Libs of TikTok

People have always come came after me and like these specific types of people like they've always called me a pedophile they've always called me a groomer so I was like yeah yeah whatever it's Tuesday

Hello, hello and welcome back to A Bit Fruity, the show that is responsible for zero bomb threats so far.

I'm Matt Bernstein and I am so grateful and happy that you're here today.

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Last week, a 37-year-old woman named Katherine Levy from Massachusetts pled guilty to calling in bomb threats to the Boston Children's Hospital last August.

There is a bomb on the way to the hospital.

You better evacuate everybody, you sickos, she said in a phone call to the hospital.

The call was made a few days after the the hospital was put on blast by a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok, which disparaged the hospital for providing gender-affirming care to trans people.

Libs of TikTok pushed the conspiracy that the hospital was providing surgery to trans minors, which was not true.

After the bomb threat, the hospital was put on lockdown and a bomb squad was dispatched.

Libs of TikTok is, for the most part, a Twitter account.

or X or whatever it's called by the time you're listening to this.

Libs of TikTok currently has two and a half million followers.

I'm blocked, which I wear as a badge of honor, but it's essentially a curated, never-ending stream of content reposted from other people's TikToks or other social media accounts.

Most of these people are queer teachers or social workers or doctors or just literally random queer people.

It could be some teacher in Colorado with 50 followers who posted a TikTok from their classroom and there was a rainbow flag on the wall in the background.

Libs of TikTok will repost that to their millions of followers with a caption alluding to the teacher being a child groomer or a pedophile and bam.

Thousands of angry replies.

Her followers find out what school the teacher works at and perhaps their personal home address and bomb threats ensue and school evacuations.

I know that this sounds extreme, but Libs of TikTok has been connected to bomb threats at 11 different schools in the United States just in the last month.

Today, we're going to deep dive into what has become one of the biggest influences in the current anti-LGBTQ movement and rumor conspiracy and the person behind it.

And if you hang out till the end, we're also going to hear directly from some of the teachers who have been targeted directly by libs of TikTok.

To help us dig through all of this, we are joined by the extremely prolific Taylor Lorenz.

Taylor is a journalist at the Washington Post who reports on the internet and the people who use it.

She's also the author of a brand new book called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, which I highly recommend.

She's also the person who brought to light the identity of the person who runs the Libs of TikTok account and the chaos that ensued after she did that.

I will have her tell you about that.

Taylor, welcome to A Bit Fruity.

Thanks for having me.

Of course, I'm so happy and grateful that you're here.

So, Taylor, I want to start at the beginning.

Who is behind the Libs of TikTok account and what do we know about them?

Basic info.

So, Haya Rajek is around 30 years old.

She's a part of this Orthodox Jewish community.

She lives in Los Angeles.

She revealed her own address on Twitter.

I will not do it here.

But she, yeah, she, I mean, she's best known for basically launching hate campaigns against LGBTQ people.

And now she's a full-time employee of Seth Dylan at the Babylon Bee.

And she's basically a social media influencer full-time.

Who was she, though, before she started all of this?

Because she had a life of more than 25 years before Libs of TikTok.

She's from Brooklyn, right?

Yeah, and she was a real estate agent previously.

She worked at this real estate company that seems to have employed a lot of people in Brooklyn.

And then she moved out to Los Angeles during the, I think, around the pandemic.

I can't remember exactly the year, but.

She moved at some point from Brooklyn to LA.

But yeah, she was living in New York previously.

She had some like early kind of rumblings on Twitter before she was Twitter famous.

Yeah, before she was libs of TikTok, she went through several different iterations on Twitter.

She was almost sort of trying to see what hit.

She was clearly involved in right-wing politics.

She was at the insurrection and actually live tweeted from the insurrection from a previous Twitter account under her own name.

She used to tweet under her own name.

And then she had several different like weird parody accounts.

One was called like Biden's houseplant or something.

And she would tweet as if she was like a houseplant in the Biden administration.

It was very strange.

You could kind of see her basically trying out these different kind of parody identity accounts to try to get traction and generate, you know, yeah, generate attention.

So she was like firmly a right-wing individual on the internet and in her like personal life

and like trying to maybe do something online before this is what took off.

Exactly.

I mean, she was promoting election fraud conspiracies.

Once again, she was at the insurrection or claimed to have been.

She actually, she was not, she didn't even claim to be.

She was actually pretty much as soon as her face was revealed, she was found in the January 6th footage.

And so she was clearly like, she had clearly been radicalized already.

Like, she already believed a lot of this right-wing ideology, but she wasn't really specifically targeting gay or trans people.

She was mostly just, I mean, again, it was the election fraud.

It was just other sort of like generic far-right conspiracies.

It really wasn't until she kind of flipped over to the libs of TikTok.

It was summer of, I guess that would have been 2021 or 2022.

Yeah, last year was 2022.

So summer of 2021 that she really sort of started to latch on to these like groomer conspiracies and like really go hard against LGBTQ people.

Right.

So that wasn't a big part of her political totem poll until it started gaining traction for her online.

Exactly.

So summer of 2021, Libs of TikTok is born.

And like I said earlier, it's, it's a curated feed of queer people, usually like plucked out of obscurity.

Like it's not like famous gay people.

It's not like Billy Porter.

It's not even like me, like people with a follow.

It's like random people.

It's literally like your gay uncle who like works at a daycare in Alabama or something.

It's not even clear a lot of these people are gay, by the way, Matt.

Like, I will say, like, I, there's some people that that are like i mean they're just it's she sort of is against anyone that looks progressive 99 of the people are members of the lgbt community but there's also just people that maybe just don't conform 100 percentage to gender stereotypes that she targets you know as well and yeah i mean and like you said i mean they might not be queer but if they're a teacher it might be that they have like a rainbow flag in the mug on their desk or like something like really at first it felt like she was going big with like oh my god it's like a drag queen in school or something first of all i don't have any issue with drag queens in schools but it seemed like she was like i'm gonna go for like the targets that seem obvious to my audience as time has gone on and she has to keep up a feed of never-ending content it's like she digs deeper and deeper and it's like literally like a teacher with like a rainbow flag sticker on the chalkboard in the background of a picture yeah exactly i can't remember exactly when the account flipped to lips of tick tock but it was really summer of 2021 that this hatred sort of towards LGBTQ people became a core pillar of her content.

That's also when Joe Rogan, I believe Joe Rogan shouted her out that August and directed people there.

That was one of many shout outs that Joe Rogan actually gave to Haya.

And it really started to get traction with the conspiracy too.

She promoted that conspiracy that children were using, you know, identifying as cats and using litter boxes at school, which ended up being completely false.

