The Right-Wing Groomers Who Call Everyone Groomers
Currents
The term "groomer” has become nearly omnipresent in online political discourse. It used to refer to adults who lure or manipulate minors in order to rape them. Today, it’s often used as a way to slander LGBT people or anyone who speaks out for LGBT rights. Publicly defend the rights of same-sex couples to adopt or the First Amendment rights of drag queens, and you can expect to be labeled a groomer while your replies fill up with wood-chipper memes. The groomer smear displays blatant bigotry by falsely insinuating that gay, bi, or trans people are pedophiles (in reality, most offenders of child sexual abuse are straight). But this reheated canard is pernicious for another reason, too. Beyond being completely unfounded and masking prejudicial hatred under the guise of "protecting children", the hypocrisy on display is as sinister as it is stunning.
Right-wing culture warriors profess concern for children's safety, but their actions and alliances frequently reveal a different story. Indeed, many of the most vocal thought leaders on the political right who gleefully slander LGBT people as deviants and groomers are themselves guilty of enabling and excusing genuine child predators within their own ranks.
This rot exists at the highest levels of the MAGA movement and has spread outward. Donald Trump was known for flying on Jeffrey Epstein’s jet and hanging out at his properties. In 2002, he told New York Magazine that he’d known Epstein for 15 years at that point, that Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with”, and that “he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Other prominent MAGA figures have been implicated in recent years. Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House, was convicted of sexually abusing minors and imprisoned in 2016. Representative Jim Jordan was caught in a sexual abuse controversy stemming from his work when he was an assistant wrestling coach. Representative Lauren Boebert engaged in lewd sexual acts in public while sitting feet away from children. And Roy Moore, a GOP nominee for US Senate, is a man with a long history of repeatedly pursuing sexual relationships with minors.
But this trend isn’t only relevant to the Republican Party — the same disturbing pattern of behavior has now infected the Libertarian Party (LP). I’ve spent over ten years as an operative within the Libertarian Party. I’ve been elected as a State Party Chairman, run one of the largest LP county affiliates in the USA during the 2010s, and worked on Libertarian campaigns both as a paid staffer and a volunteer. Over the course of my political career, I have witnessed the party’s devolution firsthand.
As discussed in a previous article in Queer Majority, libertarians have long stood on the cutting edge of LGBT rights. In general, libertarians believe that LGBT individuals have the right to live their lives without discrimination or government interference. As such, the Libertarian Party openly and proudly championed equal rights for LGBT people since its inception in 1971 — decades before Republicans and Democrats ever considered embracing these stances.
For those who may be unaware, the Libertarian Party is the largest third party in the United States. It’s been the only active third party to procure 50-state ballot access. Its most recent high-water mark was in 2016 when the LP nominee, Gary Johnson, received 4.4 million votes in his challenge of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
However, the same kind of illiberal, right-wing populism that has seized the GOP since 2016 has crept into and all but hijacked the Libertarian Party of late. There is a civil war playing out within the Libertarian Party today, between extremists who call themselves libertarians while rejecting the core value of individual liberty, and principled libertarians dismayed at the political coup unfolding before their eyes.
In 2022, a far-right, MAGA-aligned faction called the "Libertarian Party Mises Caucus" (LPMC) took over the entire leadership structure of the party. And, despite being named after the economist Ludwig von Mises, the leaders of this caucus share none of the classically liberal values he espoused. Since the party’s takeover by LPMC, party leaders have attacked foundational libertarian principles, abolished language condemning bigotry, embraced an explicitly anti-abortion rights platform, and worked to overhaul the party's traditionally pro-open immigration stances. LPMC-backed state parties have also equated LGBT rights with Nazism and Communism.
This may all still seem like the niche infighting within a marginal party, but it has a much broader relevance. There are far more Americans with libertarian views than there are members of the Libertarian Party. According to Gallup, libertarian-minded voters consistently make up around 20% of the electorate. And while most libertarians are not card-carrying LP members, for better or worse, those who control the Libertarian Party exert tremendous influence over the “libertarian” brand in the United States, and the LPMC is now the face of the movement.
Since the ascendance of the LPMC, anyone voicing the libertarian case for LGBT rights is likely to be accused of being a "groomer" or “degenerate”, not just by anonymous online crackpots, but by many leaders and high-ranking officials within the Libertarian Party. Reed Cooley, the LP’s former Director of Communications, and the first major hire after the Mises Caucus takeover, claimed that members of the LGBT community are recruiting children. A former Mises Caucus elected Vice Chair calls people “groomers” on a regular basis. A prominent party Advisory Board member was banned from Twitter for threatening to assault people engaging in drag queen story hour — and, of course, also calling them “groomers.” These are only a handful of examples.
Meanwhile, many of these same people systematically ignore, downplay, or even hide actual child abuse that happens within their ranks.
During the Mises Caucus’s takeover of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC), the caucus’s founder, Micheal Heise, personally nominated MAGA star Daryl Brooks for Governor of Pennsylvania — a man twice convicted of sex crimes years prior, including exposing himself to two young minors. The nomination was denounced across the Libertarian Party but received no condemnation from the Mises Caucus.
Another LPMC member, Matthew Schutter, ran for the Pennsylvania State Legislature with the caucus’s endorsement. He was later arrested and charged with possessing child pornography and now faces 40 sex crime charges.
Months later, the LPMC took over the National Libertarian Party and elected Chairwoman Angela McArdle. Afterward, they immediately elevated the illiberal voices within their faction of the movement and sought to completely redefine the ideas of libertarianism.
Their first major campaign of the Libertarian Party LPMC management included a rally in support of Russian aggression and in opposition to US support for Ukraine on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. If you can believe it, they invited a convicted pedophile as a keynote speaker: disgraced UN weapons inspector and Putin fan Scott Ritter.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Mises Caucus hired “Liberty Lockdown” podcast host Clint Russell as the LP’s “messenger in residence.” He also found himself at the center of disturbing controversies. Several years ago, he interviewed right-wing Twitter star Eliza Bleu, and the topic of the age of consent came up.
In the podcast with Clint and the author and history professor Thaddeus Russell, Eliza described her ideal society in which local communities, caregivers, parents, teachers, neighbors, and faith leaders are able to decide whether children are “cognitively ready to have sex with [adults].” Clint and Thaddeus nodded the entire time and even doubled down in support of Eliza’s position in a Twitter Spaces conversation weeks later. A few years prior, Thaddeus Russell produced an entire podcast episode defending adult-child sexual relationships, resulting in a national controversy. He has publicly advocated similar positions as far back as 2017 in a piece for the Daily Beast. In spite of this, Thaddeus was invited by the current LNC Chair, Angela McCardle, to keynote events for the California Mises Caucus.
Prominent libertarian podcaster and Mises Caucus Advisory Board member Tom Woods has a long history of joining right-wing culture wars against LGBT people. He was also a founding member of the neo-confederate organization “League of the South.” In 2022, an investigation discovered that he started a relationship with his ex-wife when she was 15 and he was 26. The investigation showed evidence that their relationship started when she was underage and that he effectively groomed his wife-to-be from the age of 15. His public response to these revelations was to say that “all traditional Catholics marry young” and that his wife was “very mature for her age.” What was the LPMC’s response? Their thought leaders tried to actively suppress the information.
Woods isn’t the only member of the Mises Caucus’s Advisory Board that has a troubling history. “Black Guns Matter” founder and prominent Mises advocate Martin Jones (who goes by Maj Toure) has spent the last decade building a large platform for himself and has been featured in publications like Vice and Reason Magazine. Jones rose to national prominence for loudly and vocally advocating that the African American community embrace their Second Amendment rights, a goal perfectly in line with libertarian thought. But Jones also has a checkered past when it comes to his behavior toward LGBT folks.
In 2023, Jones was permanently banned from Twitter for violent threats against people in his community who hosted drag queen story hour. Addressing his ban on a new account, he said, “Yup. Got banned for saying I’d slap a groomer.” What Martin won’t boast about is that he was arrested in 2012 for unlawful sexual contact with a minor. He’s taken to social media since claiming that he was falsely accused of rape, but his behavior shows a pattern of harassment.
I could go on and on. These are not a series of isolated incidents. Time and time again, right-wing populists and other extremists who are quick to join anti-LGBT culture wars are caught up in these types of scandals.
Not only does misuse of the term "groomer" in political discourse cry wolf, muddying the waters and making it harder to protect children from genuine abuse, but it also represents a disturbing trend of hypocrisy and deflection. The irony is palpable when considering the countless instances where figures, who have loudly championed anti-LGBT rhetoric under the auspices of protecting children, are themselves implicated in scandals involving the behavior they claim to decry. Perhaps this hints at an ulterior motive: When everyone is a "groomer", it becomes much harder to find the actual groomers. This dissonance between public posturing and private actions not only undermines legitimate child safety, but also uses children as props to advance illiberal political agendas.
If the rise of “groomer” discourse over the past few years has taught us anything, it’s that those of us committed to truth, human rights, and child welfare would do well to push back on bigoted anti-LGBT smears. More than that, we would be prudent to regard those who do the smearing with an extra heap of suspicion, because methinks they doth protest too much.
Published Apr 1, 2024
