It's been a week since the murder of Laura Ann Carleton. Carleton was a business owner in California who was murdered by a man, Travis Ikeguchi, after a dispute about a Pride flag hanging in her shop. Ikeguchi, who was later killed by the police that same day, was discovered to have had a history of posting of disgusting and violent anti-LGBTQ messages on social media.
A Thursday article on NBC Out delved deeper into Ikeguchi's history of posting this ugliness on social media and how it ties into far-right conservatives smearing the Pride flag itself and the LGBTQ community as pedophiles:
The far right has repeatedly linked the flag to the decades-old trope that links gay and transgender people to child abusers who want to “groom” or sexualize children, a trope that has recently had a resurgence.
“The pride flag does not deserve our respect or deference,” right-wing provocateur Matt Walsh declared in March to his 2.4 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Nearly all of the most depraved attacks on children, tradition, and common sense in modern society happen under the hideous banner of the pride flag.” A day later, Walsh dedicated an over hourlong episode of his podcast, “The Matt Walsh Show,” which is produced by the media company The Daily Wire, to the Pride flag. The episode was titled “The Pride Flag Deserves Our Disrespect.”
Chaya Raichik, who runs the far-right X account LibsOfTikTok, has repeatedly prompted conversations among her nearly 2.5 million followers that appear to take aim at the Pride flag. “Imagine walking into your kid’s elementary school and this is what greets you,” she wrote on X in June, along with an image of what appear to be teachers wearing rainbow Pride clothing and a person dressed in drag. “What do you do?”
You will notice that the article mentioned two prominent anti-LGBT activists - Matt Walsh and Chaya Raichik of the infamous Libs of TikTok. Needless to say, neither was happy it. Both took to Twitter to voice their disapproval:
