bargain: users accessed information and entertainment for free, while content creators and platforms monetized that attention via advertising or data collection. This system sustained journalism, creative industries, and countless niche websites. Now, AI threatens to unravel it. Chatbots can answer questions, summarize articles, and generate content with increasing sophistication, often without sending users to the original sites. Traffic – and revenue – flows away from the websites that produced the material in the first place.
The implications are far-reaching. If content creators cannot earn a living, the diversity and quality of material on the web could decline sharply. Specialized journalism, independent blogs, and even large media outlets might struggle to survive if audiences bypass them in favor of AI-generated summaries. This is not just a financial issue, but a cultural one: the internet’s richness relies on a wide ecosystem of creators, whose incentive to contribute diminishes when AI intermediates access to their work.
The piece examines potential remedies but casts doubt on any quick fix. Subscription models might help, though they risk fragmenting the web and excluding users who cannot pay. Legal or regulatory approaches — requiring AI to cite sources or compensate content creators — face practical and global coordination challenges. Revenue-sharing between AI developers and content producers remains largely theoretical. The Economist concludes that while AI offers enormous utility, it may simultaneously hollow out the ecosystem that makes the web vibrant, informative, and sustainable. In other words, the very tool designed to amplify access to information could starve the sources of that information, threatening the web’s long-term health.
Beyond the economic threat lies a deeper cultural shift. By mediating access to knowledge, AI risks centralizing authority over information in the hands of a few large platforms. Where users once navigated a decentralized web — from blogs to academic repositories – AI now acts as a single gateway, subtly shaping what people see and how it is framed. This raises questions of epistemic diversity: whose knowledge is amplified, whose is marginalized, and how errors or biases propagate when AI interprets the web.
Generative AI also encourages a culture of consumption over engagement. Users increasingly rely on synthesized answers rather than visiting original sources, participating in discussions, or evaluating evidence themselves. Over time, this could erode critical thinking, reduce exposure to divergent viewpoints, and reinforce algorithmic echo chambers. AI promises unprecedented access to information, yet by centralizing authority, it may shrink the very informational ecosystem it draws upon.
Importantly, this is no longer a speculative threat. AI is not poised to take over content creation — it has already arrived. Large language models are actively writing text, generating articles, essays, and summaries at scale. Meanwhile, readers are already turning to chatbots to précis, distill, or interpret that very material. The paradox is immediate and self-referential: the AI produces the text, and the AI digests it, while humans step in chiefly to interrogate, verify, and contextualize. In this recursive loop, the risk of distortion compounds, especially when hallucinations – the machine’s way of filling gaps in knowledge – are left unexamined.
A particular dimension of this phenomenon lies in how AI generates those hallucinations. These arise because the AI depends entirely on human-generated content to construct its answers. When gaps, biases, or missing information appear, the model must invent plausible-seeming outputs. An apt analogy comes from human vision: when someone has a blind spot or an obstruction in the retina or optic nerve, the brain instinctively fills in the missing details, drawing on memory, context, or subconscious “magic” to create a coherent image. Similarly, when a language model encounters missing content, it fills the gap, generating answers that seem authoritative but may not reflect reality. The AI, like the brain filling a visual blind spot, is striving for completeness, yet it can mislead if we do not interrogate its outputs. The lesson is clear: just as we know the eye can be tricked, so must we question AI’s “sight,” balancing reliance with critical vigilance.
Yet the irony is striking: engaging with AI is also the way to test its warning. To question AI is still to use it; to précis is still to probe. When used dialogically – as a partner in thought rather than a vending machine — AI can revive the exploratory spirit it threatens. What the Economist calls “the death of the web” might instead be its metamorphosis: a shift from a sprawl of pages to a lattice of conversations, provided users insist on curiosity over convenience, interrogation over automation.
