The person behind the anonymous anti-LGBT account supported by Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and now the broader right wing media has been identified as LA-based real estate broker Chaya Raichik. We sit with Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz to discuss the absurd accusation that her reporting "doxxed" Raichik, who by the time the article was released had already registered a media company, been interviewed by the New York Post and Fox News, and was taking money from the founder of the Babylon Bee.
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Episode music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 187 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Libs of TikTok episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field, Liv Aker, and Travis View.
This week, we're sitting with Taylor Lorenz, a reporter for the Washington Post whose recent article on Twitter account, Libs of TikTok, has become a flashpoint in the broader culture war.
As we explored a few episodes ago, the American right has been engaged in an extensive anti-LGBT messaging campaign in the wake of Governor DeSantis passing the so-called Don't Say Gay Bill in Florida.
The effort also coincides with a Republican political push before this year's midterm elections, and as a result, Libs of TikTok's rapid growth in popularity has made it a go-to source for larger right-wing media outlets seeking footage that will make their audience cringe and grow totally outraged.
So, welcome on the show, Taylor.
Thanks for having me.
You know, just to kick off for listeners who may not be familiar with this story, what is Libs of TikTok and how did it rise to prominence?
Yeah, Libs of TikTok is essentially like an aggregator account, and it kind of has become this like wire service for the right wing media.
It's primarily a Twitter account with nearly a million followers, but they're also on Instagram.
They were on TikTok before they were banned at a bunch of right-wing sites.
And they basically just post a non-stop stream of social media content from mostly LGBTQ people, but anyone they kind of deem a liberal.
So they'll share TikTok videos, screenshots of Facebook status updates.
They basically just go around hoovering up private, you know, personal social media postings from people across the country and then amplify them, usually with, like, sort of outrage bait framing to their audience.
So, for instance, a video on TikTok that maybe a kindergarten teacher posted about coming out as gay to his class that, you know, they might have just shared on TikTok with their friends.
Libs of TikTok will crawl those platforms, find that content, repackage it,
and then share it to their social media feeds, like this is who's teaching your children.
The account said that no one that comes out to their students should be in the classroom.
So it's kind of providing outrage material to that part of the internet.
And so this account is created and it starts to gain traction.
Can you walk us through the kind of rise to prominence?
You know, I mean, how does an anonymous account with no apparent connections to the big, you know, kind of right-wing media machine at first, you know, how did they become so in favor?
Yeah.
Well, the account had several lives.
So, Taya Raychek, who founded the account, started it actually November 2020 around the election.
And the account was initially used to push election fraud conspiracies.
She tweeted under several versions of her real name.
Initially, she live tweeted from the ground at the Capitol during the January 6th insurrection.
didn't pivot her account until Libs of TikTok until April of last year. And it really seemed
to take hold. It started to gain this niche cult following on the internet. And then last August,
Joe Rogan gave it several shoutouts on his really popular podcast. And that was sort of
the account's big break. So it's skyrocketed from just I think it had around 100,000 followers to
over 300,000 with Rogan's endorsement. He called it like the best fucking account. And it really
started to like pivot as well.
You sort of saw the way that it was talking about different things move.
It was obviously the election fraud stuff, and then it started posting other conspiracies or other kind of right-wing messaging around stuff.
And then by the end of last year, it was leaning fully into this LGBTQ panic content, basically.
Yeah, I noticed that even its logo has kind of, you know, like gender symbols on it.
So it seems like that was the intention pretty early, but it's become even more intensely focused as it kind of finds its purpose, I guess, in the greater right-wing media sphere.
Yeah, the account was always homophobic.
Like, it was always a homophobic account.
It just wasn't the majority of its content until the end of last year.
So here's Joe Rogan on three separate broadcasts promoting Libs of TikTok.
Ever seen those people on the libs of TikTok where they're inventing new sort of genders?
They have genders that no one's ever heard of before and they'll explain to you what those genders are and how they're supposed to be talked to.
There's a thing called libs of TikTok.
Ever gone on Libs of TikTok?
Yeah, right.
That's right.
Libs of TikTok on Twitter is one of the greatest fucking accounts of all time.
Libs of TikTok, that page that I showed you on Twitter, it's the best.
It's like the most nonsensical fucking cuckoo talk.
So, you know, I mean, obviously with the Joe Rogan endorsement, the account started growing.
It got the attention of Tucker Carlson, of course.
And I wanted to play a little clip of Tucker Carlson interviewing The then-anonymous person behind the account, and this was before you published your article, I think it kind of sets up some of the justifying arguments that you now see fully embraced on the right.
So for the crime of letting liberals talk about themselves and showing people what they actually think, Media Matters did a hit piece on Libs of TikTok, described it as hate, and Twitter dutifully pulled it off the platform.
That's exactly how that system works.
So the creator of Libs of TikTok remains anonymous.
Why?
Because we live in a country where you can't even say what you think without threats of violence against you if you're not on the left.
But we are happy to talk to that person over the phone, which we are doing now.
The creator of Libs of TikTok joins us on the line.
Don't know your name.
Glad you're on.
So you were pulled off Twitter after you were attacked by Media Matters for disseminating hate.
Were you surprised by this?
Exactly.
No, I was not surprised at all.
It definitely felt like a very organized attack by the left to get me suspended.
So how big, and this is not the first platform from which you've been suspended for holding up liberals in their own voice to the rest of the country.
Where else have you been kicked off?
I have been kicked off of TikTok, and I've gotten multiple violations on Instagram.
It's just remarkable to me, in a country like ours, that you feel the need to remain anonymous.
Tell us why you're not giving us your name tonight.
Well, I've gotten a few death threats.
I get a ton of hate mail, and the left has been showing recently, you know, how they would treat people who disagree with them.
It's funny because there is some of the death threats.
I mean, I like reported it and the people, they still have their accounts on Twitter.
So, you know, you can threaten violence and still keep your account, but you can't play
a video of what a leftist is themselves saying.
Right.
So your opinions are violence.
Their violence are protected speech.
You see how that works.
Thank you so much for your bravery.
And again, I just can't overstate, you're not even giving your opinions necessarily.
You're just holding up their opinions for the country to see and for revealing them in their natural habitat.
You're on the run.
So Taylor, I wanted to play that clip because, you know, it sets up this story they have that they're just simply an aggregator.
They don't make commentary.
But from what I've reviewed, they'll say stuff like, look at this pedophile or whatever, or this is a groomer or let's get this person fired.
Yeah.
I mean, it is in no way just, quote unquote, holding up a mirror at all.
