Imagine looking like this and daring to clown Jasmine Crockett.

Proof that clowning Black women is easier than facing your own reflection

A funny thing happens with grifters when they first set out on their hustle: at the beginning, almost all of them know they’re full of shit. They’re in on the con. They understand their message is phony, their outrage is manufactured, and they deliver it with a wink and a nod to themselves about how clever they’re being. But as the clicks roll in, the donations swell, and the crowds start getting bigger and chanting their name, something shifts. People gas them up. Their following becomes bigger than they ever imagined. And somewhere along the way, the performance hardens into belief. They start inhaling their own fumes, mistaking attention for validation, and before long the same person who began as a cynic is parroting their own lies with the zeal of a convert — trapped inside their own delusions of grandeur.

There’s actually a psychology behind this descent from performance to self-delusion. I once heard an old professor of mine at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology describe it as veritas fallax — the lie that becomes truth. It’s the process by which a falsehood, repeated often enough and buoyed by the cheers of a movement, takes on the weight of reality even in the mind of the person who invented it. In more formal terms, it’s cognitive dissonance meeting the illusion of truth effect — the brain bending itself to reconcile the gap between what it knows is false and what it keeps repeating as gospel. Anyone can fall into this trap, especially when the lies and the movement begin to outgrow them. And that’s when the hustler becomes the convert. Enter Laura Loomer.

For all the performative chaos she thrives on, Loomer isn’t without academic pedigree. She studied at Mount Holyoke College and transferred to Barry University, where she graduated with a degree in political science. She’s not a stupid person; she knows her way around politics and understands the mechanics of messaging. Which makes her latest attacks on Rep. Jasmine Crockett all the more transparent. Loomer knows the things she’s saying about Crockett are not just false, they’re arguments that aren’t rooted in any serious intellect. They’re straight out of her boss’s playbook — the same tired script Donald Trump dusts off whenever he calls Black women who would intellectually lap him multiple times “low IQ,” “stupid,” or whatever else he tells himself to preserve the illusion of superiority. Loomer even went so far as to mock Crockett’s physical appearance, a tactic so lazy it’s almost beneath mentioning — except for the fact that Crockett is 44 and could pass for someone in her late twenties or early thirties, while Loomer, at just 32, looks like a 64-year-old who lost a prizefight with a syringe full of Botox. The irony writes itself: here’s a woman clowning a Black woman’s looks while plumping her lips to mimic the very features she ridicules. It’s hypocrisy carved into filler, a face that sags under the weight of its own contradictions.

And Loomer isn’t alone in this. Her sister in bigotry, Megyn Kelly, decided to take her own swing recently — this time at journalist Jemele Hill. On her podcast, Kelly mocked Hill’s looks, sneering that Hill “can’t both be ugly on the outside and the inside” and telling her to “choose one.” This is classic Megyn Kelly: the same woman who once sat on Fox News and declared with a straight face that “Santa Claus is white,” as if she had just returned from the North Pole with notarized documents to prove it. The same Megyn Kelly who convinced NBC to shove Tamron Hall out of her own time slot in one of the most reckless programming decisions in morning-show history, only to deliver “Megyn Kelly Today,” a show so lifeless it made daytime television feel like jury duty. And, of course, the same Megyn Kelly who couldn’t keep her mask on long enough to cash all the checks; she mused on-air about blackface not really being a problem and effectively fired herself in real time. NBC, desperate to be rid of her, cut her loose but still had to hand her the remainder of her $69 million contract. Megyn Kelly managed to fail upward so spectacularly she turned racism into a retirement plan.

And yet, for all that money and all those second chances, Megyn Kelly still managed to get mopped by the very woman she tried to belittle. Jemele Hill doesn’t need me or anyone else to defend her; she made light work of Kelly’s insult by reminding the world that Kelly “couldn’t even keep her job at Fox News” and was “sent packing by NBC for being racist.” Then she twisted the knife by echoing Don Lemon’s legendary clapback — that maybe Kelly should focus less on calling other people ugly and more on why her own husband couldn’t keep his eyes off Lemon’s husband. That’s not just a rebuttal, that’s a public mugging. Hill’s response was so casual it felt like she dashed it off between assignments, dropped the mic, and went right back to doing real journalism. I don’t usually care how politicians or journalists look, but when below-average white women like Kelly or Loomer weaponize appearance against Black women, I feel a way about it. Especially when Hollywood cast Charlize Theron — one of the most breathtaking women alive — to play Megyn Kelly. Kelly has to live with the knowledge that Theron’s effortless beauty will forever be associated with her name, a cruel reminder that no amount of makeup or studio lighting can close that gap.

