Libs of TikTok

The LGBTQ community has become this cult... I think they’re evil. And sometimes we try to break it down a lot and we discuss why this is happening, what's happening, whatever, and I think sometimes the simplest answer is they're just evil. They're bad people. They're evil people. And they want to groom kids.

Libs of TikTok is a far-right anti-LGBT Twitter account run by Chaya Raichik. The account has become highly influential in conservative circles, and it has over 1.8 million followers as of January 2023. The central narrative pushed by the account is "grooming", the lie claiming that LGBT people are pedophiles manipulating children into sexual deviancy. The concept went mainstream after Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning classroom instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation in grades K-3 in Florida public schools, with his press secretary accusing the bill's opponents of being "groomers".

Raichik's posts on Twitter have been directly linked to transphobic and homophobic threats, violence, and attempted terrorist attacks. Incidents include bomb threats against a school in Wisconsin, a near-riot at Idaho Pride, and threats against a Jewish summer camp. False claims that Children's National, Boston Children's and other pediatric hospitals were performing gender-affirming surgeries on children led to the hospitals being inundated with harassment and threats of violence. Boston Children's Hospital received three bomb threats within just a couple of months. The account again received national attention in November 2022, when it drew attention to a Colorado-based drag charity only hours after a gay night club massacre in Colorado Springs.

Background
Chaya Raichik is a New York City-based real estate agent and is an Orthodox Jew. Within the Chabad-Lubavitch community, "Chaya" is a common female given name, typically given in tribute to Raichik is similarly a common surname among Chabad Jews. This has led to cases of mistaken identity. An influencer named Chaya Raichik, originally from Los Angeles but now residing in England, was harassed by trolls after a journalist mistook her for LoTT. (Many clickbait profiles of LoTT use photos taken from this woman's Instagram.) Another NYC-based Chaya Raichik, author of a book about the Jewish ritual bathing practice known as, quips on her website that she is "not a real estate agent" and "also not a twitter, instagram or tiktock [sic] influencer."

Early activity
In November 2020, Raichik created the Twitter account that would become @libsoftiktok under the handle @shaya69830552, changing this to @shaya_ray before the end of the month. Initially, Raichik ran a typical right-wing "reply account", responding to tweets from more prominent conservatives. She trafficked in far-right fodder like COVID-19 denialism and 2020 U.S. presidential election conspiracy theories.

On January 6, 2021, Raichik used her Twitter account to document her presence at the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot. In a play-by-play account, she indicated that she got close to the clash with Capitol police, tweeting that a rubber bullet "hit right next to me" and sharing a video labelled "tear gas in action." Afterwards, she downplayed the violence during the riot, claiming that only "a few crazy people" actually "stormed the capitol and went inside," and asserting it was "very peaceful" in contrast to a BLM protest. Examination of video and photos of the Capitol riot after Raichik's first in-person interview with Tucker Carlson in December 2022 appear to confirm her presence.

Rise to lame
The role I've seen this account playing is finding new characters for right-wing propaganda. It's relying on the endless stream of content from TikTok and the Internet to cast any individual trans person as a new villain in their story.

Raichik cycled through multiple Twitter handles in early 2021, finally settling on @libsoftiktok on April 19, 2021. The Libs of TikTok account initially promised to "help you find your daily dose of cringe," re-posting pro-vaccination songs found on TikTok. It deliberately pivoted to anti-LGBT content for Pride Month in June 2021. This shift quickly launched the LoTT account into ring-wing celebrity status. The account grew from less than 1,000 followers in early 2021 to 1.3 million in September 2022, amplified by exposure from well-known conservatives like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Greenwald.

The LoTT account's current schtick involves re-posting content from left-leaning and LGBT people. Raichik and her defenders claim that these reposts simply "hold a mirror up to the left". Tucker Carlson, in his December 2022 interview of Raichik, stated that what she has done through LoTT is "bring to light, publicize what they ['libs'] are already saying in public." What these analyses neglect is that Raichik isn't simply an unbiased reporter, but a propagandist who strategically packages reposted content in a misleading, inflammatory manner. The LoTT account exists to bring LGBT and left-learning targets to the attention of a hostile far-right audience. Critics have pointed to this as an example of that allows Raichik to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability while inciting her followers to action.

