Wasted opportunity – Bernard Media and the blown chance to pants RWNJs

See if you can spot where a prank designed to make Laura Loomer and Infowars look like dolts went horribly wrong. And no, it isn’t because they both do a perfectly good job without help.

Laura Loomer, who operated as an anti-Muslim online activist before she was suspended permanently from Twitter, was duped by internet pranksters into believing that her suspension occurred due to alleged lobbying by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights group in America.

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Bernard told Right Wing Watch that the goal of their stunt was to see if Loomer would go on-air at Alex Jones’ Infowars and repeat what they had told her, after which they planned to reveal the details of their joke in order to make a point about what they said were Loomer’s and Infowars’ non-existent journalistic standards and confirmation bias.

But something else happened.

“Don’t worry it will be big,” Loomer wrote to the pranksters in a December text message. “I have a big network of journalists I know.”

Was it someone at the Washington Examiner?

No.

Was it someone at the Wall Street Journal?

No.

Was it someone at Drudge?

Wait, back up, it was the Wall Street Journal.

Conservative Jewish activist Laura Loomer says she didn’t know until recently that outside groups and individuals had privately lobbied Twitter executives to remove her from the site in late November.

In an email to Ms. Loomer, Twitter said she had violated its hateful conduct policy for a tweet calling Ilhan Omar, the Muslim congresswoman from Minnesota, anti-Jewish and supportive of Shariah law. In an interview, Ms. Loomer says she was referring to a 2012 tweet from Ms. Omar in which the congresswoman wrote, “may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Among the groups that had complained to Twitter was the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization.

The council doesn’t often step in to advocate against other [Twitter] users, says Executive Director Zahra Billoo, but did so in the case of Ms. Loomer based on her previous comments about Muslims. In 2017, Ms. Loomer tweeted after a terror attack in New York City, “Leave it to Muslims to ruin everything. People can’t even enjoy #Halloween without those savages f**king everything up for everyone.”

Other organizations, including the civil-rights organization Muslim Advocates, voiced similar complaints.

The article was published online Jan. 8 and quickly picked up by all of the places that like to stand around screaming about the threat of people who practice a specific religion when they aren’t screaming about liberals who are trying to take away the religious freedoms of RealAmericans: WND, Twitchy, Breitbart, Uncle Jim’s Pants Shitting Chronicles of White Anxiety. The WSJ article is paywalled online and if the paper has issued an update, it is after the visible lede.

So, have you spotted where the Make Loomer/Inforwars Look Dumber campaign went wrong?

Correct. The decision to use Muslims as bait in a trap for rabid Islamophobes. I’m all for practical jokes, especially jokes that make a mockery of the right wing. However, any practical joke that accidentally involves, annoys or harms someone who isn’t the intended target has failed. This caper went that extra furlong and intentionally plays on the hatred the marks feel towards people who were not intended targets of the joke and who are already the targets of threats and violence from all levels of the right wing, even the highest.

And it would have been so easy to do something great here: Convince Loomer a right winger who is jealous of her fame, or a secret lefty mole pretending to be a comrade, got her kicked off. Make them fight and root for injuries. Of course, my plan would exclude leaping out with a cry of “Ah-ha, fooled you!” because that wouldn’t cause as much damage, and therefore wouldn’t be as funny.

In the Right Wing Watch article, architects of the prank Nathan Bernard and Chris Gillen repeatedly express their surprise that things went so far. They can barely believe Loomer believed them, much less that anyone at the WSJ believed her. It was supposed to stay within the confines of the right wing loop, but as this piece from Slate notes, it would have gone wrong, even if it did.

As a Muslim who is online too much, I certainly took pleasure in watching Loomer be ridiculed for the compulsive, uncritical fraud she is. There is something poetic about exposing a Project Veritas alum with a secret recording. But as I listened more, it didn’t feel so funny. At the prankster’s first mention of CAIR, Loomer immediately feels vindicated: “Everything I said was true! It’s fucking Muslim Brotherhood Sharia money! It’s disgusting.” She calls CAIR “a terrorist organization,” an oft-repeated and just-as-often debunked claim. Hearing this, I had a sinking feeling: It makes no difference to Loomer if this was a prank. She will continue to peddle her lies about CAIR and “Muslim Brotherhood Sharia money” to her audience, and it will continue to believe them. (Her response to the Right Wing Watch piece pretty much confirms this.) No one capable of critical thought believed Loomer was credible before this; the prank changed zero minds. And so it sort of seems like the real loser in this scenario is not Loomer, but people like me.

The damage has already been done, and the resiliency of bigot-driven minds will make sure it stays done. Had everything gone to plan, it is doubtful Infowars viewers would have heard the big reveal, and if they had, they would have been unlikely to believe a couple of guys who admit they like to make the right wing look dumb. They are liberals and therefore the enemy. The same goes for a retraction by WSJ. They’ll continue to believe it for the same reason that two reporters believed it — they want to believe that’s how the world works.