Conservatives Don’t Care About Your Kids

Nex Benedict was 16 years old.

They were a sophomore at Owasso High School in Owasso, Oklahoma, a suburb of about 40,000 people just north of Tulsa.

Nex was non-binary, meaning they identified as neither male nor female.

As Nex's primary caretaker, Sue, would put it, Nex identified as, quote, right down the middle.

Sue Benedict is often referred to in the media as Nex's mother, but in reality is their biological grandmother who raised Nex for more or less their whole life.

As it pertained to Nex's non-binary identity, Sue has said that she was still learning about it, but she always kept an open mind.

Sue's husband told The Independent,

When you're old, you don't always understand it, but it would be very boring if we were all the same.

It's on the inside that matters the most.

When Sue or her husband used Nex's birth name or their old pronouns, Nex would correct them and they'd all just get on with it.

Nex was a stellar student.

They loved reading and Minecraft and their cat.

Next also dealt with bullying for years, which will come as approximately no surprise to any queer person who has ever attended a school.

They first started telling Sue about the bullying last year.

On February 7th, just a few weeks ago, Nex was in the girls' bathroom with their other trans friend.

Mind you, Oklahoma passed a law recently that students must use bathrooms consistent with the sex they were assigned at birth.

And Nex and their friend got into an altercation with three other girls who had been bullying them.

In text messages Nex sent to a family member who later shared them with the local news, Nex wrote, quote, they had been bullying me and my friends, so I got tired of it and I poured some water on them and all three came after me.

The girls knocked Nex into the ground and repeatedly slammed Nex's head into the floor.

The fight was eventually broken up by classmates and faculty.

Nex had bruises on their face and scratches on the back of their head.

No one from the school called an ambulance, a hospital, or the police.

Sue was notified, though, and told that Nex had been suspended from school for two weeks.

Sue picked up Nex and took them to the Bailey Medical Center in Owasso, from which they were later discharged on the same day.

In those text messages that Nex sent to a family member, Nex wrote,

Got a shot in the butt for my pain, but if I'm still dizzy and nauseous in the morning, I might have a concussion.

They went to sleep.

The following day, Thursday morning, February 8th, Nex was getting ready to go to Tulsa with Sue when they collapsed in the living room.

Sue called an ambulance, and by the time the EMTs showed up, Nex wasn't breathing.

Nex was pronounced dead at the hospital later that day.

Ryan Walters is the state superintendent of all Oklahoma public schools.

His Wikipedia page describes him, first and foremost, as an American hate monger.

He's been called Oklahoma's top culture warrior.

In 2022, Ryan ran for state superintendent, a campaign which was endorsed by Ted Cruz, and he won.

His platform consisted of the typical shit you expect from far-right politicians in education at this point.

You know, get the wokes out of the schools, get the gay books out of the libraries, stop wokeifying the kids with lessons about gender and race.

Woke, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke.

Ryan has a particular fixation on what he considers to be pornography in libraries and has accused school librarians of promoting pornography.

What he considers to be pornography, by the way, tends to be like, you know, sex education that includes gay people.

He elaborates on these beliefs in his frequently tweeted car vlogs.

Edmund Public Schools is leading the charge to put pornography back in schools.

Today we see Edmund Public Schools is fighting to keep pornography on their shelves and are challenging our rule to keep pornography out of the classroom.

This is unbelievable.

It's a great day for Oklahoma schools.

Big win today.

The drag queen is out at Western Heights.

I've demanded it from day one.

On August 21st, 2023, the far-right anti-LGBT stochastic terrorist hate account, Libs of TikTok, ran by Haya Raichik, who we'll get to her in a second, reposted a 16-second TikTok video originally posted by an Oklahoma public school librarian, a young woman named Kirby.

In the video, Kirby lip-syncs to a ludicrous song and a superimposed caption reads, POV, teachers in your state are dropping like flies, but you are still not quite finished pushing your woke agenda at the school.

This is a joke.

This is sarcasm.

And there are two reasons you might not read into it that way.

The first is if you're autistic and struggle to pick up on social cues, which, like, no shade, that's a thing.