Raichik seemingly had ambitions of building Libs of TikTok into a brand from an early stage. A trademark application for the account's first logo (based on the stylized TikTok musical note) was filed by Federalist Society-associated lawyer Grant Lally in August 2021. The current logo was registered by Lally in December 2021. Raichik registered the domain LibsofTikTok.us under her own name in October 2021. Seth Dillon, her business associate, first incorporated Libs of TikTok LLC in Delaware in December 2021, and then as a foreign corporation in Florida in March 2022.

Washington Post article
Libs of TikTok was nominally an anonymous account until Washington Post reporter broke the story that identified its owner as Chaya Raichik on April 19, 2022. This provoked accusations of "doxxing" from the conservative commentariat. Alt-right YouTuber Tim Pool, with the help of Daily Wire co-founder and razor peddler, went so far as to buy a billboard in Times Square proclaiming "Taylor Lorenz doxxed @libsoftiktok." Raichik echoed this accusation against Lorenz, stating that her critics were seeking to "intimidate [her] into silence," and vowing that "unfortunately for them, that's just never going to happen." The LoTT account nonetheless gained 200,000 followers in the 24 hours after the article's publication.

Lorenz has stated that, while investigating the story, she visited a Los Angeles address "linked to Raichik's name", but that the woman who answered the door "declined to identify herself." The Chaya Raichik from LA (mentioned above) confirmed in an interview with the  that this woman was her mother. By her account, she belatedly discovered several "urgent" inquiries from Lorenz on the night of April 17, having not used her phone for two days due to Passover. Lorenz was trying to confirm whether she was behind LoTT. She replied, telling Lorenz "you have the wrong Chaya," and asked Lorenz to leave her alone. Lorenz visited her mother's residence on April 18. That same day, the Chaya Raichik of LoTT fame somehow caught wind of this incident, asking Glenn Greenwald to report it to "deter Taylor from stalking more people." Greenwald blasted out a tweet charging that Lorenz "showed up at the house of the relatives of the citizen behind @libsoftiktok and badgered them." (Reporters have noted such visitations are standard journalistic practice. ) The Chaya Raichik from LA asserts she has never met LoTT and does not know how they are related.

For her part, Lorenz maintains that her detractors are attempting to "sow doubt and discredit journalism," and both she and the Post have stood by the integrity of her reporting. In a tweet, Lorenz revealed that, due to the article on LoTT, her family and even "random friends I've tagged on Instagram" had been doxxed and stalked.

Jewish community reaction
A group of 2,000 Orthodox rabbis belonging to the conservative lobby group the released a statement demanding that the Washington Post apologize for outing Raichik soon after the publication of Lorenz's article. The rabbis held that her faith was "entirely unrelated" to the story, deeming its revelation "simply unacceptable" given that "Jews constitute a small minority, yet are disproportionally targeted by hate crimes."

, writing in the , countered that "Jews are visible and assertive in public life," questioning why Raichik "deserves special handling" when she has "willingly placed herself at the white-hot center of our national argument." of the Forward was far more pointed in his judgment that the LoTT account is a "shanda" (disgrace) that is "fueling an early-stage pogrom against trans youth and their allies." He compared LoTT's propagation of the "groomer trope" to the antisemitic blood libels of the past, finding that it "preys on people's fear for their children, which then justifies the most extreme actions in response."

In an article by of the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Elchanan Poupko, a  rabbi, speculated that the anger over Raichik's unmasking expressed within the Orthodox community may have been influenced by cultural mores. According to Poupko, "there remains a degree of stigma associated with posting on social media among haredi Orthodox Jews" given their traditional avoidance of technology, but that it can be "all right to engage, but it's better if it's done anonymously." Kampeas noted that women "within both haredi communities and the Chabad movement" are becoming more active on social media, developing "influencer personas" with focuses as "diverse as religious observance, fashion, parenting and antiracism." Poupko further observed that Orthodox women have more freedom on social media than Orthodox men due to the "belief that women are better equipped than men to withstand temptation."