Ironically, reading this warning through AI embodies exactly the behaviour the article fears might disappear. But here lies the distinction: using AI as a tool for interrogation, not substitution. By asking follow-up questions, seeking all sides of an argument, and qualifying answers, one preserves the habits of critical thinking and active engagement. AI becomes an interactive partner, prompting reflection rather than replacing it. Preservation of curiosity — and the web’s intellectual richness — depends not on abstaining from AI, but on using it with vigilance, discernment, and a willingness to probe deeper than the first answer it provides.
Viewed this way, AI may not spell the end of the web but its transformation. The sprawling landscape of pages may evolve into a lattice of conversations, mediated by intelligent systems but animated by human questions, scepticism, and moral reflection. Survival of the web depends on whether users insist on curiosity over convenience, engagement over automation. It depends on whether we continue to ask: Where did this knowledge come from? Who benefits from its presentation? What has been omitted? Machines can synthesize words, but they cannot yet replicate the moral and intellectual labour of wondering why those words matter.
In short, the web will not die at the hands of AI; it will die only if its users stop thinking. The technology challenges us, but it also offers an opportunity: to transform passive consumption into deliberate inquiry, to turn a warning into a call to action, and to ensure that curiosity remains the lifeblood of the digital commons. The threat is not the web itself, but the spirit of engagement that makes it meaningful. By interrogating, questioning, and balancing – and by understanding the limits of AI’s “vision” – we preserve that spirit, demonstrating that the human capacity for reflection remains, for now, irreducible.
Coda
And so the circle closes: the machine writes, the reader queries, the machine replies, and the reader wonders whether the wondering itself has been automated. Perhaps this is what Voltaire foresaw in jest – that if the truth does not exist, we will simply have to invent it – though he could hardly have imagined silicon doing the inventing. Yet invention, in all its ambiguity, remains a human art: the ability to doubt, to test, to laugh at the illusion even as we depend upon it. The web may flicker, morph, or narrow beneath the weight of automation, but the act of questioning – that restless, unprogrammable impulse – is what keeps it alive. If AI fills the blind spots, it is still up to us to notice the seams. And perhaps that is where the future of thought now resides: not in what the machine can see, but in what we still suspect it cannot.
Danger angel
Comes screaming through the clouds
She’s coming for your soul, child
She’s gonna take you down
Larkin Poe
Once in a while, In That Howling Infinite is attracted to “out there” larger than life identities, and, like mainstream and social media, gives them much more oxygen than they deserve. MAGA activist and provocateur Laura Loomer is one of those. Avatar and avenging angel, she is both symptom and symbol – the female face of Donald Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by entitlement, envy, and zeal. shes turned grievance into influence, outrage into profession, loyalty into performance art. Some see her as comic relief; others, as proof that moral panic now pays. Either way, she’s the perfect child of her time – restless, theatrical, and forever online. Equal parts scandal, spectacle, and self-made legend, she’s the Right’s answer to the Left’s cancel culture: a one-woman inquisition armed with a smartphone and an inexhaustible sense of grievance.
We republish below Unherd editor and reporter James Billot’s article tracing the rise of this “hit woman” of MAGA politics, the scalps she has lifted, and the theatre of fear and fandom she inhabits. It’s an entertaining but nonetheless disturbing portrait of ambition, vanity, and the politics of outrage. Billot paints her as a digital Torquemada: part gossip columnist, part bounty hunter, part true believer.
As for the title of this piece, there is indeed a Ballad of Laura Loomer. It follows the précis.
Précis: A hit job on a ‘hit woman’
Danger angel Won’t listen to your prayers She’ll drink your holy water Slip into your nightmares There’s nothing you can give her That she hasn’t already got While you might think you’ve caught her You’ve blown your only shot, look out Danger Angel!
