Candace Owens & Laura Loomer Go Nuclear in All Out Civil War, Wild Accusations Made

0:04All right, a lot of people treat what's happening in the right-wing media ecosystem as fringe that we don't need to pay attention to. Look who's president. We should pay attention to this. And there is a civil war happening in the MAGA influencer world. And we at I've Had It are seated for all of the drama. And joining me today is one of my favorite journalists who covers all of this piping hot tea, Will Sommer, a senior reporter at The Bulwark, where he writes the false flag newsletter on right-wing media and hosts the weekly maggot monday live stream will i'm going to play a clip for you in case my uh listeners and viewers don't quite understand the psychology and the duplicity and the hypocrisy that you cover here is laura loomer hannah so is just this one resentful ghetto black bitch like that's literally what she is she she's a racist too like you can listen to this and i'm not a racist person right I don't hate black people, but I say she's a ghetto black bitch because you have to listen to the way that she has so much resentment for white girls, like white girls with blonde hair and blue eyes.

1:09And, you know, I'm originally a blonde, too. I have blonde hair and blue eyes, right? Maybe that's why Candace has so much resentment towards me. I've heard enough. I've heard enough. She got kind of a crazy tan, too, among other things. okay so laura loomer and candace owens have been going at it recently what started the beef and where does it stand right now sure so candace owens you know ever since charlie kirk's assassination has really been on the rampage and she's been saying you know implying that israel did it you know erica kirk did it all these other things laura loomer is obviously very pro-israel um but more recently uh candace has really turned on trump and sort of said you know trump himself as this very evil figure kind of in the aftermath of the iran war starting so laura has really weighed in in here she's she dug up candace's husband's dui arrest the mug shot all this stuff so things are really getting ugly and i saw that the uh president re-truth a really racist uh like fake time magazine uh image of uh candace owens where they tried to make her look like a a rough, like maybe gang-like person.

2:23And I always say, and I don't always say this, I borrowed this from somebody, but like women who carry the water for the patriarchy are the first to drown. And so I feel like Laura Loomer will drown with Trump. I think she'll just go down, rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic with him. Yeah. I mean, she's so devoted to him. She's maybe like the most devoted person, maybe more than Melania, more than, you know, of members of his family. I mean, she's talked about how, I mean, she's engaged now, but before she, because people will always say to these women on the right, well, why don't you have kids or whatever?

2:56Why aren't you married? And she would say, you know, I'm basically like, I've given up that to have, to support Trump. So, I mean, she really, and, you know, to your point, over and over, you see these right-wing media women realizing like, wait a minute, this movement that talks about hating women constantly, that includes me. They also see me as a woman. Exactly. All right. What is Candace claiming to hold over Laura? And what is Laura claiming to hold over Candace? They're always teasing these little tidbits that they're about to drop the big bomb. Yeah, so it's interesting. You know, there's on one hand, Laura has a, shall we say, a checkered past.

3:35You know, a lot of this stuff hasn't been verified. You have these other characters of sort of varying levels of credibility, people like Milo Ewanopoulos waiting in, all these kind of like Roger Stone associates. yet um in this case you know it's often been discussed laura legally had issues getting a gun uh and there were claims that you know she had basically been forced put in a sort of sanatorium uh because of her supposed mental illness you know i think candace will refer to that meanwhile laura has teamed up with people like house inhabit who's a big kind of maha instagram influencer who hates candace uh and they dug up candace's husband's dui arrest they seem to have i mean they seem to done some like serious kind of reporting footwork here it's stuff i should have done um and they seem to have filed a freedom of information act request they got his mug shot the 911 called pictures of this car that he allegedly ran into a ditch i mean his uh blood alcohol was like 0.26 which is like pretty high you know um to be driving and so um so now they're they're really going to war at each other over this stuff that really is sort of like politically immaterial but after candace has been going after erica kirk for so long it's like look no holds barred you know, really nothing is off limits for this crew.