I mean, they're basically taking content from private citizens, often marginalized people,
decontextualizing it, misrepresenting it to a massive audience that's sort of primed for
outrage.
And that's just the posts that are pegged to sharing other people's content.
You know, they also retweeted the Trevor Project, calling it a grooming organization.
They've also doxxed people.
At one point, the woman behind it said that she called a phone number and tweeted out
a teacher's private address and personal phone number, encouraging followers to kind of harass
that person.
So, you know, just the idea that this is just holding a mirror to anything is just that's
a lie.
Like, that's just a lie.
That's not what the account does.
The account takes these little snippets from people around the web and tries to recast
them and inflame them.
One thing I noticed consistently is that, you know, even after you published your article,
Tucker had Haya back on the show and he still didn't reveal her name.
And she certainly wasn't on video, but they would put up the actual, you know, quote unquote
libs of TikTok.
They would put up footage taken from that account.
Over, you know, her little like box where it's like her calling in and then later even they just put your picture up.
Right.
So there's there's this like very strange relationship with like, yeah, I'm totally protecting the anonymity of this person and discussing how they're on the run while I'm showing on the screen, you know, a person's TikTok with the address of their TikTok account as well.
So even in these broadcasts where they're interviewing her, they're kind of continuing to make sure that these people get, you know, visibility on these super big platforms, even though they
don't really have that many followers.
Yeah, it's just average. I mean, these are some of the most marginalized people out there. These
are trans people. These are LGBTQ people, often young people. I mean, teenagers, like this account
is targeting marginalized people with no social media following. They're not going after big LGBTQ
influencers. They're literally just scraping together posts in some cases that the people
themselves didn't even realize were public.
I mean, the account has shared Facebook posts from private groups and things like that.
You know, it's very invasive.
And to kind of try and raise concerns about privacy when you yourself, the entire point of your account, is violating other people's privacy and driving hate towards them is just so disingenuous.
Yeah, and I think one thing that they really rely on is, like, if you're a conservative or whatever, you see these people and they're always, like, the most tattooed.
They always have, like, the most extreme version of, you know, gender ideas and stuff like that.
And essentially they just rely on it being, like, cringe and or scary.
And so that validates the reason why it's important for you to know that your kids' teachers are like this, right?
And I noticed also using the name libs of TikTok, it makes sure that, you know, the essential argument is all libs essentially are groomers and pedophiles.
Here are some examples of them doing that.
But they deny this through and through.
There's a lot of messaging throughout all and definitely on Fox News to kind of convince the viewer that like, no, they're just simply reposting something that someone already posted, you know, publicly for attention.
Yeah, right.
But what they're doing is decontextualizing that and misrepresenting it.
They're misrepresenting the context of these videos over and over and over again, and reframing them in an incendiary way.
Also, you have to consider the fact that most people in America, a lot of people don't even know a single trans person, right?
Like, these are some really marginalized groups.
We're talking about and, you know, Libs of TikTok is essentially taking these individual people sometimes that like, yeah, might like look a little bit different or have dyed hair or whatever and sort of trying to say like, look, this is this is all trans people or taking someone in the midst of a mental health crisis and saying, look, this is this is all gay people.
This is and they're with your children and they're unstable, whatever.
It's just misrepresentation.
And there's undeniably a political motive behind it.
And obviously Fox News is going to lie about that because Their political motives are in line with this account.
I mean, they're using this account literally as like an assigning editor, practically.
Yeah, it seems like most of that discussion is predicated on abstracting away any real interaction between these people and queer people, where the only interfacing you have is these groups, like Libs of TikTok, calling them pedophiles and being like, look at how different they are, how terrible they are, and also constructing this idea that queerness is something that liberals thought up and Yeah.
Implanted the idea onto, you know, like vulnerable children.
And that's why they're so, you know, quote unquote, fucked up or outside of sort of normative bounds.
And it seems like all of this is like also connected to the fact that, like, you know, you see you see in like the Tucker Carlson interviews that the main thing that they're worried about is the safety of the libs of TikTok accounts, as if like the primary experiencer of violence here is people who do transphobic harassment, as opposed to like trans people and queer people.
In reality, again, this is all about abstracting away from what's really happening.
What's really happening here is an attempt to look at the large upswing of transphobic and queerphobic violence and encourage it.
And then when people who are experiencing this sort of violence react negatively, You can say, look, these are the main people attacking us.
Look at how mad they are.
But it's like, of course they're mad.
Like, of course people who are dealing with this massive attack against, you know, queer identities are angry that there are certain accounts that are really, like, boosting these things and making it much worse.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I think it's time to move on to the real, uh, the real crime here, which is that, you know, Taylor, you used publicly available information to reveal the person behind this, at that point, massive account.
Her name is Haya Reitschick.
She's a real estate broker living in Los Angeles, and she had attended the January 6th riot at the Capitol, like you mentioned.
And she kind of tried all these different angles, like, you know, like you kind of walked us through.
She even had an account that made me chuckle, which was she pretended on Twitter to be a houseplant living with Joe Biden.
Yeah, it was so funny to like follow this woman's like desperate attempts to go viral.
There were several other handles that she cycled through that she had sort of tangential handles that I didn't even it was getting to be too much in this story was so long.
But she also had like New York shitty.
She had something about anti-Gov. Cuomo.
She sort of tried all of these meme-y type Twitter accounts and nothing took hold until
the lips of TikTok.
And so, you know, people are using this term "doxing,"
right, which is thrown around constantly these days to describe, you know, publishing Hayaraychik's
name and the giant city in which she lives.
And so the idea here is like, oh, basically you doxxed Raichik because you included her real name and the city.
There was no photo of her in the article.
No home address, no phone number.
But a lot of the discourse, you know, around this is being like, how outrageous it is that the Washington Post, you know, would publish the real name of a person behind an anonymous Twitter account, some small account, right?
Travis, I hear you laughing, Travis.
Why is that?
Yeah, you know, yeah, I was like, I was very interested in this story, watching people just losing their mind with rage at the idea that Washington Post would publish the real name of an anonymous account.
Because, yeah, I started as an anonymous account when I was tracking QAnon, and I even like, you know, I published a couple of Washington Post columns, and it was coded Washington Post under my fake name.
But as I kept getting more notoriety, I was like, Oh, I'm gonna be doxxed eventually, both by like the QAnon people who don't like me very much that I figured also by the mainstream media, because I just I just kind of understood that you'll get to have a degree of influence without also getting a, you know, a degree of scrutiny as well.
And so eventually, yeah, so eventually after the was the Q into the Storm documentary came out, basically, some of the Washington Post called me up and And that was fine.
I was fine with that.