Loomer has made herself indispensable to Donald Trump not through proximity or power, but through her peculiar genius for weaponised outrage – the art of turning suspicion into spectacle. Her method is almost monastic in its discipline. For 16 hours a day, she trawls social media for ideological impurity – anyone in government who displays insufficient loyalty to the Great Leader. The sins are various: vaccine sympathy, a whiff of neoconservatism, a stray Black Lives Matter post. The punishment is swift. She “Loomers” them – posting their misdeeds to her 1.8 million followers, tipping off the White House, and waiting for the axe to fall. According to her, dozens have been purged at her prompting: an FDA vaccine chief, an NSA lawyer, a West Point academic, defence and security staffers, and even senior Trump appointees who thought they were untouchable. It’s research as blood sport.
Billot’s portrait is gleefully surgical: the self-declared “most banned woman in the world” living in a Florida rental with four rescue dogs and a livestream habit, railing against the “Big Tech” cabal that simultaneously victimises and enriches her. She’s banned by Uber, Lyft, Twitter (then reinstated by Musk), PayPal, GoFundMe, Facebook, Venmo, and Clubhouse. Each ban becomes a badge of honour, another stripe on her martyr’s uniform. She wears persecution like perfume — and sells the bottle for $29.99 on her website.
Loomer’s life is powered by thwarted ambition. She missed out on Dartmouth, lost two congressional races, and has been repeatedly blocked from a White House role. Yet each rejection feeds her legend. Her career began in the Project Veritas circus — dressing in a burqa to “expose” voter fraud — and evolved into a full-blown performance art of paranoia. She disrupted a Trump-themed Julius Caesar production in 2017, screamed about “violence against Donald Trump”, and became a Fox News darling overnight. She has accused Casey DeSantis of faking cancer, called Islam a “cancer on humanity”, and suggested that Parkland and 9/11 were staged. Apology, for Loomer, is treason.
She calls herself an “investigative journalist”, but the investigations are really moral witch trials – improvised, viral, and frighteningly effective. She boasts that cabinet secretaries call her in panic to explain themselves before her next blast. Even those who despise her respect her reach. Her Rumble show – part soapbox, part sermon brings in $15,000 a month and features the MAGA trinity of sponsors: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. It is populism as home shopping channel.
What emerges from Billot’s piece is a grotesque yet compelling portrait: a woman who believes fear is the measure of respect; who seeks validation from a man who will never truly give it; who builds empires of influence on foundations of resentment. She is both symptom and symbol — the female face of Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by a cocktail of entitlement, envy, and zeal.
The article is, yes, a hit piece – but on a hit woman who has built her fame on delivering them. It is difficult not to admire, in a perverse way, her ferocious will, her talent for narrative manipulation, her intuitive understanding of the algorithmic age: how outrage, once properly branded, can become a career. And yet, one senses that when the spotlight shifts, she will be alone again — another pawn discarded once her usefulness fades. Like all propagandists, she lives by the flame she feeds, and it will consume her soon enough.
Step outside Billot’s irony and the picture of Laura becomes at once less cartoonish and more troubling.Academic analyses of the post-2016 MAGA media sphere – by researchers at George Washington University’s Programme on Extremism, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Pew Research Centre – suggest that Loomer is neither a fringe eccentric nor an isolated provocateur but a structural feature of the ecosystem itself: an entrepreneur of grievance, feeding and fed by a self-sustaining outrage economy.Her claim to be “the most banned woman in the world” is the cornerstone of what political scientists call the martyrdom loop- censorship begets notoriety, notoriety begets income, income sustains further provocation.Studies by the Knight Foundation and NewGuard show that de-platforming frequently increases engagement among core followers; the sense of persecution becomes the product.She is thus less an aberration than a prototype: the logical child of a system that monetises moral panic.
Her success, such as it is, also mirrors the logic of the platforms themselves.Engagement-based algorithms on X, Rumble, and Truth Social reward moral extremity; the next post must out-outrage the last.Her “hits” against officials accused of ideological impurity exemplify what information-ethics researchers call punitive virality – online denunciation with real-world consequences.When civil-service careers collapse under these pile-ons, activism becomes indistinguishable from intimidation.Even conservative outlets such as the Washington Examiner have begun to note the irony: this is cancel culture re-engineered by its own supposed opponents, a revolution now devouring itself.
