A Reddit post is making its rounds across the conservative sphere of the Internet,
essentially exposing a transgender parent forcing their child to take hormones.
Now, unsurprisingly, it turns out that they were duped by a fake post.
But since conservatives have been primed by all sorts of hucksters and
grifters to believe that there are all these nefarious people out there who
are encouraging kids to have gender reassignment surgery.
Of course they fell for this, of course they got duped.
Please go out in the real world, get off Twitter.
Please, get off Reddit, get off Twitter, talk to real people,
understand the world around you.
But let's give you the details of this story.
So, right-wingers like Justin O'Donnell tweeted a screenshot of the Reddit post
with the caption, this is effing child abuse and I'll die on this hill.
So, there's a screen cap of the post, again, this is completely fake.
And it says,
anyone else have trouble convincing your team to continue transitioning?
My 14-year-old daughter has started refusing her estradiol.
So, I've been crushing the pills and putting it in her cereal in the morning.
How could anyone believe that this is real?
But again, of course, conservatives have been primed to think that this is
like normal, this is what everyone on the left is doing.
They're trying to encourage their kids to take hormones.
They're trying to encourage their kids to have gender reassignment surgeries.
Again, go out there and talk to real people.
Now, again, it's all complete bs, none of this is true.
So, over the week, O'Donnell's post has actually garnered
almost 46,000 likes and 8,000 retweets.
The abusive mom post is obviously suspicious because the medication
that she's referring to, the hormone pill that she's referring to,
it could be dangerous and you can have serious ramifications of taking it.
The idea of crushing it and
sneaking into your child cereal, no parent would do that, okay?
In fact, if you read about it on WebMD, it specifically says, if you are taking
the extended-release tablets, do not crush, chew, or dissolve them.
Doing so can release the drug at once increasing the risk of side effects.
Yeah, but sure, go ahead and
believe that a parent is sneaking it into their child cereal.
Now, Reuters did their own investigation into this and
they reported that it was a fake post.
A conversation in an online forum on August 6, 2021 revealed that the users
were planning to contribute false stories to the subreddit, transparenttranskid.
On the same forum, the user or a user called Funkyduffy responded to
a call to snap up the subreddit and fill it with fabricated stories by
linking to the post about the forced administration of that drug.
And so Reddit actually did investigate that subreddit and
they had taken it down back in August of 2021.
So, who knows how this post reemerged but it is a complete fake.
There isn't a parent out there who's crushing this drug and
hiding it in their child cereal.
>> Yeah, so, this is one of the problems of a divided country because
we don't talk to each other anymore.
So, we have no idea what the other side actually thinks.
The right wing screams their hateful opinions everywhere on social media.
But when it comes to the left wing, the right wing really believes the things
that Tucker Carlson says, and every other hateful right wing media outlet.
Tucker Carlson said something hilarious that we've made fun of over and
over again when he said that if Joe Biden wins
they're gonna make you drink Starbucks every day.
Have you ever met anyone from the left?
Why would we make you drink Starbucks?
It's maniacal, right?
>> Look, what would we get out of that?
>> Okay, what do we get out of it?
I don't get it why.
We must support the corporation of Starbucks, what?
Why would the left wing want that?
>> We're the party of iced chais, what can I say?
>> Yeah, but since they don't interact with the left wing and
the only media they're consuming is hateful right wing media, they genuinely
think that the left wing are monsters who they want all their kids to be trans.
So if the kid doesn't agree to it,
they'll trick them by putting the pills in their cereal.
You'd have to be a lunatic to do that.
I don't know of a single person who's ever done that.
But when the right wing sees this, they go, that's obviously true, like,
like, like, like, like, like, like like like.
And so when I went to go talk to Patrick about David, he's a right-winger.
And his show at least when I was on it was not at all hateful.
So, credit workers- >> No, it was a great conversation.
>> It was a really good conversation.
>> It really was, yeah.
>> And one of the things that happened there was, I think they would seem
genuinely shocked at my opinions because since they only consume right wing media,
they have this caricature of the left.
>> Right, of course they do, yeah.
>> Right, and so when they meet a person who's actually on the left,
they're like, you sound actually totally reasonable, you just want higher wages and
health care for everybody, and you want equality of opportunity.
That shit sounds pretty good.
Yeah, I know, it is pretty good.
Okay, cuz this stuff is nonsense.
>> I can't help but think about the discussion we had recently about that
fantastic Atlantic piece that talks about the tribalism online, and
how social media has kind of distorted our perception
of people who might not be part of our political group.
And so, look, the loudest people on social media are not
representative of an entire political group.
In fact, it's a tiny, tiny percentage of that political group, and
unfortunately they're dominating the discourse.
So, we are only, if we're not going out of our way to have discussions,
civil discussions and civil debates with people we disagree with,
we're gonna have a skewed view of the other side.
And if I was determining my perception of right-wingers,
I would think they're all exactly like Steven Crowder, but that's not the case.
There are Republicans in my family, Republicans in my husband's family.
We have debates, we have discussions, they don't believe any of the nonsense
garbage that you see the online right pedaling.
>> Yeah. >> And
I think it's important to keep that in mind.
>> Yeah, so, look,
are there real people on the left that right-wingers wouldn't agree with?
Yes, so, we did a story recently where we said, and so brace for impact, that we're
not going to call all mothers birthing people and some people were upset, okay?
And so they'll be upset again.
So, does that exist?
Yes, but if you pulled that, that would come in,
even among the left wing at 99 to 1.
Nobody's gonna switch mothers to birthing people.
By the way, if you wanna call yourself a birthing person, no harm in that, great.
>> If you want me to refer to you as a birthing person, I will happily do it.
>> No problem, right.
>> Yes. >> Right, but
if you want every mother to be called birthing people,
it's not gonna happen, okay?
And the left doesn't agree to that.
And if you think they do, you're mistaken.
But I give you that as an example because that's a tiny, tiny,
tiny minority of the left.
Unfortunately for the right, it's not so tiny, right?
And I do it based on the polling cuz when I saw like, QAnon thinks that
celebrities and democratic politicians are drinking the blood of children.
I thought, well, nobody believes that,
that's just lunatics online that maybe comes in at 2%.
A guy would be terrible if he came in at 5%, right?
And it came in at 15% of the whole country and about 30% of Republicans.
I was like, that's super scary.
So, there is a disparity here.
And part of the reason for it is,
the right wing is constantly fed lies just like this.
And then when you go take it off of Reddit because it's literally a lie,
totally made up, they go, censorship, censorship.
Now you won't let us lie about how everybody on the left is trying to
transition their kids against their own will.
No, we're taking down something that you're purposely misleading people with
and dividing the country further on.
And by the way, the people on the left-wing line, we always regulate.
And everybody knows that.
We take on people on the left who lie all the time, right?
But on the right wing, there is no regulation of that.
>> No, of course not.
>> They all celebrate the lies.
>> Yeah, it's their bread and butter.
>> And when I say all, I mean the pundits.
>> Exactly, yes.