Adam Zivo: Laura Loomer’s pro-Ukraine redemption tour

Prominent MAGA influencer Laura Loomer — who maintains a close relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump — is currently visiting Ukraine to witness, with her own eyes, how Russian propagandists bamboozled her about the country. Previously a staunch critic of Kyiv, she is now praising Ukrainian resilience in a stunning reversal that should be studied by conservatives everywhere.

Loomer has been a darling of the MAGA movement since the late 2010s, garnering millions of followers through provocative stunts and commentary. Her unwavering public loyalty to Trump earned her the president’s appreciation and made her a central figure in his second administration, allowing her to influence high-level government staffing decisions.

For years, Loomer promoted Kremlin-friendly narratives and portrayed Ukraine as an ungrateful, Nazi-infested cesspool undeserving of American support. Yet, over the past few months, she gradually realized that she had been duped by Moscow and decided to do some on-the-ground reporting to verify the truth herself.

“I was lied to for years,” posted Loomer to her widely-followed X account last week, shortly after arriving in Ukraine. She declared that Russia is “very good at information warfare,” and that she, having been wrong, now “had a responsibility to correct the record.”

Among her first appointments was a trip to the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra — a revered thousand-year-old monastery that Russia bombed last month. In a professionally edited video, she showcased the holy site’s interior and argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not, in fact, the champion of Christian values that he presents himself to be.

“I just don’t think that you should be allowed to say that you’re protecting Christianity if you’re trying to drone strike Jesus Christ,” she said, noting that the wooden monastery could have easily burnt down. In other social media posts, she criticized Putin for killing Ukrainian priests and for using Muslim soldiers — predominantly from the Caucasus region — to slaughter and displace local Christians.

Loomer, who is Jewish, also visited Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Moshe Azman at his Chabad synagogue for a kosher dinner, where he explained that Jews live freely as an integral part of Ukrainian society. She learned, to her surprise, that Ukraine has stronger antisemitism laws than the United States. “I admit, I fell for Russian propaganda,” she confessed in a post about the experience, condemning Putin’s lies about the need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.

Most astonishing of all, she interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the presidential palace last Friday. Although the exchange was generally cordial, she pulled no punches, criticized Ukraine’s failures at strategic communications and bluntly pressed Zelenskyy to explain how helping Kyiv puts America first.

The president argued that a revived Russian empire could, together with China, pose a serious threat to American security, and that Ukraine’s cutting-edge drone technology — built through years of real-world battle experience — is an asset to Washington. Loomer agreed. She emphasized that Ukraine currently produces 8 million drones per year while the United States produces only 300,000, a gap which she believed could be closed through cooperation.

The interview was widely discussed in the media and approvingly shared by Trump, who met Zelenskyy in Washington this Tuesday for pro-Ukrainian Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral.

Loomer, meanwhile, has continued her tour with gusto. In an interview with one of Ukraine’s leading journalists, Marichka Padalko, she said that she was “very ashamed” of some of her past comments and that Ukrainians had been “very kind” to her.

“I doubt I would have been welcomed the same way in Moscow. If I had criticized the Russian government, security service agents would probably have tracked me down right at the hotel,” said the MAGA star, who has since advocated for tightening sanctions against Russia and sending more patriot missiles to Kyiv.

For many of Ukraine’s supporters, particularly those on the political left, Loomer’s sudden emergence as an enthusiastic ally has been discombobulating. How did this happen? Is she being authentic?

In a phone interview over the weekend, I asked Loomer about her political transformation. It was almost midnight and she was returning to Kyiv after visiting Kharkiv and Dnipro, two major cities near the front line. She had passed many bombed-out gas stations earlier that day.

Loomer explained that she originally fell into Russia’s orbit after she, like many other MAGA influencers in the late 2010s, was banned from mainstream American social media platforms. She migrated to using Telegram — a messaging and social media app where Russian media is widely shared — which functioned as a “digital gulag” for censored conservatives.

She told me that, in this echo chamber, she began to regularly consume content published by RT (formerly Russia Today), Moscow’s state-controlled broadcaster, which warped her foreign policy views. After Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, RT asked Loomer to write several unpaid columns in 2021, skillfully manipulating her anger at being deplatformed. They then used this relationship to gradually weave more propaganda into her worldview, she said.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Loomer staunchly opposed American intervention. According to her, it was not just that Moscow had groomed her, but there were simply no trusted voices in her bubble that could address her concerns and misconceptions.

Genuinely believing that Ukraine is full of Nazis, she did not understand the logic of investing billions of dollars into the country’s defence. “We were, you know, kind of broke as a country. We’re $40 trillion in debt. And so, from a foreign policy perspective, right off the bat, I was fully opposed to it,” she told me.

Her mind began to change, though, after Trump was re-elected and a faction of conservative influencers — most notably Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens — turned against the president and began spewing “toxic” anti-American and antisemitic rhetoric.

Loomer was disturbed by how these podcasters cheered on American adversaries — especially Iran and Russia — while demonizing the United States and Israel. Worse yet, media outlets owned by enemy states had a tendency to amplify their content. She came to believe, with good reason, that Republicans were being targeted by sophisticated foreign influence campaigns sowing sedition and discord.

The response of these influencers to the Iran war further opened her eyes, as did the fact that many of them attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia last month. If these people could invent “crazy lies” about so many things, she wondered, what had they fabricated about Ukraine?

Loomer’s curiosity was further piqued when one of her editors, Andrew Moore, visited Kyiv last month and debunked many Kremlin narratives. Her content became explicitly pro-Ukrainian, with a particular focus on Putin’s persecution of Christians.

She told me that when she decided to visit Ukraine, she informed only her fiancé, fearing Russia’s public threats against her. The day before her arrival in Kyiv, the city was hit with 40 ballistic missiles. She was told her overnight train, like all others in Ukraine, could be delayed by drone attacks. Upon experiencing her first air siren, she was stunned by how casually Ukrainians reacted, calling it a “testament to their resilience.”

Now that she has seen the country with her own eyes, she wants to warn Republicans of how “propagandized” they’ve become by Russian media, which she sees as “a massive threat to national security.” If extremists on the left and right are converging to destroy the West, she stands opposed — despite the personal risks.

National Post