Actually, Tyler Kincaid tracked down why that rumor spread and the the litter boxes were actually for children to use if they needed to use the bathroom during a school shooting lockdown.

That's why the school had litter boxes.

It was, it had nothing to do with like LGBTQ students.

But she promoted that conspiracy and a number of others.

And as you said, it's really just like anybody that sort of supports the LGBTQ community.

Mostly it is gay people, but a lot of times, yeah, it's just like a rainbow sticker, you know, or something.

And she also said, I believe, didn't she call like the Trevor Project like terrorist organization or something?

She had a lot of sharp words for the Trevor Project as well.

Yeah, it gets really dark.

I mean, the Trevor Project, which is chiefly an LGBTQ crisis hotline, she disparaged at length before, I believe, deleting the tweets, disparaging them, but she was basically like, this is an organization for groomers.

And it's like, oh my goodness.

This isn't an episode about the groomer conspiracy theory.

This is an episode about...

higher each and libs of TikTok.

But like the idea, which I feel like is important to understand for any of this behind it and behind the groomer conspiracy is that, I mean, it's the gay agenda.

If you've been alive for more than 15 minutes, you're aware of this.

It's the modern iteration of the gay agenda that gay adults, you know, can't, and trans adults and queer adults, like, we can't reproduce.

So we're going to schools and we are,

because we can't reproduce, we're,

we can reproduce, by the way, but because they think we can't reproduce.

biologically that we have to go and recruit.

And so we're recruiting in schools, we're recruiting by becoming teachers and bus drivers and, you know, social workers and whatever else.

And so the whole idea behind all of this is like, save the children, right?

We have to save the children.

And the amazing thing about her little Trevor Project barrage was that the Trevor Project is like quite literally a resource to save queer youth from dying.

I mean, that's what the Trevor Project is.

So each of these posts of like random people, queer or suspected queer, will generate, you know, hundreds to thousands of comments consistently on every single post on Twitter.

And it's extremely hostile.

It's all, you know, this is a pedophile.

This is a groomer.

And then as we'll talk about in a little bit, like a lot of these people will do a lot more than just leave a nasty comment.

They'll take action that transcends the internet and starts to affect these people's real material lives.

But you mentioned Joe Rogan.

At what point does Libs of TikTok go from being another one of Haya's like projects that she's trying out on the internet to like big time?

Really fall of 2021 and early 2022.

In January of 2022, or really by like January, February, March, the groomer conspiracy had like really taken hold.

You started to see the rise of this anti-LGBTQ legislation in Florida.

It was just going really viral.

Like her account grew significantly during those that six-month period of sort of late 2021 into early 2022.

She also was doing more and more media appearances.

She did a whole interview with the New York Post.

She was on Tucker Carlson.

She had very much become this like popular figure on the right by then.

But it's notable that she wasn't going on these shows with her face yet.

Or like her real voice, right?

She went on anonymously and just and hid her face and disguised her voice, basically.

Right.

And the whole thing was like, I'm anonymous.

I'm like this like like superhero saving the children anonymously, not for long.

But my other question about the beginning of Libs of TikTok is like, where does the funding come from?

Because in theory, it's like this like grassroots, like we're just building a movement from the ground up.

But like a lot of times when things seem that way, it's not.

It was very much not grassroots.

By February 2022,

she had already struck a deal with Seth Dillon and was making quite a significant amount of money to the point that she could quit her job and work on it full-time.

I mean, she was already funded by the Babylon, like Seth Dylan, who owns the Babylon B.

Right.

And the Babylon B.

I mean, at first, wasn't she soliciting donations and stuff?

Yeah, she also got, well, she has solicited money throughout her account's history.

She set up a sub stack to get subscription money.

She sells merch.

Like, she has her own sort of various monetization strategies.

But early on, it was primarily Seth Dylan's payments that were funding her.

Right.

And Seth Dylan is the, he's the editor-in-chief, CEO, whatever you want to call it, of the Babylon Bee, which is like, it's like the right-wing version of The Onion.

It's like a, it's like a satire website.

It's meant to be a satire website, but it's like barely satire.

Like, especially because most of the people that read it just think of it as news.

It's just like weird right-wing headlines, basically.

Right.

Yeah.

It's just, it's just like right-wing headlines with like maybe a little bit of like what they consider comedy in there to position it as not real news.

It's also like the reason that Elon Musk, by the way, this is a little bit of a tangent, but it's the Babylon Bee is the reason that Elon Musk like bought Twitter, I believe, because I think they were banned or suspended or something under the old Twitter management.

And then Elon Musk was like, comedy has to be legal again.

Like this is this is outrageous that they were banned for something that was overtly transphobic.

And then Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Yeah, they're like, comedy is just like misgendering trans people.

Right.

So libs of TikTok, as it's growing, it goes from, you know, no followers to like hundreds of thousands of followers very quickly.

And it starts to shape.

And this is like why we're doing this episode, by the way, because like I wouldn't, if

a lot of people on the internet are transphobic.

A lot of people on Twitter are transphobic.

A lot of people are transphobic and we don't make a show about them because, like, who actually gives a shit?

But the thing about Libs of TikTok is it became very quickly, and this is something that Taylor really highlighted when she wrote about the person who was behind it.

It became like a machine that started to inform legislation and right-wing sentiment about queer and trans people in general.

Like you would see videos that Libs of TikTok, that Hya a chick scraped from like some teachers,

some random teacher's TikTok account or something.

And then you would see that video being played on Tucker Carlson's show when he was still at Fox News to, you know, millions of people and being like, this is what they're doing in our schools.

And so it like trickled up very quickly to like the most powerful people in media, which in turn trickled back down to all of the consumers of that media being like, oh my God, what's happening in our schools?

And then we see these bills,

you know, don't say gay bills and ban bills banning trans health care for minors and sometimes trans healthcare also for adults start floating around through the country.

And that's, you know, that's why we're talking about it.

So I want to address something about the, you know, anytime I talk about libs of TikTok, I get a ton of shit, which is, I mean, I get a ton of shit every time I talk about anything, which is what it is.

But one thing that both Haya Rachik and all of her millions of followers love to say anytime you criticize libs of TikTok, especially when you talk about the real-world effect that they're having, you know, the bomb threats on schools, the bomb threats on hospitals, the doxing of teachers, is this isn't a right-wing account.

I'm not posting anything that isn't already out there.

You know, I'm just showing what's already being posted by these teachers.

Because in theory, they're just taking videos and photos that you know teachers and other people you know queer people are posting on their own social medias in fact just the other night when i was taking notes for this show haya tweeted to her personal uh twitter account which i'm also blocked on which is great but

she tweeted if you need a reminder on who the real fascists are the left wants me to go to prison for reposting their own tick tocks this is such a dishonest framing of what's really going on here.

