Libs of TikTok vs. The RegimeThe Washington Post's targeting of the anonymous account is just the latest flare-up in a cultural, spiritual, and political war.
April 23, 2022
Declan Leary
Writing in the New York Times on Friday, Jamelle Bouie—a far-left scribbler who has done as much as anyone to mainstream race radicalism in 2020s America—presents Richard Hofstadter’s numbskull analysis of “the function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950’s…[as] not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage, or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.”
This misreading of history is then spun into a misreading of current affairs, whereby “the crusade against ‘critical race theory’ and the slanderous campaign against L.G.B.T.Q. educators and education” become “yet another witch hunt against those [whom conservatives] perceive as enemies of American society, using whatever state power they happen to have at their disposal.”
Bouie’s public confusion ran under the headline “Democrats, You Can’t Ignore the Culture Wars Any Longer.” He seems to think that the left, up to this point, has simply stayed above the fray, operating on the assumption “that Democrats can lose only if they engage this culture war, and that they’ll be on safer ground if they can deliver in Washington and run on their policy achievements without getting into the muck with Republicans.”
As Mr. Bouie surely knows, privilege is invisible to those who have it. The left has never had to wage the culture war with the same intensity as the right because the entirety of the American power structure is aligned in service of left-wing cultural interests.
Case in point: The Washington Post‘s recent hit piece on the previously anonymous Twitter account @LibsofTikTok and its now-doxed operator.
Libs of TikTok has become something of a sensation over the past year, with a simple strategy: repost clips of progressive extremists (many of them teachers) and let every would-be groomer hoist zimself with zer own petard. For the simple act of amplifying already public videos, the account received multiple suspensions from the notoriously partial overlords of Twitter. But Libs of TikTok saw tangible, positive results as well: multiple unfit public-school teachers disciplined or terminated for things they posted online which might have gone unnoticed but for Libs of TikTok’s intervention.
The account drew the attention of Taylor Lorenz, a middle-aged progressive activist and de facto TikTok publicist who identifies as “a columnist at The Washington Post covering technology and online culture.” On Tuesday, Lorenz published an expose of sorts on the viral Twitter phenomenon. Sourced exclusively by left-wing activists, including an LGBTQ program director for Media Matters and a media strategist for the ACLU, the piece unmasks the anonymous owner of the account and casts her as a key player in “the right-wing media outrage cycle.” Upon initial publication, the Post even included a link to the woman’s home address. (The link has now been removed, and WaPo senior managing editor Cameron Barr denies ever having published it—an easily disproven lie.)
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/libs-of-tiktok-vs-the-regime/