But my real beef with that whole column was that it was that they implied that I was being deceitful or something that I was like, you know, wasn't being honest.
But yeah, the whole thing was weird because it's like all people are always acting like how this is like the first how dare the Washington Post or whoever published the real name is like, what the fuck am I chopped liver?
I was like, this exact same thing happened to me yesterday.
I didn't get Glenn Greenwald, you know, just losing his goddamn mind in a thread about how the corporate Jeff Bezos media would do such a thing.
I didn't get like, you know, major cable, you know, hosts, you know, talking about how outrageous this was.
I was, my whole story was ignored.
It was fine.
I wouldn't like, I wouldn't like for people to freak out because it wasn't that big of a deal.
But yeah, man, the whole, It was really bizarre watching people act like this.
It's unprecedented that, you know, an anonymous account would get scrutinized because it's gaining influence in the media world.
Yeah, and to be clear, you weren't doxxed.
It was just your name and there was a photo of you.
Yeah, right.
It's like, you know, they weren't publishing your home address, your phone number, all these things that used to be what it meant.
It meant publishing, you know, private documents online so someone could, like, very literally locate the person and kind of, you know, attack them in some way.
So, I don't know.
It's pretty confusing all in all.
But yeah, Taylor, tell us what you think about this entire, you know, doxxing thing going on in the media right now.
Yeah, I mean, it's just not doxing.
It's not even remotely doxing.
It's reporting and they have a vested interest in trying to obscure those two things and conflate them.
I was dying because, you know, I did show up at her house to knock on the door to confirm it was her and that was really her, the person that lived there and everything.
Um, she tweeted a photo of me that literally showed, you know, her street, like way more identifying info than I could have ever shown.
And I was just like, this is so disingenuous of this person to claim persecution and then be giving away information like this. I mean, my feeling too is like you
did an entire right-wing media tour, like you've given exclusive interviews to Tucker, to New
York Post, like all this stuff.
Like you don't get to do that and have all this political power and internet power and
remain anonymous. Like you're just, those things are in conflict.
We deserve to know who's exerting power on the Internet, right?
Yes.
And yeah.
Here's how Tucker framed it.
Here's another clip.
This is after the article was published.
But, you know, he's interviewing Reichick anonymously again.
And this is the part of the interview where he basically sets up what you should think about LOTT, what position this person has in the hierarchy of power.
Maybe you're okay with your kids being taught by emotionally incontinent nutcases like that.
Maybe you're not.
But you probably ought to know either way, so you can see why Libs of TikTok quickly became so very popular.
You didn't have to wade through some long editorial to find out what was actually happening.
You could see the raw video, and again, you could assess it for yourself.
Millions of parents are grateful for that.
So is Katrina Pushaw, who's the press secretary for the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.
It was partly in response to videos that she saw on Libs of TikTok that Florida ultimately banned public school teachers from lecturing kindergartners about sex.
That's no law.
It's one of the most popular laws in the state.
Majority of Democrats support it.
So libs of TikTok was getting results, as good journalism does.
Not bad for a Twitter feed.
So of course that Twitter feed had to be shut down.
So there's a lot of lies here.
But yeah, could you walk us through, you know, the various different ways that he's misrepresenting this?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, Libs of TikTok was never shut down.
They blatantly violated multiple terms.
They were misgendering trans people, engaging in targeted harassment.
They violated certain terms, which gave them a temporary timeout from Twitter.
So they were temporarily suspended for, I think, less than 48 hours, twice.
So Tucker keeps saying they were banned.
They weren't.
That's not what they were banned.
They were not banned.
They're still on Twitter.
They just were suspended for violating terms.
What's so crazy about what Tucker's saying is he's actually making the case for why finding this woman's identity is so important, because he's talking about its direct impact on legislators.
He's talking about how, you know, Christine Pushaw actually cited this account and looks at this account and the influence it has.
He's like simultaneously talking about how much power it has, while also sort of arguing that it doesn't deserve scrutiny.
Yes, exactly.
It's like, it's a small, innocent account that's also a journalist working with legislators, but it must be protected.
Not the people it's showing, but, you know, this poor account that has now over a million followers on Twitter.
To say nothing of the fact that the account, it's in my story, itself had registered and trademarked itself as a media organization.
Yeah.
And at that point, it appears also that they had already cut a deal with the guy who runs the Babylon Bee.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah.
So a couple months ago, the Babylon Bee gave some funding to Libs of TikTok, as I understand, in exchange for equity, where they're basically paying this woman a salary so that now she can do this full time.
So she's been doing it full time for the past few months, and this is her thing and it's basically it's a media entity partially
owned by the Babylon Bee now.
And so this is, you know, where things get interesting because Tucker didn't just,
you know, do all this bad faith stuff. He also started spinning elaborate conspiracy theories.
Oh my god, I was dying over this one.
It's absolutely wild.
So first, we're going to play a clip of Tucker, you know, kind of framing, trying to frame the article.
And then after that, we'll jump into a clip where he really fleshes this out and makes it go full QAnon in some ways.
The Washington Post published a piece by Lorenz linking to the name, the physical address, and the real estate licensing information of the woman who runs Libs of TikTok.
After the Post published the article, the woman behind Libs of TikTok went into hiding.
That was, of course, the whole point of the exercise.
People know where she lives because The Washington Post linked to it, so she had to leave.
Now Taylor Lorenz, of all people, knew this would happen.
She knew what she was doing when she wrote the story.
She was trying to shut this woman up.
So first of all, we absolutely did not publish anything, anything that linked to or revealed or had anything about her personal address.
The most revealing information about her personal address was the photo of me that she posted showing her street.
The only thing that I think he's referring to with the link is, you know, I think the original article included a link to her license, her real estate information, which is posted online by the state government for the public to access.
There is nothing private about that.
Like, nothing had anything with her personal address, nothing had any identifying info.
I cannot stress that enough.
Like, he's just lying.
Like, this is a flat out lie and they know it's a lie.
And they're just, anyway, it's just so, so crazy to hear him say this type of stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so, I mean, that lie obviously wasn't enough because here he is spinning it into something much wilder.
So Travis Brown on Twitter basically found some public information, and Tucker is about to connect Travis Brown to an organization that Travis works for, to the German government, to, well, you'll see.
Who's paying for this?
Well, a foreign government is paying for it.
The prototype fund gets its money not from private donors, but from the government of Germany.
Germany's Federal Ministry of Education.
It says so right on the website.
In other words, what happened to the woman who runs Libs of TikTok, her life being destroyed, was not the work of Taylor Lorenz, the fearless journalist who cries on TV from her PTSD.
No.
