Today, Explained - ok groomer

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

Accounts like “Libs of TikTok” are fueling right-wing media to label people who speak openly about sexuality and gender as “groomers.” Vox’s Aja Romano and the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz explain this age-old practice. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Will Reid, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coming up on Today Explained, you've heard of OK Boomer, but maybe not OK Groomer? In the last couple of months, conservative politicians and conservative media personalities and various social media accounts and influencers have been pushing the idea that liberals and queer people and queer allies and trans people and trans allies are quote unquote groomers. This idea really got started around the public debate over Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill. And then it started popping up all over social media. It started popping up during, for example, confirmation hearing for Justice Ron Jackson. And I think from there, it's kind of become almost meme-ified, except that people are taking it very seriously. The bizarre, though very serious, accusations being lobbed online, and one particular Twitter account doing a lot of the lobbing, ahead on Today Explained. delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points.

Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today Explained, I'm Sean Ramos-Furham, and just a heads up, today's show features discussion of pedophilia and sex abuse. That is what this whole groomer thing is really about. Asia Romano has been covering the story for Vox. What exactly does it mean to be a groomer, Asia? The idea of grooming has a couple of definitions. The most literal definition refers to a person who's in a position of power

over someone who's much more vulnerable than them, either a small child or a teen or sometimes a much younger adult. How did you get them alone? Grooming. It's when they conditioned them over time to accept sexual abuse. When we were on the ballparks or on the gym floor, you know, I would make sure which ones I wanted to molest. I would give them special attention, congratulate them.

I would give them the attention that an official is not supposed to give anybody. And it made them feel like, wow, he's paying me attention. In the less literal sense, it can be when they condition them over time to accept some other sort of abuse. The expanded version basically seems like grooming is being used to brand pretty much any and all ways in which liberals in general, but especially teachers, talk about various ideas that the extreme right has coded as left wing. Now, if the last two weeks have taught us anything, it's that the left is obsessed with teaching children about sexual and gender identity. Anybody who suggests that, say, the definition of gender is fluid or that people exist on a spectrum,

they would be considered to be, quote-unquote, grooming their students. What's happening in our schools is sexual influence peddling. And if you want to protect your kids, you have to get up to speed on what your kids are being subjected to at school. So sometimes the accusation might be that they are literally grooming them to be preyed upon by child predators. But it more generally seems to be that they are grooming them for liberal indoctrination. What we're talking about here more broadly is sort of a really extreme assertion that talking about homosexuality or queerness or even gender is somehow some form of pedophilia or predatory sexual behavior. Right. That's an idea that has long existed

among homophobic rhetoric in the US and all over the world. This false, obviously very false, association of homosexuality with pedophilia and child predators has been used to marginalize queer people for centuries. And it seemed as though

around the time that gay marriage became constitutional in the U.S. that conservatives had largely lost the culture war on this specific issue. Listen, I've been around for a long time. The pendulum always swings. Will it swing back to that type of small closed window? More than likely it will. So in the meantime, we're enjoying drag race. Within the last decade, basically, I think the far right has pivoted to discussing transgenderism and progressive thought on gender in general, and has sort of used that to really stoke reactionary fervor against the LGBTQ community because they sort of started by attacking the idea that trans

people should have the right to express their gender or express their identity through use of pronouns, for example. Well, for all of our lives, we've lived in a world of boys and girls, but that is changing along with everything else in 2017 in Canada. And now that they've sort of really made headway on that, we're seeing the resurgence of all these very homophobic laws across the US. And so I think to mainstream America, a lot of this probably sounds very arcane and even Byzantine, but for the extreme right wing, these ideas have always been a huge threat to America. And I think that the fact that they are now essentially directly trying to equate homosexuality and queer identity and genderqueer identity with child molestation shows how confident they are and that they've realized that if they can conflate these things

together, they can actually make regressive strides in turning the public against gay rights and against the rights of trans people. And how is this panic manifesting in our country right now? I mean, I think we're seeing it kind of come out all over the place and sort of crawl out of the woodwork, as it were. For example, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow was accused by her fellow state Senator Lana Theis of grooming and sexualizing children. And so she sort of went viral a couple of days ago in her response to this, basically calling out the absurdity of it. People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that health care costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession. I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight, white and Christian. But I think that just sort of tells you, you know, this is happening among politicians accusing each other of being groomers without necessarily any direct connection to reality at all.

