The conservative glee over labeling people as “groomers” and openly wishing fatal violence on them feels like a precursor to the kind of oppression and bloodshed that LGBTQ people are seeing in Europe, including in Ukraine and Poland, both of which had “LGBT-free zones” patrolled by neo-Nazi and far-right enforcers. Groomers face the wall and wait for the bang ?- Railey Djinn??? April 29, 2022 He’s called on his handful of supporters to pull similar stunts by confronting people themselves and recording the interactions, as he did at an LGBTQ-friendly church in Phoenix in early April.
But his rhetoric is also a worrying symptom of the growing number of people who label their opponents as “pedophiles” and then explicitly advocate for violence against them, using bizarre turns of logic and layers of misinformation in their mission to depict queer culture and sexual education as a threat to kids.Īt various points in the past two years, Schmidt has reportedly dabbled in anti-Semitism, anti-Blackness and support of explicit white nationalists, all while racking up bans from social media platforms and crowdfunding platforms for a range of speech and activities, including allegedly assaulting people and trespassing in order to assert his anti-mask rights as well as getting banned from the Arizona Capitol earlier this year after reportedly harassing a Democrat with slurs and throwing Nazi salutes in its halls.
In a vacuum, Schmidt is a tiny personality fighting for approval in a vast sea of right-wing agitators, many of whom have realized that the American conservative movement can grow through a series of disinformation campaigns and willfully ignorant moral panics.