Because if you were just reposting content innocently with no motive behind it, not trying to, you know, maybe project any of your own narrative or agenda onto it, then you would not be connected so closely to so many bomb threats.

And you get this from her followers too.

Like, she's not right-wing.

She's not, you know, doing anything wrong.

She's not endangering people.

She's just posting what these people have already posted.

What do you make of that argument, Taylor?

I mean, it's, it's just a flat-out lie.

She's overtly right-wing and proudly right-wing and speaks, constantly promotes a very far-right agenda.

It's also just a flat-out lie that she only reposts content.

Let's not forget she's tweeted out the address and personal phone number of teachers before.

She's targeted people explicitly.

Like you said, she's made commentary about the Trevor Project and others.

She also edits videos and manipulates them to make them really inflammatory and often misleading.

She's never showing the whole TikTok.

She'll often show clips of it or takes things out of context, deeply out of context, to mislead.

And this is all just classic misinformation.

She's using source material of content that she founds online and then skewing it and misrepresenting it and using it to target average, you know, people, just working people, like you said, people with often no following.

Yeah, I mean, it's just a completely, she's just a liar, and that's not true.

And she's not just resurfacing content in a neutral way at all.

And I think she's, she does so much editorializing that to try to act like she's some sort of neutral actor is just, it's ridiculous.

It's just an obvious and overt lie that can be disproven very easily by just looking at her Twitter feed.

Yeah.

Well, one of the times that she went on Tucker Carlson, notably the time after you, you know, exposed her as it were, which we'll talk about in a second.

But one note that Tucker said, that like fucking, this was an hour-long interview that they did, and it fucking blew my mind because Tucker returned to this point over and over again that how brilliant the idea was for Libs of TikTok because she, in his mind, does so little editorializing.

He was like, it's amazing that you don't even have to add much, that you don't even have to add your own thoughts or context.

You just present the information as is and see how people react.

And one of the amazing things about that to me was, first of all, if you listen to Haya Raychik speak, and I know I'm gonna go like maybe a little bit below the belt here, but she doesn't actually have that much to say.

Part of the reason why she's not, you know, she does write captions whenever she reposts content.

And the captions, to your point, Taylor, like, they are very inflammatory.

They will always allude to people being groomers or pedophiles with no evidence whatsoever.

But the thing is, if you listen to her speak in interviews and whatnot, she's like, she doesn't have a lot of thoughts.

It's not a lot going on.

And so it's like, wow, you have this brilliant concept where you don't need to, you know, speak that much about your own belief system.

And it's like, I don't think she has that much of a belief system, guys.

I think she likes being viral on Twitter.

Well, she does, I would say she does have a very right-wing ideology.

I mean, I went to her house and I saw the books on her bookshelf.

And she has, you know, a lot of far-right stuff.

Tucker Carlson's book was there, obviously, Glenn Greenwald's book.

Like she's clearly steeped in this right-wing ideology, but I totally agree.

Like, I mean, she's just an incredibly uncharismatic person generally.

She would never make it as an influencer if she didn't have this sort of anonymous account that she ran, that she's built up.

Like, her as a person, she's not compelling, really, other than she's just a hateful, kind of spiteful person.

But yeah, I mean, she absolutely does not just take videos.

And you hear this from a lot of people on the right, by the way.

You know, they like to call themselves journalists when they're not doing journalism, but people like Andy Nyo, you know, he does the same thing where he will take videos, right, of protesters or, you know, something happening.

I just remember during the Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle, he was sharing just like videos of random black people, like sometimes committing crimes or appearing to commit crimes and just be like, look at what's going on.

You know, like there's this very specific subtext there, and there's a very specific reason they're sharing these specific videos at this specific time to promote a specific agenda.

And it's just, it's a lie for her to act like she's, she's not doing that because that's the whole point of her account.

Yeah.

When I explain to people what's going on at libs of tick tock and when they say to me they're like well she's just posting other people's videos i'm like if i fed my audience a steady stream of material that said like every brunette woman was a serial killer right and i like implicitly or explicitly like was consistently feeding them language that was like you know better watch out you know wouldn't wouldn't really want a brunette woman around my kids and then i like take i find like a tick tock video of some random woman with brown hair and I post that, a screenshot of that onto my, you know, to my audience.

And I'm like, look, a brunette woman.

And then millions of people who follow me go and like find her address and, you know, attempt to bomb her house.

And then I go, well, I never said she was a serial killer.

I just said a lot of brunette women are serial killers.

And then I showed you a random brunette woman.

What the fuck do you think they're going to do?

She knows what they're going to do.

She wants them to do these things, right?

She's, she's implied support for the, for this whole agenda.

Like she said, gay people shouldn't be allowed to teach in schools.

Like, this is what she backs.

And it's just, I mean, she's just a liar.

She's a liar.

And Tucker Carlson's a liar, by the way, too.

They're just liars.

And you can't really like fight with liars because they're just pathological liars.

She's just going to keep lying and be like, oh, no, I'm just this little old woman sharing things.

It's like, no, you have such exactly what you just said.

You know what you're doing and you're inciting violence against an oppressed group of LGBTQ people who you hate.

And, you know, that's horrible.

And making an eye-watering amount of money in the process.

Obscene amount of money.

Obscene amount of money.

She's making so much money.

So much money.

And she's profiting off a hate campaign against vulnerable people who have no access to money.

I interviewed teachers who she got fired.

And these are LGBTQ people that are, you know, we're already making almost no money as teachers.

And we're now fired because of hate campaigns against them.

And, you know, there's no, there's no support.

There's no relief for these people.

There's no, maybe sometimes one of them will tweet like, hey, go fund me or something, but there's no lasting, that the harm to them is irreparable.

And she doesn't care.

She doesn't appear to care.

Yeah.

So in April of last year, As millennials say, you did a thing.

You wrote an article in the Washington Post titled, Meet the Woman Behind Libs of TikTok, Secretly Fueling the Rights Outrage Machine.

So up until that point, Libs of TikTok, as we said, she had been operating anonymously.

How did you figure out who was behind the account?

Because

there was a campaign that ensued against you.

That was one of the

most

vicious hate campaigns I have ever witnessed on the internet against anyone since like Gamergate, if

you, the listener, know what Gamergate is.

This like resembled that in a lot of ways, I thought.

So, what motivated you to figure out who was behind the account or tipped you off, or you know, write this article in the first place?

Well, obviously, I'm a huge supporter of LGBTQ rights.

I was just disgusted by what was happening and horrified.

I saw this sort of increased violent rhetoric against gay people and trans people specifically.

And

I saw this account growing in power.

I cover online influence for a living.

So I cover, you know, influencers of all types, including far-right influencers.

