--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up on Today Explained, you've heard of OK Boomer, but maybe not OK Groomer?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: This idea really got started around the public debate over Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then it started popping up all over social media.
--:-- Asia Romano: It started popping up during, for example, confirmation hearing for Justice Braun Jackson.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think from there, it's kind of become almost memefied, except that people are taking it very seriously.
--:-- Asia Romano: The bizarre, though very serious, accusations being lobbed online and one particular Twitter account doing a lot of the lobbing ahead on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and of course, the perfect cold weather staples.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram, 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: Asia Romano has been covering the story for Vox. What exactly does it mean to be a groomer, Asia?
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: How did you get them alone? Grooming. It's when they conditioned them over time to accept sexual abuse.
--:-- Asia Romano: When we were on the ballparks or on the gym floor, you know, I would make sure which ones I wanted to molest.
--:-- Asia Romano: I would give them special attention, congratulate them. I would give them the attention that an official is not supposed to give anybody.
--:-- Asia Romano: And it made them feel like, wow, He's paying me attention.
--:-- Asia Romano: In the less literal sense, it can be when they condition them over time to accept some other sort of abuse.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: What's happening in our schools is sexual influence peddling.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: So sometimes the accusation might be that they are literally grooming them to be preyed upon by child predators.
--:-- Asia Romano: But it more generally seems to be that they are grooming them for liberal indoctrination.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: Right. That's an idea that has long existed among homophobic rhetoric in the U.S. and all over the world.
--:-- Asia Romano: This false, obviously very false, association of homosexuality with pedophilia and child predators has been used to marginalize queer people for centuries.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: Listen, I've been around for a long time. The pendulum always swings.
--:-- Asia Romano: Will it swing back to that type of small closed window? More than likely it will.
--:-- Asia Romano: So in the meantime, we're enjoying drag race.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: And now that they've sort of really made headway on that, we're seeing the resurgence of all these these very homophobic laws across the U.S.
--:-- Asia Romano: And so I think to mainstream America, a lot of this probably sounds very arcane and even Byzantine.
--:-- Asia Romano: But for the extreme right wing, these ideas have always been a huge threat to America.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: And how is this panic manifesting in our country right now?
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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 for 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 that health care costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: But I think that just sort of tells you, you know, this is happening among politicians accusing each other of being rumors without necessarily any direct connection to reality at all.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Asia Romano: Look, as I listened to your testimony, I believe you are someone who is compassionate.
--:-- Asia Romano: I believe you care for children, obviously your children and other children.
--:-- Asia Romano: But I also see a record of activism and advocacy as it concerns sexual predators.
--:-- Asia Romano: They were accusing her of giving them lenient sentences and being, quote unquote, soft on them.
--:-- Asia Romano: And they really kind of leaned in hard to that accusation, even though it really didn't hold up.
--:-- Asia Romano: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: I'm just here to tell you that what you're supporting is grooming little children what you're saying is i 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 the more frequent ways you might have seen if you've been spending any time online is uh people accosting other people by replying to them on social media with the words, OK, groomer.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Kind of like OK, boomer, but the pedophile version.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Yes. A way of basically dismissing whatever they're saying by lumping them in with child predators and child sexual abusers.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Partly this is a meme. It's been around for a while.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's basically become a way of kind of shorthanding the groomer accusation in one very pithy response.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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 genderqueer agenda, whatever objection you have this day of the week.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Is that where this is sort of coming from?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Right. It's almost identical to QAnon in a lot of ways.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: The cause sounds good, save the children.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: But nationally, some rallies have been tied to bizarre conspiracy theories involving pedophilia and the Democratic Party.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: But of course, just like QAnon, the historical roots of this go much, much farther back.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Wow, a house made of gingerbread. Come on in, my darlings.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: The best candies are inside.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: You know, particularly in the Middle Ages, you saw a lot of witch hunts, a lot of like blood libel conspiracies.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: By blood libel, I mean that they were conspiracies that explicitly posited that Jewish people were murdering young Christian children.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And then we saw a huge resurgence of that in the early 20th century, go figure.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's basically kind of a glorified urban legend.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It just keeps getting recycled.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And this latest iteration is finding no greater quarter than in Florida.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Florida, of course, was in the media because of the don't say gay law.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: But I think we've continued to see the controversy over that law play out now with with the Disney protests.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: of this Disney bicep.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And we're seeing people protesting outside Disney every day, holding up signs that say Disney is grooming kids.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's not just about Disney with the 666 right there.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's not just that.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's the fact that child traffickers get to go free.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: So that's a whole other extension of the original debate.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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 Say Gay law
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: As promised Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signing a law ending Disney self and tax breaks
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: We are sort of primally conditioned to believe this sort of conspiracy without a lot of pushback or resistance.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: In a minute, on Today Explained, the one Twitter account driving a ton of the hysterics around groomers.
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--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Chime feels like progress.
