Life of Wry

Look at this little blip I read this evening in the NYT (the bolds are mine).

The power of Loomer

The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official resigned under pressure yesterday after he found himself in the cross hairs of the right-wing influencer Laura Loomer. I asked my colleague Robert Draper, who recently profiled Loomer, to explain what this tells us about what she calls her “independent auditing.”

For Loomer, the F.D.A. official, Vinay Prasad, failed a basic loyalty test: Even as he had criticized vaccine manufacturers and Anthony Fauci, he had, in years past, repeatedly disparaged Trump and his followers.

Loomer has devoted considerable energy to looking into the backgrounds of officials who fall under the purview of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who she says is “running a shadow presidential campaign” from his office. Prasad fell into that category.

In an interview today, Loomer said that someone like Prasad — who had said on his podcast of Trump, “I hate him, too,” and ridiculed his followers as a “cult” — was not beyond redemption. After all, she said, “JD Vance compared Trump to Hitler.” But, she added, Vance “publicly apologized.”

“My biggest litmus test, besides loyalty,” Loomer said, “is whether you’re honest and have enough humility to demonstrate that you’re sorry.”

According to Loomer, Prasad didn’t come close to asking for forgiveness from Trump. “You’ve got to at least pretend like you’re sorry,” she said.

Isn’t it creepy that someone can just take it upon themselves to run around trump’s government hunting down people who fail the loyalty test? She, presumably, passes those names along to officials who then fire these non-loyalists.

It’s a lot, this administration, and its baldfaced authoritarian practices. The stuff that’s overlooked or, worse, normalized because there’s just no way the media, the congress, the resistance movement can keep up with all this… it’s exhausting and defeating.

Never mind all the self-dealing.

I hate this.