Why the WaPo Fears Libs of TikTok

BUCK: Here’s the story today in the Washington Post that I want to tell you all about. “Meet the Woman Behind Libs of TikTok, Secretly Fueling the Right’s Outrage Machine,” by a figure that some of you may have heard of. She’s not famous, but she’s certainly infamous in media circles, a Miss Taylor Lorenz, who is, I believe, roughly my contemporary. Clay’s a little older, but roughly my contemporary.

CLAY: (laughing) You make it sound like I’m 74.

BUCK: I gotta get in a shot where I can. Roughly my contemporary, Miss Lorenz. So here we are seeing this piece on Libs of TikTok, and before you say… Clay, what percentage of our audience do you think is on TikTok? I’d say less than 1%. Right? You think that’s fair?

CLAY: I’m not even on TikTok. Are you on TikTok?

BUCK: I don’t post, but I have a TikTok. I follow some TikTok accounts, mostly cooking of meat and some fitness tips, but also steak. There’s all this meat. Like, literally, m-e-a-t TikTok, where you get to see people making wagyus and, you know, the expensive meat that you’ll be buying me when Hunter Biden doesn’t actually get prosecuted.

CLAY: No, I have… I don’t believe I have ever been on TikTok. So, no. If I’m not on it, the idea that very many of our listeners, I think, would be on it… Now, there may be some parents out there that are on it to help monitor what their kids are seeing so maybe there’s more than we’re thinking.

BUCK: So, here’s how the ecosystem works, everybody, ’cause this goes all the way up to the top. Meaning this goes all the way up to the Washington Post, the Jeff Bezos, billionaire-owned Washington Post going after this one account — and here’s why. I’ll actually read from you a little bit of this piece, so you understand why they’re so upset about it.

“On March 8, a Twitter account called…” It’s also on Twitter to be fair. It started on TikTok, and now it’s on multiple platforms, so it has additional reach. “[A] Twitter account called Libs of TikTok posted a video of a woman teaching sex education to children in Kentucky, calling the woman in the video a ‘predator.’

“The next evening, the same clip was featured on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program, prompting the host to ask, ‘When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?’ Libs of TikTok reposts a steady stream of TikTok videos and social media posts, primarily from LGBTQ+ people, often including incendiary framing designed to generate outrage. Videos shared from the account quickly find their way to the most influential names in right-wing media.”

Okay. So that’s from the start of the Post. We’ll get to the doxing of this woman in a second. But it’s fair to say, Libs of TikTok — you follow it, I follow it, and now it’s on multiple social media platforms so you don’t even have to have a TikTok account. But the stuff that it shows, it just takes what people who are leftists who announce their pronouns, who I can’t even really…

You have to sort of see some of this. I mean, there are people that truly look like they’re in need of tremendous psychological help. But then they’ll announce that they’re a kindergarten teacher. You know, they have… You have to see it. How do I describe this so people could really understand? It’s insane.

CLAY: Yeah, the way I would describe is these are mostly videos that people are shooting of themselves sharing their opinions, and what Libs of TikTok does is collate these videos and share them with an audience that’s different than the audience that might have otherwise been consuming them, right? Because these are basically far left-wing people usually talking to other far left-wing people, and Libs of TikTok shines a light on what that universe is actually discussing.

BUCK: It’s almost just like retweeting, if you understand in the Twitterverse, how that stuff works. They’re just resharing content that already exists. It’s not cutting in a way that’s unfair to the content. It’s just, “Here’s what this individual thinks,” and this is why this has become to contentious. Because the left with the whole “don’t say gay” bill, the Parental Rights in Education law.

In fact, that is now the law in the state of Florida. Ron DeSantis fighting with Disney, all these issues that started to go against the activist LGBTQ+ groups, the activist groups that push much of this content, this ideology — and the storyline kept being, “Nobody really wants to indoctrinate your kids into gender identity,” right?