And the second is if you're, I don't know, a right-wing politician who is purposely missing the sarcasm here because you want to exploit this sentiment in earnest to outrage people into thinking some fucking school librarian is literally on a warpath to make all of her students transgender.

Superintendent Ryan Walters shared the video to his Twitter, adding the caption: quote: Democrats say it doesn't exist.

The liberal media denies the issue.

Even some Republicans hide from it.

Woke ideology is real, and I am here to stop it.

It's crazy, right?

How all you have to do is be like, you know, gay agenda, L-O-L-O-L, and the dweebiest white guy you have ever met thinks he's transforming into fucking Batman,

flying across the city by night to save the poor, poor children.

Not from pedophile priests, not from poverty, or lack of affordable housing, or lack of subsidized school lunches, or lack of health care, or the increasingly uncertain future kids are facing as a result of climate change and the impending collapse of Social Security.

No.

He's saving the kids from some fucking school librarian who reads books about loving each other.

Union Public Schools, the school system that that librarian Kirby worked for, they received bomb threats every day for the six days following Superintendent Ryan Walters' tweet.

And so did the librarian directly to her home.

Only after the fourth day of threats did Ryan Walters call for them to stop.

And even still, he didn't and still hasn't removed the post that was widely believed to have sparked them.

At the end of this past January, two weeks before the death of Nex Benedict, Superintendent Ryan Walters hired Haya Raychik, the Libs of TikTok influencer, to serve as a member of the Oklahoma Department of Education's Media Review Committee.

Haya Raychik is a former real estate agent in her late 20s, originally from Brooklyn and now living in Los Angeles.

Haya skyrocketed to conservative media fame a couple years ago with her account, Libs of TikTok, which I've discussed ad nauseum on this podcast.

On Libs of TikTok, which is actually a Twitter account, Haya's stated goal is to stop the sexualization of children in schools.

In practice, though, it's an endless feed of pictures and videos of random queer or queer-friendly teachers plucked out of fucking obscurity because they had a rainbow sticker on the chalkboard or a rainbow flag in a mug on their desk or something, posted to Haya's 3 million followers, oftentimes with the name of the teacher, the school district they work in, and some snarky caption insinuating that they're a pedophile because they support their LGBTQ students or something.

Whenever these posts go up, bomb threats and other threats of violence against the school districts targeted almost always follow, sometimes leading to evacuations of elementary schools.

Save the children, right?

I mean, what could be traumatizing about scurrying a bunch of fucking 10-year-olds outside with alarm bells ringing because some deranged libs of TikTok follower called in a bomb threat over a teacher who had pronouns on their fucking name tag right one thing that is truly fantastic to witness from haya raychik is the way she genuinely has no coherent belief system around any of the shit she talks about online taylor lorenz the washington post journalist who actually was the guest on this show for the episode we did about libs of tiktok recently met haya for an interview outside of a coffee shop in lay where they both live haya agreed to the interview on the grounds that it would all be recorded, which is just mind-boggling to me because.

If you eradicate transgenderism, which I believe you suggested in a post today.

No, I never suggested that.

Okay.

You reposted a post that was advocating for that.

What would happen to the people that have already medically, socially, completely transitioned and are leading happy lives?

What would happen to them?

I mean, what's your plan for that?

If transgenderism doesn't exist, which it seems like that's what you believe, what happens to all the people living happy lives as trans people?

Well,

first of all, the whole trans is it's based on a lie.

You can't change your gender.

Okay, but so they can they could go live their their their life.

I mean, I can't tell someone what to do in their in their house.

Sounds like you do want to tell people what to do in their house.

I never said that.

So you're totally okay with people being trans, just not as long as they're in public.

No, I never said that.

They could

it's the whole thing is based off of a lie, and I think that

the fact this lie cannot be mainstream in our in our society it's just it's a lie and what harm is it causing do you believe

I like the truth I like truth

right but I'm saying what what's the what's the harm of people expressing their gender identity differently than you believe it to be what what harm are they causing

like I said we are a

a nation of truth, and

I seek the truth.

But I'm asking about the harm.

What's the harm?

You might believe it to be false, but what's the harm?

The harm is that there's a lie that is very mainstream and is being embedded into every institution.

