IIRC there’s a belief that white “libs” are self-hating anti-white racists who want immigrants to flood in and destroy “white civilisation” as penance for the crimes of American imperialism.
The account’s original purpose was to repost examples of particularly extreme or stupid “wokeism” from TikTok. Kind of like how there are a bunch of left-leaning Twitter accounts that post snippets of videos of right-wing politicians and pundits saying outrageous things.
But whereas those left-leaning accounts are at worst guilty of sometimes misleading editing to support a particular narrative (see, e.g., https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/trump-confuses-vietnam-war-with-desert-storm-in-bizarre-peech-video.html), LibsofTiktok takes bad faith to another level and adds a big heap of homophobia and transphobia on top of it. Her posts are circulated in right-wing circles as “evidence” to support the most hateful anti-LGBTQ policies, and she doesn’t go after politicians and pundits so much as she goes after kids and ordinary people.
The right-wing argument here is that liberals are purposely not enforcing immigration laws and making it easy for people to come here illegally because one or more of (1) liberals are stupid and don’t understand the consequences of their policies, (2) liberals hate America and are purposely trying to ruin it by filling it up with undesirable people, or (3) (the dumbest one, since undocumented immigrants don’t vote) liberals want immigrants to come here illegally to help vote for Democrats.
No. I’m sure you know this, but stats consistently show that immigrants (especially undocumented immigrants) are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. But facts don’t really matter to Trumpists.
See above: libs’ stupidity/hate for America/power-hunger outweight libs’ self-preservation. Or something.
I’ve seen some clips, and the interviewer seems REALLY good with their questions.
But I just can’t listen to anything Chaya says for more than a few minutes, before my mouth starts to taste like bile.
@micah thanks for that.
I suppose the part I don’t get on a lot of this is how do they benefit from spewing this nonsense? Is it clicks? Is it the satisfaction? I mainly do things because I’m paid to or I like to. Is it the cruelty all the way down?
I’m going to give it a try. Wish me luck.
Some of it may be monetary: it’s possible to leverage a big Xitter following into money-making/grifting opportunities. Some of it is probably just attention-seeking.
But in her case, I think she actually believes she is standing up for what is good and right and moral. She comes from a world (the Chabad Lubavitch hasidic sect) where gender roles are extremely rigid, modest clothing is mandatory, and there aren’t many opportunities to interact in meaningful ways with people from other cultures. Most Lubavitchers are nothing like her, but it’s not surprising to me that someone from that background, exposed to a big helping of right-wing propaganda about LGBTQ “groomers” and criminal immigrants, might then go on TikTok and discover a whole bunch of stuff that seems to confirm her prejudices (drag shows with babies in attendance! fringe lefty activists saying we shouldn’t have a border at all! etc.) and feel compelled to amplify it for fellow right-wingers to “prove” that right-wing fear-mongering about wokeism is justified. That feedback loop then gets reinforced as people send her more and more extreme material (often taken out of context) to confirm her prejudices.
I think you’re missing the greater point amongst the details: it doesn’t matter who ‘they’ are, it’s enough that they’re ‘them’.
Looking for a strict definition of what she or her followers mean by “Libs” or “they” is a hiding to nothing, because the functional definition is the same as their definition of “woke” or “socialism”: it’s “that thing you hate, you know what it is (wink).”
It means “Democrats”, and it means “progressives”, and it means “feminists”, and it means “satanists”, and it means “atheists”, and it means “secularists”, and it means “Roman Catholics”, and it means “PoC”, and it means “women”, and it means “Jews”, and, and, and, …
It’s deliberately vague so that the right can pretend to be a broad tent organisation. “Those people, you know, those people, aren’t they stupid and funny and hateful, and wouldn’t we just be better off if we got rid of them somehow, you know, ‘eliminated’ them or something, you know who I mean”. That way they can get the incels who hate women to line up next to the TERF lesbians who hate trans folk next to the evangelicals who hate lesbians next to the nazis who hate Jews and PoC next to the conservative Jewish folk and PoC who hate anyone who reminds them that the people they’re standing next to hate them too.
And all of these groups are happy to go along with it, because they all think they’re using the other groups to work towards eliminating the group that they see when they think of “them”, and they all think that when their work is done there, they all know they’ll turn on each other, and they all think that they’ll end up on top.
You’re looking for logic and firm definitions where there aren’t any. It’s all smoke and fog and dogwhistles and nudge-nudge-wink-wink, and if all the other reasons weren’t enough, it’s so that people like you can’t get a grip on who they are and what they’re doing and why they’re doing it until they’ve done it and it’s too late.
All this.
And minor aside for those not regularly using Au / NZ / UK English
This expression became one of my favourites after I moved to Oz. It means “a long, hard, futile, and ultimately pointless task.” And the task described - seeking consistent and meaningful use of language from fascists - is absolutely a hiding to nothing.
I’ve seen a few video clips aimed at young adults explaining this - if an argument sweeps you up in strong feelings when you hear it, but you later can’t work up that feeling or figure out exactly what was meant when you try to explain the words, you might be on the receiving end of emotionally charged fascist content. I’m not sure how well that message cuts through, but I love what they’re doing.
It’s some of the cheapest and lowest effort content out there: take someone else’s content from a social media site, strip it of any context or humanity, editorialize it as much as you can to align with some narrative you’re pushing, and then monetize all of it.
Cruelty is a motivator as well, of course.
We will always have xenophobic assholes. That’s just human. But damnit, we need to make that position unacceptable, shameful and wrong again.
MFAA: Make Fascists Afraid Again
We haven’t had a crop as influential as these with the ability to spread their message this effectively in decades, if ever.
I don’t know if that can happen on a mass scale as it did in the post-war period. The media landscape is so diffuse and algorithmically personalised, too many people who could personally attest to the negative outcomes of fascism and white Xtianist supremacy and sexism have died, and one of the duopoly parties has reached the logical end of spending half a century appealing to bigots and authoritarians.
I hope society can figure out a way to counteract this without learning things the hard way. Again.
That’s what I mean. They have always been there, but at this point they are emboldened and empowered to carry out their racist, xenophobic agenda publicly and proudly. That needs to end. It is not what this country is about, and for a time, at least, this was SOP for the country. There were still racists, but they knew they had to keep it quiet because it was unacceptable. It can be again.
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