The rise of LoTT has drawn wider attention to the spread of far-right ideology within Orthodox spaces. In his JTA article, Kampeas noted that Raichik isn't unique as an "Orthodox Trump supporter", remarking that she is "renewing conversation about how deeply some members of the Orthodox community are embedded in the American far right." Left-leaning Hasidic Twitter user Shulim Leifer has attributed this shift to the development of an ecosystem of "pithy and withering" Orthodox political dialogue within "closed groups on apps like WhatsApp." He further mused that "anyone shocked that a frum [devout] person could be an unhinged right-wing maniac" has not looked at their friends' WhatsApp statuses "for the last 6 years." Joshua Shanes, in a trenchant piece for the blog Jewschool, declared that "Orthodoxy – and Chabad especially – has become a MAGA religion." Twitter user @Evel has similarly remarked that the "rapid radicalization of orthodox communities in recent years is dark and twisted."

Painting a target on her ideological opponents
We've reached this phase in social media where people know what to do when an account like Libs of TikTok calls out another account or a person or institution... The online threat escalates very quickly into offline violence when we start to see these patterns of attack.

Libs of TikTok has been credited as one of the driving forces behind a wave of anti-LGBT hate and violence in 2022. Her most frequent targets are all-ages and youth-focused drag events, healthcare providers that offer gender-affirming care to young people, and elementary and high schools supportive of LGBT students.

Hospitals and healthcare providers

 * August 2022: LoTT took aim at in a series of tweets, falsely accusing it of performing hysterectomies on minors as part of its gender-affirming care program. This provoked death threats against doctors and staff, and a bomb threat on August 30 that forced the hospital into lockdown. A second bomb threat against Boston's Children's Hospital followed on September 9. And then a third bomb threat came in on 16 November.
 * August 2022: in Washington, D.C. received an influx of harassment and threats after Raichik published a recording of a "sting" phone call in which she posed as a mother seeking a hysterectomy for her pretend 16-year-old trans son.
 * In total, 24 hospitals and healthcare providers across 21 U.S. states were targeted for providing gender-affirming care in 2022, according to a report from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.

Drag events and drag performers

 * June 2022: Proud Boys stormed a event at a library in San Lorenzo, California, after the event was signposted by Libs of TikTok.   They shouted homophobic and transphobic slurs at attendees, which reportedly "totally freaked out all of the kids."
 * June 2022: On June 11, police in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho arrested an "army" of 31 members of the white nationalist group hiding in a moving van, shortly before they could disrupt a pride event.  Libs of TikTok and other far-right figures spent weeks leading up to the event negatively reporting it to their followers.
 * July 2022: An LGBT+ youth center in North Bay, Ontario received a barrage of harassment after LoTT reposted a promotional video for a planned drag event.
 * November 2022: Only nine hours after the over midnight on November 19-20 at a gay nightclub called Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado left 5 dead and 25 wounded, LoTT singled out a Colorado-based charity that educates youth in drag performance.
 * December 2022: On December 3, two electrical substations in Moore County, North Carolina were deliberately sabotaged in what has been widely speculated was an attempt to shut down a drag event at a small-town theatre, leaving 45,000 county residents without power for several days afterward.  LoTT had retweeted a promotional flier for the drag event a few weeks prior in November.

