Far-right influencer Laura Loomer gets her appointment at a prestigious military academy revoked

Laura Loomer has once again forced the Trump administration to bend, by getting the US Department of Defense to cancel the hiring of a senior civil servant at a prestigious military academy on Wednesday, July 30, after the far-right influencer denounced the recruitment on social media. The decision by a deputy defense secretary once again illustrates the considerable influence of ^Ms. Loomer, a close associate of Donald Trump and a conspiracy theorist known for her racist remarks, on the government, whose attentive ear she has gained.

On Tuesday, she denounced on X the "appalling" hiring of Jen Easterly, former head of the US cybersecurity agency CISA, as a professor of social sciences at West Point, the most prestigious of the US military academies. Referring to "moles" within the Department of Defense, Laura Loomer said she couldn't stand the idea that people appointed under the administration of Democrat Joe Biden were given positions under that of Republican Donald Trump.

And less than twenty-four hours later, she won her case. Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Army, Dan Driscoll, announced Wednesday on the same social media platform that he was "terminating" the recruitment of Jen Easterly for a chair at West Point's School of Social Sciences. He also demanded that the military academy, located near New York, conduct a "complete review" of its hiring procedures.

Dan Driscoll doesn't say why Easterly's contract is being terminated, but the Pentagon spokesperson wrote on X that the military "is not going to turn [military] cadets into censorship activists." This is a veiled reference to allegations, made by Laura Loomer and certain conservative circles, that CISA, then headed by Easterly, had targeted right-wing voters under the guise of combating disinformation. The senior official had also debunked unfounded accusations of widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 election, an electoral defeat that Donald Trump and part of his electorate never really accepted, denouncing alleged fraud.

In the spring, Laura Loomer had, according to the American press, succeeded in obtaining from Donald Trump the head of the head of the powerful electronic intelligence agency NSA , accused of "disloyalty" , and the president's doctor, accused of being "pro-vaccine" . This thirty-year-old has in the past claimed that Islam was "a cancer" , that 9/11 was the result of an "internal conspiracy" and that Joe Biden was behind the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024.