4:45So it's interesting to me, the right wing media ecosystem, how quickly they start cannibalizing each other. You know, I'm on the left or left adjacent, you are too, ecosystem. And I have found ours to be so collaborative. Anybody I reach out to, would you like to be on my pod? Yes. Will you be on mine? And I always want to promote, you know, the whole ecosystem. On their side, it really seems like not only are they competing to see who can love Trump the most, but they're also competing to take each other out. Like it's literally like a, that you could do a reality show, like member survivor when they're all out on the Island, you could do like, who's going to survive in the right-wing media ecosystem because the cannibalization is really quite delicious.

5:33Yeah. I mean, you know, this is what makes it so fun to cover, really. I mean, you know, as terrible as it is that these people are worth covering because they have so much power in our country now. I mean, right wing media attracts people, number one, who I think often have very kind of challenging personalities to deal with. If you're trying to work with them, I mean, there are people who are like, often very kind of self promoting, they're constantly clashing with each other. And in this case, I mean, there's sort of like a real policy thing at stake here, ultimately, like Republican support for Israel.

6:00But in practice, I mean, these people just they want to destroy each other and this is things that they've tried to do to people on the left before and now that republicans are in power they're sort of just they're looking around and they're going after each other instead it's crazy how much influence do you think laura loomer really has over trump i think she has a lot of influence i mean just recently there was there was i mean you know obviously she purged the national security council last year uh i mean that's crazy and this is someone who locked herself up to twitter headquarters this is someone who eight years ago like other republican activists other kind of crazies were like whoa she's a little embarrassing i don't want to associate with her and now this is someone who yeah i mean she got the state department to ban palestinian children from getting medical care in the united states i mean all of these crazy things i mean she got um these iranian women who were supposedly qasem sulamani's relatives arrested by the way not true the i would think drop site news has a story about how this was basically just totally cooked up these were just two iranian women living in the u.s And now they got arrested.

7:02And so, I mean, she I think she has a lot of sweat. I do, too. Do you think it's that she understands psychologically the same thing that like a Putin or a Netanyahu understand about Trump, which is whoever has his ear last and can effusively praise him? that he's going to go that way. And you can maybe confirm this for me, but I remember during the debate with Kamala, she was on the plane with Trump on his way there. And she's the one who got him to say that the Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs. And so you've always heard this about Trump, the last person in his ear. And if they're really complimentary, do you think she like, maybe is it like her crazy understands his crazy?

7:50And then they're just like uber simpatico And then that's the first part of the question. The second part of the question, and you don't have to answer it or not, but I read online that she's claiming, she or somebody else is claiming that she gave Trump the best blowjob he's ever had. I don't know if there's any veracity to that, but it's pretty titillating. yeah right okay so on the first count yeah i mean there's a lot to get into part two there okay yeah i mean i do think trump's clearly like the thing he cares about most is this kind of like devotion that's sort of however committed you are to him and never criticizing him um and so i think in that way like you know with q anon people said well what do you think of q anon and he said well they seem to like me a lot so you know as far as i'm concerned that's the end of it uh and so i think laura you know one time when he got the the jet from qatar she said oh i don't know about this You know, guitar is not so nice to Israel.

8:36And then she was told like, hey, you know, get in line. And she said, oh, never mind. Actually, I love the jet. And so speaking of jets, you know, as to your second point, you know, this was widely rumored back in 2024. 24. I think, you know, we have to take this with a grain of salt, because, you know, again, a lot of these are also not very credible characters. This is a, you know, it is a den of vipers. But I will say, you know, after and this got litigated in court, because Bill Maher made this joke on HBO, he said, you know, maybe Laura Loomer's sleeping with Trump. And then she sued him over it.

9:09And she claimed that basically, because in part, because of this rumor that he helped, you know, promote, I guess, in her point of view, she got basically banned from the plane, she got banished from Trump world. She said, I could have been like Caroline Leavitt. I could have been the press secretary. And so, I mean, I think this really is like whether true or not. And like, I don't think there's enough. I certainly wouldn't affirmatively say it. I think this rumor has really dogged her. And now we're seeing Candace dredge it back up. And how out of all of the people in the right wing media ecosystem, who who is the biggest?

9:40Who is their biggest star? Is it Tucker? You know, I think it's probably Tucker, Megyn Kelly, you know, Candace Owens. I mean, you know, in a way, like we're kind of leaving Fox News aside here. But I mean, obviously, those are the people with the biggest audience. But I think in terms of like driving the agenda, Fox is pretty irrelevant now. I mean, they're just going to say whatever Trump likes and and, you know, sort of bolster that. But I think in terms of like who's looking at the post Trump future, what is 2028 going to look like? I think, unfortunately, it's these really like kind of dissident, often racist or anti-Semitic people.

10:11Also, Nick Fuentes. These are the people I think who have kind of like the dynamism and the energy behind them. I think that Tucker Carlson is in this mode of cult capturing and he's trying to capture the cult. And I think he scares the shit out of me because he's a lot more clever than Trump is. And he's a lot better liar than Trump is. And I saw this New York Times interview with Tucker where he's dying for the interviewer to ask him, you know, who's worse, Ted Cruz or Nick Fuentes. And so he asked the interviewer, and of course she flips it right back to him and he goes, Oh, of course, Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz, it's not even close.

10:52And I appreciate Tucker's hatred for Ted Cruz. I do appreciate anybody who hates Ted Cruz, but he, he, and, um, the vice president, the president, everybody always runs cover for Nick Fuentes. It's fascinating to me that they don't just objectively say, we have no room for neo-Nazis in our party. They always provide, he's just a kid. He doesn't have any power. And Donald Trump had dinner with Nick Fuentes. How big do you think this Groyper thing is? And comment about how, has anybody in the Republican party really said that's a power player in MAGA spoken out against Nick Fuentes, who was a self-confessed neo-Nazi?

11:39Yeah, I mean, to your question, no, I don't think so. I mean, maybe a senator or a member of Congress or something, but really, certainly no one in the administration has come out and just said, you know, as you said, there is no room for this in the party. I mean, we saw this late last year when Tucker interviewed Nick Fuentes. I mean, the Heritage Foundation, right? I mean, as sort of a big pillar of the Republican Party, they tied themselves up and not saying, you know, we still support tucker after this interview we were saying well like really this one where he sort of just you know it plays around with nick fuentes oh yeah we still we still like him and obviously that caused a lot of resignations there so i think there's this um it's just sort of a sense of like what no one is standing up to him as you said and i think it's because they recognize that for young republicans you know this kind of racism anti-semitism is a huge thing i mean this is even after charlottesville alex perrine wrote an article that was like you know young people are not being drawn to the party because of like they want lower taxes or they want tariffs or whatever.

12:33I mean, this is the draw is the racism, the white nationalism. It's fascinating. I remember seeing this clip of like Nick Fuentes and these other like, I guess, male MAGA influencers singing Kanye West's song Heil Hitler. And like somebody went through each person and if they were alive during Hitler's Germany, they would all be sent to camps. They would all qualify as people that would be sent to camps. And it's fascinating that even the vice president, you remember those Nazi chats, that he refused to condemn those. So it seems to me that the Republican Party is really trying to make a big tent of bigots because nobody really condemns this.

13:20They keep making space for this movement. What do you make of Tucker kind of rebranding right now? And like, you know, I'm going to have to apologize for it. I didn't see what was coming with Trump, even though we know from the Fox lawsuit, he couldn't stand him. And I think he's in his like cult capture era. I always go back to this with Tucker, that he says that he was attacked by demons while he was sleeping. You know, like that, Somebody who says that I was sleeping with my four dogs and also these demons woke me up in the middle of the night and scratched me and beat me up should be sent off to like mental institution land.

13:58But because Trump has normalized crazy so much, he could very easily be the nominee in 28. Sorry, my cat was just getting out there. Oh, no worries. I think that's right. I mean, I think we're looking at this issue, whether it's Nick Fuentes or Tucker. Tucker, we're looking at something very similar to Trump originally, where you have this Republican Party that's not willing to stand up at all to this thing. And there's everyone saying, I don't want to be the one to ruin my career fighting this. So I'm just going to I hope someone else deals with it. And now what we're looking at is that, you know, we're looking at really the same thing where these they don't want to fight the Groypers.

14:34People don't want to stand up to Tucker. I mean, he's obviously very tied to J.D. Vance already. So I think this is something that, like, you know, they're just they're not willing to take over. And just like with Trump, it's actually going to cannibalize the party. I mean, you said how big are the Gripers? I mean, certainly within sort of the D.C. young political operative class, whether these people maybe individually don't like Nick Fuentes, but in terms of their ideas, in terms of the idea that like, yes, we need to restrict immigration, kind of the Stephen Miller thought, like we need a white country.

15:03I mean, I think that's hugely popular. You know, I always say like the Tea Party incubated MAGA. And what is MAGA incubating? incubating. And I think we're getting a glimpse. It's going to be worse. And the Bulwark did a focus group on Americans who voted for Trump at least twice. And a majority believed that the White House Correspondent Center shooting was staged. These are two-time Trump voters. What did you hear from these people? I mean, these are people who thought, you know, they are, as you said, they voted for Trump at least twice. Now they disapprove of him. But often it's not that they disapprove of him because gas prices are up or anything else.

15:42I mean, it's because they think he's covering up the Charlie Kirk shooting. It's because, you know, all of these other reasons that are kind of crazy. But what was interesting about this focus group, as you mentioned, is that they, you know, I think liberals have taken a lot of heat for, you know, saying it's a false flag or whatever. But I think increasingly Republicans, you know, who are already sort of in this conspiracy theory stew beforehand, they're saying, oh, yeah, that's clearly staged, you know, Trump did that to get the ballroom or, you know, this was somehow a setup to make Trump look better because he's unpopular.

16:12Yeah, it's wild. It's I find myself, I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all, but I find myself even falling prey to some of it because we live in such a post truth era where the president gaslights and lies all the time. Oh, you know, we're gonna open the straight in two weeks and the war's over. We're at war again. And the war's not that long. It's just, you know, batshit crazy stuff all day, every day. So originally on like Butler, I think because I, I as a liberal wanted to think, oh, the right wingers are such conspiracy theorists. I thought there's no way it was staged. And then as time's gone on with it, I'm like, maybe it was.

16:50And then I'm like, am I a nut? Am I a conspiracy theorist? It seems like the, the erosion of the truth when you don't have government agencies that are reporting facts, from people that are non-biased government workers. The erosion of the truth, I think, is expanding far beyond MAGA into, you know, there's Blue Anon, you know, there's people, I believe the results of the 2024 election, but there's a whole group of people online, liberals, that think that Elon Musk hacked the voting machines. And so there's conspiracy conspiracy theories seem to be ubiquitous, no matter what political party people are in right now.

17:33Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of two things going on. On one, practically, I mean, we know this administration will lie about anything. I mean, they lie constantly. And so I think people say, well, you know, in the past, maybe I would have taken the government's point of view and said, you know, that's probably true, you know, barring other evidence. And now it's just like, well, you know, who knows what they would do. And I think emotionally, I think for liberals, you can look at the right where anything politically unfavorable that happens to Trump, they'll say it's the deep state or, you know, California wildfires were caused by satellites shooting lasers down to trick everyone about global warming and the Marjorie Taylor Green thing.

