Laura Loomer spent years selling herself as a free-speech wrecking ball. Cancel culture, woke censors, sacred identity groups: she built a brand railing against all of it. Then she went to Ukraine, sat in the glow of her “apology tour,” and admitted she wants the state to jail people for the wrong speech about Jews.
In the clip, Loomer notes that Ukraine criminalizes antisemitism. “Antisemitism is illegal in Ukraine…. You will go to jail.” Offenders go into a database. Then the tell: “We don’t even have that in the United States,” she complains, because of free speech. America has “so much antisemitism,” and the First Amendment is inconvenient.
Not Whether. Which.
Every society runs blasphemy laws. The liberal lie is that modern nations outgrew it. They didn’t. They changed gods.
Historic blasphemy statutes punished insult against the holy things of the true God, or at least against the public religion of a Christian people. The point was ordered toward worship, truth, and the suppression of open revolt against heaven. Strip the law of God, and the machinery remains. The state still decides which names you may not defile, which groups you may not offend, and which speech counts as heresy. The only real fight is which altar the police are guarding.
Ukraine’s statute, signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky in April 2026, makes “manifestations of antisemitism” a criminal offense. Fines. Restricted liberty. Prison up to eight years in aggravated cases. It is not merely a ban on pogroms. It is a speech regime. Loomer holds it up as proof Ukraine is no Nazi playground and, more revealing, as a model America lacks. She is not defending Jews from violence. She is envying a blasphemy code with a new sacred object.
Call it what it is. Secular blasphemy. The Torah is optional. The Holocaust functions as holy history. “Jew” becomes a protected category in a way “Christ” no longer is in the public square. Criticism that would be routine against any other nation, lobby, or people gets elevated to ritual pollution. The state becomes priest.
This is the woke operating system with a different favored icon.
Progressive hate-speech regimes declare certain identities untouchable. Speech that violates the hierarchy gets relabeled violence. Loomer does not reject the system. She fights for custody of it. Trade race, sexuality, and gender for her preferred taboo, keep the databases and the jail cells, and pretend the First Amendment was the problem all along.
Once the state claims power to criminalize “hate” against a designated people, the list of protected deities is a political question, not a moral ceiling. Today antisemitism. Tomorrow Islamophobia, anti-black speech, “transphobia,” or whatever bloc buys the legislature. The mechanism is identical: civil authority defines the sacred, then punishes desecration.
Defenders will say the laws only hit “real hatred,” not legitimate criticism of Israel, Jewish institutions, or power. That distinction dies on contact with enforcement. IHRA-style definitions have already been stretched over Israeli policy fights, dual-loyalty language, and demographic pattern-noticing. The vagueness is the feature. When the cost of guessing wrong is a record, a database, or a cell, the public learns to kneel. That is how blasphemy regimes always work.
If Loomer wants proof America is not a free-speech paradise, she can skip Kyiv and read a docket from Rochester. Shiloh Hendrix, a Minnesota mother, was convicted of disorderly conduct after a viral park confrontation involving a Somali father and his autistic son, whom she accused of taking from her child’s diaper bag. She used a racial slur on camera. A jury cleared her on one count and convicted her on another. The sentence landed as a $1,000 fine, community service, and a stayed jail term. The state did not need a statute titled “blasphemy.” It used disorderly conduct to punish speech that violated the racial sacred order.
That conviction is the domestic twin of Loomer’s Ukrainian envy. Different preferred victim class. Same catechism: some words are not arguments; they are sacrilege, and the magistrate exists to avenge them. America already enforces blasphemy for race. Loomer wants it hardened and redirected toward Jews. The left wants it expanded across the whole identity pantheon. Nobody in that fight is defending neutral liberty. They are fighting over liturgy.
The First Amendment Is Not a Neutral Heaven
The standard liberal reply writes itself. America’s constitutional tradition rejects sacred castes. The First Amendment allows criticism of every ethnicity, every religion, every political project, including Jewish ones, so no group can be insulated from scrutiny by law. Violence, true threats, and direct incitement remain punishable. Broad criminalization of “offensive” attitudes does not. Import Ukraine’s model and you do not reduce sin. You create a privileged speech category and invite endless expansion of the protected list.
It is right that Loomer’s move builds a rival identity hierarchy instead of repenting of the whole cursed project. Fighting the left’s sacred castes by crowning a different caste is not courage. It is a custody battle over the same idol factory. Treating any ethnic group as a deity beyond criticism is political theology. Loomer just wants different vestments on the priests.
It is wrong when it pretends the American settlement escaped blasphemy law into clean “enlightenment.” It didn’t. It disestablished Christ and reestablished new gods under procedural language. The First Amendment, in the hands of a people who still feared God, restrained sectarian persecution and state churches gone feral. In the hands of a people who mock God, it becomes a shield for public blasphemy against heaven and a paper barrier that progressive prosecutors, HR departments, banks, and “disorderly conduct” statutes walk around whenever a favored identity is touched.
So no, importing Ukraine’s model would not “defend the West.” The West was not built on the right to treat every altar as equal. It was built by men who knew some speech is rebellion against God, and some public insults dissolve a Christian people. A constitution that restrains ecclesiastical tyranny is not the same thing as a constitution baptized into the lie that the magistrate has no duty toward the first table of the law.
Violence and true threats are not the only speech issues in a moral universe. A nation will either suppress open revolt against God or it will suppress open insult against the regime’s pets. There is no stable third option where the state worships nothing and polices nothing sacred. That vacuum gets filled. Hendrix proves it. Loomer proves it. Ukraine proves it.
Law Toward God, or Law Against Him
Scripture does not treat the mouth as freestanding property. The Third Commandment forbids taking the Lord’s name in vain. Israel’s public life assumed boundaries around true worship and false gods. Christian magistrates historically understood that a people cannot stay a people while treating insult to God as a lifestyle brand and insult to favored minorities as a felony.
The modern settlement inverted this. You may mock Christ in taxpayer institutions with career safety. You may not violate the new holy categories without risking courts, HR, banks, and now, in Minnesota, criminal conviction. That is not neutrality. That is established irreligion with selective sacred cows.
The liberal frame asks whether adults should be jailed for words, then answers with a sermon about enlightenment and equal scrutiny. That is a childish half-question dressed up as principle. The Christian frame asks which words a people must not normalize, which Name is actually holy, and whether the magistrate will honor God or police the feelings of whichever group holds the whip
Loomer wants blasphemy law for her sacred category. The Hendrix verdict proves America already runs a version for the left’s. Building rival identity hierarchies is not a defense of Christian civilization. It is proof the blasphemy impulse never left. It only changed gods.
A country that will not protect the name of Christ will not become a free marketplace of ideas. It will become a temple to whatever idol can capture the statute books.