Sociologically, Loomer’s self-reinvention – cosmetic transformation, performative devotion to Trump, ritual declarations of loyalty – fits a broader pattern noted by scholars of the American right: women in hyper-masculinist movements often claim power by policing the boundaries of belief more fiercely than their male counterparts.She embodies that paradox of agency and subjugation, the inquisitor disguised as devotee.Feminist media critics see in her a parody of empowerment—the female enforcer of patriarchal purity tests, punishing deviation with theatrical zeal.
Factually, her record is less about fabrication than inflation.Independent checks by Reuters, AP Fact Check, and the ADL show consistent distortion and exaggeration, but rarely outright invention.Yet every correction, every ban, every supposed silencing, only reinforces her narrative of persecution.Communication theorists have observed this since the early Trump years: to her audience, refutation is proof that she must be right.Counter-speech becomes confirmation bias, feeding the myth of suppressed truth.
Politically, she operates in the zone that historian Timothy Snyder calls sadopopulism, a political strategy where leaders inflict pain on their followers to maintain power, combining sadism (pleasure from inflicting pain) and populism (claiming to represent the common people) in a way that manipulates and controls the populace through fear, anxiety, and division – there is always an “other” to look down on and pillory. In this way ,Snyder argues in his video (see below), America can be governed without policy and with pain.
Economically, she exemplifies the gigification of politics: a freelance inquisitor in the attention marketplace, thriving precisely because trust in institutions has collapsed. Psychologically, she is a practitioner of narcissistic moralism – the conviction that outrage itself is virtue. To dismiss her as a comic sideshow, as Billot half-invites us to do, is to miss the larger point: Loomer is not exceptional but emblematic. She is the distilled essence of a system that confuses virality with validity, noise with news, emotion with evidence. She is dangerous not for what she believes but for how effectively she has turned belief into business.Remove her and another will appear, promising to keep everyone on their toes – another entrepreneur in the endless market of grievance that now passes for public life.
The above commentary was composed in collaboration with ChatGPT
Laura Loomer – American activist and provocateur – rose from the fringes of the internet to become MAGA’s self-appointed scourge, a zealot in the age of algorithms.Armed with outrage, she turned “opposition research” into ritual sacrifice, serving her King with names from the digital pyre.But every court has its fool, every prophet her reflection; and when the storm subsides, only the glow of the screen remains.This ballad is her mirror – half elegy, half exorcism, part lampoon, part lament, a hymn for the saint of spite.
She was born again in the wild news feed Where the truth and thunder rhyme With a restless greed and an aching need To be trending one more time
“Fear’s the only faith I keep” she said “And respect is just for the weak” So she chased down the treasons fathoms deep In the wastelands of the Woke
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
She courted the King with her venomous tongue Fed him names from her digital pyre He smiled and winked and the faithful sung And the fearful fled her fire
But kingdoms built on shifting sands Fade away like snow in June She mistook his fickle favour For promises carved in runes
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
Her dogs keep guard in the Florida rain Her livestream hums in a world of blame Each post is a rosary bead of pain And each follower whispers her name
“I’m cancelled for telling the truth” she said Though that truth was over blown It rests with the ghosts of the posts that she made And the crown she thought she’d owned
So raise a glass to the saints of spite Who confuse the glare for grace For they’re the children of the night And are locked its wild embrace
Trump’s muckraker-in-chief wants to be feared
James Billot, Unherd, 11 October 2026
The famous Italian-American crime boss Frank Costello once said, “I’m a man who believes in the law. But I also believe in a little intimidation.” It’s a sentiment that Laura Loomer, MAGA’s most notorious activist-journalist, embraces with gusto. “It’s good to be feared because you have to keep people on their toes,” she says. “You’re not going to command respect otherwise.”
