Hindu Supremacists ❤️ Laura Loomer Despite Her Racist Anti-Indian Tirades Because She Hates Muslims
Islamophobia is forging a troubling new geopolitical alliance between the Indian, Israeli, and American far right
A celebrity MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist walked into a conclave in India under fire for mocking Indians as “third-world invaders” with low IQ and bad hygiene, but walked out as a new mascot for India’s Islamophobes earlier this year.
Framing herself as a “proud Islamophobe,” Laura Loomer during her March visit to India delivered a heady cocktail of rants on “Islamic terrorism” and Pakistan’s “jihad export,” garnished with a message of affection from President Donald Trump for India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, enough to win over an audience primed to forgive racism if it comes wrapped in anti-Muslim fervor.
Loomer’s passage to India points both to the power of an emerging pattern of global far-right networks of anti-democratic politics shaping today’s geopolitics, as well as the limitations of such transnational solidarities because of the contradictions engendered in these movements’ racist core.
The incendiary social media posts have thrust Loomer into Donald Trump’s orbit and given her considerable influence over the U.S. president—but also landed her in a raging fireball of outrage over her invitation to India Today magazine’s conclave in Delhi in March, given her record of slurs and rants against India and Indians.
To an Indian-origin Congress member’s X post on immigration justice, for example, her rejoinder was: “Please go back to India.” In another post, responding to praise of Indian skilled workers’ role in America’s tech innovations, she wrote, “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, she added, “PS: why are people in India still shitting in the water they bathe and drink from?”
But once in India, Loomer turned over a new leaf. She apologized for her past indiscretions and masterfully recast herself as an advocate for “Hindu people” against the “brutalities of Islam.” When a journalist at the conclave confronted her over her “brazenly racist and Islamophobic” remarks, she later fired back on X: “How can you sit back and watch the Islamic massacre and raping of Hindus?” Music to the ears of the country’s ruling Hindu supremacists, at whose behest the Modi-friendly publication had laid out the red carpet for her despite her deeply problematic record, her pull with the president of the United States being the other reason. And she wooed them again last month after Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to the land of Gandhi, gushing, “Seeing all of [Marco Rubio’s] photos from India makes me want to go back to India! I love India. Such a beautiful country.”
Prominent right-wing personalities like Loomer with proximity to power increasingly provide new connections of parallel diplomacy—geopolitical pathways that are seldom studied or discussed by think tanks and foreign policy pundits.
The Geopolitics of Hindutva
These co-options are of a piece with the global strategy of “Hindutva,” the political ideology of Hindu supremacism. It has spent decades embedding itself in the West with the help of a network of charities, think tanks, and influential public figures. While white supremacists have been increasingly speaking out against Indians and Hindus, the Hindutva ecosystem echoes their anxieties about Muslim immigrants. Indian social media is crawling with posts on the supposed Islamization of Europe, framing Europe as a cautionary tale of rising Muslim population. In the mainstream polity, Hindutva networks have been cultivating and funding right-wing American leaders, most famously Tulsi Gabbard, outgoing director of national intelligence.
Connections like these contributed to a particularly strong bonding between Modi and Trump in the latter’s first term. They hosted each other with lavish public rallies affirming their friendship. But Trump’s second term has been a different beast. The much-touted Trump-Modi “bromance” of the past and his popularity with Modi’s base have offered India little protection from Trump’s tariff tantrums. Pressure from Trump has forced India to limit its energy purchases from Russia and quietly fall in line with the attack on Iran.
Modi faced criticism at home for his muted reaction to the war and a visit to Israel right before the Iran offensive started. He announced that India stood with Israel, elevated bilateral ties to “special strategic partnership,” and even addressed the Knesset on the trip, giving Netanyahu a much-needed diplomatic boost.
Diplomatic and military ties between India and Israel have deepened in recent years, in part driven by a convergence of Indian and Israeli right-wing ideologies. India’s backing on Palestine, once rooted in anti-imperialist solidarities, has simultaneously waned. Hindu supremacists, animated by Israel’s example of a majoritarian ethnostate that they want to create for India by replacing its equal citizenship with a Hindu-first order, look up to Israel for its battles with the Muslim world. Vinayak Savarkar, the primary formulator of Hindutva, wrote in the 1920s: “If the Zionists’ dreams are ever realized—if Palestine becomes a Jewish state—it will gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.”
With Hindutva becoming the dominant political ideology in India, the Indian state’s support for Zionism and Israel has simultaneously risen and mainstreamed. Diaspora Hindu supremacist groups have looked to American Jewish groups like AIPAC as role models for advancing India’s interests in the U.S. and copied Israel’s lobbying vocabulary and techniques, such as framing and wielding “Hinduphobia,” modeled after “antisemitism,” to shout down any attack on the Indian government’s discriminatory agenda.
India has also correctly read the extent of Israel’s influence on America’s foreign policy and begun to use its ties with Israel to lean on the U.S. The ideologically induced strategic convergence is shaping a new India–U.S.–Israel alignment with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.
Fascisms, Old and New
In her speech at the Delhi conclave, Loomer, who is also Jewish, spoke effusively about the potential of this three-way alliance in battling Islamist terrorism, drawing India into a vision of what many see as a new form of fascism emerging in the U.S.
India has been here before.
There is a long history of India’s connection to such transnational linkages of exclusionary ideologies, going all the way back to the days of the old fascism. The ideology and organization of the Hindutva movement was itself inspired by European ethnonationalism of the early 20th century. Another “influencer,” of her age, French-born Greek fascist Maximiani Julia Portas traveled to India in search of a living pagan Aryan culture in the early 1930s. She became famous as Savitri Devi Mukherji and espoused a synthesis of Hinduism and Nazism, proclaiming Adolf Hitler as an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.