I guess I'm wondering what the material harm is.

Aside from it's maybe something that you disagree with, as in your version of the truth is different than their version of the truth.

What is the material harm of them living their life as a woman or man or gender that you don't admit?

Not anything that's wrong.

Is there a material harm necessarily?

So there's no harm.

I didn't say that.

Would you say that you're a free speech supporter?

Yeah.

So how do you square the sort of being this free speech supporter with wanting to ban literature?

What kind of literature?

Any kind of literature.

I mean I would think that.

What kind of literature am I trying to ban?

Oh, I thought you were just trying to say you're...

that you have, I mean, you've made an effort to get books removed from school.

What kind of books?

Books dealing with LGBTQ people and sexuality.

No, that's not what I said.

Oh, so you're not trying to get any books banned from school?

That's not what I said either.

Okay, why don't you explain to me how you're thinking about this?

You just accused me of wanting to ban books.

What kind of books am I trying to ban?

You tell me.

I totally don't know.

I'm not trying to ban anything.

But you're not trying to ban any books.

You said I'm trying to ban books.

Are you trying to remove books from libraries?

From public school libraries.

Okay.

The fact that she can't string together a sentence if her life depended on it aside, these are softball fucking questions Taylor's asking.

And you know, I happen to think Taylor is a good journalist, but these aren't even tricky questions.

She's asking Haya the most basic, fundamental questions about her own belief system.

A belief system which she spends 25 hours a day espousing online for millions of followers and an ungodly amount of money.

Do you believe in banning books?

What is the harm of trans people being themselves?

What do you believe?

And Haya's like, gee, I've never fucking thought about it before.

Haya Haya Raychik has been labeled by many as a stochastic terrorist.

Stochastic terrorism is a form of terrorism where if you openly and directly target a community with violent, slanderous rhetoric, as Haya does online with queer people every single day, some form of violence is likely to transpire as a result of that rhetoric.

Like, if you keep lying to millions of people on Twitter that gay and trans people are posing a real threat to children, for example, one of your followers is very likely going to take that claim to its natural conclusion and do something fucking crazy.

In response to credible accusations that Haya's online practices of targeting teachers, librarians, and schools is causing real psychological harm to both school teachers and their students, Haya laughed.

USA Today published a headline that read, quote, when libs of TikTok posts, threats increasingly follow.

Haya responded by holding up the newspaper and smiling with it for a photo, which she then made her profile picture on Twitter.

Because what the fuck else do you do when your primary goal is, as the Libs of TikTok website states on its donation collecting tab, protecting American families?

What better way to protect American families, American children, than to pose with the newspaper calling you a terrorist threat to schools everywhere and make it your fucking Twitter picture?

Surely her goal with all of this isn't to, I don't know, monetize a culture war whose ultimate victims are fucking transgender children who want to live their lives and otherwise be left the fuck alone.

Surely her goal isn't to become famous and end up with, I don't know, a TV show on Fox News or, hey, a position in Trump's cabinet.

If Trump was re-elected, would you be interested in a job with his administration?

Uh, maybe.

No, no.

This isn't about you, Kaya.

It's not about your fame or money or career or influence.

It's about protecting the children from sexualization in schools, from those dirty, dirty, gay teachers.

But not the straight ones, though, interestingly.

Not from straight male adults whose sexualization of young girls is famously like the most fucking common problem when it comes to the sexualization of children.

But that's none of my business.

That's none of your business, Kaya.

No.

What we need to protect the kids from really at the end of the day is that polyester fucking rainbow flag in a mug on some teacher's desk in a conservative town in Oklahoma.

That is who is posing the real threat here.

And thank God we have Haya and her fans threatening to blow up entire schools because of it.

Saving the children.

I mean, what the hell would we do without you?

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Now back to the show.

So why does Ryan Walters, this Ohio state superintendent, appoint a Brooklynite turned Los Angelino, former real estate agent, turned conservative hate monger who has self-admittedly only ever been to Oklahoma once to a position on the Oklahoma Department of Education?

Because this is America, you fucking idiot.

We made a reality TV competition host the fucking president.

You can do anything you you want as long as the vibes feel right.

Don't let your dreams be dreams.