🚨🚨🚨.@UofNH professor says it’s ineffective to assume a sexual relationship between young people and adults is predatory and criminal pic.twitter.com/GqQXmcr7hc

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 18, 2022

“Nobody wants to tell your 5-year-old about pansexuality. That’s just a right-wing lie.” Oh? Libs of TikTok shares accounts from people who are saying crazy stuff about how they actually do want to teach your — and they’re teachers.

CLAY: And teachers.

BUCK: Right. So there are teachers, and this is what’s gotten so much attention. And, yes, some of the content is shared on, you know, Tucker’s show on Fox, Laura’s show, you know, different shows on Fox. We’ll talk about some of it here on this show. So this became a big problem for the propaganda machine of the left because their storyline is, “The right’s lying, nobody wants to groom children or to sexually indoctrinate young children into these gender identity theories at a very young age.

“No one wants to do that,” except for all these accounts of people who are teachers who are saying that that’s exactly what they want to do. So what does the Washington Post do? They have Taylor Lorenz find the anonymous individual behind the Libs of TikTok account to try to cut off this content pipeline, in essence, from the big shows, from the national conversation. She showed up — she showed up, Clay.

CLAY: She’s a reporter for the Washington Post for people who don’t know. Yeah.

BUCK: She showed up at the family members of the anonymous Libs of TikTok woman to ask them questions. This is pure intimidation. Everybody in journalism knows it, but this is what the left does. Remember when they had CNN showing up to some woman who clicked on a Russian Facebook account or something about the election and they’re on her front lawn asking her questions like she’s a bad person? They destroy everyday people to make a political point.

CLAY: Remember when they showed up for people who were donating, like, $50 to the Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense fund?

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: They showed up knocking on the door asking, “Why did you donate $50 to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense?” doxing these people. That’s a word that a lot of people are not gonna be familiar with that we should probably explain, Buck, the concept of doxing, which is you are otherwise a normal person, right — like you have your normal life — and you may decide to donate $50 to Kyle Rittenhouse.

And you may do it under your own name, not thinking, “Hey, one of the largest media outlets in the world is going to show up at my house and write an entire article about the $50 donation that I’ve made.” You may run an anonymous account that becomes popular, but have a normal life otherwise and not anticipate that you’re going to be investigated as if you’re committing some sort of crime.

BUCK: And look at how easy it is for them. Let’s say you’re Bob the Accountant, and Bob the Accountant gave $50 to the Rittenhouse defense fund. By the way, the now-exonerated Kyle Rittenhouse.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Worth pointing out. Kyle Rittenhouse was innocent, found innocent in a court of law, or not guilty, but effectively innocent because it was a self-defense case, and it was self-defense. You know, it wasn’t like they lacked evidence to understand what had happened. They knew exactly what happened. But let’s say you’re Bob the Accountant, and the Washington Post prints your name, your company, your address, and now all of a sudden your boss, the chief accountant, is getting death threat emails, is getting, “How could you employ this person?”

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: And they’ll say, “Oh, well, it’s a free company, it’s a company, it’s private company, can do what it wants.” Yeah, so you get fired. So you didn’t do any wrong but your boss freaks out and you get fired. They do this to send a message. They do this because, sure, it’s one person, right? But that one person could be anyone, which is why it is so impactful, which is why this is so important to the leftist machinery of propaganda and of making sure that people stay within the prescribed political boundaries.

Hi @TaylorLorenz! Which of my relatives did you enjoy harassing the most at their homes yesterday? pic.twitter.com/QehkBSgcmG

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 19, 2022

Because, Clay, there are very few… You know, we do political commentary, right? So if someone’s gonna come at us, fair game. There are very few people whose companies would withstand even a short-but-aggressive political campaign to have them fired. Very few places would say, “It’s so worth having Susie scanning the groceries at our Quik-E-Mart or whatever that we’re gonna keep her even though there are a hundred emails saying they should be fired because of this thing.”