And

it wasn't just that she was an influencer online, it's that she had become a media figure.

She was essentially a de facto assignment editor for the entire right-wing media, as you mentioned.

Like she would cover something on her account, and it would be on Fox News and Breitbart and all these websites like the next day.

Christine Pushaw, DeSantis' press secretary, also cited her account and said it informed

the thinking of the DeSantis campaign, who's obviously pushing super anti-LGBTQ legislation.

So it felt like it was affecting, you know, it felt like her account was affecting laws, you know, used to restrict LGBTQ rights.

And then also, you know, she was targeting these helpless people and it was just getting increasingly violent.

And she was this huge political public figure doing public appearances, by the way, like going on Tucker Carlson, doing interviews, but nobody had reported who she was.

And so I thought, I'm going to do that.

I've done that before for influencers.

Like, I mean, I think it's really important to understand kind of who's shaping our media landscape.

And if you have someone highly influential with tons of money launching these hate campaigns against LGBTQ people and hospitals, by the way, that provide gender-affirming care, we should know who that is.

We should know who that is.

We should know who's behind an account like that so that we can give them the appropriate amount of scrutiny.

So I decided to do that and, you know, through a lot of reporting, found out who she was.

I famously visited her house.

She wouldn't give me comment for the story.

I had tried to call her a number of times and she hung up on me.

And as a journalist, if you were going to, especially if you're going to reveal someone's identity publicly in a newspaper, you need to make every single effort to get comment from them.

Like you need to really make sure it's not enough just to be like, oh yeah, by the way, I tried to call you a couple of times because for all I knew, that number could have not been her.

That could have not been her answering the phone.

So I really wanted to make sure that I had the right HIRI HIRI check.

There's several HIRI checks, including several in Los Angeles.

So, I visited her house and confirmed that she lived there.

She actually tweeted a photo of me at her doorstep, which I was shocked by because for somebody that appears that alleges to care so much about their own privacy and safety, she tweeted a photo of me at her doorstep that not only showed the exact street that she lived on in Los Angeles, but it showed the exact house that she lived at.

So, you know, for somebody to cry doxing and then essentially show their exact address before I had even published the story was kind of crazy to me.

But anyway,

yeah, it, I, yeah, it published the story the next day.

I'm sorry, it's not funny because what you went through is not funny, but also

I don't care.

By the way, I would go through it again.

I would go through it 150 times over.

I totally 100% stand by that story.

And I would do the story again today.

We should know who these people driving hate campaigns are.

You don't get to to anonymously build millions of followers, solicit millions of dollars in donations and fundraising, be involved in our political system, and then cry anonymity.

No, like you are a, you are a public figure and you just deserve scrutiny.

Period.

So the doxing allegations, and this isn't really like the story of libs of TikTok, and so it doesn't really matter, but I do want to like, I think the wrath of her following and the amount of well-connected right-wing influence that she has is really well represented by what you went through.

So, do you want to like briefly explain what happened after you published the story and like notably the billboard?

Oh my God.

Yeah, I almost forgot about the billboard.

What happened after I published the story is a cycle that I've unfortunately been through several times at this point, which is the right-wing media sort of like machine coming at you.

I was very quickly doxxed.

All of my family members were doxed.

Everyone affiliated with me was harassed.

My family members, some people in my family were swatted.

People tried to get, you know,

target LGBTQ members of my family saying that they should have their children taken away and trying to kind of take steps to initiate that.

I mean, it was just crazy.

Like they obviously, they got Tim Poole

got, who's a far-right influencer on YouTube, got put out a big Times Square billboard saying Taylor Lorenz doxed libs of TikTok.

I mean, it just, yeah, it was like this whole dog and pony show that they do every time they don't like a story.

I mean, it is the Gamergate playbook, right?

It's like, let's dox and harass and destroy this woman's life and launch this smear campaign and make her controversial and target her employer and try and get her fired.

And, you know, like all of this stuff that they do.

And it was crazy.

It was, it was really crazy, especially because then you, then you see Haya out there claiming persecution.

Meanwhile, she's got every single right-wing person backing her.

Like I'm like on my own, you know, like I have no, I don't have millions of dollars.

I can't run to, you know, whatever.

I think she said like Ted Cruz or some politician was offering her like hiding or something.

Like I don't have any of that.

I'm just a journalist.

And, you know, thankfully I had the Washington Post behind me.

But yeah, it was, it was crazy.

It was, it was crazy.

I remember watching it from afar.

And first of all, I was one of, I was like, I mean, obviously there are thousands of targets of higher rate chick at this point and thousands of people that Libs of TikTok has posted.

I'm one of them.

I was one of the early ones.

I fortunately was posted on Libs of TikTok when her following was still in the lower hundreds of thousands.

Also, like, people didn't really come after me in that way.

And also, like, people have always come.

came after me and like these specific types of people like they've always called me a pedophile they've always called me a groomer so i was like yeah yeah whatever it's tuesday i remember seeing the billboard.

I remember, first of all, I remember being extremely grateful for your reporting around what was going on because it meant a lot to me personally and also me as, you know, a queer community member that you were doing that.

And I will never stop thanking you for that and for writing that piece.

But I remember seeing what was going on and the stuff around it.

And then I saw the billboard, which was, yeah, it was a fucking Times Square billboard that says, Taylor Lorenz doxed Libs of TikTok, which by the way, you found her identity using publicly available information.

I just want to be clear, I definitely did not dox her.

Like, doxing is like revealing non-like private information.

And I never linked to any address.

You know, I never linked to her home address.

People were like, oh, you linked to her home address.

No, I did not.

Absolutely not.

She tweeted her own address out.

Like I said, she tweeted that picture of me on her doorstep that showed the street that she lived on and the house that she lived at before I even published the story.

And all I said in my story is that she lived in in Los Angeles.

I did not dox her in any meaningful way, in any way.

Right.

Right.

In any meaningful or

non-meaningful way.

So after you publish this article, Haya, first of all, you know, aside from all of the railing against you that happens, which goes on for a long time, by the way, it was like, it felt like months that they were just going after you.

They're still going after me, man.

It's still, I still have her fans in my mentions.

Yeah.

Well, you know, for what it's worth, same.

Yeah.

Haya is like, I am going to

make my play, and I'm going to use this to become a celebrity with my face attached instead of an anonymous right-wing celebrity.

The first thing I remember her doing is going on Tucker Carlson, and this is when he still had a show on Fox News, Rest in Peace.

And I want to play for you a slightly less than two-minute clip from that interview where,

well, let's just watch.

What is going on here?

Do you have any theories?

I think

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 of these things.

And it's really, really hard to get out of it.

It's really difficult.

And there are studies on this.

