Rep. Summer Lee says the Laura Loomer conversation is missing the bigger picture
The congresswoman says Loomer’s attacks on Black women point to a broader issue of racism being normalized and elevated.
Conservative personality Laura Loomer drew strong condemnation after calling several prominent Black women in politics “ghetto Black bitches,” among other racist and sexist insults.
As theGrio previously reported, Loomer hurled the personal attacks at Florida U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon, U.S. Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar, former U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, and even U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Days later, the ally of President Donald Trump repeated the slur when attacking U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver, who had defended her colleagues online.
But Loomer’s use of the racist term against Black women is one that she has used repeatedly. She used it against U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in September 2025. Weeks before her most recent viral attacks on Nixon, McIver, and others, U.S. Rep. Summer Lee called out Loomer for the term when approached at the U.S. Capitol by conservative influencer and Loomer associate Charles R. Downs, who replied, “She doesn’t mean that,” and that she was “joking.”
“That’s racism,” Lee told Downs. Loomer would later, too, call Lee “ghetto.”
During a recent interview with theGrio, Congresswoman Lee said what’s missing in the Loomer discourse is bigger than her racist remark.
“We know that racists exist. We know that people harbor racist feelings against us. The issue is when that person has power or proximity to power,” says Lee. “The issue is not Laura Loomer herself. The issue is that we have a government and we have a system right now that has normalized her existence.”
Loomer, who has described herself as a white nationalist and pushed conspiracy theories like the 9/11 terrorist attacks being an inside job, has emerged as an influential figure in the Trump White House. In April 2025, the 33-year-old former U.S. congressional candidate met with Trump and White House senior officials to present opposition research and later convinced him to fire a handful of national security officials she said were not “loyal” to him.
Rep. Lee says the country must answer to the present national culture that has “normalized” and “elevated” Loomer.
“There was a solid couple of decades when somebody whose views were so explicit would not be in the ear of a president, at least not publicly. There would be public condemnation, even from Republicans, because there were certain things that were just beyond the pale,” she explained.
“We have to say that if the president is OK taking advice from somebody and not condemning somebody who would say the things that she would say at the regularity that she would say it, and that she would still have a role, a position, a status, then we know that the problem isn’t just her. We know that this problem goes way deeper.”
Lee asked, “How did we get back here, and what are the implications for a culture that doesn’t just normalize her, but elevates people like her?”
She continued, “Because it ain’t just Laura Loomer; it’s Randy Fine and a whole bunch of elected people, a whole bunch of people in business leadership who have always been waiting in the shadows for their turn to be explicitly racist, like some of their forebears.”
The Pennsylvania congresswoman said the country must return to an “era where there are consequences for that type of thinking,” adding, “Whatever that consequence might be.”
Ultimately, Lee says, it can’t just be Black voices “standing up” to Loomer and people like her.
“This can’t just be a Black person’s problem,” she told theGrio. However, the congresswoman said she doesn’t really “care to give [Loomer] oxygen.”
She added, “She has attention-seeking behavior, and the best thing you can do is to deprive her of oxygen. So we don’t have to starve the system that created her oxygen. That needs a little bit of light.”