It was a foreign intelligence operation designed to silence and intimidate an American citizen.
Wait, is that legal?
Did the Biden administration have any role in this particular Intel op?
Why is the German government trying to shut down an American Twitter account posting about American teachers?
And since she was the recipient, the willing recipient, of this information from a foreign government designed to destroy an American citizen, why hasn't Taylor Lorenz at the very least registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act?
Fair enough.
We seem to remember quite a bit of talk about this over the last few years.
We think there was an impeachment trial over it.
Someone went to prison because of it.
But Taylor Lorenz can take information from a foreign government to crush an American citizen, clearly as part of an intel operation, and she's a journalist in good standing at the Jeff Bezos's newspaper?
Lots of questions here.
We hope we can get to the bottom of all of them.
He talks about right chick like she's in a black site tied to a chair.
Can I just say something?
This is my story.
I spent quite a bit of time reporting out this story.
Travis is wonderful and was able to provide all of these receipts, but this woman registered her website under her full name with her personal address and personal cell phone number on it.
Literally.
Like, you just had to look at domain tools.
And, you know, it had been, like, her name was kind of getting out there on Twitter, especially after Travis's thread.
And Travis had done the work of really, like, documenting sort of all of these past tweets.
For instance, he found the tweets about her being at the insurrection, which was a really important part of the story, I felt.
But, like, what?
It's very funny, because I'm part German, too.
I don't even think he realized that.
But yeah, that's actually the first time I watched the whole segment.
I kind of skimmed through it.
But he's, like, implying I should go to jail as a foreign agent.
What?
Yes, basically.
He's trying to Louise Mensch you.
You're a German bot.
I'm obsessed.
Like, one big brain shit.
Yeah.
We live in the desert of the real.
You can just, like, say whatever on, like, one of the largest, you know, TV spots that Americans watch.
It's just, like, complete nonsense, but people eat it up.
Also, this is, like, seven steps removed.
Like, Travis does not, like, work- like, Travis is working on this, like, very limited project that receives funding from Prototype Fund, but it's, like, it's, like, 12 steps removed, honestly, from, like, the actual German- like, it's just the- yeah, it's all very...
I mean, it's literally like Alex Jones reasoning, where he takes, like, little pieces of information, then spreads them, you know, connects them in a big board, and then assumes everything's connected, and then creates a story that's, you know, very exciting and conspiratorial.
Yeah, we needed this massive, you know, paper trail, this chain of different orgs giving money to different people to look up public information.
So public, too.
Like, so public.
Yeah, like I learned, I mean, I learned the name, like I'm sure like a lot of people who are maybe spend too much time on Twitter.
I learned the name of the person behind Libs of TikTok a few days before that story was published because it was kind of being passed around.
Yeah, and I've had even spoken openly about doing this story on the Daily Beast podcast a couple weeks ago.
And I was like, because I try and always work on stories pretty publicly just in case there's people like Travis that are like, hey, I'm actually working on something at that or like, hey, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
And I was just like, this woman was not remotely difficult or like that hard to find.
She had kind of put herself out there so much.
She also tweeted under her literal actual name for months.
But in Tucker's conception, she has been both quote, crushed and her life ruined, which I'm sorry, what proof?
Can you tell us what happened exactly to this?
All she got is more clout, like, which I, you know, this was something that I was really, I will say that I thought about a lot because when I initially wanted to write about the account in like, end of January, like when I started really like
looking at it in February, I was like, "Ugh, I'm gonna end up giving this lady more clout by writing
about her." And it really wasn't until she went on Tucker and she had already gotten like so much
reach that I was like, "Okay, this is at this point, like, you know, whatever." But of
course, she just cries victim and them making this whole right-wing media cycle around her
amplified her.
Now she's got tons of money.
She's launched a sub-stack.
I mean, she's thriving.
All this did is galvanize her.
I mean, hopefully what it did is she deleted thousands of tweets, and it has led to increased scrutiny on her, which is the goal of the article.
But she hasn't been financially hurt in any way, or there's no consequences for this person.
No, and also, I mean, you know, I guess it's a good time to bring up that just maybe hours before this recording, Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk and is now going to be a private company.
So, I mean, I don't think we're moving in a direction where, you know, big anonymous Twitter accounts are getting more scrutiny and more punishment.
If anything, quite the opposite.
Yeah, it's terrifying, actually, to think about what that'll be.
I don't know.
I mean, at the same time, Elon, yeah, it will be very interesting to see how the platform evolves.
I'm eager to see kind of what shakes out.
I saw some of kind of the worst people already declaring victory through this.
Like, that guy, what's his name?
He's really crazy.
Michael Malice or whatever, he's like, remind your Facebook friends having a meltdown right now about Elon Musk, that there is no place safe for them anymore.
All their spaces that they regard as sacrosanct will be invaded and conquered.
We will enjoy every minute.
It's like right-wing lunatic.
That's amazing.
Elon's actually going to open Twitter up as a hunting reserve, and we're all going to be able to hunt our enemies on it now?
That's what they would love.
Very strange.
They hate all of the bad, you know, Jewish billionaires, but they love him.
They want to be dominated by him.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, you know, when I recently attended the first anti-LGBT protest in front of Disney Studios in Burbank, like the, I mean, the first around this kind of wave of, uh, reaction to the Don't Say Gay reaction.
So it's all reaction to reaction to reaction anyways.
But I was, I was amazed to see how widespread the QAnon style messaging had become.
It was like, everybody's a pedophile, you know, you're a groomer, this is a demonic agenda.
But there weren't many mentions of Q or QAnon proper.
So, you know, what do you kind of make of, I guess, the mainstreaming of some of these kind of, like, extreme QAnon beliefs?
Yeah, well, I think, like, the term QAnon, they recognize as, like, toxic, kind of, like, it's gained, like, there's a level of, like, mainstream understanding of that term, that they're not gonna maybe be as overt about it.
But it's undeniable, this is all tied into those same narratives, right?
About, like, protect the children, save the children, you know, sort of satanic panic type stuff.
Like, it's all of the same cloth.
It's just kind of a different name.
Also, this is what it looks like to bleed out into the mainstream, right?
I think what the right has been successful at doing is sort of like taking trans people and kind of trying to like Use trans people as a way to attack the broader LGBTQ rights movement because there's such little understanding of sort of trans issues and it's so divisive they can kind of use that to like chip away and normalize this level of homophobia that we have not seen online in years.
Like obviously it's always been in these forums and stuff but like just the casual homophobia that people have on the internet these days is like I think higher than it has been in years.
Yeah, and I think it is also interesting to examine this in, you know, the context of a larger phenomenon of aggregator accounts, you know, like insert here posting their L's or MagaCope or this and that.