She popularized the notion of the Aryan connection between India and Germany and developed the mystical interpretation that linked Nazi ideology to Hindu symbols, including the swastika—a common Hindu religious sign, a version of which the Nazis adopted as their own.
Portas is claimed by some to have pioneered Holocaust denial and was a key figure in the creation in 1962 of the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS), an umbrella group for neo-Nazis across the globe. She died while traveling to the U.S. to deliver a lecture and her ashes were shipped to the headquarters of the American Nazi Party in Arlington, Virginia, where it was placed next to those of its leader George Lincoln Rockwell. The National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP), formed later as a rebrand of the American Nazi Party, is a foundational pillar of the modern U.S. white nationalist movement.
Though antisemitism continues to motivate sections of these far-right groups, 9/11 and rising anxieties over Muslim immigration in Europe have partly pivoted today’s politics of hate away from Jews as foundational targets toward Muslims. And this is where the extremely well-resourced Hindu far right finds common ground with Western hate groups.
Flush with funds derived from their control over the reins of the world’s fourth largest economy, the sophisticated propaganda ecosystems of the Indian far right have made India a major source of Islamophobic content on social media platforms globally.
Modi’s India is an unfortunate exemplar of a new strain of fascism that unfolds not with jackboots and torches, but through the stultifying grip of a repressive majoritarian machinery on institutions, vigilante violence, state-driven radicalization against the country’s minorities, and a media muzzled into sycophancy.
It bears eerie parallels to Nazism in its ever-expanding curbs on civic rights, cult of personality around a strongman leader, glorification of a mythicized glorious past, and a violently exclusionary ethno-nationalism. Democracy trackers now classify India as an “electoral autocracy” domestically.
But Hindu supremacy also arrives equipped with a formidable global outreach mechanism that reveals a movement that is not simply reshaping India but also influencing and shaping global far-right politics.
Modi’s World
Norwegian mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto praised Hindutva as a key ally in a global struggle to bring down democratic regimes across the world. European right-wing MPs have helped to whitewash Modi’s controversial policy of stripping the statehood and bifurcation of what was India’s only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir. A leaked U.K. Home Office review identified Hindutva as an “extremism of concern” that played a role in the violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester in 2022.
Hindu Right leaders have been attending the National Conservatism, or NatCon, conferences that bring together conservative thinkers in the U.S. and Europe. India’s 100-year-old Hindu far-right fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—of which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is an offshoot—has been lobbying for congressional influence in the U.S.
RSS is among the organizations the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has requested the State Department to sanction this year. Its lobbying exercise was terminated soon after it came to light, but Hindutva activity in America has been unceasing.
A watershed moment in the Indo-American far-right solidarity came when former Trump strategist Steve Bannon became an honorary chairman of the Republican Hindu Coalition. Bannon, who once called Modi “a Trump before Trump,” is among the many on the American right impressed by Hindutva’s stamina, spread, success, and sophistication. Few far-right movements globally can after all claim Hindutva’s century-old endurance or the reach of its network. Hindutva’s creeping capture of the state and incremental dismantling of a constitutionally mandated liberal democracy is a model for Western far-right groups that look at it with envy.
Internal Contradictions
But transnational alliance of political groupings that draw sustenance from xenophobia is inherently ridden with contradictions, especially when such exclusionary politics is racially coded. While Portas was imagining India as a pagan bastion of the Aryan master race central to the Nazi worldview, Hitler held Indians in deep contempt as an inferior race.
Today’s white supremacism in the U.S. is similarly fraught with internal paradoxes even though it has created a space for non-white groups. MAGA ranks are dotted by figures like Vivek Ramaswamy, a presidential candidate in the last election, and Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the given in this accommodation is that these communities and their representatives accept subordination to white supremacy. The far-right logic of geopolitical fraternity is similarly premised on the acceptance of this color-coded hierarchy. But even that implied submission is no protection from a political culture steeped in racism.
Last year, Patel got into MAGA hot water for merely marking Diwali in a post on X. He immediately faced a torrent of online hate, including calls to go back to India. Ramaswamy has similarly been subject to in-house slurs. Usha Vance, the Indian American second lady, continues to be the butt of MAGA hate.
Soon after Trump won his second term, the MAGA community turned on itself following an Indian-origin venture capitalist’s nomination as policy advisor for artificial intelligence. It escalated into a bruising battle over race and immigration. Loomer took the leading role in trashing the appointment, bristling at the nominee’s past advocacy for removing country caps on green cards, which would allow in more skilled workers from countries like India. “The average IQ in India is 76,” she wrote on X in the course of the debate to make her case for keeping Indians out and giving policy preference to American workers.
From a cheerleader at home for expelling Indians to defender of Hindus in India, Loomer’s U-turn has been a masterclass in political doublespeak. The “proud Islamophobe” rounded off the India trip with a gushing post on the beauty of Taj Mahal, the monument to love built by a Muslim king to his dead queen in the 17th century. “It is the most incredible monument I have ever seen in my life. … India is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever had the pleasure of traveling to. Highly recommend!” she signed off.
Back home, Taj inspired other ideas among her ilk. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a social media post promoting a “self-deportation” scheme for undocumented migrants using the imagery of Taj Mahal, causing outrage in India. “You can go home with a fresh start! Receive a FREE flight home and a $2,600 exit bonus when you use Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Home to self-deport,” read its cheerfully worded polite boot.
The irony is difficult to miss—like that of the love between white and brown supremacists. Despite the shared hate for Islam that enables it, the racially fraught caveat looms large in the relationship. Even the magic of the Taj would not be enough to disappear these fault lines.
An earlier version of this essay was originally published by the Toda Peace Institute.
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