Another example you might recall if you watched any of the confirmation hearings for Justice Brown Jackson was that Republicans kept emphasizing her sentencing history when it came to child pornographers. Look, as I listened to your testimony, I believe you are someone who is compassionate. I believe you care for children, obviously your children and other children. But I also see a record of activism and advocacy as it concerns sexual predators. They were accusing her of giving them lenient sentences and being, quote unquote, soft on them. And they really kind of leaned in hard to that accusation, even though it really didn't hold up. As a mother and a judge who has had to deal with these cases, I was thinking that nothing could be further from the truth.

And then we're also seeing it play out, obviously, among ordinary people, too, because the more things like this flourish, the more it sort of builds up and sort of pops out when you least expect it to attack you in real life, you know? I'm just here to tell you that what you're supporting is grooming little children. What you're saying is I am an adult that wants to talk about sex to six, seven, and eight-year-olds. And I'm an adult who tells you that that's sick. Well, one of the more frequent ways you might have seen if you've been spending any time online is people accosting other people by replying to them on social media with the words, OK, groomer. Kind of like, OK, boomer, but the pedophile version. Yes. A way of basically dismissing whatever they're saying by lumping them in with child predators and child sexual abusers. Partly this is a meme. It's been around for a while. It's basically become

a way of kind of shorthanding the groomer accusation in one very pithy response. But I think it also functions as a dog whistle to sort of identify people you've labeled and targeted as being liberal and or promoting the queer or gender queer agenda, whatever objection you have this day of the week. This all sounds sort of reminiscent of QAnon, which is, as we've covered on the show before, this conspiracy that the former president is going to save the children from a cabal of left-leaning pedophiles. Is that where this is sort of coming from? Right. It's almost identical to QAnon in a lot of ways. The cause

sounds good, save the children. But nationally, some rallies have been tied to bizarre conspiracy theories involving pedophilia and the Democratic Party. But of course, just like QAnon, the historical roots of this go much, much farther back. You can trace it back to centuries because the tropes that comprise QAnon and this new groomer variant, as it were, are essentially exactly the same as tropes we've seen dating back to the Middle Ages.

Wow, a house made of gingerbread. Come on in, my darlings. The best candies are inside. You know, there have been conspiracy theories about shadowy figures kidnapping and abusing children for centuries, often baked in with a lot of anti-Semitism, a lot of witchcraft and satanic rites. You know, particularly in the Middle Ages, you saw a lot of witch hunts, a lot of like blood libel conspiracies. By blood libel, I mean that they were conspiracies that explicitly posited that Jewish people were murdering young Christian children.

And then we saw a huge resurgence of that in the early 20th century, go figure, and then saw it again sort of revive and recycle itself in the mid to late 1970s, which sort of paved the way for the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s. Daily, nearly moment by moment, young people are bombarded by distorted visual images and twisted music messages that are saturating their minds and, yes, sabotaging their futures. The same exact tropes, the same exact panicking over kids being abducted and forced into satanic rites involving ritual, something that began to be called ritual sexual abuse.

