In the late night open thread, Anne Laurie covered “Libs of TikTok” hate channel creator Chaya Raichik’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s pay site for angry, day-drunk retirees, “Tucker Carlson Today.” IMO, the topic bears repeating for the day shift.
Raichik is a Brooklyn real estate agent who manages the “Libs of TikTok” hate channel across multiple platforms. Her shtick is feeding outrage bait to anti-LGBTQ culture warriors. She got her big break after meathead podcaster Joe Rogan featured some of her material, and over the past year, she has steadily gained influence with “anti-woke” media jerks and elected Republicans.
She used to manage her accounts anonymously until reporter Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post followed some fairly obvious online breadcrumbs and wrote an article (gift link) that revealed Raichik’s name back in April. Raichik cried foul about being named and claimed she got death threats. On Carlson’s show last night, she said Florida’s governor offered her asylum in the governor’s mansion:
“When I was doxxed, someone from Ron DeSantis’s team called me,” she told Carlson. “She said, ‘The governor wanted me to give you a message. If you don’t feel safe, if you need a place to go, to hide, to stay, you can come to the governor’s mansion.’ She said, ‘We have a guest house for you, and you can stay as long as you need.’”
Despite Lorenz “outing” her, Raichik continued to operate low-key anonymously until she “revealed” herself on Carlson’s program. So what kind of stuff does this influential content creator who was invited to stay at the Florida governor’s mansion on the taxpayer dime put out there for public consumption? Here’s an excerpt of her views as aired on Carlson’s show:
“There’s something so unique about — the LGBTQ community has become this cult and it’s so captivating and it pulls people in so strongly unlike anything we’ve ever seen and they brainwash people to join and they convince them of all these things and it’s really, really hard to get out of it. It’s really difficult.”
Carlson asked if it was a “spiritual” problem, which might seem odd coming from him but isn’t if you’ve noticed he’s leaning even harder into Christo-fascist framing lately, since it is favored by leaders he admires, such as Vladimir Putin. Here’s how Raichik responded:
“I think they’re evil. And sometimes we try to break it down a lot and we discuss why this is happening, what’s happening, whatever, and I think sometimes the simplest answer is they’re just evil. They’re bad people. They’re evil people. And they want to groom kids. They’re recruiting.”
IMO, saying evil people are coming for your kids is eliminationist rhetoric, and it’s nothing new from Raichik, who was saying the exact same shit when Ron DeSantis offered to put her up at taxpayer expense. That sort of rhetoric is grotesque under any circumstances — the equivalent of KKK and Nazi hate speech.
But whereas — for now, at least — prominent Republican politicians don’t openly embrace the ravings of the local Imperial Wizard or Joseph Goebbels, moral panic purveyors, including conservative celebrities, elected Republicans and their spokespeople, eagerly package Raichik’s content and stream it into the brains of GOP base voters — and state legislatures. From Lorenz’s piece:
By March, Libs of TikTok was directly impacting legislation. DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw credited the account with “opening her eyes” and informing her views on the state’s restrictive legislation that bans discussion of sexuality or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade [note: weasel language bans discussion in ALL grades], referred to by critics as the “don’t say gay” bill. She and Libs of TikTok have interacted with each other at least 138 times publicly, according to a report by Media Matters. When asked by The Post about her relationship with the account, Pushaw wrote, “I follow, like and retweet libsoftiktok. My interactions with that account are public,” and added that she’s a strong supporter of its mission.
To their eternal credit, American voters rejected the Trumpiest candidates in November and blunted the much-ballyhooed “red wave” in most places, Florida being an unfortunate exception. Opinion pieces in outlets like the Financial Times and The Atlantic hopefully speculate that right-wing populism / authoritarianism may be on the wane.
I hope they’re right. But moral panic purveyors like Chaya Raichik, Christopher Rufo, etc., are still out there trying to manufacture consent for atrocities against our friends, family, neighbors — ourselves. They have the ear of powerful people. We shouldn’t ever forget that nor lose an opportunity to speak out against it.
Open thread.
Baud
Sounds like classic conservative projection.
BellyCat
Truth. The divide deepens as the rhetoric expands.
West of the Rockies
I wonder… did she at some point discover she had a girl crush and went into an existential panic?
kindness
Carlson, the libs of tictok, and the right wing media are mimicking what the Nazis did 90 years ago. They started with gypsies, the mentally infirm & the Communists. They then bumped up to include their Jewish populations. Had they not been losing the war so badly the rest of their opposition would have gone to the camps/furnaces as well. These right wing (nut jobs) here intend to not just hurt us but to eliminate us from the body. They openly say we aren’t citizens and deserve none of the protections the Bill of Rights provide us. I believe them. I wish our MSM paid as much attention to what they say and do and less to the eyeball clicks keeping the money spigot flowing.
