Dear Taylor Lorenz, Brian Stelter, and the Rest of the Press— why not show the videos?
Are you ashamed of them?
Taylor Lorenz is a reporter for the Washington Post who wrote a scathing piece about the lady who runs the LibsofTikTok account. She claims the account has wrongly and falsely shaped narratives that have guided the right to act in homophobia.
Lorenz writes, for example, of Tyler Wrynn, a school teacher fired from his job after his publicly available and publicly performed TikTok videos were highlighted by LibsofTikTok
Tyler Wrynn, a former English teacher in Oklahoma, posted a video telling LGBTQ kids shunned by their parents that Wrynn was “proud of them” and loved them; it was featured on Libs of TikTok last week. Since being featured on the page Wrynn has been barraged with harassmentand death threats.
A few days before Lorenz’s piece ran in the Washington Post, the Post ran this story about the lockdown in Shanghai. The piece starts with a video from a Shanghai resident showing a robotic dog barking orders. Throughout the piece are multiple other videos.
Isn’t it funny that Lorenz’s piece, in the same paper, could not show Tyler Wrynn’s TikTok video? Here it is:
Yes, that is Tyler Wrynn telling kids of their parents “F— them, I’m your parent now.”
Why not show the video of the teacher who teaches first graders that doctors look at babies to guess whether they are boys or girls?
And this teacher says it is okay to teach THREE-YEAR-OLDS about sexual orientation.
I find it very interesting that Taylor Lorenz can write that entire piece, make sure everyone knows the LibsofTikTok account owner is an Ortodox Jew, and never once bother to actually show or link to the actual videos. The Washington Post will show videos of Chinese protestors, but not the videos of the people on TikTok we’re all talking about.
Here is more of Taylor Lorenz:
On March 8, a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok posted a video of a woman teaching sex education to children in Kentucky, calling the woman in the video a “predator.” The next evening, the same clip was featured on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program, prompting the host to ask, “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?”
Note the link. It goes to the web archive, not the original. The clip will not play. You will not get to hear the “teacher” talk about teaching toddlers to masturbate. Here is the actual clip that Lorenz sought to downplay as “teaching sex education to children.”
The “camp” also teaches self-administered abortion techniques. Taylor Lorenz left that out too.
Then there is Brian Stelter of CNN/CNN+. He claimed that LibofTikTok is taking clips out of context and cherry-picking. He talked to Mavi Ramirez who LibsofTikTok had highlighted.
Stelter never actually played the video from Ramirez that LibsofTikTok highlighted. In the video, Ramirez claims that even using the word “gay” could get her fired. That is flagrantly not true.
For a man who spends every day whipping Fox News for supposed misinformation or disinformation, you’d think he would want to correct the record. But he would not even show Ramirez’s TikTok video that LibsofTikTok showed. Here it is:
You’ll note that Ramirez’s claims are actually directly contradicted by the text of the law. But Stelter not only did not show her video, he did not correct the record. If anything, he allowed her to perpetuate the mythology she’s embraced and himself advanced misinformation by claiming LibsofTikTok is taking videos “out of context.” No, the context is there. Like this professor who says he cannot say it is wrong to have sex with kids.
I just find it fascinating that Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post, and Brian Stelter, among others, are all obsessed with disinformation and misinformation, but do not trust their audience to see the actual videos in question. Instead, they expect the audience to rely on their characterizations as fair.
Perhaps it is because they’re not actually advancing truth, but engaged in their own bit of narrative shaping. Perhaps it is because they know this sort of stuff, fully and publicly on display, does not go over well with parents so they have to do damage control for damaged people displaying their damage and bragging about the damage they want to do to our children. Like this person:
I am struck that the self grooming choices are all similar, multicolored hair, odd cuts, the clothes, neck tattoos. Good God.
And I think doctors take biology.
Anyone who can't look at their body and determine their gender/sex shouldn't be allowed to teach kids about gender.