And it's this kind of, I guess, like it's all we have left, you know, like a lot of these, these are big private platforms, you know, we're kind of feeding straight into this.
giant capitalist machine that is making money off our loneliness and our willingness to kind of represent
ourselves constantly online as if we've kind of Internalized PR and advertising and we all think of
ourselves as a brand looking at you live but
kidding, of course, but yeah I think I mean like do you think there's a broader
realization that these kinds of accounts can get rapid growth if they just get
the formula, right Of course!
I mean, this is why I wrote so much about the rise of T-accounts.
That's basically what these accounts are.
We saw accounts like this emerging, these aggregator type accounts, for years in the influencer space, in the entertainment world, and now we're seeing all of it applied to politics.
It's super viral content packaged in this really native way, designed to Play on something right to like play into people's preconceived beliefs about something and I think it's just a recipe for success and engagement.
People love these types of things.
This is where people get their news from.
This is what the subject of my fellowship that I did a couple years ago was about kind of how accounts like this aggregator accounts are merging on Instagram as a news source, but obviously they're all over.
And I think that's kind of the future of media.
If we think of the future of media as being driven by these platforms, these types of accounts are what these platforms reward and optimize for.
Yeah.
I mean, speaking of that, you know, how exactly did TikTok contribute to, I guess, the ease with which they were able to kind of crawl all this content from small accounts?
You know, does the algorithm and the way that TikTok works contribute to that or?
Yeah, so it just, yeah, and I think it also goes back to like, I mean, I think TikTok is basically like a mix of the worst parts of YouTube culture and the worst parts of Twitter, and like mashing it together where it's this open platform where suddenly people are creating content and really highly engaging video content that's easily downloadable and easily shared.
So it just makes it really easy.
You could almost never run this type of account off just Instagram.
It's really hard.
Most people have private accounts.
TikTok stuff is default public, and it's a place where people go to talk about themselves or talk about their identities.
It's sort of been a haven for the LGBTQ community to talk about their experiences, connect with people, other teachers.
All of those people have found a home on TikTok.
And so I think Lips of TikTok is just mining that in the worst way.
But it's also just, yeah, it's just this, like, massive platter of content, basically, that's very easy to, like, you know, distribute, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, the way Tucker framed it as, you know, This is a very useful resource for parents because you can see what's actually happening.
So the idea here is that these people posting themselves and their opinions is somehow news or is it is a news item and or representation of reality and not a curated version of, you know, the most, I guess, outrageous small account posts about, let's say, you know, gender or or queerness or whatever.
So, I don't know, I just feel like there's something, I mean, obviously dishonest about it, but, you know, what do you make of private citizens' lives slowly becoming, I don't know, like, indistinguishable from news for a lot of these big platforms?
Yeah, I mean, I think this is what the quote-unquote news industry is becoming.
Like, if you look at entertainment, right?
Like, people get their news from Drama Alert, from TikTok Room, from The Shade Room, from, like, all of these kind of, like, crowdsourced feeds that kind of just, like, aggregate.
Content with a specific point of view.
And I think we're just seeing that now applied to politics and people like to get their news from something with a point of view, right?
Like people generally like to like, it's why they watch Tucker, right?
Like they want to hear someone kind of like a commentator, like put things in context that feeds into their preconceived beliefs.
And that's what these accounts do really well.
Obviously, they're not news. Like, this is not a journalistic account whatsoever. They
are following zero principles of journalism, but they're framing themselves that way. And
I think the people following, like, view them that way, unfortunately.
I mean, I feel like your work has also followed a trajectory where you were covering influencer
culture, TikTok culture, I mean, and then kind of you're now finding yourself thrust
into, I guess, a position where you're covering higher and higher, you know, I mean, you're
interacting directly with Tucker Carlson.
So, I mean, how has that kind of, yeah, how did that?
Well, I will say I've always covered Politics.
I mean, I literally was at the Hilton the night that Trump was sworn in covering that, and I covered that.
It was something I talked about extensively, was sort of Trump's rise on the internet and the rise of these far-right communities and stuff.
Because influencers, I mean, Milo, I think you could consider an influencer who I covered a lot.
Like, there's always been these figures and these cults of personalities in the internet.
It's just that now they have more power than ever.
I think my work, people didn't really get it.
Yeah, until like the past two years.
Like, I think a lot of people kind of thought, oh, well, that's she covers like, oh, entertainment people, right?
Like James Charles, Jake Paul, like, oh, you know, those are teen YouTube things.
It's like, no, no, no, this is about the disruption of media.
And this is about how people consume information and what the media landscape looks like.
And it's just now we're far enough into that new media landscape that people like, My work has more consequences, I guess, for the people that I cover, where they're more angry about it.
I mean, I was always writing these stories.
I mean, Tucker, yeah.
I think also just me joining the New York Times was kind of a flashpoint for these people, because they had kind of hated me for years.
And I wrote about Pamela Geller's daughters that are big Instagram influencers, and they were all mad about that.
But I think it's also my work has a level of mainstream credibility that it didn't used to, where I was just sort of in the corner of The digital culture section at some millennial news site, you know, and now I think people take it seriously more and they don't like that.
I mean, they don't want scrutiny on this world.
That's what like Glenn Greenwald was so angry about.
It's like they want to be able to operate with impunity and they want to be able to build these massive media organizations with no critique or oversight and they don't want people to understand it.
And for the most part, the mainstream media does not understand that world.
But we need to do more stories like the Libs of TikTok stuff so that we can bring accountability to these powerful internet figures.
Yeah, it's so interesting that, you know, they treat Libs of TikTok like a really serious journalist.
But then, like, as soon as, like, really basic stuff is revealed to them, that, like, if any other, you know, if any serious journalist, their name was revealed, it wouldn't be a big deal.
As soon as that happens, they revert to, like, essentially seeing them like an anonymous random account on Twitter.
Yeah.
It's interesting how they flee away from the sort of serious journalism in the only moments where it would be useful to attack their enemies, basically.
100%.
It's all about just lying and driving narratives that try to absolve them of any kind of accountability.
What's interesting, too, is that there's a kind of You know, people have been talking about Tucker's populism, you know, he rails against, you know, the corporate state and all this stuff.
And he's like, oh, Bezos owns the Washington Post or whatever.
But, you know, you never hear about how the accounts that are featured by Libs of TikTok are working class people.
Yeah.
But that never comes up.
There seems to be only limited class analysis.
Are you saying Tucker's a hypocrite?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's no class analysis and there's no... I mean, this is like a multi-millionaire cable host claiming persecution.