Like,

there's been a lot of reporting on this about people, parents who are like, you know, my child is starting to say, you know, that they're non-binary or transgender or whatever.

And what do I do?

How do I stop this?

And it's really, really difficult.

It's unlike anything we've ever seen, I think.

It's extremely poisonous.

Do you see a spiritual component to any of this?

You don't have to answer that if you don't want.

Yeah, I don't know.

Well, I do.

I do.

I don't think this makes sense at all.

No,

it doesn't make any sense.

And

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, and whatever.

And I think sometimes the simplest answer is like, they're just evil.

They're bad people.

They're just evil people.

And they want to

and they want to groom kids.

Yeah.

They're recruiting.

This is one of my favorite videos because it's like so revealing of what I said earlier about Haya not really

having like the most developed belief system in the sense that like Tucker asks her one question about like, do you think there's a spiritual component?

And she obviously doesn't know what he means.

And she's like, I don't know.

And all she can say and all she can repeat is this, they're just grooming kids.

They're just grooming kids.

And I just think they're bad people and they're grooming cats.

And she doesn't really have much to say beyond that.

And like you said, Taylor, she strikes me as someone who would really struggle to have a career as an influencer if it were not for this very specific thing that she's chosen to do where she doesn't have to say much at all.

Exactly.

I mean, I think she doesn't have very sophisticated

political beliefs or a very sophisticated ideology.

It's just all predicated on like hate.

And she is very much the one in the cold.

I mean, you see, listen to her talk about things like the LGBTQ agenda and all this stuff.

It's like...

She's brainwashed.

She's brainwashed by conservative media that's told her to sort of villainize this oppressed group.

But she can't even really understand why.

It's just sort of like she's adopted this ideology.

I think partially because it plays well online.

I think also partially she probably believes it herself, but she doesn't really understand why.

And she certainly can't talk about it in any kind of like thoughtful detail.

No, she can't.

And

I love that when she's like, it's a cult, you know, there are studies on this.

I love that.

Whenever people really have nothing to say or nothing to back up their point, people love to say there are studies on this.

And what I love is that Tucker does not, notably, does not ask her about where those studies are.

It's great.

It's great.

I love that clip.

I mean, I don't love that clip, but you know.

You can also find studies to say anything.

Literally.

Yeah.

There's no, there's like there's right-wing studies, right-wing think tanks that promote wild studies.

You can literally find a study to back up anything you want to say.

That doesn't mean that it's scientific consensus.

And scientific consensus says that gender-affirming care is good for trans people and LGBTQ people are not.

There's not something like medically wrong with them or psychologically wrong with them.

And, you know, she's talking about stripping people's identity and like ignoring their sexuality where she's saying like, oh, it's really hard to get people out of this cult.

It's like, you're trying to turn gay people straight.

You know, like, yeah, it's not a cult.

It's just that you are refusing to recognize their identity and their sexual orientation.

I almost feel like it's

besides the point to try, unfortunately, to try to contend with the things that she says because they're so far gone.

Yeah, anyway, I can't even contend with the things that she says is my point.

So Libs of TikTok is a really great example of what people are calling stochastic terrorism.

And this is a really important concept to understanding this episode and to understanding Libs of TikTok and why what she's doing matters beyond just that it makes life online harder for for queer people and queer teachers.

So stochastic terrorism is, here's the definition, it's the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable, but whose specifics cannot be predicted.

And so what that basically means is if you have a bunch of really powerful people with really big audiences demonizing a person or a group.

So queer people.

The idea behind stochastic terrorism is that a violent act, you know, a shooting, a bomb,

a bomb threat, whatever, some act of violence will probably occur at some point.

And we can't exactly say when, but the fact that all of these, you know, big media heads and influencers and right-wing news people are demonizing this group consistently means that we know it's probably going to happen.

Weiss just published an article the other day that I was reading in preparation for this episode, which detailed 11 different schools that have received bomb threats just in the last month and whose bomb threats were connected to Libs of TikTok in the sense that Libs of TikTok posted a picture or a video of a teacher or a faculty member that works at these schools and bomb threats ensued.

And so I'm going to read an overview of some of these and so, you know, strap in everybody.

Western Heights School in Oklahoma City was targeted in three Libs of TikTok posts between September 9th and September 14th.

During this time, Oklahoma's state superintendent of education posted a photo with Raychik and praised her as doing more for transparency and accountability in schools than most elected officials.

An elementary school in Western Heights received a bomb threat on September 15th, one day later.

Witchcraft Heights Elementary School in Salem, Massachusetts was targeted in a Libs of TikTok post on September 12th.

The school received emailed bomb threats on September 15th, 19th, and the 21st, prompting evacuations.

Anoka Hennepin, sorry if I'm butchering the pronunciation there, school district in Minnesota was targeted in libs of TikTok posts on September 13th and 14th.

They received a bomb threat by email on September 15th.

Red Oak School, an elementary school in the suburb of Chicago, was featured in a libs of TikTok post on September 15th.

The elementary school received three threats over the course of four days.

Children were evacuated from school following the first two threats.

These are elementary schools.

Davis Joint Unified School District in California was targeted in two separate Libs of TikTok posts on September 19th and 22nd and received bomb threats on September 20th and 25th.

On both occasions, the threats indicated that bombs have been placed in the homes of school district officials and in certain schools in the district.

We're almost there.

Pulaski High School in Wisconsin was targeted in a Libs of TikTok post on September 20th.

The school was evacuated on September 22nd and again on September 26th.

Due to two separate bomb threats, Brownsville Elementary School in Kitsap, Washington was targeted by Libs of TikTok on September 21st.

On September 25th, the school was evacuated due to an emailed bomb threat.

We're really, you know, saving the children here.

Cherry Creek High School District in Colorado was targeted by Libs of TikTok.

And on September 22nd, they received bomb threats against several schools and administrative buildings that same day.

Denver Public Schools were targeted.

You get the point.

I'm actually going to stop reading these.

You get the point.

There have also been, as we've said, hospital bomb threats to hospitals that may or may not provide gender-affirming care.

Bomb threats to librarians' houses.

And then there's like the stuff that wasn't just threats, you know, like when the Club Q shooting happened and when recently a woman shop owner was killed outside of her shop in California, people quickly connected these to right-wing influencers, including Libs of TikTok.

So what does Haya say when she's publicly connected to all of these bomb threats and sometimes actual acts of violence?

So the advocate this past week reported on a bunch of the bomb threats that I just described and in an article titled, Schools Keep Receiving Bomb Threats After Libs of TikTok posts about them.

Kaya, on her personal account, once again, tweeted a screenshot of that article and wrote, the quote, dangerous cusp of online rhetoric, unquote, that the advocate is so terrified of is called reposting the left's own words.

