The popular Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which reposts videos of gender- and race-focused rants on TikTok, came squarely into the left’s crosshairs after the account user’s identity was revealed in a Washington Post exposé.
The account was already unpopular with the peddlers of critical race theory and radical gender ideology, but once the story broke and the owner’s identity became widely known, the floodgates opened. Post reporter Taylor Lorenz doxxed the owner’s name and address, the rest of the corporate media piled on, activists smeared the account as promoting violence against LGBT people and some lunatics even sent death threats.
All for simply reposting videos that were already available online. But Libs of TikTok committed the ultimate transgression in the eyes of the left — exposing their extreme views out in the open.
Because of Libs of TikTok, millions of people have seen their unhinged ideas stripped bare of any of the indecipherable jargon or emotionally manipulative spin the left’s cadres employ to obfuscate their agenda. Therefore, the account’s user must be destroyed.
Leftists haven’t taken over every major institution in the country through mass popular movements or shrewd legislation. They became ascendant in the media, pop culture, academia and the federal bureaucracy by quietly infiltrating them and gradually remolding them over several years, even decades.
This strategy of infiltration started in academia.
Philosophical movements like the Frankfurt School, which was founded by German Marxist expats who fled the Nazis, originally found their way into a few select, elite universities throughout the 1930s and ’40s. Just a few professors at elite colleges influenced hundreds if not thousands of students, many of whom went on to become professors themselves.
Critical theory emerged in the 1960s and ’70s primarily from the work of the successors of the original Frankfurt School.
Critical theory can be used as a lens through which to view numerous social issues, including race, sexuality and gender. Its primary goal is the critique of Western capitalist society and emancipation of individuals from an oppressive society made up of traditions and morals that have ostensibly been put in place for the benefit of the people in power.
Critical race theory and critical gender theory are subsections of the philosophy developed by the students of the Frankfurt School. Both of these theories now pervade almost every institution in the nation, from classrooms to boardrooms.
A handful of refugee professors were able to drastically alter the landscape of American education, and by extension American society, in only a few decades. And once they got a hold of education, the other bureaucracies — the government, Hollywood, corporate HR departments, etc. — inevitably followed.
But they were only able to do it clandestinely, subtly influencing their students and planting the seeds for a larger dissemination of their ideas throughout academia. If the wider public knew the true Marxist ideology of these professors in the midst of the Red Scare and Cold War, it never would have been allowed to proliferate like it did and the Frankfurt School would have been snuffed out at American universities.
Very few people noticed what was going on at universities until it was far too late, and now the left is heavily entrenched in the administrations of all but a few colleges.
The left relies on bureaucracies so much because it’s easier to take them over than actually winning over a majority of Americans, there’s very little outside scrutiny or oversight and the institutions they dominate are a force multiplier throughout society. By dominating public education, for instance, they can affect the ideological development of almost every young American to some degree.
Secrecy is paramount for the left’s infiltration strategy, but the Libs of TikTok account, along with others, took that advantage away. No one noticed some of the truly disturbing diatribes and confessions posted to the shadowy, far-left corner of TikTok before the account went viral. Possibly mentally unwell people ranted about multiple personalities, dozens of different pronouns and really dehumanizing conceptions of themselves as animals, inanimate objects and even clowns. Teachers admitted to coming out to their very young students and even making sex jokes with their students.
“They think nobody is going to see it. You post on a public TikTok account, you never know who is going to see it,” the Libs of TikTok user said in a recent interview.
Exposure is the worst thing that can happen to a strategy that relies on secrecy. Most Americans have no idea what is going on in the bowels of TikTok and other social media sites, and Libs of TikTok is performing the invaluable service of bringing these videos to light and uncovering what the far left really wants for America and schoolchildren.
Showing Americans what’s really going on, and what the stakes are, is the most effective countermeasure to the left’s design.
The left sees its victory as inevitable, a culmination of a decades-long march through the institutions of power. Libs of TikTok has meddled with their plan, revealing the man hiding behind the curtain. And, to them, she must be forced to atone.
Hayden Daniel is the opinion editor of the Daily Caller.