It's basically kind of a glorified urban legend. It just keeps getting recycled. began to be called ritual sexual abuse. It's basically kind of a glorified urban legend. It just keeps getting recycled. You know, it's that horror story you tell around the campfire, except people have expanded it into political rhetoric and used it to justify mass genocide and persecution and marginalization of people for centuries. And this latest iteration is finding no greater quarter than in Florida. Florida, of course, was in the media because of the don't say gay law. But I think we've continued to see the controversy over that law play out now with the Disney protests. The corruption of the LGBTQ queer gay trans vibe. You got to expose all that wokeness

and get them out of this Disney mindset. And we're seeing people protesting outside Disney every day, holding up signs that say Disney is grooming kids. It's not just about Disney with the 666 right there. It's not just that. It's the fact that child traffickers get to go free. So that's a whole other extension of the original debate. And the fact that Disney is now embroiled in a fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis

over its financial status and all its tax breaks because it spoke out against the Don't Say Gay law. As promised, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signing a law ending Disney's self-government and tax breaks. Because these conspiracies always have the same structure, you know, American history, just independently of conspiracies, has always been sort of flavored with this paranoiac tendency to believe that there are secret parts of the government that are in league against them, right? We are sort of primally conditioned to believe this sort of conspiracy without a lot of pushback or resistance. And because conservative activists are also using charged terminology like groomer to sort of trigger your alarmism and trigger all your hand-wringing and fear about kids, that just makes it spread further.

In a minute, on Today Explained, the one Twitter account driving a ton of the hysterics around groomers. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained,

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. All right, Ramos Firm, we're back. And now we're going to try and wrap our heads

around one Twitter account that's been driving a lot of the hysterics around groomers. Quite confusingly, this is a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok. Despite the confusion, the accounts racked up nearly a million followers as of publishing time here at Today Explained. Libs of TikTok is primarily a Twitter account, and they basically repost a steady stream of TikTok videos and social media posts, mostly from LGBTQ people, but they include incendiary framing, and it's all sort of framed at generating outrage. So it's finding clips of personal posts from mostly LGBTQ people

and amplifying them for an audience of millions online. Taylor Lorenz writes about technology for the Washington Post, and she recently investigated this account that's been massively successful at pushing the idea that liberal teachers and others are quote unquote grooming kids. This account, it doesn't just exist on Twitter, although it is on Twitter. It has a really popular email newsletter. And the founder of Libs of TikTok has said that anybody that comes out to their students should be basically banned from teaching, should not have a place in school. The goal is to drive hate towards LGBTQ people, specifically trans people. But the power of libs of TikTok isn't just making videos of liberal teachers and others

go viral on Twitter. The key to its success is in who is watching these videos, who is following this account. This account does not exist in a vacuum. It's basically become a wire service for the right-wing media. So anything that this account posts gets nearly immediately picked up by Fox News and the right-wing media ecosystem. The iPhone is obviously rearranging our brains and making us compliant, dumb, and destroying our attention span. But there is an upside. They have video. So a lot of parents all of a sudden know for certain what is happening in their kids' classrooms. It's also followed by tons of really influential lawmakers.

This is now the official line from the White House and the Senate Democrats that child pornography and child exploitation is apparently all just a conspiracy theory. It's impacting legislation. It's gotten tons of people fired. It's ostracized tons of gay and trans people from public life, and it's just hugely influential

in the right-wing media ecosystem. This account has become popular because it exposes to light people on the left and what they say. How dare there be an account that just basically retweets people on the left? Lives of TikTok got its start last April originally, but it wasn't until last August when Joe Rogan started promoting it that it really got traction.

This is all kinds of crazy. It's liberal people. It had tens of thousands of followers and it was gaining prominence by posting these viral videos. But Joe Rogan shouted the account out three times, twice in August and once in September. And every time he did, the account would get a huge boost in August and once in September. And every time he did, the account would get a huge boost in following. Yeah, right. That's right. Libs of TikTok on Twitter

is one of the greatest accounts of all time. Huh. He liked that it was calling out liberals. I mean, something the account constantly purports is, look, we're just showing liberals in their own words. These are videos that gay people are putting out on their own. Yes, but you're completely misrepresenting them and then spoon feeding them to an incredibly homophobic audience.

So it's not sharing gay people's content in their own words. It's sort of taking morsels of private people's internet presence and putting them on blast in front of millions. And I guess that resonated with Rogan because he started promoting it end of last summer. So once Joe Rogan starts promoting it, it really starts to get attention and it starts leaning really hard by the end of the year into this groomer discourse. So a lot of people have sought to kind of tie LGBTQ identities to like pedophilia. Of course, this is a completely baseless and disgusting accusation, but it's just a line used by homophobic people to attack anyone advocating for gay rights.

