For those that don't know, "Libs of TikTok" is a Twitter account that specializes in anti-LGBT content, most of it deeply paranoid stuff intended to portray specific LGBT Americans as predators or "groomers." If that sounds familiar, that's not by accident; the account is now wildly popular with the Fox News crowd, with hosts like Laura Ingraham using its content to generate new hate campaigns and death threats. Note that the "groomer" talk has become the latest QAnon-inspired National Republican Thing, a recent fascist insistence that not just LGBT Americans but any "libs" that support them are probably secret pedophiles.
Anyway, the anonymous activist behind that account has just been exposed by The Washington Post, and the whole conservative movement is extremely freaking upset that the person with an account devoted to getting people fired or hounded by death-threat spewing hate campaigns over short snippets of misleadingly-presented video is themselves facing their 15 minutes of fame.
The actual revelation is, as you might expect, pretty banal. The brains behind the hate account belong to a conservative woman who has a day job in real estate but has flitted from one conspiracy theory to the next—including stints with QAnon "sex trafficking" claims to anti-pandemic disinformation to claims of election conspiracies before landing on new claims of there being LGBT "groomers" absolutely everywhere—and would turn her anonymous conspiracy beliefs into internet fame points redeemable on Fox News and other conspiracy-eager outlets.
There's not much to it, and if you're going to devote your life to posting video clips directing angry mobs toward random schoolteachers because you, personally, like to spread conspiracy theories about them, then yeah, at some point, you're going to want to invest in anti-leopard insurance yourself.
At the very least, you'd have to be a special kind of twit to stare at the news coverage in between new posts attacking random Americans who might not even be the people you're claiming they are, and think, "I don't deserve this."
That out of the way, let’s talk for a moment about why this extremely generic conspiracy crackpot— whose transition from conspiracy sphere to conspiracy sphere is about the most rote path you could possibly take as a far-right, hate-obsessed nobody—managed to finally stumble on popularity when she started claiming that The Libs are "grooming" your children.
For the record, and there won't be a quiz on this afterward, because I have not yet been put in charge of such things: One of the most influential Republican Speakers of the House in recent history was exposed as a serial child predator not all that long ago.
Republicans eagerly backed Roy Moore, whose predation attempts on teen girls were so prolific and well-known as to get him banned by the local mall. (Republicans, when the accusations against Moore surfaced, defended him by noting that the Bible encouraged sex with young girls.)
Rep. Matt Gaetz is still under investigation, but it's been well established at this point by witnesses, that Gaetz "groomed" younger girls at drug-fueled parties and trafficked at least one minor girl across state lines for the purposes of sex.
Rep. Jim Jordan was elevated to omnipresence when he was exposed as one of the many, many athletic coaches in America who knew his athletes were being sexually molested and worked to cover it up.
Rep. Lauren Boebert's husband was arrested for exposing his penis to underage girls at a bowling alley, of all places, and Boebert still launched a career based on QAnon hoaxes that assume everyone except her husband is secretly something-something-pizza-basement.
We could go on, but that is the landscape of current Republicanism, before and after the election of a truly thickheaded reality television faker with a long history of being a total pervert, one who was immediately adopted by the (religious) base as the new avatar of everything they wanted America to be.
Now, the conservative movement is many things, but subtle it is not. It has a public heartbeat that is very hard to ignore, and one that takes no great genius to predict. Republicans began claiming President Joe Biden was "senile" in response to concerns over Donald Trump's diminished vocabulary and increasingly out-of-touch-with-reality announcements. Republicans launched an enormous effort to claim Ukraine and Democrats were the real culprits behind 2016 election hacking—in direct response to intelligence community findings that Russia provided significant aid to Donald Trump's campaign efforts, while multiple Americans working with Donald Trump either sought to coordinate campaign actions to Russian efforts or, in the most famous case, straight-up shared polling data with a Russian cutout.
Republicans are currently attempting to make a great deal of unknown something over Hunter Biden making money from his status as Biden's son; that effort, which continues despite primary advocate Rudy Giuliani subsequently being raided by law enforcement for take-your-pick, was launched after an endless barrage of stories about all the ways Donald Trump's family was blending their White House roles with their own financial schemes, up to and including Trump's Master of Everything, Jared Kushner, getting his financial ass bailed out by the same Saudi regime that Kushner gave such deference to at his White House post. That's the heartbeat. Pick any Republican scandal, and you can predict what conspiracy theory Fox News producers will be most fervently looking to put on the air immediately afterward.
Take a wild guess, then, why the entire Republican ecosystem has now latched on to the idea that Americans who are not powerful Republicans are "groomers" and "pedophiles." Go on. Take a wild, speculative guess on why specifically the sort of Fox News Republicans who still hand a microphone to Matt Gaetz, who still treat Donald Trump as their personal messiah, are going absolutely batshit with new theories in which every last American who does not like those skeevy people is secretly a pedophile.
Republicanism no longer has a party platform, but it has a single overriding media strategy. Whatever a prominent Republican has recently been exposed for doing becomes the fertilizer for the very next conspiracy theory.
So yes, there's no surprise why this particular nobody managed to stumble into the next big Fox News thing when she decided that an account devoted to accusing random non-movement Americans of pedophilia and "grooming" was what she, personally, needed to focus her life on at this point in time. The entire Republican movement has been exposed, incontrovertibly, as morally bankrupt. There is literally no crime, from sex trafficking to rape to tax fraud to international extortion to goading violence against public officials to an outright coup, that will get the Conservative Jesus crowd to not rise up and declare that Republicans have the right to do those things.
The QAnon movement started out this way. It was a repackaging of Nazi and neo-Nazi claims that their enemies (Jews) "harvested" children for their secret rites. Every not-Nazi was supposed to be assisting in the "trafficking" of those victims. People believed it all immediately because it pushed every button they needed to be pushed, everyone ran with it, people held up signs and made asses of themselves and started gargling bleach while waiting for dead celebrities to give them guidance.
Those conspiracy theories didn't go anywhere. They're still everywhere in the conservative base, and they're continually shifting their theories to test what people most want to hear. Right now, Republicans want to hear that schoolteachers are the enemy because schoolteachers are teaching children about things like diversity and acceptance and that you can't just write "my dad said Jesus did it" when explaining the difference between exothermic and endothermic reactions. Schoolteachers are the enemy because they are telling kids that wearing masks helps people not get sick. Schoolteachers are the enemy because schoolteachers made a big fuss about not wanting to die of a preventable disease when red-hat parents decided that the entire world was pulling a prank to make their Republican leader look bad. Schoolteachers are in deep trouble because the school libraries these days have books that discourage suicide for teens struggling with sexual questions, and Republican America remains damn pissed off those books exist. Schoolteachers are enemies of the movement because it is schoolteachers who hand out history books and explain what slavery was, what lynching is, and what the people being honored with huge bronze statues in the town square actually did that made other Americans put up monuments to them.
So now schoolteachers—all schoolteachers but especially any schoolteacher who isn't white, conservative, heterosexual and/or bigoted—are "grooming" children, say the voices Fox News has chosen to rally around.
And if that happens to use up airtime that would otherwise go to reporting on who, in America, credibly stands accused of sexual predation or coverups? If that muddles the reporting so that now it's "both sides" that stand accused of such things, even if some of those accusations consist of crank real estate agents shouting at their bedroom walls? Book that person immediately.