They really hate when their own views are shared more widely.

Why is that?

And so it's like, again,

people are like, Haya, right after you posted about these 11 different schools, they all received bomb threats.

Save the children, by the way.

And then she's like, she does this plausible deniability thing.

I just want to say, like, once again, she's lying.

Like, she's lying.

She has no legitimate plausible deniability here.

She's causing these bomb threats.

She's, her actions are directly leading to these bomb threats.

And she can try and weasel out of it however she wants by misrepresenting the content on her own account.

But it's out there for everyone to see.

Her comments are out there for everyone to see.

And, you know, she's just lying.

Another thing that happened last week on her Twitter account was a journalist named Zach Shermiel.

Again, I'm sorry if I'm butchering that, but he said,

he's a journalist at USA Today.

And he DM'd her and he said, hi there, my name is Zach and I'm a reporter at USA Today.

We are writing a story about the bomb threat threat on Fresno State University's campus that occurred this week targeting a professor whose pronoun policy your organization criticized in a tweet on Wednesday.

Wondering if your organization has any comment on this incident.

I am filing the story in the next hour.

Thanks.

She responded to his DM and then screenshotted it and tweeted it on her account.

She wrote, you have pronouns in your bio, which tells me that nothing you say should be taken seriously.

And it's like,

is this where we're at?

That you can cause a bomb threat on a a school?

And then when someone asks you about said bomb threat, you go, you have he, him, in your bio.

So I'm not addressing you and I'm not taking this inquiry seriously.

Well, the subtext there is that he's a member, like she believes him to be a member of the LGBTQ community and she does, she refuses to engage with actual LGBTQ people, you know?

She's like, she's implying that he's not worth speaking to and doesn't deserve a response because he somehow ascribes to, yeah, those beliefs.

My question for you, Taylor, is what do we do?

Like, who can we hold accountable for making this stop or at least navigating around it?

Is it social media platforms?

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's bigger than social media platforms.

Ideally, a platform like Twitter would police this sort of hate.

And, you know, platforms like YouTube, for instance, other major social platforms do take into account offline behavior and activity.

Like, I mean, Alex Jones was banned from YouTube, not necessarily from what he said on YouTube, but from a lot of his behavior outside of YouTube as well.

And I think you can very clearly see Haya's behavior and sort of what she's inciting as incitement of violence.

I mean, she's directly inciting violence with her tweets.

She should not have access to the audience that she does if she's going to use it, you know, to incite violence.

But But of course, Elon supports these violent campaigns, right?

And so he's never going to police it.

I think we have a much bigger problem than that, though, because I think that people don't seem to understand the urgency of

these sorts of hate campaigns.

Like we've seen a huge resurgence in anti-LGBTQ hate in the past few years.

I think it's been normalized.

partially through the mainstream media as well and just in culture and politics.

So it's not enough to just ban libs of TikTok, right?

We need politicians and members of

political parties to also care about protecting LGBTQ rights.

And we need

a media that also recognizes it and doesn't both sides the issue or

do what the New York Times has been doing with their trans coverage, which is basically launder a bunch of far-right anti-trans talking points through the guise of a neutral article.

I think the problem is bigger than libs of TikTok, but yeah, I mean, it would be great to see her her reach restricted because of how she's using her platform.

Um, I don't think that'll ever happen on Twitter.

And, you know, I mean, she's on Instagram and other platforms too, and they seem totally fine monetizing hate.

It's disappointing that all of these platforms will fundamentally allow the monetization of hate because it drives engagement and they have business models built on monetizing engagement.

Yeah, I actually had a meeting recently with a queer colleague of mine and a bunch of people who work at Meta and my colleague who I'm not going to name in case they don't want you know me to talk about them in the story but both basically like you know can you please do something about all of the super far right-wing hate groups that you're allowing on Instagram that have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.

Libs of TikTok has 400,000 followers on Instagram.

Gays Against Groomers has 400,000 followers on Instagram.

And they were like, well, you know, and I was like, these are hate groups.

They're called a hate group.

I went to Gays Against Groomers Wikipedia and it was described as a hate group.

And they were like, well, that's Wikipedia calling it a hate group.

And I was like, are you fucking kidding me?

They were like, well, anyone can call anything a hate group.

And I'm like, and the world is made of pudding.

Right.

Also, no, not anyone can

reliably call someone a hate group.

There are actual hate groups and then there are not hate groups.

And you can call certain things a hate group.

That doesn't mean that it's right.

But Gays Against Groomers is a hate group.

Lives Against TikTok TikTok is a hate account.

I mean,

these are hateful, far-right, extremist media properties.

And we should absolutely treat them that way.

They're there to promote a very regressive and terrifying kind of political agenda that restricts the rights of LGBTQ people, women, people of color.

And yeah, I mean, Facebook obviously has no spine, right?

Like they'll, they'll go ahead and block newsworthy terms on threads or whatever, showing that they can actually moderate content very strictly.

And then they'll allow stuff like this to flourish because fundamentally they are able to monetize it.

And this is why we're never going to get, I mean, you can never trust corporations to defend LGBTQ rights.

They're not going to.

Look at what Bud Light did with Dylan, right?

Like they'll hang, they'll hang LGBTQ people out to dry every single time, right?

Aside from even when if they have their like corporate pride month in June, right?

Like none of that matters.

A corporation is never going to defend human rights generally.

So we need people in power to hold corporations and hold people accountable and to push and to change culture.

Like we need it, we need to make it socially acceptable not to launch hate campaigns against gay people.

That should not be socially acceptable.

Yeah.

And when the people in power, and by that I mean CEOs of tech companies and politicians and people allowing libs of TikTok to flourish across multiple social media platforms when they are like, well, we can't do anything about this because free speech is really complicated.

It's like, you're the people ultimately legitimizing hate campaigns against like a random gay teacher.

Also, yeah, it's not even like a free speech issue in my opinion.

It's like you are directly inciting violent acts.

Don't do that.

Don't do that.

Don't do that with your account or, you know, don't amplify it.

Like these platforms amplify this content.

They suggest libs of TikTok to other users.

You know, if you follow certain accounts, I followed, I think it was RFK the other day, but, you know, you get a dropdown dropdown list and you're prompted to follow a lot of other extremist accounts.

That's dangerous.

We shouldn't be doing that, right?

But of course, these platforms have shown time and time and time again that they're perfectly happy to champion hate campaigns and hateful people and bigotry as long as it allows them to profit.

And let's be clear, they're profiting very heavily off it.

Meta and Twitter and all these platforms, they're profiting off that hate and engagement that's generated from these accounts like Lives of TikTok.

So before we go, I want to talk about one post from Lives of TikTok that went particularly viral in the last week.

