The Americans Who Are Fleeing the United States – The New Republic

In November, voters in Georgia reelected Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene despite her history of antisemitic rhetoric; following
her reelection she appeared at a New York Young Republican Club gala whose
attendees also included
white nationalist Peter Brimelow. America’s most-watched cable TV host is Fox
News’s Tucker Carlson, who routinely spews white nationalist rhetoric and
praises authoritarian regimes like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and that of autocratic
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was a featured speaker at last
year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. And this month, DeSantis’s administration rejected
a nationwide A.P. African American studies course as “woke indoctrination.”

Carlson scored the first literal and figurative mask-off televised
interview with Chaya Raichik—the former real estate agent behind LibsOfTikTok,
who regularly tweets screenshotted announcements of all-ages drag events and
trans-inclusive health care services knowing her followers will call in death
and bomb threats—in which she called
the LGBTQ community “evil” and a “cult.” Raichik is the same woman who, within
hours of a gunman shooting up a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, attacked
a youth drag event in the same state on her Twitter and whose tweets attacking
Boston Children’s Hospital for its transgender care program led to it receiving
multiple bomb threats.

It’s thanks to the “groomer” libel and false claims that
LGBTQ people are pedophiles spread by people like Raichik, Matt Walsh, James
Lindsay, and Chris Rufo that drag queen storytime and drag brunch events now
routinely have fascist
thugs show up, sometimes armed. In December, angry demonstrators, consumed
with unrestrained animal rage, spat venom at a drag queen story hour event in a
library in New York’s heavily LGBTQ Chelsea neighborhood, and two women were
later arrested
after attempting to gain entry into gay New York City Councillor Erik Bottcher’s
apartment building, writing “groomer” and “predator” on the sidewalk outside. Meanwhile,
bills
attacking LGBTQ rights have been signed or introduced in dozens of states, including
several banning trans-affirming health care, one in Oklahoma
that would make it a felony to perform in drag in the presence of minors—including drag queen story time—and one in North
Dakota that by some interpretations could make it possible to prosecute
trans people for existing in public.