Well, there’s unhinged – like any tweet from a certain someone after ANYTHING pisses him off – and then there’s UNHINGED. Like, say, a “Senior Writer” for Salon who whips up a scathing article dripping with venom and accusations about an online conservative personality she accuses of viciously outing a small town GOP mayor, and doggedly harassing him to the point of suicide.

Which he eventually commits.

Wow. Heavy stuff.

Now the “Senior Writer” is Amanda Marcotte and she really did scribble this overwrought Gothic tale for Salon. In fact she’s busy defending the pile of poo on X right now.

Maybe you can guess the villain of the piece, but if you can’t, I’ll clue you in – Chaya Raichik of “Libs of TikTok” fame.

It starts like this:

The suicide of a gender non-conforming GOP mayor reveals the incoherence of the right’s culture wars
Instead of thanking a Breitbart writer for outing their leader, this conservative Alabama town is outraged

For most Americans, viral internet memes are mostly harmless ways to waste time: Trendy TikTok dances, goofy cat videos and Instagram thirst traps. For MAGA nation, however, the hottest online trend of the past couple of years has been digging up images of random queer people, splashing them all over the internet, and inviting the deplorables to threaten them. Libs of TikTok is a Twitter account dedicated to revealing the identities of gender non-conforming people, so that they can be abused by strangers, for no other reason than who they are. The account has 2.6 million followers, but its reach goes way beyond that because the names and pictures of people blasted by Libs of TikTok are then often amplified by right-wing media outlets like Fox News.

“[T]he content it surfaces shows a direct correlation with the recent push in legislation and rhetoric directly targeting the LGBTQ+ community,” Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post wrote last year of Libs of TikTok. As USA Today reported earlier this month, there have been “dozens of bomb threats, death threats and other harassment after Libs of TikTok’s posts since February 2022.” In November 2022, a Colorado gay bar was attacked by a shooter who appeared motivated by the rising tide of vitriol towards LGBTQ people. Five were killed and dozens injured. While Chaya Raichik, who runs the account, claims she doesn’t want violence, no one really believes that. After all, she celebrated the story about the violence she inspires.

Marcotte then illustrates how Raichik “celebrates” the violence she inspires. I’ve included a reaction from one of the people who were NOT as horrified as the fragile Marcotte.

Congratulations! 😂

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2023

You get the gist of the piece in those first two paragraphs, with a Taylor Lorenz affirmation for good measure. Libs of TikTok is “dedicated to REVEALING the identities” of gender non-conforming people. Apparently, heartless Raicheck hunts these innocents down in clubs, bars, and bathroom stalls, does she? Otherwise no one would know who they were, shy and demure creatures of stealth and anonymity that they are. So Marcotte implies, contrary to what we all know the truth is.

What and who Raichik exposes via her X account must be video she’s obtained through electronic countermeasures that would make a FISA court blush, again, per Marcotte’s overwrought verbiage.

…On a recent episode of the “A Bit Fruity” podcast, host Matt Bernstein invited victims of the Libs of TikTok account to speak about their experiences. The stories are chilling: Schools facing down multiple bomb threats. People driven out of their jobs. Teachers asked by kids if anti-gay terrorists will kill them. But whenever people confront Raichik over the damage done by Libs of TikTok, she always denies responsibility. Instead, she claims, she’s just sharing facts: This person is queer, this person looks feminine, this person does drag on the side.

Raichik’s “VICTIMS” as they are known, and would never otherwise be known if it were not for her, because they loathe the spotlight and being on record for who they are and whatever hateful drivel they espouse.

What Marcotte never once acknowledges in all the histrionics are two important things. The first being that Libs of TikToks has only ever used the publicly available, self published videos made by these same “victims.” The “victims” who uploaded themselves to public social media sites for the world at large to ogle and share. These are their own videos and their owns words. Period. Libs of TikTok is just another account using the “share” feature enabled on the “victims” public account.

The second point, in specific regard to the suicidal mayor, is that Raichik had never tweeted about the case at all. Not once.

Here’s an unhinged 7 tweet thread from @Salon blaming me for a suicide which I never even tweeted about. Just completely deranged. @CommunityNotes https://t.co/i4ckblrAem

— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) November 15, 2023

Yet, according to the drift of Marcotte’s prose, Raichik killed this man…and MAGA MAGA MAGA loves it. I’m assuming the gay bar shooting was thrown in for dramatic effect because Marcotte forgot to mention the guy with the gun was “nonbinary and uses “they” and “them” pronouns.”

Do they not check themselves before they emote?

The Alabama pastor and small-town mayor whose sad story was the impetus for this bilious explosion and scurrilous smear job? Well, he seemed to have been loved by pretty much everyone in the area, judging by the reaction to both the “unmasking” and his tragic demise.

