Of *Course* Chaya Raichik Sounds Like an Idiot

Morons can do stochastic terrorism too.

YouTube

Last weekend, Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz published an extensive piece on how LibsOfTikTok operator Chaya Raichik became one of the most powerful, and powerfully harmful, voices in the Oklahoma school system, despite not living in, or having any personal connection to the state or its educational apparatus.

The article is well worth reading for the way it compellingly links Raichik’s hateful online presence to the struggles taking place in Oklahoma schools (and beyond) for LGBTQ+ kids—including, most poignantly, 16-year-old nonbinary student Nex Benedict, who died one day after a vicious beating by fellow students in the bathroom of his suburban Tulsa high school, where he’d allegedly been bullied for his gender identity.¹

However, the piece—which, again, is quite good!—has largely been eclipsed by Lorenz’s accompanying video of her nearly hour-long interview with Raichik, which she published on her personal YouTube account this past Saturday.

In it, an extremely patient Lorenz presses Raichik on her intense transphobia and her fascist fan base. Raichik, on the other hand, spends the bulk of the interview sounding, well, dumb as shit. And not dumb in the “this woman is a hateful monster whose entire public persona is based on a hodgepodge of pseudoscience and ill informed grievances” (although there’s that too). I mean dumb as in, y’know…dumb. Really, sincerely, genuinely stupid.

As clip after clip of Raichik’s bumbling non-answers was shared across Twitter, the discourse quickly coalesced around the basic question of how someone so influential could at the same time be such a painfully public moron.

The answer, of course, is “easily,” as you can see for yourself in the video below.