Hollywood didn’t honor Megyn Kelly by casting Charlize Theron — they put her on layaway and let Charlize cover the balance.

These aren’t stray jabs; they’re part of a long, ugly tradition of trying to strip Black women of legitimacy by reducing them to punchlines. It’s the politics of diminishment — and it’s effective for the audience it’s intended for. People who already resent Black women in positions of influence don’t want substance, they want validation. They don’t need to hear Jemele Hill dismantle policy or Jasmine Crockett hold her ground in a hearing; they just need someone like Kelly or Loomer to toss them a racialized insult that makes their own insecurities feel justified. That’s why it keeps happening. Kelly knows it. Loomer knows it. And Trump, the undisputed king of projection and playground nicknames, has turned it into an art form.

The Prospect recently pointed out that Trump’s racism isn’t coded anymore — it’s not a dog whistle, it’s a bugle call. When he fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, one of the most qualified public servants in Washington, the White House claimed she had “put inappropriate books in the library for children.” That’s not just false, it’s laughable. The Library of Congress doesn’t operate like that, and everyone knows it. The real offense was that Hayden is a Black woman with authority, and Trump couldn’t stomach it.

And this isn’t just about insults tossed on Truth Social or podcasts. The Louisiana Illuminator reported that Trump has made a habit of targeting cities led by Black women. Muriel Bowser, the mayor of D.C., was told to hand over control of her police force even though crime was at a 30-year low. When she refused, Trump tried to oust her police commissioner — a Black woman — and replace her with a white man. Jasmine Crockett, meanwhile, has been subjected to Trump putting her title in quotation marks, demanding she take an “intelligence test,” and questioning whether she belongs in Congress at all. Loomer and Kelly are just the commentary wing of the same project: delegitimizing Black women by any means necessary, whether it’s a slur, a sneer, or a hostile takeover.

Political scientist Sydney Carr-Glenn put it bluntly: Black women have ascended to positions of power, but that visibility makes them easier targets for backlash. Crockett is living proof. Before she ever stepped into Congress, she earned her bachelor’s degree from Rhodes College and went on to receive her J.D. from the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University — a path that demanded brains, persistence, and grit. She built her career as a public defender and civil rights attorney before running for the Texas House, where she became known for her sharp questioning and refusal to back down in hearings. In short, she’s smart — scary smart — and anyone who’s ever watched her work a committee room knows it. Which is exactly why her critics don’t dare engage her on substance. Instead of debating her points, they go after her eyelashes, her looks, or her intelligence. They don’t want to grapple with her record because they can’t win on the merits. So they resort to what Trump has always resorted to: insult comedy with a fascist undertone.

And none of this is new. Shirley Chisholm faced it when she became the first Black woman elected to Congress and dared to run for president — her opponents dismissed her as “unqualified” not because of her resume but because of her race and gender. Michelle Obama, despite her Ivy League degrees and extraordinary popularity, was reduced to grotesque racist caricatures about her appearance the moment she set foot in the White House. And Maxine Waters has been caricatured as “angry” or “crazy” for decades. Bill O’Reilly once went further, dismissing her entirely by saying he was too “distracted by her James Brown wig” to hear her words. Waters clapped back by pointing out his long record of sexual harassment allegations — and not so coincidentally, O’Reilly was soon fired from Fox News for, take a wild guess, sexual harassment.

They can’t beat Black women on merit, so they attack their hair, their bodies, their very existence.

The through-line is clear: the more accomplished, educated, and effective a Black woman becomes, the more vicious the attacks grow, because critics know they can’t outmatch her credentials or her intellect. Crockett, Hill, and Hayden are just the latest in a long line of targets — women who embody excellence while their detractors reach for the bottom shelf of insults.

What’s striking is how predictable all of this has become. Trump does it, his followers mimic it, his enablers excuse it, and the media sometimes treats it as colorful rather than corrosive. But the damage is real. Every time Crockett or Hill or Hayden is forced to answer to an insult rather than an issue, it drags the public conversation back into the gutter. It wastes their time and our time. And worse, it sends the message that Black women in power are fair game for ridicule in ways their white counterparts never are.

Republicans are the masters of gaslighting themselves. Trump beat Kamala Harris by a razor-thin margin, and instead of governing in a way that speaks to all Americans, they’ve convinced themselves that most of the country is on board with this brand of insult politics. They mistake a fluke of the Electoral College for a mandate, and they confuse cruelty for credibility. It’s the biggest lie they tell themselves — that ridicule is resonance, that projection is persuasion, that the majority of Americans actually want this. It’s veritas fallax on a national scale. They started out knowing they were full of shit, but somewhere along the way they began believing it — and now they’re trapped inside their own con.