After Chaya Raichik was revealed by Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post to be the creator behind Libs of TikTok, a popular account that trafficked in anti-trans rhetoric, Gov. Ron DeSantis offered her refuge within the visitor home of the Florida Governor’s Mansion.
Raichik made the revelation throughout her first TV look on Tucker Carlson Today on Tuesday. It was the primary time that she had ever given an interview publicly. She works as an actual property agent in Brooklyn and has managed to maintain a comparatively low profile even after the Post reported her identity in April. Raichik said that public knowledge of her identity led to steady threats to her life, which is why Gov. DeSantis offered her a secure haven.
“When I was doxxed, somebody from Ron DeSantis’s team called me,” she told Carlson. “She said, ‘The governor wanted me to give you a message. If you don’t really feel safe, if you want a spot to go, to hide, to stay, you can come to the governor’s mansion.’ She said, ‘We have a visitor home for you, and also you can keep so lengthy as you need.’”
Raichik started posting content material denigrating liberals on her private social media accounts round April of 2020, however rebranded as Libs of TikTok a year later. Then she constructed a massive following of greater than half a million customers on Twitter, the place she would repost content material by LGBTQ and politically liberal creators with cheeky captions meant to incite outrage. Raichik started by poking enjoyable at Anthony Fauci, the country’s chief medical advisor on the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then she started spouting hate towards Black victims of police violence earlier than repeatedly depicting queer and trans people as predators who endangered children.
Raichik’s content material is regularly shared by right-wing media outlets, and a number of shout-outs from Joe Rogan helped the account take off. The Washington Post article additional outlines how the account prominence escalated to the purpose of shaping political discourse and directly impacting legislation.
“Libs of TikTok has become one of many most important websites of reporting within the brand new media,” Carlson said in a teaser for the interview. “Essentially, Libs of TikTok is one of many causes we all know what’s happening in classrooms throughout the country.... For doing this, the left has actually tried to harm the person who runs this TikTok.”
Those classrooms became battlegrounds in Florida, the place DeSantis centered his 2022 re-election marketing campaign on a invoice that banned teachers in kindergarten through third grades from talking about gender identity and sexual orientation to their students. Critics called the invoice “Don’t Say Gay,” and DeSantis signed it into law in March. Several different state legislatures followed, in what one homosexual rights advocate told Paige Skinner of BuzzFeed News was a “coordinated nationwide campaign” to make use of LGBTQ people as a “political wedge issue.”
It doesn't seem that Raichik took Gov. DeSantis up on his offer for a Floridian hideout, however she was nonetheless effusive in her gratitude.
“I was almost in tears,” she said. “He took time out of his extraordinarily busy schedule to ship somebody to name me to make sure I’m safe. It was incredible, I don’t even have the phrases for it.”
“I by no means did any in-person events, and I’m selecting to do that now because I really feel like, over the previous few months, I’ve done so much,” she told Carlson. “I’ve helped educate people. I know that I’ve helped create laws to tackle a few of those issues, and I think I’ve done all I can, and I am prepared for the subsequent step.”
Now that she’s made her on-camera debut, Raichik has plans for extra talking engagements within the approaching months to “push against the types of leftists she spotlighted with her account.”
