Laura Loomer, the former Rebel Media contributor best known for stage-crashing a Donald Trump-themed production of Julius Caesar and blaming her car’s blown tires on probably fictional leftist saboteurs, has joined the exclusive but growing club of far-right Twitter personalities banned from Uber for racism.
Loomer was in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday at the scene of a terroristic car massacre, apparently with the intention of taking photos of random Muslims to harass them on social media. In a series of cringe-inducing posts, the self-declared “Investigative Journalist” tweeted that “Someone needs to create a non Islamic form of @uber or @lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver,” afterwards noting the supposedly high number of Muslim drivers was “extremely unfortunate and this is a conversation we need to have for our safety.”
“I’m late to the NYPD press conference because I couldn’t find a non Muslim cab or @Uber @lyft driver for over 30 min!”, Loomer continued. “This is insanity.”
(Note that the Uber app only displays names and photos of drivers, not their religion, so Loomer’s Islamophobic witchhunt was also indisputably racist.)
Having triggered the libs by blaming her inability to get to a press conference on time on her own bigotry, Loomer then photographed random New Yorkers from behind and accused them “rubbing [the attack] in everyone’s face” by “aimlessly walking around in hijabs”—a stunt so casually stupid and bigoted it earned her rebukes from other far-right personalities like Lauren Southern or YouTuber Joey Salads. (Yes, Salads, the guy who wore Nazi armbands to Trump rallies as part of a “social experiment.”)
Business Insider was first to report that Loomer’s account was subsequently disabled. In a statement, an Uber spokesman confirmed to Gizmodo that “she was banned for violating our Community Guidelines.”
Hopefully that means New York’s cab drivers will be spared from being dragged into some other low-grade stunt designed to shake some crowdfunding from racists’ wallets.
Earlier this year, Uber handed out similar bans to neo-Nazi-adjacent jerks Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, James Allsup, and Matthew “Millennial Matt” Colligan, who were booted from Uber after starting an altercation with a black driver during a notoriously violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Numerous tech companies have rushed to reverse laissez-faire approaches to community moderation in recent months after realizing their platforms have been used for far-right organizing, but the results have been mixed.
In the midst of her departure from Rebel Media earlier this year, Loomer has made her own contributions to the ongoing purity spiral in the racist far-right in the form of numerous feuds with her former comrades. She responded to news of her ban on Twitter by calling for a boycott of Uber and claiming she was already suing the company for other nefarious Islam-linked plots, which sure, whatever.
Gizmodo has reached out to Loomer for comment, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.
Update 10:05 pm ET: According to Business Insider, Lyft has also banned Loomer.