And it was not of a teacher.

It was not of a parent.

It was not of a social worker or a doctor or a school or a hospital.

It was just a queer adult.

So Livs of TikTok made this post where they just posted what looked like a professional portrait of someone named Tyler Cherry.

So Tyler Cherry is currently a communication director for the Secretary of Interior for the Biden-Harris administration.

And Haya basically just posted his professional work portrait.

And it's just, you know, what looks like a visibly queer person.

He looks young, maybe 30 years old.

He's wearing a black turtleneck and a striped white and navy blazer and some like gold hoop earrings.

And this got nearly, according to Twitter, which I don't even believe these numbers, I think Elon inflates them

to look good for advertisers.

But according to Twitter, the post got 26 million impressions.

And it did get, and this, you know, we can see, it got 12,000 replies from people making, you know, jabs at this person.

The reason this stood out to me so much is like, even if you buy into TikTok or libs of TikTok's main premise which is that they're here to you know save the children from gay teachers or whatever this person isn't even a teacher he doesn't work with kids in any capacity he's a government official who wore earrings and so I thought this was extremely revealing of what Haya Rachik is actually about, which is not saving children.

I think we already knew that based on the amount of bomb threats that she's causing on children's schools, which she seems to not care about.

But it's not about saving children.

It's just about...

Someone screenshotted that post that she made and was basically like, why would she do this?

Is the point just to be mean

and just to be a bully?

And someone named Max Fox quote tweeted that and wrote, the point is to construct a society that does not allow queerness in public.

And ideologically, I thought that was a really astute way of putting her primary goal.

What do you think?

100% agree.

I think that's a really good way to explain what she wants to do, which is drive queer people out of public life and, you know, assert very specific gender roles and this very sort of restrictive and toxic gender binary.

I mean, you also see her promote a lot of misogynistic stuff too, not just against trans people, but even cis women, like because she believes in this really regressive worldview where cute earrings, if you're, you know, identify as male or whatever, right?

It's just, it's about conformity and it's about driving queer and all LGBTQ people out of public life, out of schools, out of everything.

She doesn't want them to exist and it's horrifying.

So as I promised, we're going to hear directly from some people who have been targeted by higher a chick and lips of TikTok.

But Taylor, I want to let you go.

I know you've had a long day and you continue to have a long day.

I know releasing a book and promoting it is a ton of work, but I want to say before you go, where can people find you and support your work?

Well, I have a YouTube now, so follow, subscribe to my YouTube.

It's just Taylor Lorenz.

I'm also on TikTok and Instagram and Blue Sky and Threads, pretty much everywhere except Twitter.

And your book.

Oh, yeah.

Obviously, buy my book.

My book.

Don't you forget.

I'm so fried.

My new book is called Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

It's all about the rise of the social media sort of influencer ecosystem.

It's a lot about sort of like the people that pioneered the internet, which is actually a lot of LGBTQ people and women who have been very written out of the history of social media, you know, as told through Silicon Valley narrative.

So yeah, please get it.

It's on sale now.

Taylor is extremely, you know, nothing if not thorough and vicious in her pursuit of the stories that she's telling.

And I can't recommend just following along with her and her work enough.

Taylor, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you for having me.

So we've been talking a lot this past hour about anyone who is in the line of fire of Hia Ray Chick and Libs of TikTok.

And as promised, let's hear from them.

Hi, my name is

and I'm up in Canada.

Last year, a teacher here, who is also a Drake performer, was doing a Dre Queen story time in a park where he was physically assaulted by protesters.

The protesters actually stepped on children to get near to the performer.

This obviously hit the news, which caught the attention of Libs of TikTok.

And she

tweeted out a video of

in his high school art classroom

as a TikTok, and he's just showing like lights and the decor.

And of course, that went viral.

And then Marjorie Taylor Green also picked that up and tweeted that to her followers.

And overnight,

aka Mr.

got tens of thousands of death threats overnight.

He had to leave his job and he ended up trying to unalive himself.

Has pulled through.

I'm not sure if he's working at the moment, but yes, an absolute victim

of loads of TikTok

and we're in Canada.

It's fucked up.

In my town, I'm a sophomore.

I'm 16.

I live in a small town in California and about nine or ten weeks ago, the anti-trans group Moms for Liberty had an information setting, you can't see my body, but I'm doing air quotes, about trans girls in sports at our local library.

And some friends and I, along with community members, went to the library to do a sit-in protest against them.

And before this happened, the library staff outlined the rules of the library, right?

They outlined how respect and a bunch of other core principles were important to the library.

And if people violated those rules, they would be asked to leave.

And part of that was respecting people's identity and people's pronouns.

And this was told to us and the anti-trans hate group Moms for Liberty, Liberty, which has a chapter in our town, and they were the one doing the information setting.

Anyway, in short, they continuously violated the library's guidelines, so individual speakers, and then the entire group was asked to leave.

During this time, they verbally harassed us, they physically harassed us.

It was very scary, especially as a young kid, but that's not what this is about.

They recorded it for the intention of suing the library, but it made made its way onto Fox News and Libs of TikTok.

And because of that, our school district has had almost seven straight weeks of bomb threats.

Like there hasn't been a week where there hasn't been between one and three bomb threats.

Each one attached is a horrifically anti-queer and anti-trans

message that are just so scary to read.

My school has been closed significantly.

Other schools have been closed significantly.

Our high schools, our middle schools, our elementary schools,

some of our elementary schools are connected to preschools.

Our library has been review bombed.

Our library has been threatened.

So have the staff and individual people and politicians in our town.

The library is right next to our local high school and our local, one of our local elementary schools and they've been attacked.

repeatedly.

It's really, really scary, especially because some of the people in these anti-trans groups are significant members of our society and hold positions of power which is really scary to see

anyway

it's a hard time especially as a student especially as a trans kid but

what's been really hopeful and really beautiful to see is that earlier this week we had a big show of solidarity for trans kids and queer kids and we had a lot of supporters and we had a big letter of support and that was really beautiful to see because there is hope out there but uh anyway fuck lips of TikTok, fuck turfs, and why in the world will you say that you're protecting kids and then attack their schools?

So, I used to work at an elementary school, I was an assistant teacher in a sixth-grade language arts classroom.

And on the first day of school, a couple years ago, I posted on my personal Instagram account, and in the photo, I was standing in my classroom, and I I had a beard and eyeliner and eyeshadow.

And in the caption, I was basically sharing joy that I was openly using they, them pronouns and using the gender-neutral honorific mix as opposed to mister.

and

just kind of sharing joy that my administration and my staff and my students and their parents and families were supporting me and were very kind and accepting of my identity.

