Tuesday, FNC host Tucker Carlson reacted to the fallout from Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz’s reveal of who was behind the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account.
According to the Fox News Channel host, the effort was an “intimidation campaign” meant to shut down that Twitter account.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Last year, unbeknownst to pretty much nobody, a woman in Brooklyn started a Twitter account that was comprised almost solely of videos of liberals talking about themselves.
So, the concept was very simple: Find interesting tape that had already been uploaded to the internet by the people who made it and then repost that tape. There was no editing of it, no special effects. There was very little editorial content.
The idea was to let activist-types describe, in their own words, what they believe, unfiltered. The woman who created it called that account “Libs of TikTok.” Libs of TikTok now has more followers than the entire population of the State of Wyoming. Libs of TikTok’s audience dwarfs the nightly viewership on CNN.
So, it was quite successful by definition. The question is why?
Here’s why: It turns out that is repellent as academic lifestyle liberalism may seem to you as an observer. The reality of it, as described by the people who actually believe this stuff, is even worse than you ever imagined. It’s really beyond belief, both idiotic and disgusting.
It’s like watching someone eat roadkill. You feel nauseous, but you can’t turn away. So, Libs of TikTok found all kinds of tape on the internet, but they found a bunch of selfie-style videos from the publicly available social media accounts of teachers. They didn’t snoop. They just put what people already posted. Here’s some of what they found:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OZ, PRESCHOOL TEACHER: Hi, my name is Oz and I am a preschool teacher. Recently, we’ve started wearing pronoun pins and the kids get to pick a new pronoun pin every — we have some that pick like fewer every single day, and we have some that change it up.
MIX GRAY, PRESCHOOL TEACHER: So, I’m a non-binary preschool teacher and my kids know I’m non-binary. They know I’m not a girl or a boy. I use they/them pronouns in the classroom. We work on it. Not all kids get it. That’s OK and I go by Mix Gray in the classroom, not Miss or Mister.
TEACHER: Man, you all thought me teaching the children about me being poly was crazy, but not only that, but they also know that I’m gender-fluid.
TEACHER: I’m going to give you my explanation about what it means to be transgender as well. So, when babies are born, the doctor looks at them, and they make a guess about whether the baby is a boy or a girl.
TEACHER: Kids as young as three and four are actually aware of their gender identity, even if they don’t have the language for it. To say that pre-K through 3rd grade are not ready for such topics is actually internalized homophobia and transphobia.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So those are the people in charge of tending to your small children’s minds while you’re at work. Now maybe you agree with the views you just heard. Maybe you think that doctors just guess at the sex of newborns. Maybe you don’t agree. It almost doesn’t matter.
Either way, you have a right as a parent to know what these people are teaching to your children. And yet, before Libs of TikTok, there was not an easy way to find out what they were teaching. You take the teacher’s word for it.
Well, it turns out there are an awful lot of videos like this out there. Libs of TikTok found a lot of them. Here, for example, is the scene at one private school in Washington, D.C.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHILDREN CHANTING: Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: OK, so let’s say you’re paying $45,000.00 a year to send your kids to some overrated, mediocre private school in the District of Columbia. You think everything’s fine. You pull up Libs of TikTok and you find out what’s actually happening in your kid’s classroom. What’s wrong with that?
This is journalism. No news organization in America has done more to reveal the reality within American schools than Libs of TikTok.
We aired a number of their videos on the show, and we are grateful for their reporting. It was far more straightforward than anything you’re going to find in “The New York Times” or “The Washington Post,” because it wasn’t accompanied by a lot of bloviating. They just showed you the tape, and you can decide. That’s journalism.
Here’s another piece of tape that Libs of TikTok unearthed that amazed and horrified us. This is a teacher screaming at a student for refusing to wear a mask.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STUDENT: Are you playing?
TEACHER: No, I’m not. Otherwise, I will call the police. I’m serious.
STUDENT: Are you serious?
TEACHER: Yes, I am serious, man. I had enough of it. I knew you were going to take off your mask the moment I turned the corner. So enjoy BIA.
STUDENT: What’s that?
TEACHER: That’s the in-school suspension where you have to sit in the room with the military guy all day because you’re a piece of [bleep].
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “I’m going to call the police,” he screeches, because the kid has the mask beneath his nose. Now again, maybe you’re OK 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 were grateful for that.
So, is Christina Pushaw who is 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 now law. It’s one of the most popular laws in the state. A 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. The Biden administration and its many servants in the news media set off to work. The neoliberal slander machine Media Matters published four separate hit pieces on Libs of TikTok in just the past three weeks. It was trafficking hate for allowing liberals to talk about themselves. It was anti-gay as if the site was attacking anyone.
Certainly, it was not attacking gays. It was just playing tape of people talking about themselves in their own words – video that they uploaded.
Well, Twitter could not stand this. They shut down the account entirely twice. They suspended it. One of the suspensions came after a complaint from a Harvard law instructor called Alejandra Caraballo.