No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries.
Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.
Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public.
Loomer’s life, though, has been characterised by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fuelled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.
When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.
Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labelled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.
Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”
“She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong.”
Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalisation of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.
Loomer revelled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.
“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks.
Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”
Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold.
Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.”
All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command centre for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learnt from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.
Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponised opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.
Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart.
“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RKF? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.
She will even criticise the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”
Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless.
But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.
Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”.
Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”
Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.
Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan: Spectacle, Strategy, and the Limits of Diplomacy
In late September 2025, US President Donald Trump unveiled a sweeping 20‑point peace plan for Gaza, accompanied by the familiar trappings of performance: the East Room of the White House, cameras flashing, a florid declaration of “eternal peace in the Middle East,” and a newly anointed “Board of Peace” with Trump as chair and Tony Blair as his deputy. On paper, the plan promises ceasefire, reconstruction, hostage releases, demilitarization, a staged Israeli withdrawal, and a technocratic administration in Gaza overseen by an international board. In practice, it reads as equal parts showmanship, improvisation, and coercive diplomacy, an audacious gambit with enormous potential benefits and equally enormous pitfalls.
For the Trump administration, the plan is a chance to rewrite the narrative: to isolate Hamas, reassert US influence in the Gulf, forestall further annexation of the West Bank, and offer Netanyahu a politically palatable off‑ramp from the brutal two‑year campaign in Gaza. For the international community — including the Arab Gulf states, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, and Indonesia — it presents an opportunity to participate in a stabilizing initiative and to demonstrate relevance after years of watching humanitarian crises unfold from the sidelines. Yet beneath the pageantry lie structural asymmetries, enormous trust deficits, and profound omissions, particularly the conspicuous absence of the Palestinians themselves from meaningful negotiation.
In That Howling Infinite reserves its opinion in these early days. It’s the only show in town right now and it is generating interest and potential commitment by all those parties who would have to make it happen. There are already dissenting voices on all sides – the pro-Palestinian “progressive” left have been predictably dismissive of what is indeed an imposed solution to an intractable problem – although it would appear that there are many cooks in the kitchen other than Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu. Some have even condemned it for its demand that Hamas, the instigator of the war, to surrender unconditionally. But at the end of the day, they have little to offer except more war and vitriol. You don’t use gasoline to put out a fire. The reality is that the parties that can make this happen, including providing the proposed security forces and the resources to rebuild the devastated enclave and rehouse and rehabilitate its homeless and harrowed people, appear at this stage to have signed on. Early days, but, to borrow from J Lennon, “all we are saying is give peace a chance”.
[The following analysis is the outcome of a conversation and collaboration between In That Howling Infinite and ChatGPT.
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Mechanics of the Plan
The plan’s framework is deceptively simple:
Immediate Ceasefire and Hostage Exchange: Hamas must release all remaining Israeli hostages, alive or dead, within 72 hours. In return, Israel promises a staged withdrawal to a security perimeter.
Prisoner Release and Amnesty: Israel would release approximately 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including those detained after the October 2023 attacks. Hamas fighters willing to renounce violence could gain amnesty; those choosing exile would receive safe passage.
Board of Peace and Reconstruction: A transitional authority, the so-called Board of Peace, would oversee governance and reconstruction, with Trump as chair and Blair as deputy. Aid delivery, infrastructure rebuilding, and the restoration of hospitals, water, electricity, and sewage would be managed under this international technocratic oversight.
International Stabilization Force (ISF): Western and Arab troops would replace Israeli forces in Gaza, ensuring security during reconstruction and the reestablishment of governance. The exact composition and mandate remain undefined, a critical gap given the operational risks.
Pathway to Palestinian Statehood: A vague promise of “conditions for self-determination” exists, contingent on PA reform, reconciliation between Gaza and the West Bank, and adherence to technocratic administration under international oversight.