An Alabama preacher and politician who killed himself days after being outed for having a secret life online as a “transgender curvy girl” had told a friend just days earlier that he was experiencing some “dark days.”

F.L. “Bubba” Copeland, 62, who was the mayor of tiny Smiths Station, confided in the friend after a news outlet published a story that featured photos of Copeland’s “alter ego” Brittini Blaire Summerlin in a bra and feminine clothing.

“After watching for a day or two [of] people just relentlessly attacking Bubba, I was quite bothered by it, and I just decided to reach out to him,” former Phenix City School Superintendent Larry D. Chiara told NBC News.

“It was the day before he passed away. I said, ‘Bubba, keep your head up, you’re a good man with a great heart. Don’t ever forget that. Call me if you need me,’” Chiara recounted.

But, in point of fact, there was a lot more to Mr Copeland’s side gig than just dressing up as a big girl, and I don’t know that I’d think of it as all that harmless. Perhaps that was what was weighing so heavily on his mind before he did what he did.

The man had issues. And some of what he’d done living his second life could conceivably have gotten him in real hot water. None of which, mind you, makes it into Marcotte’s hit piece.

…In another long-form fictional story posted under Copeland’s pseudonym, Brittini Blaire, the narrator becomes obsessed with a real-life local business owner, who he ultimately murders to assume her identity. For the sake of the woman’s privacy, 1819 News has provided a copy of the fictional story with names and other identifying information redacted.

…The story then goes into a graphic description of the narrator seducing the woman’s husband after fully assuming his female identity. It concludes with the narrator assailing the woman on a cruise ship, taking her wedding and engagement rings, and finally throwing her to her death.

…The character in the story is a real person, local to the area. Copeland’s story names her and her local business in the fictional story.

1819 News spoke with the woman, who was distraught by the information. She said she was unaware of the story’s existence but was close with the family.

Copeland frequently used pictures and details from local residents in his online life. On his Reddit page and elsewhere, he would often post fictional memes featuring young boys and girls with the illusion that the young people in the memes were one person who had undergone a gender transition.

One meme featured a local brother and sister, at least one of which is a minor, with the caption, “Take the shots, get implants, become the whore.” The meme was designed to give the impression that the young boy had transitioned into a young girl.

After the initial story ran, the father of the two children contacted 1819 News, asking the picture to be removed to protect the children’s privacy. The image of the minor boy appears to have been taken from the father’s social media, as it is currently featured there.

…One woman contacted 1819 News saying she had discovered her social media postings on one such porn site. The woman, whose name is being withheld for privacy, said that she knew Copeland from when she was young and living in the area but had not seen him in years.

“[S]omeone came across one of his sites that he posts on, and he’s posted photos of myself! Now my photos (from Facebook) are on all of these nude/porn sites,” she said.

So the pastor wrote snuff fiction (at least 4 stories on the fiction website that 1819 News found), used local childrens’ pictures lifted from FaceBook as well as old friends’ on porn sites, in addition to advocating for gender transitioning. Dreamboat, he wasn’t.

Does that mean he should be dead?

Of course not.

Does that mean by virtue of his “trans” habits he should have been protected from ever being exposed to the public? I have my opinion – and I’m pretty sure people who are finding their kids’ pictures – or themselves – splashed across porn sites, or their names and businesses featured in erotic snuff stories online may well experience a change of opinion themselves.

Marcotte states it is “obviously” MAGA hate for the alphabet soup sex cult which led to Copeland’s exposure.

…And then there was a subcategory of comment: The people insisting there’s no conflict between outrage over what happened to Copeland and being MAGA. “I voted for TRUMP. I lean far right & what happened to this man is despicable,” one woman wrote angrily. There was much talk of Christian forgiveness, all to smooth over the cognitive dissonance.

It’s frustrating because Copeland’s death is obviously tied to the MAGA movement and the rising tide of hate against LGBTQ people. Hate crimes against LGBTQ people, especially trans people, have risen dramatically in the past few years. There’s also been a surge of intimidation and threats against LGBTQ people, from harassment of drag shows to, of course, the direct and personalized abuse aimed at anyone that Libs of TikTok targets.

THE RISING TIDE OF HATE AGAINST LGBTQ PEOPLE

I won’t point out to the oblivious Marcotte who the “rising tide of hate” has actually been focused against. We document it here every day, and, unlike “senior writers” for prestige rags, we include all the facts we have at our disposal.

For Marcotte to imply a simple man who just liked pretty dresses and make-up on the weekends shot himself because Chaya Raichik exposed his part-time fetish to the world is a dirty journalism too far, wouldn’t you think?

It’s almost like she’s trying to call a hit in herself.

Don’t be hateful like Amanda.