Quote: “My report on Libs of TikTok violating Twitter rules got them suspended,” she bragged. Yet the woman who runs Libs of TikTok kept going.
So ultimately, Jeff Bezos weighed in. Bezos’ personal newspaper, “The Washington Post,” decided to harass the family of the woman who operates the Libs of TikTok. They couldn’t find her, so they went after her family. “The Post” sent what it calls its tech columnist, Taylor Lorenz, to show up outside a home that belongs to one of the woman’s relatives and then Lorenz set about trying to find the woman herself.
She couldn’t. She sent a direct message on Twitter to someone who turned out to be not that woman and had nothing to do with the account whatsoever. But because she did that, we know what Taylor Lorenz was saying.
Here’s what she said, quote: “You’re being implicated in starting a hate campaign against LGBTQ people.” Right. A hate campaign. So here you have Taylor Lorenz, who is effectively acting as the Stasi for the Deep State, trying to intimidate a private citizen into silence and this morning she gave it her best shot.
“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. It was just a couple of months ago, you might remember, that Lorenz herself complained on television that she was being harassed and that no one under any circumstances would be allowed to show up at her home. Here she is:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ALICIA MENENDEZ, MSNBC HOST: Trolls live everywhere. Can you just explain was it was like? Can you draw a picture of what it is like when a surge of harassment hits?
TAYLOR LORENZ, TECH COLUMNIST, THE WASHINGTON POST: It’s horrifying and it’s not just me either. You know, they immediately dox you and go after your family members. They try and look up everyone who has ever been associated with you, and it’s just completely overwhelming and terrifying.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “Oh, they go after your family members.” Could we put that picture back up? Can the control room do that? This is Taylor Lorenz outside the family members of the woman who run Libs of TikTok the other day, harassing the family members.
Now the tape you just saw comes from January. Then in April, just eight days ago, Taylor Lorenz, who cannot stop talking about herself, drowning in Lake Me, cried on television because she’d been criticized online. Watch:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LORENZ: I’ve had to remove every single social tie. I have severe PTSD from this. I contemplated suicide. It got really bad. You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life and it’s so isolating.
REPORTER: And terrifying.
LORENZ: It’s horrifying. I’m so sorry.
REPORTER: No, you’re fine. You’re fine.
LORENZ: It’s overwhelming. It’s really hard.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: It’s really hard to be from Greenwich and work for The Washington Post. It’s hard. No power. But if you really think it’s hard, if you’re really against that kind of behavior, why are you engaging in it at scale?
So a few weeks later, after shooting that performance, Taylor Lorenz shows up at the door — and there’s the picture right there — of a relative of the private citizen who posts videos that Taylor Lorenz’s bosses don’t like, and then she posts that person’s identity online.
So this is obviously an intimidation campaign designed to shut down a highly effective Twitter feed. But take one step deeper into the story and ask yourself: Did Taylor Lorenz, the woman you just saw crying on TV because she has PTSD, did she really do the reporting here? Did she really track down the personal information of the woman who runs Libs of TikTok? Please, of course not. She couldn’t.
Taylor Lorenz is not a reporter. Apart from whining about herself on television, she has no skills. She couldn’t do a weather forecast in a rainstorm. She’s not a journalist. She’s merely a receptacle for information that other people gather for their own ends, a willing receptacle.
So where did she get this information? Who gave her the identity of the woman who runs Libs of TikTok? Well, actually, we don’t have to guess because today’s “Washington Post’s” story answers that question.
“The Post” piece tells us that information came from a man called Travis Brown. Travis Brown runs the quote: “Travis Brown Hate Speech Tracker,” which uses a variety of proprietary methods to reveal personally identifying information of private citizens who stray from the approved storyline.
Now, who pays for all this? That’s the question. Well, the “Travis Brown Hate Speech Tracker” is funded by something called the prototype fund. Here’s how the prototype fund describes the point of Travis Brown’s project, quote: “Prominent right-wing extremist accounts on Twitter and Facebook have developed a well-documented pattern to distribute controversial and extremist content to their followers and then delete it before moderators have the opportunity to react to it.” In other words, before it can be censored.
“Archiving is an important element in counteracting this behavior and has in many cases led to prominent victories in the fight against the extreme right.”
Extreme right? So, not all hate speech is the same. The hate speech tracker does not target the hate speech of BLM rioters or Antifa. No, only enemies of the Biden administration and the guys at Davos. How do they do it? Well, Brown’s methods, according to him, include using automated software to save user account names and social media posts long after they have been deleted.
So, there’s no hiding from these people. Now, that appears to be a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Not that we care because they don’t care. We reached out to Twitter about this. Isn’t this a violation? Well, they ignored us. They suspended our account.
What’s interesting, though, is that Travis Brown himself appears to be a former Twitter employee. So again, 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 (FARA)?
We seem to remember quite a bit of talk about this over the last year. We think there was an impeachment trial of 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 Jeff Bezos’ newspaper? Lots of questions here. We hope we can get to the bottom of all of them.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor