Shock confession: Trump influencer admits she 'fell for Russian propaganda'

One of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, far right activist Laura Loomer, admitted on Wednesday that she had been seemingly tricked by the Russian government.

“When I was deplatformed, and when my election was rigged because the Big Tech social media companies wouldn't allow me to have access to social media, RT started reaching out to me and asking me to come on their show,” Loomer said, referring to her failed Florida congressional run (about which there was no evidence of fraud) and the Russian state-sponsored television network. “And they said, why don't you have a byline on RT? And you can even write for RT?”

Loomer claims she never took money from RT but appreciated that they allowed her to appear on their network. Yet even though she interpreted this at the time as the network perhaps caring “more about free speech than my own country,” she later felt manipulated.

“Now, when I see them say things like, we need to denazify Ukraine and we need to continue our brutal war with Ukraine, while they pretend to be, you know, some Orthodox Christian country — but they're slaughtering thousands, like hundreds of thousands, of young Christians in Ukraine — and then they're supporting actual neo-Nazis in the United States of America by clipping their podcasts, I'm like, wow,” Loomer said. “We fell for Russian propaganda, and I fell for Russian propaganda. And so when Loomer Unleashed had this opportunity to send a correspondent, um, abroad to Ukraine, to be embedded on the front lines of the war and meet with, uh, Ukrainian officials — and there were multiple U.S. senators there at the Odessa Security Conference, um — and Andrew asked me whether I would approve a correspondent to go to Ukraine, I thought about it for a while, and I was really hesitant to do so, because I thought, what are people going to think of me?”

She added that she has been anti-Ukraine for so long without “recognizing how, you know, as a conservative, or as a Trump supporter, or just as an American citizen, how I was being emotionally manipulated by propaganda online. And so I felt a little embarrassed, to be completely honest, sending a correspondent abroad, because I thought, well, people are going to attack me, and they're going to say that I'm a hypocrite, and they're not going to be gracious, and they're not going to give me an opportunity to change my opinion.”

This is not the first recent occasion in which Loomer has split with the Republican’s far right on foreign policy. In May she argued that former Trump supporters like former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens have “Israel derangement syndrome” by seemingly blaming all the world’s problems on Israel.

“It’s like a psychosis. It’s literally a psychosis,” Loomer said. “It really is Israel derangement syndrome.”

At the same time, Loomer has had outsize influence over American foreign policy during the second Trump administration, such as getting key national security council advisers fired and urging the president to wage war against Iran.