As much as we all would like for cancel culture to go away, unfortunately, it’s going to be with us for the foreseeable future. It will be with us at least until its proponents can either be convinced of its many pitfalls or fall victim to it themselves.
The latest attempt at cancellation comes courtesy of the Washington Post, who last week via their technology reporter Taylor Lorenz outed the popular “Libs of TikTok” (LoTT) Twitter account, essentially branding them harmful to society over the content they feature on their page.
LoTT’s apparent crime was simply reposting TikTok videos of radical leftist public school “educators” in their own words bragging about the indoctrination tactics they use on their young students on issues like gender identity politics, sexual orientation, and Critical Race Theory. According to Lorenz, LoTT sharing those publicly available videos had caused some of the teachers in the clips to either be suspended, lose their jobs, or receive threats.
Further, some of what LoTT had linked to on their page was reportedly seen by members of the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and in part were the basis for his support of the Parental Rights in Education bill and the Stop WOKE Act, both of which he signed into law.
It was ostensibly for those reasons that Lorenz felt perfectly justified in doxxing (digging up personal information not publicly available) the private citizen behind the anonymous Twitter account in part by using information obtained by a member of an “open resource group” funded by the German government. She was also assisted by the far-left “Media Matters” group, and even at one point knocked on the doors of family members seeking comment.
I should also note for the record that Lorenz herself in the past has decried the use of the very tactics she used against LoTT. Except when Lorenz was shedding tears over the tactic, it’s because it had been used on her in response to some of her other name and shame campaigns against anonymous social media users.
Though things got a little scary in the immediate aftermath of the report going live (LoTT announced they had to “hole up in a safe location” for a time), the Post’s efforts at intimidating LoTT to shut up and go quietly into the night ended up backfiring spectacularly.
Since the Washington Post piece was published, the LoTT account has grown by 327,000 followers and is closing in on a million. In addition to that, they’ve started a Substack page where they are boasting of “thousands of paid subscribers.”
Perhaps best of all, on the same day all hell broke loose, Seth Dillon, who is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, announced a personal deal he made with LoTT that would allow it to keep doing what it was doing.
“The exposure of @libsoftiktok isn’t journalism; it’s pure intimidation,” Dillon wrote in a Twitter post. “They’re threatened by her effectiveness, so they hope to silence her by making her too afraid to continue. They want to raise the cost of doing her work so high that she has no choice but to quit.”
“But I think they’ll be surprised by her resolve. She’s afraid, as anyone would be in these circumstances, but she’s also determined to not be bullied, threatened, or harassed into silence. That takes remarkable courage that few people possess,” Dillon also noted.
Fortunately, thanks to Dillon, the support of hundreds of thousands of followers, and the resolve of the person behind the LoTT account themselves, LoTT is going to come out of this smelling like a rose, and stronger than ever.
That said, the Washington Post still shouldn’t be let off the hook for what it tried to do. Readers should email their opinions to the paper, letting them respectfully but firmly know just how badly they screwed up.
Media analyst Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
