LibsofTikTok's Interviews Prove She's Not Unbiased. She's Generating Anti-LGBTQ Hate | Opinion

The infamous Twitter account LibsofTikTok, once anonymous, has revealed her face in a series of high-profile interviews, first with Fox News' Tucker Carlson and then with independent journalist Tim Pool. The account, run by a woman named Chaya Raichik, reposts videos Raichik finds on TikTok, more often than not featuring drag shows, queer persons or trans teachers supposedly indoctrinating young people.

The account rocketed from obscurity to 1.7 million followers in two years thanks to signal boosts from high-profile personalities like Joe Rogan and Meghan Mccain, and it's been influential enough that actual legislation has been inspired by Raichik's posts, causing many on the Left to decry the account as anti-LGBTQ.

Both Carlson and Pool disputed this view, casting Raichik as an unbiased reporter simply holding up a mirror to the Left. "What you've done essentially is bring to light, publicize what they are already saying in public," Carlson said. "That's your crime."

"A person says a thing and then you go, 'Hey look, this person said a thing', and they are like 'Stop!'" said Pool.

That's how Raichik herself sees her account. "What we do is we hold up a mirror to the Left and we show people what they themselves are saying. And they just can't stand to see it," Raichik told Pool.

Unfortunately, this is not an accurate accounting of what LibsofTikTok does. In reality, it is a hate account.

Because the truth is, contrary to Pool, Carlson, and Raichik, an account can be hateful just by reposting something already public. Though the videos are already in the public domain, Raichik makes curatorial decisions in what to amplify to construct a harmful narrative about queer people—namely, that a cabal of queer activists and educators are sexualizing young people and indoctrinating them into a queer ideology. Raichick makes decisions about what to repost and—even more importantly—how to frame those reposted videos to construct that narrative.

Let's start with the choice of content. The videos Raichik picks present the most aggressive, idiosyncratic approaches to teaching sexual and gender diversity. She then presents these radical, extreme views as the norm on the Left (hence the "libs") and certainly the norm for queer folks, when this is far from true.

Raichik then describes the video to her audience, often reiterating narratives of indoctrination, sexualization, and "grooming."

For example, Raichik recently tweeted the video of a non-binary educator who made a TikTok video about ways to make a classroom more inclusive for non-binary students.

The recommendations they gave included not using gender-coded colors like pink for girls and blue for boys and not lining up students by gender. If these seem innocuous to you, they didn't to Raichik, who framed the video with accompanying text: "These are the people teaching your kids."

The implication is clear: Such a person is not fit to be an educator because they are queer.

Repeated tweets of this type are meant to paint a misleading picture that America's school system is overrun with "queers" who are hell-bent on sexualizing young people. And if Raichik's audience is not intimately knowledgeable of what happens in school systems, they may believe that narrative.

But Raichik really tipped her hand in her interview with Carlson, where she exposed her real feelings toward gay, queer, and trans people.

"The LGBTQ Community has become a cult; they brainwash people to join," she said. "It's extremely poisonous. 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."

With her comments, Raichik made her contempt for the entire LGBTQ community clear. It's not just people inappropriately discussing sexual content with kids who bother her but the entirety of the gay community.

So much for holding up a mirror!

This kind of ugly rhetoric and selective boosting can lead to real world harm. I've seen it happen with my own eyes. In 2021, a non-binary colleague of mine, Dr. Allyn Walker, was interviewed about a book they had just published. The book was about people with a physical attraction toward children. The researchers who study this phenomenon call these individuals Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs).

Dr. Walker's aesthetic and choice of scholarship were tailor-made for Raichik: They are visibly non-binary and write about an issue that allowed Raichik to conflate being queer with sexual deviance.

Raichik tweeted a clip from an interview and framed the clip with the text: "This non-binary assistant professor at Old Dominion University is trying to normalize the term MAPs (Minor Attracted Persons."

This was followed by a second clip from the interview with the accompanying text: "They are coming for your kids."

Of course, Raichik did not include a link to the full interview, during which Walker is extremely clear that the term is not an attempt to condone a sexual interest in children, but rather is used to destigmatize the people who have this attraction, making it possible for them to seek help. In other words, the terminology is meant to protect kids.

Now, I don't happen to agree with Walker about this change in nomenclature. But Raichik chose clips selectively and described them in a way that constructs a hateful and inaccurate portrayal, which resulted in Walker facing immense harassment, being put on leave and eventually leaving their position.

I don't think Raichik, Carlson, or Pool are naive or stupid. I am willing to concede that they may not wish harm on people, but I think they are being willfully ignorant, willing to accept distortions and look the other way when queer people are harassed.

The great tragedy here is that there are many Americans who are uneasy with the rapid acceptance of sexual and gender diversity in our institutions. These Americans deserve a better conduit for their views than LibsofTikTok.

LibsofTikTok is not simply reposting videos. It is intentionally generating hate against queers through distortions and lies. Raichik made that clear this week.

Roderick Graham is an Associate Professor at Old Dominion University in the department of sociology and criminal justice.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.