Don't limit yourself to being a Twitter influencer when you can also be the person who eggs on real-life hate crimes in Oklahoma public schools and get paid for it.

I mean, seriously, diversifying revenue streams as a content creator is vital these days, I would know.

In 2022, Haya Raichik targeted Tyler Rin, a queer Oklahoman English teacher who worked in Nex Benedict's school district.

Tyler had posted a TikTok where he told his students that he loved them and was proud of them, even if their parents weren't.

Haya shared the video to Libs of TikTok, inspiring her followers to threaten and harass Tyler within an inch of his life, and amidst all of this, he was let go from the school.

According to Sue Benedict, Nex thought this was fucking ridiculous, which it was.

After news broke of Nex's death last week, people immediately began calling into question the role that Haya Rachik may have played in it, and for good reason.

Haya has been clearly and intentionally making American public schools a place where nobody is allowed to openly express any sort of gender variance and where no teacher can openly support LGBTQ children without the very real fear of being exposed to Haya's millions of online followers through her editorialized homophobic lens.

I mean, what the fuck else are you going to do when telling students that you love them just as they are could result in an entire school district being held hostage by hateful internet psychopaths who genuinely think of themselves as crusaders for child justice.

Obviously, you're gonna stay quiet.

Obviously, you're gonna take down the rainbow flags and the safe space classroom signs.

Obviously, you're gonna feel scared to reach out to a student who might appear to be struggling with themselves or with bullying for being themselves because you're scared someone's going to accuse you of having ulterior motives.

And obviously, these invisible forces will make any school feel more hostile and less safe, particularly to LGBTQ students for whom school is already pretty fucking isolating to begin with.

When I was 15, I wasn't out to my family yet.

I was really struggling, as most queer kids do, in this time between realizing you're different, but not knowing where it's safe to express those feelings.

One of the first people I came out to as gay was my health teacher at the time.

After class, when the rest of the students had filed out, I just asked her if she had a minute and I I told her.

And then, you know, her eyes turned black and the floor opened up beneath us and we both descended into the pits of hell as she laughed maniacally.

No, nothing happened.

I told her I was gay and she was like, okay,

that's okay.

And you know what?

That's all I fucking needed.

Someone to tell me that the world wasn't going to collapse, that I still had a future, that it was fine.

That's what an accepting teacher can do.

It's not indoctrination.

It's not an agenda.

It's not Satan worship.

It's just making it more likely that that scared little queer student is going to get up the following morning and keep going because they know they aren't completely on their own.

That's it.

Anyway, nowhere has Haya Raychik wreaked more havoc, arguably, than in Oklahoma, where Nex Benedict died after getting beat up in that school bathroom.

So when people started to point this out, how did Haya respond?

Well, she posted a selfie on Twitter, doing a duck face and holding up a peace sign with the caption, Good evening, everyone, even to the haters and losers, kissing emoji.

And then the following day posts yet another selfie, this time in different makeup and hair, but same post with yet another caption, good afternoon, everyone, even the haters, losers, and liars, kissy face.

When people on Twitter called her the queen of stochastic terrorism and, quote, murderer alert, she satirically retweeted those claims as if to say, you know, jokes on you.

I'm owning these titles.

Is this the response of someone who cares deeply about the welfare of children?

I mean, I don't know.

I feel like someone who genuinely cares about the safety and well-being of school children, you know, the belief that Haya's career claims to be built on, would express somewhere in all of this mourning, devastation, sorrow.

A kid is fucking dead.

But no, no, not you, Haya.

You are gallivanting around the internet, posting meme after meme, mocking people who dare to question your potential involvement with the death of a high school sophomore like it's a big fucking joke to you.

Where's the compassion?

Why this unrelenting, heartless cruelty?

I could tell you why.

None of these people care about children.

Not Haya Raychik, not Ryan Walters, not any conservative media personality on Fox News, not any politician who runs platforms on protecting children from transgender mental illness or the woke mind virus or parents' rights or whatever.

These people do not care about children.

You, the listener, you might.

You, a follower or a fan of one of these people, might, but they don't.

Or at least, I feel extremely comfortable saying that their primary goal in discussing the protection of children is not the protection of children.