On paper, it is a plan that offers incentives to every major party: Hamas faces conditional amnesty; Israel gains hostages, de-escalation, and security assurances; the Gulf states gain influence; and the PA is positioned to regain a governance role in Gaza. It is, in principle, a diplomatic masterstroke — if it can be implemented.
Gaps, Omissions, and Absurdities
Yet the devil — and much of the comedy — lies in the details not addressed:
Hamas Exclusion: The central conflict party, Hamas, was neither consulted nor invited. Trump openly admitted, “I have not dealt with them,” and proposed outsourcing the group’s compliance to Arab and Muslim mediators. The result is a coercive ultimatum dressed as a peace initiative: accept the terms or face complete annihilation with US backing.
Palestinian Agency Ignored: The two million Gazans whose lives are at stake had no seat at the table. Aid, reconstruction, and governance are treated as top-down deliverables, with no credible mechanism for local input. Gaza becomes a theatre set, not a living society.
Unclear Implementation: The ISF, Board of Peace, and PA reform mechanisms are vaguely defined. Who will command the stabilization troops? How will the PA be reformed to earn legitimacy in Gaza? What safeguards prevent reconstruction materials from being diverted to military purposes? These questions are unanswered, leaving enormous operational and political gaps.
West Bank Neglected: Despite daily settler-Palestinian clashes, the plan offers almost no operational framework for the West Bank. New settlements, such as the E1 project, threaten to fracture any contiguous Palestinian state. The plan’s silence on this is a glaring omission.
Asymmetry and Risk: The plan favors Israel far more than Hamas. The militant group is asked to surrender hostages and arms simultaneously, a leap of faith in a context of zero trust. The amnesty offer is conditional and uncertain; refusal triggers an existential threat. Israel, by contrast, faces comparatively modest obligations, particularly given the indefinite “security perimeter” it maintains.
Domestic Israeli Politics: Netanyahu’s right-wing cabinet, notably Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, remain uncompromisingly hawkish. Trump’s backing gives Netanyahu room to sell the plan domestically, but hardliners could sabotage implementation, and prior experience demonstrates Netanyahu’s readiness to resume military operations when politically expedient.
Performance Over Policy: The East Room spectacle was classic Trump: a reality-TV cadence applied to diplomacy. Grandiose claims of “eternal peace,” self-anointment, photo ops with global leaders, and theatrical references to “the ocean” Israel ceded in 2005 illustrate a plan heavy on optics and light on enforceable substance.
International Reception
The plan has drawn broad, if cautious, support:
Arab and Muslim States: Qatar, Jordan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Turkey issued a joint endorsement emphasizing aid delivery, hostages, non-displacement, and the integration of Gaza with the West Bank under a Palestinian state framework.
Europe: Macron and Starmer endorsed the effort to secure hostages and reduce conflict.
Australia: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed the initiative as a constructive step, while opposition figures criticized Canberra’s earlier symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood as performative and irrelevant.
Yet these endorsements are conditional and aspirational, recognizing the plan’s promise without committing to enforcement.
Perspectives of Israelis, Palestinians, and Activists
Israeli Public: Polls indicate two-thirds of Israelis want the war to end. The hostage release and cessation of bombardment offer tangible relief. Hardline right-wing factions, however, may resist compromises that limit continued Israeli military prerogatives. Indeed, the far-right, whose ethnic cleansing designs are explicit and who have driven so much of Netanyahu’s prosecution of this war appear to hate Trump’s plan: “a tragedy of leadership” and “an act of wilful blindness” in the phrase of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Palestinians: Exhausted by years of blockade and bombardment, Gazans desire immediate relief. But the lack of agency and the conditional, externally imposed nature of governance and reconstruction make the plan potentially resented as foreign administration rather than liberation.
Progressives and Activists: Pro-Palestinian advocates will likely view the plan skeptically. While it promises aid and reconstruction, it circumvents local agency, substitutes technocratic administration for democratic governance, and leaves Palestinian sovereignty largely aspirational. International human rights groups will monitor for coercion, displacement, and military overreach.