And so previously, this account had been posting election fraud conspiracies and conspiracies related to Biden. But by the end of last year, it was essentially accusing gay and trans people of being pedophiles and groomers and calling for any teacher that came out as gay to their students to be fired on the spot. And so what is this account posting that's sort of feeding this groomer frenzy? It's just posting a nonstop feed on Instagram and Twitter of this types of commentary. Sometimes it's just tweets to news articles. Sometimes it's tweets to segments. Most of the time it's clips of actual gay and trans people and their private social media posts. So these are just average citizens.

The account will kind of trawl the internet for any gay or trans person that posts, for instance, hey, you know, I want to create an inclusive classroom. And so that's why we ask children their gender. Or it can be another teacher saying, hey, look, you know, if your parents don't accept you, I, you know, consider me your parent and I love you. I accept you and you should be yourself. You know, just like mostly what this account is railing against

is any kind of acceptance. It's just attacking anyone that kind of is saying that it's okay to be LGBTQ. It will imply that that person is grooming children. They will be smeared as a pedophile. Hey, if your parents don't love and accept you for who you are this Christmas, I'm your parents now. I'm proud of you. This viral TikTok has been viewed more than 200,000 times.

It's one that's captured the attention of U.S. Senate candidate Jackson Laumeyer, who called Tyler Wren a predator. They will get dozens or hundreds or sometimes thousands of people contacting the school board. Anybody that's featured on the account gets viciously harassed, doxed, stalked. I mean, everything in the book is thrown at them. The district said, quote, Tyler Wren is no longer in the classroom and the Board of Education accepted his resignation

on April 11th at its regular monthly meeting. The account posts it, Fox News runs it on, you know, Tucker or Laura or something like that. Then this person gets like hellfire rained on them and then they end up maybe getting fired. Is that sort of the life cycle of a video? That's the exact life cycle. Your reporting actually uncovered who was behind this account. I guess they had previously been

anonymous. Who is it running this account? The woman behind the account is this woman named Chaya Raichik. She's a former Brooklyn-based realtor. She lives in California now, according to recent interviews she's done. And this is basically her full-time job at this point. She claims to have attended the January 6th insurrection and actually posted content from behind the barrier right by the Capitol. It matters to think about who's behind these accounts because this account is already influencing policy and public opinion. And I think voters and average people deserve to know,

like, who are these people shaping our politics, right? It's so easy to have these hugely influential social media accounts. We should know about who's behind them and where their funding is coming from as well. What did you discover about funding? Did you discover anything about funding? Yeah, so I discovered that they were funded in part by the Babylon Bee, which is a right-wing

news media company. And they had been monetizing also directly through Venmo donations through Twitter. So this person is making money, this person is building an email news list, and this person is encouraging followers to run for office and reshape public policy. I think all of those things, even on top of the fact that they're also driving all of these right-wing media cycles, makes understanding who this person is

and what their ideology is really important. I think the policies that this account supports and that Raychick has advocated for are super regressive and super anti-LGBTQ, especially the Florida Don't Say Gay bill, which DeSantis' own press secretary said that, you know, her thinking on was completely reshaped by libs of TikTok.

And others have said the same thing. It's also, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene has come out in support of the account. Its impact on lawmakers is significant. And so I think that if you're pumping lawmakers and decision makers full of anti-LGBTQ sentiment all day, that's, yeah, it's impactful. I think that we're seeing this wave of anti-trans legislation and legislation against gay people kind of just become more and more pervasive across America and homophobia is becoming more normalized. And this account has played a crucial role in all of that.

You can read Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post. You can read Asia Romano, who you heard from earlier, at Vox.com. Our program today was produced by Miles Bryan and Will Reed, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Sean Ramos-Fur them. It's Today Explained. you