It's absolutely nonsense.
Meanwhile, they're getting teachers in the middle of the country that make $45,000 a year fired because, you know, they talked about their husband during class or something.
Like, it's absolute nonsense.
And he just lies.
So it's kind of unsurprising.
And you know, it's interesting because Rychik, like you kind of examined, she's worked her way to this point.
She has, you know, tried to get the formula right.
Then she got it right.
Then she grew her account.
She got all this support.
She thrust herself into that position.
Whereas somebody who's featured on that account, they don't gain any power.
They're not working towards massive public exposure.
The only real crime here is cringe.
And if you can't post cringe, then I'm sorry, but we need to shut everything down.
Cause we are all, that's all we do.
We all post cringe all day.
So, um, yeah, I guess what, what do you make of, um, something that may at first have been, Hey, anyone can start an account and get big by like finding a cool angle, uh, to the point where we're at now, where it's like, Oh, legislation is being decided based on, uh, you know, the curation of, uh, of an account like Libs of TikTok.
I think it's actually, I think it's far more pervasive than people think.
Like, I think Lips of TikTok is a high-profile example of this, but you see more and more people, especially people in Congress, everywhere.
Our worlds are shaped by these digital ecosystems that we live in and the accounts that we follow and these aggregator accounts or these influencers, right?
And I think they have more and more power over us every year.
The media ecosystem is only moving more towards that model.
So I think we should all Question these influencers, even the ones that we deem reliable, right?
And just kind of think.
I mean, I'm no defender of corporate media.
Obviously, there's so many problems with legacy media.
It's like the whole crux of my beat is talking about those issues.
But I think we really need to scrutinize this new sort of like influencer-driven system too, because it's, you know, it's way worse in a lot of ways.
Right.
And I wanted to also get your take on, you know, censorship, which is a real thing on some of these platforms, not in the way that the right conceives of it.
But, you know, there are like private public efforts to track user behaviors, determine which one is like dangerous.
So how does that work in to this environment where it seems On one side, like they're rewarded and they just keep
growing.
And on the other side, these private companies are kind of struggling to figure out what to do.
You know, Obama recently made a speech, you know, kind of chastising these companies for not doing more.
So, I mean, what do you make of that?
Yeah, I love how he's like talking about this.
Like, it's just funny to see that turn from him.
I think it's reflective of this broader, the different lens that we're looking at from tech companies, because he was such a booster.
I remember I was at South by South Lawn, which was this event they had for Silicon Valley people at the White House, and just, you know, talking about how great Uber is and great these companies are.
And now it's like, no, they were always harmful in these ways.
I think a lot of people were ignorant of that for a long time.
I think, I mean, in terms of like censorship or whatever, the most censored and persecuted people on the Internet are marginalized groups.
It's not these right-wing conservatives that have every outlet available to them to talk and, in fact, rarely face any kind of Penalties.
And as we've seen time and time again, it's actually far-right figures and information that outperforms anything from the left.
These algorithms are built to reward this type of right-wing outrage.
I mean, Facebook, we know, but Twitter and TikTok as well.
It's terrifying the lack of media literacy people have, especially on TikTok.
And I think we're just sort of in the beginning of seeing those consequences.
But yeah, I mean, all of those debates about like censorship are kind of just nonsense because, of course, this is the same party that's trying to ban books, you know?
Yes, that effort is happening concurrently to, you know, the argument that the teachers are kind of playing an outsized role.
And I did notice that that in general, you know, even among I was looking into this dark MAGA stuff, which let's let's touch on that for a second.
So there's there's this kind of I don't know, it's mostly an aesthetic, it seems at this point.
So it essentially yearns for like a vengeful, effective Trump in the same way the QAnon people conceive of it, you know, like some version of him that would come in and really usher in the storm or like drain the swamp.
But essentially what they're asking for is using state power to crack down on enemies.
Right.
And Darkmaga is this rebrand of like, "Oh yeah, no, we're even more bloodthirsty.
Like, oh, there was so much optimism in 2016maga, but now it's time for punishment or whatever."
Which is essentially what QAnon was doing while Trump was in office.
And I saw this article written about it by a far-right guy who was kind of, you know,
playing footsie with it.
You know, his AVI on Twitter, for example, has the shining eyes or whatever.
But he was kind of fantasizing specifically about state control of the press so that articles like yours, the one you published about libs of TikTok, would get state scrutiny.
It just struck me as, I don't know, a contradiction.
But yeah, what do you make of the state potentially regulating your articles?
Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely insane.
It just goes back to the fact that, like, no one is a fiercer defendant of the free press and of free speech than journalists.
That is literally how we do our job.
It is so crucial that we protect free speech and that we protect the First Amendment.
That is, we couldn't have a free and fair press without that.
Meanwhile, it is I mean, the right, they just lie.
Like you said, they're just, they're lying.
They make one point that's expedient, and then they'll contradict themselves in the next point.
Because ultimately, what they're advocating is this authoritarian rule, that they want power.
Like, they don't want authoritarianism in general.
They want their authoritarian rule to take over, right?
They want a state-sponsored press that can crush their political enemies, not The other way around, right?
So it's, yeah, it's just, it's nonsense.
And I think I was really happy to see how my article kind of exposed a lot of these hypocrisies.
I like doing stories that kind of get at this stuff, because I think it, it forces these people to kind of like twist and turn and, and expose themselves for who they are.
What we need as a response to Darkmega is DarkBrandon.
Hashtag DarkBrandon.
We have tens of thousands of indictments on the pedokons.
They will be unsealed.
The storm is coming.
Yeah, trust the plan.
Trust the plan.
Hashtag DarkBrandon.
He's actually doing 5D chess, is what I hear.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, speaking of the kind of macro environment here, all of this, a lot of this, at least, is just to harvest votes.
You know, the right wants to regain Congress and potentially, obviously, the presidency in 2024.
So, you know, can you tell us a bit more about how these efforts and even ranging to accounts like Libs of TikTok are actually working on a greater electoral project?
Yeah, well, Libs of TikTok, you know, Haya Raichek has talked about her political influence and how she's already inspired all of her followers to kind of like go out, run for local office.
She's talked about her followers taking over school boards, harassing members of school boards and kind of exerting their political
influence locally. She's also building this powerful email list. And you'll see like one of the first
things she did when she started to go viral is start capturing emails through Review initially,
which is a newsletter platform and then now Substack. And undeniably, those emails are going
to be used for political purposes.
I mean, clearly.
And so I think, yeah, I think that this is where we're seeing like political power evolve and these accounts are being used as tools for political campaigns like DeSantis or whoever else kind of aligns themselves with them.