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--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A.
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--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Like, really happy?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: But still, we stick it out.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: I've already put years into this place.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right, Ramas Furum, we're back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now we're going to try and wrap our heads around one Twitter account that's been driving a lot of hysterics around groomers quite confusingly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Despite the confusion, the accounts racked up nearly a million followers as of publishing time here at Today Explained.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: But they include incendiary framing, and it's all sort of framed at generating outrage.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: So it's finding clips of personal posts from mostly LGBTQ people and amplifying them for an audience of millions online.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: This account, it doesn't just exist on Twitter, although it is on Twitter.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It has a really popular email newsletter.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: The goal is to drive hate towards LGBTQ people, specifically trans people.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: But the power of Libs of TikTok isn't just making videos of liberal teachers and others go viral on Twitter.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: The key to its success is in who is watching these videos, who is following this account.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: This account does not exist in a vacuum.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's basically become a wire service for the right-wing media.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: So anything that this account posts gets nearly immediately picked up by Fox News and the right-wing media ecosystem.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: The iPhone is obviously rearranging our brains and making us compliant, dumb, and destroying our attention span.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: But there is an upside. they have video.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: So a lot of parents all of a sudden know for certain what is happening in their kids' classrooms.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's also followed by tons of really influential lawmakers.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's impacting legislation.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's gotten tons of people fired.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's ostracized tons of gay and trans people from public life.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And it's just hugely influential in the right-wing media ecosystem.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: This account has become popular because it exposes to light people on the left and what they say.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: How dare there be an account that just basically retweets people on the left?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: This is all kinds of crazy.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's liberal people.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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 following.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Yeah, right. Libs of TikTok on Twitter is one of the greatest f***ing accounts of all time.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Huh.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: He liked that it was calling out liberals.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: I mean, something the account constantly purports is, look we just showing liberals in their own words
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: These are videos that gay people are putting out on their own
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Yes but you completely misrepresenting them and then spoon feeding them to an incredibly homophobic audience
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: So it not sharing gay people content in their own words
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It sort of taking morsels of private people's internet presence and putting them on blast in front of millions.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And I guess that resonated with Rogan because he, yeah, started promoting it end of last summer.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: So a lot of people have sought to kind of tie LGBTQ identities to like pedophilia.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And so previously, this account had been posting election fraud conspiracies and conspiracies related to Biden.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And so what is this account posting that's sort of feeding this groomer frenzy?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's just posting a nonstop feed on Instagram and Twitter of this types of commentary.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Sometimes it's just tweets to news articles.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Sometimes it's tweets to segments.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Most of the time it's clips of actual gay and trans people and their private social media posts.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: So these are just average citizens.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And so that's why we ask children their gender.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: You know, just like mostly what this account is railing against is any kind of acceptance.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's just attacking anyone that kind of is saying that it's okay to be LGBTQ.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It will imply that that person is grooming children.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: They will be smeared as a pedophile.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Hey, if your parents don't love and accept you for who you are this Christmas, I'm your parents now.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: I'm proud of you.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: This viral TikTok has been viewed more than 200,000 times.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's one that's captured the attention of US Senate candidate Jackson Lawmire, who called Tyler Wren a predator.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: They will get dozens or hundreds or sometimes thousands of people contacting the school board.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Anybody that's featured on the account gets viciously harassed, doxxed, stalked.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: I mean, everything in the book is thrown at them.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: The account posts it, Fox News runs it on, you know, Tucker or Laura or something like that.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Then this person gets like hellfire rained on them and then they end up maybe getting fired.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Is that sort of the life cycle of a video?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: That's the exact life cycle.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Your reporting actually uncovered who was behind this account.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: I guess they had previously been anonymous.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Who is it running this account?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: The woman behind the account is this woman named Chaya Reitchik.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: She's a former Brooklyn-based realtor.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: She lives in California now, according to recent interviews she's done.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And this is basically her full-time job at this point.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: She claims to have attended the January 6th insurrection and actually posted content from behind the barrier right by the capital.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It matters to think about who's behind these accounts because this account is already influencing policy and public opinion.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And I think voters and average people deserve to know, like, who are these people shaping our politics, right?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's so easy to have these huge influential social media accounts.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: We should know about who's behind them and where their funding is coming from as well.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: What did you discover about funding?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Did you discover anything about funding?
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Yeah, so I discovered that they were funded in part by the Babylon Bee, which is a right-wing news media company.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And they had been monetizing also directly through Venmo donations through Twitter.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: So, you know, 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: and others have said the same thing.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: It's also, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene has come out in support of the account.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: Its impact on lawmakers is significant.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: 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.
--:-- Taylor Lorenz: And this account has played a crucial role in all of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can read Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can read Asia Romano, who you heard from earlier at Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, yikes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ouch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Could have done better.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Same goes for where you invest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Level up and invest smarter with Schwab.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Learn more at schwab.com.