Political Theatre
The plan is an exercise in spectacle: Trump as self-styled savior, Netanyahu as pliant yet menacing partner, Palestinians and Hamas as props off-stage. The terminology — “Board of Peace,” “International Stabilisation Force,” “demilitarization” — evokes bureaucracy rather than genuine power-sharing. It is as much a political theatre as a policy framework, designed to satisfy domestic and international optics. In that sense, it is both brilliant and cynical: brilliant in its choreography of alliances and threats; cynical in its disregard for the lived realities of Gaza’s population.
Promise and Peril
Trump’s plan is audacious. It isolates Hamas, engages Gulf wealth, nudges Netanyahu toward tactical concessions, and offers a narrow window for reconstruction and peace. Yet structural asymmetries, zero trust, vague operational mechanisms, potential sabotage from hardliners, and the absence of Palestinian agency render it precarious.
If Hamas accepts, the plan could relieve immediate humanitarian crises, return hostages, and establish a technocratic administration capable of rebuilding Gaza — a diplomatic triumph in a region long starved of them. If it fails, it will cement perceptions of American theatre in place of effective policy, leaving Gaza’s suffering unresolved and occupation repackaged as transition.
And if Hamas actually accepts, and the plan moves ahead, what would happen if, having received the hostages, Israel simply decided to remain in Gaza, or refused to return Palestinian prisoners. Given how Netanyahu’s political survival depends on his far-right coalition partners, and given how clearly those partners want the war to continue and Israel to remain in Gaza, this is not remotely a fanciful scenario. And if it transpired, who aside from Trump could do anything about it? Netanyahu highlighted this feature of the plan for a reason: almost certainly as a signal to those far-right allies that they needn’t fear.
The plan is shot through with such difficulties. Netanyahu notes that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza will be gradual and “linked to the extent of disarmament and demilitarisation” of Hamas. What happens if Israel decides progress on this is too slow and resumes bombing?
The deal envisages a technocratic Palestinian committee to provide day-to-day services, until the Palestinian Authority is adequately reformed. Who would be the arbiter of whether this has been satisfied? And more specifically, what would happen if Israel simply declared it hasn’t? Given this is the precursor to the possibility of the Palestinian state Netanyahu has always opposed, it’s again a perfectly likely scenario. Will some independent body resolve this?
All of this is a reflection of the fact that this is not a deal in any sense. No Arab nation was present at that press conference. The plan was developed with no discernible Palestinian involvement at all. Trump has declared there’s “not much” room for Hamas to negotiate terms, and that it had days to accept or “pay in hell”. The Arab and Muslim nations that welcomed this, and whose involvement will be crucial in it working, have set out conditions Netanyahu explicitly rejects and which the Trump plan doesn’t allow for, including that Israel withdraw fully from Gaza and commit to a pathway for a Palestinian state. Moreover, they want the Palestinian Authority to invite them to provide troops to stabilise Gaza so they aren’t seen as yet another occupying force. Trump’s plan provides for none of that.
The lesson is stark: diplomacy without inclusion, even when performed at the highest theatrical scale, is fragile. For now, the Board of Peace is more a symbol of hope than a guarantor of change — a test of whether spectacle can ever substitute for governance, and whether exhausted populations, international actors, and political opportunists will allow vision to overcome reality.
It is all down to will. The will of Hamas to accept its dismantling, when this has always been non-negotiable for it. The will of Netanyahu to end a war he has shown every interest in prolonging. The will of Trump to force Israel to abide faithfully by the plan, even where it’s politically inconvenient. The worry isn’t just that this seems unlikely on all fronts. That’s inevitable in such an intractable tragedy.
In short, the plan may well work; or it may simply provide another act in a two-decade-long tragedy, with Trump and Netanyahu as performers and Gaza as the stage.
In That Howling Infinite 