I want to talk about, yeah, for a long time now, there's been this weird strain of people who just act repulsed at the idea that they might be subject to journalistic scrutiny.
We've seen a lot like tech people in Silicon Valley, and we saw it recently in the stories about the founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Where, um, they just act absolutely outraged that they would be, you know, investigated and reported on when they have like a billion dollar venture that is, you know, huge in the, uh, you know, the crypto world.
So I don't know, there's this, I guess it used to be assumed that like, you know, if you did something that made a big impact in terms of influence or money or wealth or politics or something, well, people would look into you because that's just how the world works.
But now there's just, there's this weird reaction where people think that they, They deserve to be immune to any kind of scrutiny regardless of how much influence they have.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, these are people with power that don't want accountability.
They want to retain that power, and they don't want any scrutiny for it.
They don't want people reporting on them.
They don't want people looking into them.
They don't want people to know who they are.
They don't want to be accountable to the public or the media.
And that is antithetical to the goals of journalism, which should be to report on the truth and hold power to account.
So I think those things are always going to be in tension.
And so, you know, now with Elon owning Twitter, And you know, a lot is made, of course, of Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post.
Are we kind of doomed to try to do good journalism within a structure that is kind of owned by the very same people that don't want scrutiny?
I mean, is there any future where that gets better instead of worse?
I don't know.
I mean, I think like rich people have run media for a long time.
I don't know the best business model.
I mean, I came up, I'm a millennial.
I came up working for a bunch of VC backed digital media companies and I saw the way the incentives were warped and how we pivoted and pivoted to kind of basically just meet the whims of Facebook.
And I don't think that that's a healthy model for journalism either.
So, you know, I don't know.
I feel like we're figuring all of these things out.
I think editorial independence is key.
You know, though Bezos owns the Washington Post, we have complete editorial independence, right?
In a lot of other cases, that might not be the case.
You know, with other sort of like funding situations, we don't, we don't know for other outlets.
But I think hopefully, we can find more business models that support independent, fearless, you know, accountability driven journalism in a way that allows journalists to make a living.
It's funny when These people, you know, and Tucker and all these people, like cable news hosts, are just like ranting about how we're the media elite and everything.
And like, I'm doing fine.
I'm not trying to act like I'm not.
But like, you know, I was living in like a 400 square foot apartment until quite recently.
And it's not, you know, journalists are not in it for the money.
It's very, it's very sort of tight margins at a lot of news outlets.
And people do it because it matters to them and because we care about this stuff.
So I hope, yeah, I hope that we can find a better funding model.
I don't know where I'm going with all this other than, like, I don't have the answers.
Yeah, of course.
In 2016, we kind of saw, you know, the chans, 4chan, 8chan, and this kind of, you know, alt-right or whatever put together a movement for Trump or whatever.
Then QAnon came along to kind of, you know, You know, have that niche of someone who reinforces Republican power but is considered outside of everything.
They're not accountable.
They're not identified.
And what struck me about Libs of TikTok and the model that's kind of come together in this cycle is that this might be a kind of useful thing, right?
You need your Tucker Carlsons and then you also need your anonymous accounts that are supposedly just, you know,
giving you the raw data for you to interpret, which is some of the arguments that we
heard around libs of TikTok hinge on that. So do you think that this is a kind of harbinger
for, I don't know, hybrid campaigning or hybrid movement building?
Yeah, I mean, I think we see these movements already, like you mentioned, be built out
of the internet, like, especially the right has just been so successful and kind of like
capitalizing on these internet communities and kind of bringing these like fringe elements
into the party's mainstream, or maybe just them sort of taking over the party's mainstream.
I think this is obviously the way politics works now.
I mean, the internet is just this, like, giant game of sort of people driving narratives about each other, and I think, obviously, to win politically, you need to have a very strong narrative, and you need to have people back you up, and you need to have the right influencers behind you, and you need to have a digital movement.
Almost like I could see, you know, some kind of AstroTurf style WikiLeaks operations being put together now as part of a campaign.
We were joking about this a few weeks ago, I think, you know, that like, oh, if you hire this guy, like he'll he'll build you a cult, like he'll build you a version of QAnon for your candidate, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do see that continuing.
I think this is just, I mean, I wrote about the rise of online cults and their importance in the influencer world, and I think that's just where we're going.
It's all driven towards these super galvanized communities and what they put their mind to.
Yeah, what kind of cult-like behavior have you seen?
I think I saw you post about a YouTuber or something that's getting more and more out of control in terms of what he's making his fans do.
God, that's like every YouTuber.
I was probably posting about Mr. Beast, who I've written about a lot, but he just kind of does these more and more outlandish stunts and models himself after Elon Musk has gotten in trouble for his bad labor practices.
He's one of the biggest, most followed people on YouTube and also operates with impunity.
So I don't even know if that's who I was talking about because I feel like there's so much toxic stuff on the internet.
But these personalities are getting more and more powerful.
And if you see someone like Mr. Beast, right, like, we're not quite there yet, but soon you're going to see these people enter into politics, genuinely, right?
Like, Mr. Beast, I think, is like 22 or something, but like, if he starts getting into politics, that suddenly you have six, you know, this is somebody with 16 million followers behind them, entering into this space, talking about things, like, I mean, Elon is kind of an example of this, too, where he's political and has, like, he's who he is because of his online influence.
Mm-hmm.
Has Mr. Beast been contacting the Russians trying to buy ICBMs?
We'll see.
Who knows?
I mean, I know that Liv, like, I'd love to hear, you know, your take on this, because you've been following people like Mr. Beast for a little while.
Yeah, I think you had a particular meltdown around Mr. Beast's squid games content.
Yeah, that was that video is absurd because at the end of it, you know, in the squid game show, they play squid game at the end, but he's like, ah, no one knows how to play squid game.
Let's do musical chairs.
So like his squid game parody removes all of the content from the things he's ripping off.
But I think I think that's like, very representative of how like, absurd a lot of this online content is and I think that
connects with politics more broadly that, like Tucker Carlson for instance, can say literally
whatever. It's not based on anything in the real world but if people like it they'll believe it
and that's what it seems like an increasingly large amount of content including Mr. Beast's
stuff is around. And so when you take that absurdity, that lack of reality into politics, it
makes everything even more worse.
It allows for people to abstract away from, let's say, the real violence that marginalized people experience.
You can spin this to say, actually, no, they're the real bad people doing really evil things, and all the people running harassment campaigns against them are the ones who are the actual victims of violence.
And because all of these discourses are just not attached to the world, how it functions, a disturbingly large amount of people will believe it.
