Ronny Jackson, Trump’s favorite doctor turned congressman gets more depraved every day.
Get a load of his latest:
Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, falsely accused Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., of saying that “pedophilia isn’t a crime” when Porter actually said that LGBTQ people have been wrongly branded on social media as “groomers” and “pedophiles.”
Porter was speaking with Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, about the group’s latest report, which analyzed “the 500 most viewed, most influential tweets that identified LGBTQ people as so-called ‘groomers.'”
“The ‘groomer’ narrative is an age-old lie to position LGBTQ+ people as a threat to kids,” Porter said. “And what it does is deny them access to public spaces, it stokes fear, and can even stoke violence.”
She went on to ask why Twitter allows posts calling LGBTQ+ people “groomers” according to its own hateful content policy to which Robinson responded that while Twitter and Facebook have community guidelines in place, the platforms also need to hold users accountable to those guidelines.
The Human Rights Campaign’s report revealed that anti-LGBTQ+ content was largely driven by a small group of extremist politicians and their allies.
Just ten people drove 66% of impressions for the 500 most viewed hateful “grooming” tweets — including Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw, extremist members of Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and pro-Trump activists like “Libs of TikTok” founder Chaya Raichik.
The report found that posts from the 10 people alone reached more than 48 million views, and the top 500 most influential “grooming” tweets altogether were seen 72 million times.
She did not say that pedophilia isn’t a crime, but the congresswoman’s remarks were inaccurately portrayed in tweets by Jackson and Libs of TikTok.
“Rep Katie Porter (D) says pedophilia isn’t a crime – it’s an identity,” the account falsely tweeted alongside a video, which omitted Porter’s full comments.
Porter’s point is exactly correct. This is a cynical campaign to degrade gay people and teachers in general as part of the right’s ongoing crusade to destroy public education. It’s the brainchild of Christopher Rufo, the man who brought us the “Critical Race Theory” panic:
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo is the boy wonder of the right, having burst onto the scene as a fervent critic of left-wing pedagogy’s encroachment on the workplace and schools. The strange logic of partisanship has transmuted his role into something far more bizarre: He is now fomenting a panic about sexual abuse in public schools.
[…]
The bizarre turn of events that brought him to this point required several steps. Like a great many members of the conservative-movement apparatus, Rufo has put himself at the disposal of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Spurred by his socially conservative allies, DeSantis signed a bill restricting schools from discussing sexual orientation.
DeSantis quickly found himself on the defensive when critics labeled this the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Rather than hone down or improve the bill, DeSantis characteristically went on the offensive against his critics. His spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, signaled the new line of attack: They would call critics of the bill “groomers.”
DeSantis’s supporters, Rufo among them, almost immediately took the cue to level this charge completely in earnest.
At first, Rufo hurled this accusation at Disney, which criticized DeSantis’s law. A combination of motives seems to have inspired him to turn the subject from Disney grooming to public-school grooming. Rufo had already built his career around discrediting public education. (“To get universal school choice,” he instructed a friendly audience, “you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”) Possibly he or somebody on DeSantis’s staff realized that convincing the public that Disney’s staff is filled with pedophiles might not help the Florida tourism business.
In any case, the notion, like many of his ideas, seems to have stuck Rufo in the middle of a Twitter spat. One of his critics, Katie Herzog, pointed out that the Catholic Church contains many more sex offenders than Disney, causing Rufo to cast around for an institution that would make the Church appear innocent, and he settled on schools:
Rufo has since gone to great lengths to “prove” with statistical ignorance that there are more public school ‘”groomers” than Catholic priest “groomers” without acknowledging that there are many more public school teachers than Catholic priests.
The “groomer” panic, the trans panic, the CRT panic, all of it, is the result of cynical manipulation on the part of right wing activists ginning up hate for political gain. And there are plenty of odious Republican elected officials eager to take advantage of it.
Depraved is the only word to describe it.
If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Hullabaloo stocking, it would be most appreciated. Happy Hollandaise everyone!