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Fox News affiliate hires noted bigot and ‘proud Islamophobe’

Laura Loomer takes her hatred to the airwaves after being banned from Uber and Lyft.

Laura Loomer, bigoted conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, will be working for a Fox News affiliate. CREDIT: YOUTUBE
Laura Loomer, bigoted conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, will be working for a Fox News affiliate. CREDIT: YOUTUBE

After spending late 2017 calling Muslims “savages” and describing herself as a “Proud Islamophobe,” Laura Loomer — one of the most outspoken members of the extreme right — found herself banned from using companies like Uber and Lyft.

Her hatred, however, didn’t prevent one Fox News radio affiliate from hiring Loomer to contribute to their coverage, beginning later this month.

On Wednesday, Loomer announced on Twitter that she will be “regularly contributing” to “Fox News Radio beginning Friday!” Loomer added that her segment will focus on her “unfiltered, independent guerilla style journalism!”

In reality, Loomer will not be contributing to Fox News’s national radio broadcast. Rather, she’ll be taking over a series of five-minute segments on 1180 WFYL, an AM radio station based outside of Philadelphia. A producer for WFYL, who asked not to be named, told ThinkProgress that the station has five minutes of time allocated for Fox News at the top and bottom of every hour — time usually allotted, he said, for daily headlines like stock market updates.

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A statement from Fox News, obtained by ThinkProgress, said that Loomer “is not affiliated in any way with Fox News Radio. She will be a local guest contributor on an affiliate station, WFYL-AM located in Jeffersonville, PA, which is not owned or operated by Fox News.”

As it is, the station appears a good fit for Loomer, who appeals to the far-right. Other shows on the radio station feature disgraced pseudo-historian David Barton, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, and the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Dana Loesch. The station says that it “lies in the center of an area rich in Godly and strategic history which has influenced the United States and the world.”

The WFYL producer with whom ThinkProgress spoke said he hadn’t heard of Loomer’s anti-Muslim comments, which included claims that Islam is a “cancer” and the Muslims are “f**king everything up for everyone.” (In one since-deleted 2017 tweet, Loomer wrote that there is “no such thing as a moderate Muslim. They’re ALL the same.”) Loomer, who used to work for the extreme right The Rebel outlet, was also charged with disorderly conduct and trespassing last year for disrupting a performance of Shakespeare play in New York — a play she later described as a “form of terrorism.”

However, the producer didn’t seem perturbed by Loomer’s bigotry. “I mean, If she wants to go off about the Muslims, that’s her free speech,” he told ThinkProgress. “I’m not the one making the comments, so.”