There's all these platforms, and essentially everyone is posting by choice.
I mean, more or less.
But it's also, you know, inevitable.
Like, if you want to be online in any way, you're going to create an account on one of these, essentially, economies, like YouTube or whatever, and the algorithm will Or the corporate practice will kind of guide you towards a certain style of content.
So I find it really hard to talk about how power is playing out on these platforms without talking about how, you know, that's the kind of the ultimate form of power is like the structure itself.
Um, that'll affect a lot more than like, like Mr. Beast might come and go, but the YouTube algorithm will create another Mr. Beast just out of, you know, kind of financial success and then people modeling it.
Or the way they speak or the way they communicate after what they've seen has been successful.
So do you think this is just like a pen and we're all just fighting each other and then at the same time there's all these kind of operations to skim the worst most cringe content and then like weaponize it to political purposes or I don't know?
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think what to say.
I mean, yes, I think this is where it's all going.
I think, like, I don't know that it's all going to be, like, cringe content or whatever, but I think these types of accounts, these influencer accounts, are only going to have more power.
Influencers are only getting more power.
The media ecosystem is only getting more and more fragmented.
So that's just the world that we're living in now.
It's not going to go back the other way anytime soon.
Yeah, there's like a pessimism about like, even like the individual influencers, especially the ones who are doing particularly bad, like you replace them, the structure of like absurdity and abstracting from like, it's like sort of baked into a lot of like, especially the profit incentive driven content.
And so as long as that profit driven content is like structuring how people understand the world, you know, we're going to get this problem sort of continually popping up.
Exactly.
The two parties, you know, people will often describe like, you know, supporting the Democrats or supporting the Republicans is like team sports.
But now I feel like we're moving into a kind of fandom model instead of team sports.
So it's, you know.
I'm a Brandon Stan.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Is that something that you've noticed, Taylor, on YouTube and the way that these people are building communities, but then aren't communities?
They call them communities, but they're really followings.
Yes.
This is why I was talking so much about Trump throughout, I mean, when I covered the 2016 election.
Like, he was the only, like, he had that, like, online fandom.
Obviously, Andrew Yang did too.
Like, later, people were talking about, like, the Yang Gang in 2020 or whatever, and that flopped.
Like, just because you have a little niche community doesn't mean that you're going to go far, but I think if you're able to build this online cult following, you can do anything you want.
Like, and you're, you have no, you don't have to be accountable to anyone except your fans.
So, like, that's just the way things are going.
I don't, I think it's very hard to build those fandoms.
Like, that's what I mean.
I think we're going to start seeing more politicians that come from the internet and come from, like, those worlds.
I think, like, You know, I don't know what I'm trying to say, but yes, I mean, we live in this fandom world and everyone's an influencer and everyone's commoditizing themselves or expressing themselves through these, like, influencers that they follow.
And that's just, that's how politics is.
I mean, you always had to get voters, but now it's like, not only do they have to vote for you, you want them to develop this parasocial relationship with you, right?
Where they really feel like they know you, like an influencer.
Yeah, Trump was the first influencer president.
He was.
I mean, I said that and people on Twitter, I mean, people on Twitter are always shitting on me when I talk about branding or influencers or whatever, even though it's my whole beat.
But like, I mean, I do think that he was like the first kind of like internet president that we've seen where like his rise was so tied to those internet factions that, yeah.
In the same sense that like Obama was the first gay president, Trump is the first like Zoomer president.
Oh my God.
And so over under on the first female president being libs of TikTok.
I should make an account called libs of TikTok and it's just my own TikToks.
Actually, I did hear a media pundit accidentally say libs of TikTok.
So maybe you're on to something.
You could be like those websites that bank on like a mistype.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Skim off all the followers.
Well, yeah, thanks so much for joining us.
This has been such a pleasure, Taylor.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Oh, can I also say one thing?
Yes.
Speaking of influencers, there is a lifestyle influencer named Haya Raychek.
She is not libs of TikTok.
And she has an Instagram presence and people were hating on her because they were thinking that that is her.
And I just want to make it extra clear that the Haya Raychek on Instagram is a lovely mom who has nothing to do with any of this.
So she's just a mom influencer.
Fair.
Um, yeah, there's, you know, like, like every fandom, there's dark right chick and light right chick.
Yeah.
The two, the light and the dark, the yin and the yang.
Yeah.
So where can people follow you and find your stuff?
Yeah, I'm at Taylor Lorenz on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, pretty much everything.
You can find me.
I'm on Truth Social now.
I finally got unsuspended.
So they banned me for community guidelines within like a minute.
What happened to free speech?
Truth Social feels a bit like the old days with QAnon.
There's almost every single influencer who's been banned off TikTok is hanging out over there trying to convince themselves that this is the future.
But will they be able to compete with Elon Musk's Twitter?
No.
It's gonna be hard.
I've already seen some voices say that Elon Musk should buy Truth Social and just fold it in, which would essentially just restore all these people's accounts.
Um, I'm looking forward to it.
But yeah, thanks so much again for joining us.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
People who subscribe to our Patreon also get access to a new series that I'm working on called Trickle Down.
Which is all about misinformation and bad ideas that flow from high authority sources.
The first two episodes, which we've already released, are all about this pseudo-scientific study that fueled the eugenics movement.
And the next two, which we're working on now and we're going to release in the next coming weeks, They're all about how this sex trafficking panic around the turn of the century, which was called the white slavery panic, it wound up giving the federal government the power to imprison people for being in consensual relationships.
So lots of horrifying things that I find interesting.
But yeah, I'm really excited about that.
Yeah, it's a bit more edited.
We use a bit more music.
Like I'm really happy with how it's coming out.
So go check it out, folks.
And Liv, tell us a bit about what you've got going on.
Yeah, I have a Twitch stream, twitch.tv slash liveagar, that you can tune into on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays at 6pm Eastern.
I also have a solo philosophy podcast that I'm going to be adding a lot more content to in the coming future, which is just liveagar and whichever podcast hosting site you use.
Same with the Patreon, liveagar.
Go check it out.
So when you sub, you help us stay advertising-free and editorially independent, and we appreciate it.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
Do you know anybody that's been kicked off?
I mean, you probably can't name one.
I could, like, look right over here at this chat, and I would guarantee you that 90% of the people that are texting right now in this chat on this live program were kicked off of Twitter.
That's 53 people right there.
We're talking millions, guys.
Millions of Patriots were thrown off of Twitter.
You gotta say 20.
We're talking millions of people were thrown off the platform.
Most of them were literally retweeting stuff.
Not even for creating content, but just retweeting it.