Spirula
The real groomers are the Evilgelicals. Sunday School? Vacation Bible School? They actively seek out kids not even in their churches to propagandize, and constantly try to get their Death Cult shit into public school activities/classes. Best to get them young singing “Onward Christian Soldiers”.
hells littlest angel
The Trolley Problem, but all the people tied to the tracks are Tucker Carlson. Discuss.
Qrop Non Sequitur
Is there a way to send the trolley down both tracks?
Alison Rose
@West of the Rockies: Let’s not do that, please. The idea that virulent homophobes are secretly gay is actually kind of damaging, because you are, unintentionally in your case, attributing this kind of hateful thinking and behavior to queerness. Sure, there are some closeted people who react by being overtly homophobic, but it’s not as common as people seem to want to believe it is, and most homophobes and transphobes are just straight cis people full of hatred.
jeffreyw
@hells littlest angel:
Need moar trolleys!
JaySinWA
Re Tucker Carlson fill-in Tulsi Gabbard vrs Lying Liar congressman elect Santos: I see this as less a broken clock right twice a day [Tulsi] and more two useful idiots managing to undermine faith in elections.
To some extent it lifts Tulsi and helps Fox play fair and balanced, but the election was a small long shot bet that paid off for Santos’ bankrollers and now exposing it helps tarnish elections as a whole.
Shalimar
@hells littlest angel: Load the trolley with dynamite, just to be certain.
Skepticat
It most certainly does, and it’s mind-boggling that they’re so oblivious to what they’re doing (not to mention to reality). It’s a true danger when the echo chamber takes it up, though.
narya
One of the many things that makes me insane about all of the hate speech is this ginned-up amazed enragement, as though experiencing oneself outside of a gender(ed) binary is somehow new: it’s NOT. Years ago I read a book that posited that the gender “binary” (and the policing around it) is a late-19th-century thing, that many previous understandings posited more of a spectrum than a mutually exclusive binary. But you can’t police a spectrum, so the binary becomes a self-fulfilling thing: they want to police behavior so they encourage/continue/build a system that is easier to police.
hueyplong
@JaySinWA: I think you’re giving Fox too much credit when you say Tulsi was advancing the concept of elections as fraudulent. Fox doesn’t do subtle, and even if they did I don’t see lying about your background as the type of MACHINES ARE RIGGED FOR DEMS type thing Fox promotes.
More likely is that it was a one-off and Fox will either not mention it again or else they’ll defend the lying SOB when a Dem dares say the same things Tulsi did.
UncleEbeneezer
Shared this thread on how using dangerous language like “Groomer” leads directly to violence, towards the end of that late night post:
“I think it’s important for people to recognize that the “groomer” panic being instigated by the right is categorically different and more dangerous than what we have seen historically and has greater potential to lead to widespread political violence. My analysis follows. (link to thread reader not Twitter)
…
(3) “Pedophile” is different than most slurs because, for the right, it incites and justifies direct fatal violence. It is different than general subjugating speech, which can justify violence, but is not always or intrinsically eliminationist.”
JoyceH
@Alison Rose:
You don’t get it from men who genuinely like and respect women – always seemed to me that the root of homophobia was straight men worried that they might be treated the way they’ve treated women all their lives. And that also ties into something I noticed during my career in the Navy – that not all but MOST men significantly overestimate their own attractiveness.
PaulB
This is likely one of those cases where it’s “both”: Yes, she’s seriously homophobic, but also yes, she’s found a marketable niche/grift that’s bringing her a lot of money and attention. And she’s milking it for all it’s worth, without giving a shit about the real-world damage that she’s inflicting.
This is one of those times when I wish our society had a better answer for sociopaths like this.
Hungry Joe
Fortunately, Raichek has the charisma of a long-dead flounder: flat affect, soft/droning voice, slack/unchanging facial expression. Okay, a long-dead flounder doesn’t have a “soft/droning voice,” but I’ll stand by … well, I’ll stand kind of near (and upwind from) the comparison.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@hells littlest angel: Can I get 2 trolleys? /snark
JoyceH
New subject but one of the newly released J6 transcripts has an interesting tidbit. Remember in the late Trump administration when the daily schedule started including that ridiculous notation that the president would be ‘taking many phone calls and having many meetings’? That was because literally in the last few months of his administration, only THEN did Trump learn that his daily schedule was released to the media every day.
Cameron
Fuck these people. Time to go on the attack and advise Americans that one of their most beloved teevee shows of all time, “Groomer Pyle,” can be resurrected with only a small donation to the libtard organization of one’s choice.
different-church-lady
Well that’s fair: he runs the place like it’s an asylum.
different-church-lady
@hells littlest angel:
I’m in favor of increasing public transportation.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Soprano2
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Did kids see anything they couldn’t see at a nearby Florida beach? I doubt it.
West of the Rockies
@Alison Rose:
I can see your point. I suppose (and maybe I’m justifying and being defensive here) I’m thinking of someone like Roy Cohen who is said to have claimed he was not gay, he just liked having sex with men. Or J. Edgar Hoover, who prosecuted his lavender scare crusade.
rikyrah
She’s a hate monger.
And, NO, we ARE NOT going back to the bad old days.
They ARE NOT pushing people back into the closet.
And, yes, we will stand up for them.
Nothing but absolute hate.
We ARE NOT GOING BACKWARDS.
Citizen_X
@Shalimar: Obligatory: take off and nuke the site from orbit. Only way to be certain.
JWR
I watched the video Anne Laurie posted last night, and another thing this Ralchik idiot said was that, paraphrasing, ‘it’s a cult, and there are polls showing that getting people out of this cult is really, really hard.’ Well duh it’s really, really hard, Ms. Numbnuts. Why? Because it’s not a friggin’ cult, that’s why! Might as well ask people to stop being people.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Yes – thank you for poking back at that tired trope.
Bill Arnold
@JaySinWA:
Well, his electoral win was arguably election fraud.
They’d be right about that. As usual, it was committed by Republicans.
kalakal
@Qrop Non Sequitur: It’s what the multiverse is for!
Bill Arnold
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:
In that formulation, in all possible futures (e.g. in a multiverse), a trolley runs over a TC, so you’re covered.
I prefer to have at least one track with something like a wolf spider with an egg sack. So the trolley lever operator has the option to choose life for all the unborn spider children.
To be clear, in my ethics Tucker Carlson is a large-scale mass murderer due to his COVID denial and anti-vaccine propaganda, and he continues to commit mass murder using his Fox News platform.
ETA @kalakal: hah! But I have the same minute stamp on my comment. :-)
kalakal
@Bill Arnold: It’s quantum innit?
bjacques
MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/multi-track-drifting
Bill Arnold
@bjacques:
Thanks! Bookmarked.
Bill Arnold
@kalakal:
Experimental Test of Entangled Histories (2016)
gratuitous
The overwhelming vibe I get from Raichek is that there is a particularly odious skeleton in her closet, one that will come clattering out in a highly embarrassing and maybe even criminal fashion. At that time, people like Christina Pushaw will suddenly be, “Chaya? Chaya who? Never heard of him. Or her. Or whoever that person I’ve never heard of is. [Text beep] Chaya! I told you to lose this number. Er, that is, I mean, new phone, who dis?”
NickM
@UncleEbeneezer: Great article. Thank you.
Sister Golden Bear
@West of the Rockies: Self-hating LGBTQ+ people definitely do exist. But the trope that — at least by implication— all haters are secretly LGBTQ+ is problematic for multiple reason. For one it’s blaming discriminated groups for their own oppression, equivalent to blaming Candace Owen for racism against blacks. It also absolves cis-het people from having to take a look at their own potential role in anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, discrimination and oppression.
Anne, thank you for again bringing attention to this. I don’t have the reference at hand, but researchers have tied 66 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents to LibsOfTikTok, many of them occurring just days promoted a target.
Sister Golden Bear
@kindness:
More than just mimicking, LGBTQ+ were among the first targets of the Nazi. The famous photo of one of the first Nazi book burning was them destroying the library of the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin, headed by a gay Jewish man, who was a major advocate for all LGBTQ+. For good measure the Nazi also killed a trans woman working at the institute.
West of the Rockies
@Sister Golden Bear:
I concur fully and did not mean to suggest otherwise. I should not have highlighted the sad and ridiculous self-loathing Queer folk. Yes, good old cis straight homophobia is the real problem.
UncleEbeneezer
@Sister Golden Bear: Not sure if this is what you refer to, but here is the recent study by Task Force Butler: The Impact of Online Hate Mongering An Exploratory Analysis of @LibsOfTikTok
louc
And thanks to her appearing on Tucker Carlson, someone exposed her as someone who participated in the Capitol invasion. (At least the outdoors part, anyway)