Last week, Derek Guy, the ultra-online brain behind the X account @dieworkwear, posted a screenshot of one of Laura Loomer’s recent posts, along with this: “i setup a fake dog food company last month, bought purina at the pet store, and paid laura loomer $100 for this post,” sparking confusion. Was Guy trolling? How deep did the troll go? Did Loomer really eat dog food—“bison topper”? And if Guy hadn’t gotten her to do it, who had?
To peel back the first layer of the onion, let’s look at the source material. Loomer, the conservative extremist and Donald Trump’s recently appointed right-hand-woman whom Marjorie Taylor Greene called “extremely racist,” did indeed post a video on September 6 in which she nom-noms some woof-woofs. Her former boss James O’Keefe, the ousted CEO of Project Veritas, described her in the foreword to Loomer’s 2021 memoir, Loomered, as “[not] wired like other people.” It’s as if, he writes, she is in possession of a brain that “doesn’t process information like the rest of us.” O’Keefe also notes that “she appears to be functionally immune to fear, to shame, and to embarrassment.”
In the dog-food-eating video, Loomer opens a plastic pouch of what she calls “supplements” for dogs. “You can see here, Pawsitive Bison. It clearly says ‘dog food topper,’ and I’m going to put this in my mouth right now.” She takes a pinch from the bag and drops it into her open mouth, chews, swallows, and says, “Oh.” Then she declares it tastes “like meat” and dips back in for more.
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Self-described “Trump loyalist” Roger Stone responded, “Gross,” to which Loomer replied, “This is very healthy dog food topper for your pups Roger! Next time I see you I will give you some Pawsitive.” (Loomer did not respond to a request for comment on whether the endorsement was paid.)
Pawsitive, it turns out, is not a @dieworkwear prank, nor anyone else’s prank. It is an operational pet food company that, Loomer says, is “fighting for free speech.” (Russell Brand also filmed an endorsement for Pawsitive, but did not eat the dog bison snack. Purina appears to be entirely uninvolved.) And Pawsitive is just one in a network of companies that Rumble—the independent Canadian-founded video and web services platform that hosts Truth Social, funded by venture capitalists including Peter Thiel and JD Vance—described in a press release as “Rumble-branded products,” linked by that same passion for “free speech,” fit men, bison chunks, and a distrust in the medical establishment.
According to the site, Pawsitive’s “Chief Dog Officer” is a blond dachshund named Vienna The “Sausage” Dog, but its CEO, Foster Coulson, is a Canadian serial entrepreneur. (On his personal Instagram back in 2019 he alluded to “monetiz[ing]” his “cream weiner dog,” Dolce, in a post that showed the animal next to a bag of Royal Canine kibble.) One of his early ventures, described in a bio on one of his sites, was “a patented product line that used Ice made from water for industrial cleaning applications.” Along with Pawsitive and Coulson Ice Blast, he is the CEO and chairman of the Wellness Company, which sells “detox bundles,” telehealth services, and first aid kits. (Canine emergency aid kits are among Pawsitive’s offerings.) He also cofounded Be Naked, a “Rumble-branded” product that the platform has described as “redefining rugged masculinity with its powerful line of wellness products tailored for men, by men.” A pop-up disclaimer upon entering the site: “If you’re one of ‘those people’ who use the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ because you’re intimidated by real men who embrace their primal instincts, you should leave.” (Coulson did not respond to a request for comment.)
In a promotional video for Be Naked, posted to Coulson’s and his cofounder Tirone Parker’s Instagram accounts, the pair, perched on a large log, pensively stare into a fire as they smoke cigars. They are not naked; they wear suits. Overlaid: the braaam sound effect and the words “It’s time to make male masculinity great again.” (Parker did not respond to a request for comment.) The perceived decline of American masculinity, and its accompanying phallic allusions, is a longtime right-wing concern. In 2022, Tucker Carlson produced a testes-focused TV episode called “The End of Men”; last year Josh Hawley published a book titled Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
The Rumble press release is a veritable animal kingdom gone wild: “Inspired by the strength and nobility of the lion, our flagship product, ‘Naked Organs,’ harnesses the nutritional benefits of bison organs to fuel your day.” (Maybe the idea is that the Naked Organs consumer is like a lion eating a bison? Though today’s American bison are famously North American, while today’s lions famously are not.) In the most recent post on the Be Naked Instagram, David Freiheit, who goes by Viva Frei online, waxes poetic about the product, and says that he has eaten “bison testicles” (“#RealMen #NoAgenda #StayStrong #NakedOrgans”). (It remains unclear as to whether the bison-for-dogs and bison-for-humans come from the same bison.)
Naked Organs appears to have started as a standalone, Parker family–founded brand based in Alberta, Canada, that has donated to Indigenous truth and reconciliation projects. (According to a post on the brand’s Instagram, after Parker’s father died while he was still in utero, his mother married a Cree man.) In October 2023, Health Canada sent a regulatory letter to Naked Organs Ltd., and according to a post on the company’s Instagram, Naked Organs subsequently stopped selling within the country. In the US, Naked Organs is now distributed through Be Naked, and through a company called Holistic Goddess, founded by Coulson’s wife, Stephanie. (There is a different company called Pawsitive Dog Food, and a cosmetics line called Be Naked. Neither appears to be affiliated with the Rumble brands, and representatives for them did not return requests for comment.)
Coulson also founded the Stardust Group which comprises—along with the bison supplements for humans, and the bison supplements for dogs that humans, including Loomer, can eat—1775 Coffee (“unapologetically crushing woke corporate coffee”), which, per the 1775 site, Loomer has also endorsed (“I love there’s a coffee that’s free speech oriented!”), and Unjected, a dating site for people who haven’t gotten a Covid vaccine, which also has a streaming channel on Rumble. Proving that Donald Trump isn’t the only person who can be a multimétier impresario, Coulson started Vigilant News Network, which he is “solely funding…from my businesses.” The site publishes stories ranging from vaccine critiques to Piers Morgan plaudits, posted as original content under anonymized bylines such as Vigilant Fox and ungathegreat, or republished from outlets including InfoWars and ZeroHedge.
One such headline, pushed live this week: “Sick: Bill Maher Suggests Trump is “F–king” Laura Loomer—Loomer Responds.” On Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher said, “She’s 31. Looks like his type,” and referred to “an editorial here a few years ago…it was basically ‘Who’s Trump F–king?’” This week, he said, “I think it might be Laura Loomer.” On X, quoting a post by Vigilant Fox, Loomer called it a “blatant lie” and wrote that she “should sue” Maher “for defamation.” (A representative for Real Time declined to comment.) Loomer is well-versed in lawsuits, having variously gone after Twitter (twice), Facebook (twice), Google, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and US Representative Rashida Tlaib. None of these suits have been successful.
Loomer herself was not sued this week when she made a racist comment about Kamala Harris, nor in 2017 when she quote-tweeted a headline regarding the deaths of 2,000 migrants crossing the Mediterranean with the comment “Good. [hand-clap emoji.] Here’s to 2000 more,” nor when she requested that someone start “a non Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver,” nor when she protested a Shakespeare in the Park staging of Julius Caesar in which Caesar resembled Trump, by running on stage and shouting.
After security removed her, per The New York Times, the stage master directed the actors, “Pick up at [the line] ‘liberty and freedom.’”
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