18:06I mean, there's so many every time anything happens. And so then you look and you say, well, why should I, you know, have to grapple with, you know, what this what this means that there are all these assassination attempts on Trump or something that's politically unfavorable to me? Maybe I should just dismiss it, too, as a, you know, a false flag. A final question. These fissures that you cover in the MAGA movement, what is your take? Is it that the strong man who 18 months ago, two years ago, the image was fight, fight, fight, you know, he's this, you know, and everybody has the maxi pads on their ear and he, you know, Jesus guided the bullet away so he could serve it, you know, quote unquote, third term.

18:46And now the images of him are him totally hitting REM behind the oval where people are conducting meetings and he's sitting there sawing logs. He's got, you know, caked on makeup on his hands. Do you think the Tucker Carlson's are financial Darwinists that they see that this thing is FUBAR, this MAGA movement is FUBAR and they're going to be the first to jump off? Yeah, I think that's essentially what's going on. I mean, I do think there are some ideological goals here. Like I do think that Trump is or Tucker is actually, you know, more of an isolationist than than, say, Laura Loomer or Donald Trump.

19:24But I do think that people like Tucker, Megyn Kelly, I mean, these are like really mercenary people and they're seeing which way the wind is blowing. And they're saying, you know what, this Trump thing, this guy's looking like a lame duck. He's really unpopular. I don't see it getting better. And so at least for now, I'm going to start saying, you know, I love Joe Kent. I love, you know, who's going to be my new candidate and really sort of distancing themselves from the Trump president. Because, you know, you can look at someone like Ben Shapiro, who's really stuck with Trump because he's so supportive of Israel.

19:52Then he's looking around and saying, you know, he's seeing his views go down, all this stuff, because you're tied to these unpopular issues. Yeah, that's been wild. I know I just said final question, but I do think that's something to point out that Ben Shapiro, his views have completely fallen off a cliff because he is rearranging the deck chairs with Trump. Whereas these others that have broken off with Trump on certain issues, the war, America first stuff, they're actually growing and still some of the top ranked channels. Is that correct? Yeah. And they're breaking out into, I would say, like sort of beyond the MAGA audience, too.

20:28I mean, you know, Candace Owens is conspiracy theories and she gets into like the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni lawsuit, all these different things, you know, that that grows into more of a mainstream audience. I mean, I'll just be out and about with people who are liberals and they say, you know, I think Candace Owens makes some good points about these things. Oh, my God. You know, but I mean, that is the they're breaking out into new new spaces, whereas these kind of traditional your Mark Levin's, your Ben Shapiro's, they're stuck in the ship is going down. Like you, I have had friends that are really upset about the Democrats positioning and calling out Israel.

21:02And they will say to me, I'll tell you what, I'm starting to really like Tucker Carlson because they hear him in a 45 second clip make sense. And even Nick Fuentes in a 30 second clip can say something that you might agree. And it's a really dangerous time because I always have to remind these liberals, I'm like, he is a racist and he says F-A-G-G-O-T with reckless abandon. Tucker Carlson, a total homophobe bigot of the highest order. And he thinks demons attacked him in the middle of the night. So it's really terrifying when these clips, these kind of crazy people, conspiracy theorists that are bigots to their core, demagogues to their core, are getting people on board via these short form clips.

21:50completely i mean and and as you said i think people see this and they go oh well you know maybe i don't disagree with them about everything you know and that's really how it starts and unfortunately as you said i think because democrats are not always offering this sort of israel critical perspective at a moment when i think more and more people are just saying this just isn't right you know that i i think that provides an opening for these these kind of radical figures okay this is why i think listener that will summer's work is so important because we never treated Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing media ecosystem legitimately.

22:23And even the Republican Party in 2016 rejected the fringe movement that is MAGA, and they got two terms. So I think although this journalism is so delicious, I think it is so important that we know what the opposition is doing, and we highlight just how batshit crazy they are. So thank you, Will, for joining me. I always enjoy it so much, and thank you for all the work you do. Well, thank you so much for having me.