Very few places. So this is a silencing mechanism, right? Now, they could say that the Libs of TikTok account is a public person, but I would want to know, “Well, what are the rules now for any kind of anonymity when it comes to media? Who do they go after? Who do they do not? Wat accounts do they unveil, what accounts do they keep secret?” And why talk to her parents? What does that have to do with anything?

CLAY: It’s a method… Well, and we should mention that the Washington Post reporter who is doing all of this was — within the last month — on MSNBC crying over the fact that people were saying mean things about her online and nobody should have to ever deal with this. I think we have some audio.

BUCK: Here’s how she discusses the situation of bullying online.

Taylor Lorenz says online harassment is a huge problem because it’s a tool to silence people especially women. The irony pic.twitter.com/Rgxb6odlgd

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 19, 2022

BUCK: So she wants special protection —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — for journalists to be able to ruin anyone’s life that they choose. We’re supposed to lay off, and here she is ’cause it gets even more sad over this. This is a woman who actively tries to ruin people’s lives for her profession, makes that choice. Here she is when she gets a little heat her way.

BUCK: Oh, stop.

CLAY: She is the worst person on the internet. Buck, she has a multibillion-dollar media corporation backing up her investigation of a random, anonymous account on social media — the direct result of what she’s whining about! She’s showing up at somebody’s mom’s, dad’s house knocking on the door, trying to out them, trying to dox who is running this account because she disagrees with their politics, and then she’s gonna break down in crocodile tears on MSNBC and talk about how unfair the world is?

Look, you’re in the game. We’re in the game, Buck. If one of… Imagine the reaction if one of us went on Fox News and we were like (sobbing), “Sometimes people say really mean things to me on the internet and I just…” We would be… People, rightly, would mock and ridicule us to the ends of the earth. This is the world in which we choose to live. You can’t argue for different standards for yourself ’cause your feelings are upset while you’re trying to destroy other people’s lives like she is.

BUCK: And I would just want everyone to know that the journalistic establishment even though — even though — they’re aware of how grotesque this is at some level to go after families, ’cause this is… By the way, she’s not a first offender. She’s done this to other people. She was trying to get Kellyanne Conway’s I think at the time 14-year-old daughter to give her quotes about the fighting between George Conway and Kellyanne Conway.

She’s horrible, okay? She’s a person of incredibly poor judgment who does destroy people, who does ruin people’s lives. Clearly, she’s aware of how damaging it can be to have the media focused in on you and sharing details about you and she makes a career of that anyway. So there’s really… I think she’s a sociopath.

I really mean that. I think there’s something wrong with her. But understand that the Democrat journalistic establishment wants people like this out there. They want to pretend that the people who work for Media Matters which is extensively quoted in this piece, by the way.

CLAY: Of course.

BUCK: Media Matters is one of the worst organizations in America, and anyone who draws a paycheck from it should be ashamed. All they do is try to destroy people by being dishonest and engaging in propaganda. They are, to borrow from Bill O’Reilly, “smear merchants.” That’s all they do. Right?

There are these entities, though, that if you’re a columnist at the New York Times and you’re a columnist at the Washington Post, you view them almost as like your Mafia muscle. You want someone out there keeping all the peasants in line. Step out of line, maybe… You know, it’s not Paul Krugman or Tom Friedman that’s gonna do the doxing.

But Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post will handle that for them. They like this. Don’t forget it. They stand behind this quietly. Otherwise, they could shut this crap down in a second. It’s ’cause the left has… We haven’t even gotten into the fact that… Clay, why is it…? Maybe we can come back to this: Why is Libs on TikTok so damaging to them? Why does it…? If it were just fringe, if it weren’t something that actually represented a broader swath of left-wing opinion, it wouldn’t matter, right?

CLAY: And also, if it wasn’t being effective.

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: That’s the thing. That’s why they’re coming at them, ’cause they’re so effective.

BUCK: Well, it’s effective because it’s real.

CLAY: Reflecting reality.

BUCK: That’s why they have a problem with this.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Yeah.