It's just not.

Their primary goal in discussing the protection of children is enriching themselves, and in more ways than one.

Maybe it's monetizing viral tweets about gay teachers they're baselessly accusing of being predators.

Maybe it's stirring up fear among the constituents they represent in government enough so that those constituents will vote for them again.

Maybe it's money.

Maybe it's ratings.

Maybe it's re-elections.

You know, Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill, remember the bill which prevents teachers from mentioning anything relating to gender or sexuality in grade schools?

That created national controversy, which allowed Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to position himself as a savior and protector of children, bravely defending their innocence from the scary drag queens.

And yeah, the don't say gay bill pissed off a lot of queer people, but not everyone was so discerning about its real motivations.

Not everyone could see from the get-go that the goal of such a law is ultimately to make queerness something that's inappropriate to discuss or publicly exist in polite society.

Not everyone knows or is willing to know that if Ron DeSantis had it his way, gay and trans people wouldn't exist.

Not in public, not in their homes, not at all.

No.

When they see Ron DeSantis approve the Don't Say Gay Bill, they see someone who is bravely, as Ron DeSantis claims, taking practical measures to prevent the sexualization of children.

That's what he says he's doing, anyway.

And they believe him.

And then look, Ron DeSantis becomes a household name.

known across the country for being a brave culture warrior, fighting on behalf of the sweet children everywhere.

And hey, one year later, he runs for fucking president.

And one of the main pillars of his platform is this save the children from the gays bullshit.

Everyone wants to protect kids.

Conservatives frame all of this culture war shit as people who care about kids versus people who don't, which is a lie.

And they know it.

We all care about kids.

We all care about kids.

But they think you're fucking stupid.

They think that if they dangle this carrot in front of your face and say, look, this is why children are at risk.

And this is why child sex abuse happens.

It's because of the queer people.

It's because of the teachers with rainbow flags.

It's because of the drag queens.

And I

can take them down.

They will dangle that carrot in front of you for fucking forever if it means you'll keep giving them views, keep giving them money, keep voting them into office.

They need a villain to save you from.

Your poor innocent straight children are at risk.

And you need them to protect your children from this scary pedophilic drag queen that they've fucking invented.

And it's all a big fucking lie.

You know why?

Because the way child abuse actually happens is fucking complicated.

And it's impossible to capture in a single story or trope.

It's messy and uncomfortable to talk about because that means grappling with the fact that the vast majority of child sexual abuse isn't perpetrated by a scary stranger or a trans person in a bathroom or a drag queen at Saturday afternoon family drag bingo.

The vast majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone who is intimately close with the victim and roughly 40% of abusers are the victim's relative.

And while we're at it, Most child molesters are statistically heterosexual men.

And you know what else is hard to grapple with?

The fact that talking to kids about sex from an early age is one of the most effective ways to protect them from abuse.

You want to know why?

Because a kid who doesn't understand what sex looks like, what consent is, what body parts they have, is that much more vulnerable to being abused by an adult.

Because that kid won't know what the fuck is going on and won't know who to tell, or even what to tell, or even that something happened that was worth telling someone.

Look, I get it.

It's fucking uncomfortable that we have to talk to kids about sex.

In the average adult mind, kids and sex belong nowhere in the same sentence.

But when studies show that giving them comprehensive sex education from a young age is among the best ways to keep them safe, what the fuck does it matter if we're uncomfortable?

You want to talk a big game about caring about kids?

Well, care about kids.

But these people, these culture warriors, these media personalities and politicians, they don't care about kids.

They care about crafting an image of caring about kids.

They care about the aesthetic of caring about kids.

Because everything we know about keeping kids safe, safe from abuse, safe from isolation, safe from hating themselves for who they are, these people don't want to do it.

Because it makes them uncomfortable.

Because this is not about kids.

This is about them and their image and their careers.

But you're a good person.

You want to save children.

You want to protect them from evil.

Why wouldn't you?

So when some devious fucking politician or influencer or news broadcaster tells you that they have the solution to child abuse, why wouldn't you give them some money and a vote?

