Libs of TikTok vs The Washington Post

Why is the self-imagined newspaper of record for the country advocating for less speech? Are they worried about losing out to alternative voices? The cure for that is better speech, not less.

To hear it from The Washington Post, Libs of TikTok, a conservative, multi-platform social media account run by New York City real estate professional Chaya Raichik, is evil incarnate. The Washington Post (among others) has recently accused Ms. Raichik of endangering the lives of progressives and progressive institutions across the nation by spreading dangerous hoaxes, fomenting bias against and hatred toward LGBTQ communities, ginning up outrage at teachers and by bashing other progressive social media faux pas.

By way of disclosure, I subscribe to the Libs of TikTok Substack feed and have modestly supported Libs of TikTok. None of this is because I agree with everything that Ms. Raichik has to say. I do not. But I absolutely do support Ms. Raichik's right to say what's on her mind. Especially right now, when she has about as much clout with the public as many in the “expert” classes.

In an age where it's clear that our own government, skirting the boundaries of the First Amendment, has leaned on social media platforms to censor content they don't like under the guise of “combating misinformation,” I'm for more speech, not less. I oppose all ongoing attempts by progressives to have Libs of TikTok deplatformed. Ms. Raichik has every right to assert her opinions on her own social media. If you don't like them, they are easily avoided.

Critics of Ms. Raichik would contend that the progressives exposed on Libs of TikTok might find the threats, threats which they would maintain that she has encouraged, difficult to ignore. Putting aside, for the moment, that we might have to ban all speech if we are going to hold everyone accountable for what anyone might do as a result of public discourse, I find most of the criticism leveled at Ms. Raichik to be hysterical - if not patently false.

Libs of TikTok is a bit like a social media aggregator consisting of a mirror and a theater screen aimed at progressives. Libs of TikTok, outside of Substack, mostly re-posts items from progressive social media accounts and websites – putting them out there for a much larger audience that they would have otherwise known.

Is some of this unfair? Almost certainly. But many of those exposed on Libs of TikTok undid themselves by their own actions. Hoisted on their own petards, so to speak.

If you don't want to become an infamous social media star, you probably should probably, for instance, avoid being videoed while asking a fellow student to leave a multicultural center at a public university because you don't like a sticker on his laptop computer. If you are hospital that advertises “gender affirming” surgery on very young patients, you should probably get with your IT folks to make your own website to accurately reflect who is and who is not eligible.

If you end up being a star on Libs of TikTok over any of the above it sounds to me like a you problem. Maybe it's just me, but you problems should not interfere with everyone else's right to engage in free discourse on issues of public importance and concern.

The Washington Post has recently run a series of hit pieces, under the byline of Taylor Lorenz (and others), on Libs of TikTok and Ms. Raichik. Some of you will be familiar with Ms. Lorenz as the former New York Times and and current The Washington Post reporter (and millennial poster child) who's known to have crossed a few ethical boundaries in her own reporting. It has been reported that she's been demoted and reassigned at The Post.

Ms Taylor, who speaks often of the PTSD she suffers as a result of online harassment (and being a target of Tucker Carlson's ire), had no problem at all doxxing Ms. Raichik, with whom she obviously disagrees. That's a Mount Everest sized pile of hypocrisy for you right there: it's not OK to do something dubious to me because I'm a good person, but it's OK for me to do something dubious to you because you are a bad person.

This is the part of the progressive playbook that I find the most illiberal: the part about doxxing, harassment, deplatforming, canceling, punching down and the like being psychologically harmful, morally repugnant and just plain wrong unless deployed against someone who's not, in your opinion, on the right side of things.

It's just tough luck, I reckon, being a child of a lesser god.

The decline of The Washington Post, for which this reporting is exhibit “A”, has been long, precipitous and difficult to watch. The recent reporting on Libs of TikTok was so bad that it could have come from the The National Enquirer. I get that The Washington Post is left of center and that Libs of TikTok is pretty far right, but that's no excuse for a newspaper of The Post's caliber to advocate for less speech.

The Post's excuse for this has focused on allegations that Ms. Raichik encourages violence against hospitals, teachers and others. The problem is that actual evidence for this is downright flimsy.