Schools and teachers

 * April 2022: A middle-school English teacher from Oklahoma received death threats and was forced out of his job after LoTT reposted a TikTok video in which he expressed support for LGBT youth shunned by their families.
 * May 2022: After a string of bomb threats in May 2022, the entire school district of Kiel, Wisconsin was shut down for the remainder of the year. In the preceding days, three Kiel families had gone to local media outlets claiming their middle-school sons were facing a Title IX investigation for bullying a non-binary peer, but the story went viral after Libs of TikTok publicized it.
 * July 2022: A Jewish summer camp in California was subjected to a "social media offensive" after LoTT tweeted about its policy of trans inclusion.
 * July 2022: A -area teacher was inundated with abuse after a doubly misleading tweet by LoTT. LoTT reposted a photo of him with the quote "we had a great pronoun discussion," describing him as a first-grade teacher in the school district. However, the photo and quote were posted to Instagram in 2021 when the teacher was working in another district, and he was not due to begin teaching at a Wauwatosa elementary until September. LoTT targeted a friend who defended him, another teacher based in Chicago.
 * September-December 2022: In September, a high school in Oakville, Ontario received a bomb threat by phone. The school had come under fire from right-wing pundits including LoTT after reports of a trans teacher wearing large prosthetic breasts.  On November 16, the school received another bomb threat by email, forcing it into lockdown and closure for the day.  Six more emailed bomb threats were made against the school over the next month. The email address used to send the November 16 threat to the Oakville high school was linked to one used to send threats to Boston Children's Hospital and a California senator.
 * October 2022: A middle-school teacher from Huntsville, Alabama received death threats and was suspended from his job after LoTT tweeted about a September drag queen story event where he performed – for dogs! – at a local animal rescue.   The rescue and its staff were also barraged with death threats to the point they sought FBI protection.
 * December 2022: A K-12 private school in Chicago was forced to evacuate after receiving a bomb threat, five days after LoTT and other right-wing outlets promoted an edited Project Veritas undercover video of the dean discussing sex ed classes.

"Groomer" slur
Hateful slander linking queerness to pedophilia is nothing new. From at least the 1960s, gay men were accused of "recruiting" or "grooming" boys into homosexuality, typically through the insinuation of abuse. This moral panic was beginning in the early 2020s. "Groomer" emerged as a general slur for LGBT people during this time.

Libs of TikTok's popularity has been credited with spreading the "groomer" narrative. Raichik first accused the LGBT community of "grooming kids" in a pair of June 2021 tweets. For a time, she avoided the slur, but picked it up again in November 2021, declaring the LGBT suicide-prevention charity to be a "grooming organization." Twitter banned the use of slur in mid-2022, stating it was "committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice, or intolerance." However, enforcement of this policy at the time was described as "uneven," "patchy", and "lacking," a situation some attributed to Twitter's then-ongoing buyout by a certain chud billionaire.

On October 27, 2022, the day that Elon Musk officially took over Twitter, Libs of TikTok published a tweet containing nothing but the word "groomer" repeated 13 times, apparently testing whether the new management intended to let her practice freeze peach without consequence. A joint study by Media Matters and found that use of the "groomer" slur skyrocketed on Twitter in the two months after Musk's acquisition. Libs of TikTok's mentions saw a 600% increase of the slur in that period, jumping from almost 2,000 instances to almost 14,000.

Seth Dillon
The rise of Libs of TikTok was apparently championed by Seth Dillon, the owner of the The Babylon Bee, a Christian conservative knock-off of The Onion. In April 2022, after Raichik was identified as the face behind the LoTT account by a Washington Post report, Dillon announced that he was financially supporting her. In a tweet, Dillon proclaimed that "[Raichik] won't be canceled from her job because this *is* her job now. I've worked out a deal with her that will turn her heroic, high-risk work into a career." Dillon registered Libs of TikTok LLC in December 2021. Raichik tweeted a photo of her and Dillon together around this time (albeit with her face blacked out).

Elon Musk
In September 2022, after the Libs of TikTok account was temporarily suspended from Twitter, Dillon announced that Raichik would sue Twitter if the suspension was permanent. The official Babylon Bee Twitter account had been suspended for misgendering U.S. assistant health secretary in March 2022. According to Dillon, Elon Musk personally reached out to him to confirm the Bee's suspension, reportedly musing that "he might need to buy Twitter." Musk actually offered to purchase Twitter for $44 billion soon thereafter, seemingly so that Dillon could keep making transphobic jokes.

In December 2022, two months into his farcical, fortune-obliterating acquisition of Twitter, Musk released the "" through "left-leaning centrist" journalist. The exposé purportedly revealed that Libs of TikTok, along with other conservative-aligned accounts, was subjected to selective policy enforcement and shadowbanning prior to Musk's takeover. Instead, the "Twitter Files" revealed that LoTT received preferential treatment, with moderators being explicitly directed not to take action against the account, but rather to elevate concerns to the highest level of management. This seemingly confirms reports that Twitter took a light-touch approach to enforcing its policies against anti-LGBT hate speech during the interim between Musk's bid and acquisition.

Musk's brave new Freeze Peach regime at Twitter has predictably been a disaster. He purposely reinstated scores of accounts previously suspended for hateful conduct (bringing back The Babylon Bee was reportedly his top priority ) while suspending journalists for purely retaliatory reasons. This included temporarily suspending Taylor Lorenz for the "prior doxxing action" of writing the WaPo article about LoTT's identity in April. Twitter's content moderation system has been gutted by Musk's mass staff layoffs. He has reportedly ordered a "review" of Twitter's policy against deadnaming and misgendering trans people. Hate speech has surged on Twitter under these conditions. Musk, unsurprisingly, has been buddying up to Libs of TikTok, and has liked her tweets.

DeSantis administration
Libs of TikTok has cultivated ties with Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his hardline anti-LGBT administration. According to a Media Matters report, Raichik interacted with, DeSantis' press secretary, over 130 times on Twitter between June 2021 and April 2022. During this time, Pushaw mentioned Libs of TikTok in 97 tweets, and Raichik mentioned Pushaw in 41 tweets. Pushaw has praised LoTT as "one of the best accounts" on Twitter and has credited LoTT with having "truly opened [her] eyes" on LGBT issues.

Pushaw has directly plied LoTT for more information on Florida-based educators she has targeted, with the seeming intent of enforcing the "", a 2022 state law banning instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation for K-3 students. On March 4, 2022, weeks before the law went into effect, Pushaw tweeted her objection to the "Don't Say Gay" moniker that "liberals" have "inaccurately" attached to it, insisting it "would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill." Raichik endorsed the "Don't Say Gay" bill as "literally genius" for having made "all the creeps come out and identify themselves as pro-grooming" on March 10.

In December 2022, Raichik revealed that after her identity was disclosed by the Washington Post, DeSantis had someone reach out to her offering to allow her to "come and stay as long as [she] need[s]" in his if she wanted "a place to go, to hide, to stay." She apparently declined the offer but expressed that she was "almost in tears" that DeSantis had taken time out of his "extremely busy schedule" to have someone "call [her] to make sure [she was] safe."

The Grand Old Party
Donald Trump, DeSantis's chief rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, invited Raichik and Seth Dillon to dine with him at his Mar-a-Lago estate in January 2023. Raichik shared a photo of her and Trump giving the thumps-up sign and added in a second tweet that she had asked Trump if his "first tweet back [since his Twitter reinstatement] can be retweeting this".

Raichik spoke (or at least tried) to a mostly-empty room on the first day of the (CPAC) in March 2023. The panel discussion was dedicated to mocking openly gay journalist and included fellow D-list conservative celebs, , and Kurt Schlichter. It included a bizarre skit in which Bozell claimed, "If I ever transition, I want to be Chaya," prompting O'Connell to give him a wad of cash in an apparent lost bet. Raichik, whose reaction was described as "befuddled," repeatedly asked for clarification, but the men ignored her.

Shopify
Raichik operates a store hawking Libs of TikTok junk through Ottawa-based e-commerce platform. Shopify has refused to remove LoTT's store from its service despite having policies banning hateful content. The company has gone as far as directing customer-service employees to ignore complaints about LoTT. The site's founder, German cryptobro, has reportedly blocked anyone who asks him about LoTT on Twitter.