Why face the complicated, uncomfortable reality of what it means to protect children when you could just fucking unconditionally support some guy in a suit who says he'll deal with it by stomping out the queers from public life.

Wouldn't that be easy?

Yeah, it would be easy.

But the reality of these issues isn't.

And so at the end of the day, you can vote for the guy who will remove every pro-gay faculty member from schools, who will ban fucking drag queen bingo from any venue within half a mile of a school, who will ban life-saving healthcare for kids, who will force trans children to use restrooms they feel unsafe and uncomfortable in, force them to play on the wrong sports team, dead name and misgender them to death, to death, after death.

And you can retweet every libs of TikTok video claiming that some teacher in Oklahoma is dangerous to children because he said he'd support them and love them even if their parents don't.

You can dox all the teachers and doctors and anyone else fucking hierarchic tells you is the reason kids are in danger.

You can round up every queer person and put them in fucking concentration camps.

And you know how many kids you will have helped?

Zero.

Zero.

But you'll have hurt a lot fucking more than that.

I mean, yeah, there's the kids that are gay and trans who will feel even more isolated and unsafe in their own bodies, obviously.

They'll hate themselves.

They'll hurt themselves.

And they'll hate you too, by the way.

Good luck getting invited to your child's Christmas party in 15 years.

And then there's the straight cisgender kids, some of whom you will not only have turned into total assholes, unable to accept any level of difference or diversity,

but all these kids, the gay ones and the straight ones, trans and cis, will be fucking terrified to express themselves.

Any level of gender variation or exploration or creativity or love or art turns into a hostage situation.

Deviating from the norm is dangerous and bad.

Life is to be lived in black and white or not at all.

And those are just the kids that live.

Because you'll also have next Benedict, the 16-year-old who was beaten within an inch of their life by three other girls in a fucking high school bathroom, who was unable to walk to the nurse by themselves, who not a single teacher called medical assistance for, who collapsed dead the following day.

Next Benedict, who is dead, whose mother now has an empty chair at her dinner table, and who will never come home again.

But who cares, right?

Ryan Walters still gets to be the Oklahoma school superintendent.

He gets to continue his crusade against porn in school libraries, whatever the fuck that means.

Haya Rachik is still serving as a media advisor on the Board of Education of Oklahoma, a place she's been to once.

And she still gets to run her fucking Twitter account, where she posts selfies mocking the death of a trans child in the name of Save the Children.

She's making more money than ever.

Her selfie wishing a good evening to the haters and losers is pinned on her Twitter profile where all of her tweets are monetized according to how many views they get, where any attempt to curtail her reach or influence has gone out the fucking window because Elon Musk has crawled up her asshole and created a home there.

So who cares if a child was bludgeoned to death?

At least we can all keep feeling like we're defending the children, right?

I mean, they might die, sure, but at least they won't be queer, right?

This is fucking embarrassing.

Have we...

have we lost the plot entirely?

I have no hope for people who have staked out a position to profit from fear-mongering about queer people and children.

The politicians who have built campaigns off of creating a fake panic about some of the most marginalized people in American society so that they can win re-elections.

The influencers who have monetized the paranoia they've instilled in you.

Haya Raychik.

I have no hope for her.

I find her morally vacuous, and as far as I'm concerned, she can go fuck herself forever.

Dancing on the grave of a dead child in the name of protecting children.

The good news is, I don't think the average person is too far gone.

You, the listener.

You, who was perhaps sent this podcast by your child or a friend.

I remain completely hopeful that the average person who buys into this bullshit in one way or another is capable of learning new information that changes their perspective.

And if I can't hold on to that hope, what's the point?

What do we have?

What optimism can I maintain for the 14-year-old me, you know, the little gay boy who would sweat himself to sleep thinking about how he needed to marry a woman?

So go.

Turn around.

Love your child.

Love all children.

Love gay children and trans children and non-binary children and children who are figuring it out and children who are confused and children who have questions and children who feel certain.

Love them and protect them.

Not protecting them in a way that is ultimately only of service to you in your quest to feel like you're protecting them, but in ways that actually fucking protect them.

Because they are suffering in silence and sometimes dying, and they need you.

Thank you for listening.

I love you very much, very, very much.

And until next time, stay fruity.