The school year went on without any hiccups having to do with my identity and then nine months later

my photo ended up being posted on Libs of TikTok

and immediately tens of thousands of people had seen it and commented on it and were saying nasty things about me, about my appearance.

They called me a groomer.

They called me a pedophile.

They told me I deserved to be put in a gas chamber.

In the photo my school's name was

was on a lanyard that I was wearing, and they doxxed me, and they found my home address, and they found my elementary school's address, all the way down to the classroom number, the specific classroom number that I was teaching in.

Fortunately for me, my staff and my administration and my whole community who had seen the photo and a lot of my students had seen the photo and seen the nasty things being said about me, everyone was very supportive.

And the school district collaborated with the local police department to kind of monitor some of those death threats and make sure that I was safe and that the students were safe and luckily nothing went on further.

However, I did make the decision to leave the education field altogether.

At that point, I knew that I had wanted to medically transition and come out as a trans woman.

And that experience with being posted on libs of TikTok made me realize that it was not a safe environment for me to do that politically.

And I just wanted to be able to transition in peace.

So I unfortunately made the decision to leave education altogether.

The decision to leave the education field was really heartbreaking to me.

I loved my job.

I loved working with my sixth graders.

And I'm not ashamed to say that I was most kids' favorite teacher.

I was very scared when that photo went viral.

I was very scared when I was receiving death threats.

I was very scared when people had my home address and my classroom's address and room number.

But I knew it was the right choice for me to go, and it was time for me to transition out of the education field so that I could feel safe and happy and peaceful to do what I needed to do.

Hi, I'm a kindergarten teacher at a public school and I got canceled on Libs of TikTok earlier this year.

At our back to school kindergarten events, somebody took a picture in our classroom of me reading to the kids and in the background you could see our pride flag

and

that along with like another photo that was taken at some point from someone looking into our classroom got leaked on libs of tick tock and they interviewed a parent in my class.

They found all of my social media and everything about me, even though I rapidly tried to cleanse myself from the internet.

They still found like my mom and my mom's work address.

And it got so intense that I missed over a week of work until the district could implement a safety plan.

So

included in there are things like school police was there on my return to school and

I like get escorted in and out of the building.

And the pride flag is still up because it is protected.

But it was not a great start to the year and has continued to be a pretty traumatizing event.

So that's my Libs of TikTok story.

My cousin's elementary school in Illinois had to evacuate two days in a row because it received bomb threats.

She asked me, Why are people trying to kill me and my teachers for being who we are and for loving everyone?

Her and her parents, who are both teachers, should not have to be scared to go to school and work because a faculty member or district supports the LGBTQ

community.

But I truly want to share this story.

So I am an educator who

works in a

public school, elementary school, in a district that just received bomb threats three days in a row.

Most likely, I'm assuming, from connected to the libs of TikTok because

we had a picture shared on their profile

of just students playing a board game.

That was what it was for, but then there was a pride flag in the background, so it was shared, and 17,000 hits occurred and then there was a bomb threat so what is unique about and sad but unique about our story is that

I mean everyone had a difficult time coming out of COVID obviously so education's been a bit rough the previous summer in my district there was a mass shooting during July 4th and then

We just started to figure out

how to get along, how to work past that, and then there's a bomb threat to our specific school because pride flags that are up.

The challenge of that day was trying to remain hopeful and trying to help these students know that there's still good in the world.

The story that I like to share that I think really shows the impact of what all these things are.

So, again, these are children that had a run from a gun being shot at them during a celebration of a holiday for our nation.

You could probably feel the irony within all that.

But so as adults in a building, we're fairly certain the threat isn't real, but you know, we have to take things seriously.

My main role in the school is to work, is to help people with their social-emotional health and well-being.

And so I run to the fifth grade class, being the oldest, but also because they had a sub.

And so,

you know, subs don't know what the hell to do in that situation.

So I go there.

and take charge and we walk across the street to our you know location our evacuation location

And I'm walking and I as an adult am, again, fairly certain that everything is okay, but I'm still looking the scene because what if, what if there's a shooter that's just going to take us all out because we're all walking in a line to a different location?

True to these children's spirit, we were able to clear a school of 300 people in less than two minutes because they know what to do in situations like this, which again, sad mark for American education.

But the story we want to share, so I'm walking across the street with a 10-year-old,

just a lovely human being, has the biggest heart I've ever met in a 10-year-old.

And they're silently crying because what else can they do?

Tears are coming down their face.

They turn to me and I know this child.

I know this child on July 4th, a full year, two years ago, I guess now, but...

hid in a dumpster for three hours for their own safety, knowing that their parents ran back into a parade to help other people because their parents are educators and first responders.

And they knew that, but they hid in a dumpster until they were safe again.

But this child turns to me, looks at me with the fear in her eyes, looks, are we going to die today?

And I don't know how to answer that question to a 10-year-old because that should just never be what a child asks.

So I look back and I go, honey, I'm walking here and I'm right here with you.

Because in that moment, that's all I could do.

I'm fairly certain we weren't, but I can't make that promise anymore because that child has experienced more death threats in their life than I have.

And I'm decades older than them.

At the same time, that's all I could do is be with that person.

Because in a moment of panic and terror,

The thing that's going to get us through is looking at each other's humanity and being with the person in front of us.

And so my school was definitely affected by someone posting on social media.

Because how dare we have a parade flag in our background?

Now, how dare we try to promote inclusivity for those who may have feel marginalized in life?

How dare we try to promote kindness and accepting of others and knowing that you're not going to get along with every human being, but you could treat the human in front of you with dignity, the same dignity you want.

And gratefully, these children understand it.

They've been through shit already in their lives, but they have, they're coming out stronger.

And so that's the reason why you can't kick me out of my place of work, no matter how much people are going to try,

how much they're going to use terror and fear tactics to try to get adults to stop doing things that are right.

Again, I could give a shit how a person identifies on a gender spectrum, on a sexuality spectrum.

I do not care.

That's everyone's own personal understanding of who they are.

And

who am I to say who you are?

You know yourself best.

The only thing I'm called to do is to care for one another.

And

that's in itself is a challenge, especially when I'm still called to care for those who want to seek harm on me.

and those I love.

But that's what it was like receiving a bomb threat connected to lips of TikTok.

So that's our show for today.

As always, and especially if you've made it this far, from the very bottom of my little gay heart, thank you.

If you'd like to support the show, you can give us a little rating on whatever app you're listening on, and please follow us on that app so you're reminded each week when we release a new episode.

If you didn't like the show, as always, please don't give us a rating.

Feel free to share this episode with a friend, with your mom, with your cousin who may or may not be going down a right-wing right-wing misinformation rabbit hole on Facebook.

Maybe they'll give us a shot.

I'll see you next week, and until then, stay fruity.