Boston Children’s Hospital Blames Libs of TikTok
Hate machine Libs of TikTok’s owner and operator, Chaya Raichik, was named the cause of Catherine Leavy’s hospital bomb threat by both her lawyer and Boston Children’s Hospital’s lawyer. Let’s talk about the damage that follows in the wake of Raichik’s tweets.
Opinion, by Alyssa Steinsiek
Have you seen a documentary called The Brainwashing of My Dad?
It’s a fascinating, terrifying look inside the various modern pipelines that take goodhearted but quasi-apolitical liberals and turn them into seething, raging, foaming at the mouth diehard conservatives. It’s a breakdown of how the sweet dad who raised you gets turned into a Trump voting, immigrant hating, conspiracy believing lunatic before your very eyes. Anybody who believes in restorative justice could probably argue for hours about how this happens, how we stop it, and what should happen to the people victimized by this targeted propaganda.
Boston Children’s Hospital, at least in the case of Catherine Leavy, does not believe incarceration is the solution. See, Leavy phoned in a false bomb threat to BCH in August of 2022, which her lawyers insist was the result of “undergoing a significant medication change and increase, isolated within her family home with no mental health providers or external supports.” They’re asking that Leavy not be incarcerated on the grounds that, due to her own mental health difficulties, she was manipulated and misled by an online disinformation campaign being waged against BCH.
“This campaign has been primarily carried out by four individuals … using their respective social media accounts to spread disinformation to their millions of followers about health care provided to gender-diverse and transgender children at pediatric hospitals around the nation,” wrote the hospital’s attorney, Christopher Viney, in a victim statement filed in US District Court. “In particular, these four instigators have posted inflammatory falsehoods about the health care provided at these hospitals, claiming that there was "castration," and "butchering, mutilating, and sterilizing" of children occurring.”
Helpfully, in their own statement, Leavy’s attorney named the Twitter account they believe is most responsible for her bomb threat: Libs of TikTok.
Assigned Media has written about Chaya Raichik and her finely tuned violent transphobia machine Libs of Tik Tok… uh, a lot. In January, we reported on Raichik’s regrettably temporary ban from Facebook. A few weeks later, we covered Raichik’s unbelievable appointment to an Oklahoma book banning committee organized by state Superintendent Ryan Walters. In February, we talked about how Raichik went on the defensive when people accused her vile rhetoric of contributing to the tragic death of transgender teenager Nex Benedict.
We aren’t the only ones, of course. Outlets like Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, NPR and Advocate have all noted the links between Raichik’s posts and a deluge of bomb threats being issued to whichever innocent pro-LGBTQ+ group or business she’s most recently mentioned. An antifascist veterans’ organization named Task Force Butler published an extremely thorough analysis of the effects of Raichik’s hate mongering in 2022. Media Matters maintains a timeline of people and groups who have been violently harassed as a result of Raichik targeting them.
Need I go on?
Exactly what Raichik’s deal is has been clear for a very long time, even though—as you can see in her tweet about BCH—she likes to deny the consequences of her actions and pretend that her words have no meaning, carry no weight. Because of Catherine Leavy, we know just how serious the effects of Raichik’s lies can be:
“Her continued isolation and obsessively paranoid internet surfing led her down into the dark recesses of online misinformation–and straight into the dangerous and hateful disinformation espoused by the ‘Libs of TikTok’ twitter account and echoed online by other misinformation social media accounts … Catherine's exposure to the destructive and manipulative messaging spewed by these toxic social media accounts could not have come at a worse time. Vulnerable, dysregulated, and acutely mentally ill, she lacked the ability to appreciate the falsity of the disinformation claims. In her compromised and mentally disorganized state, she was unable to meaningfully discern that the false claims of Children's performing gender-affirming surgeries on young children were actually manipulatively masked hateful, transphobic and antiLGBTQ+ messaging.”
If you are at all familiar with the radicalization process that takes vulnerable but otherwise harmless people and transforms them into neo-Nazis, Catherine Leavy’s circumstances, as described above in her lawyer’s statement to the court, isn’t shocking or surprising. It isn’t out of the ordinary or unique in any way. It’s how people like Raichik create an army.
The people targeting BCH and other hospitals that offer gender-affirming care services to minors claim that doctors mutilate and harm mentally ill children. This is just not true. BCH has very explicitly stated that they provide no gender-affirming genital surgery for patients under 18, and that any steps taken to medically affirm a gender diverse or transgender child require informing parents and attaining their consent.
In Leavy’s case, the bomb threat was fake. Nobody was hurt. No lives were lost. Like Boston Children’s Hospital officials, I don’t believe that she should go to prison. Besides being an abolitionist, I respect that her victims acknowledge the moves she’s made to be a better person, and I don’t think punitive measures taken on behalf of the hospital would help anybody. Mind you, she isn’t entirely innocent in all of this. I think it’s fair to say that many of us struggle with our own mental health and have never been tricked into calling in a fake bomb threat on Chaya Raichik’s behalf.
But I worry that, sooner or later, we’ll all have to ask: Does a repentant propaganda victim deserve forgiveness after their actions get somebody hurt, or killed? Or get a lot of people killed? I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: If people like Chaya Raichik are allowed to continue spreading lies intended to stoke targeted hate against LGBTQ+ people and our allies, somebody is going to suffer the consequences.
Every day I hope she’s stopped before that can happen.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
