‘Groomer Panic’: NBC’s Ben Collins On Growing Right-Wing Extremist Threats to the LGBTQ Community

MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson spoke with NBC News senior reporter Ben Collins on Friday to discuss the rising threat facing the LGBTQ+ community in the United States.

“Right-wing extremists fueling attacks against the LGBTQ+ community during this pride month as NBC News is reporting. We saw the arrest of those 31 white nationalists in Idaho last weekend allegedly on their way to a pride event, but online, right-wing personalities have inundated LGBTQ allies and activists with threats forcing them to cancel events altogether,” Jackson began.

“Consider this, mentions of drag queen story hour on Twitter went up 777% in the last month, according to data provided by NBC news by a social media intelligence company,” she continued.

“Since then, since all of those mentions, we’ve seen members of Proud Boys storm a local library hosting one of these events, harassing the performer, forcing the library to boost its security, and a California state senator got a bomb threat for joking about making drag queen story hour a part of school curriculum,” Jackson concluded before bringing Collins on.

“I think a lot of people thought that was a one-and-done thing on Saturday when they saw those 31 masked men pulled out of a U-Haul in Idaho. But it is just the beginning of what these people are trying to pull off,” Collins began.

“Like you talked about, there was that Proud Boys’ storming of a drag queen story hour in California, but they have been arranging similar things in Texas and Arizona, maybe not at the militia level, but at the personal level,” Collins continued.

“Doesn’t require a whole bunch of people to do that. They’re also sending a bunch of these threats to trans rights rallies. One in Georgia, I talked to the organizers. They received one the same night as this bust and had to cancel their event for the next weekday.”

“This is something you’re seeing increasingly in these spaces. They’re obsessed with this drag queen story hour thing, they are not letting go of it and they are trying to get them canceled,” Collins continued.

Jackson then asked Collins to explain “How is it that that machine has managed to grow so quickly, even if the last few weeks, the last month?”

A quick thread on extremists targeting Pride and drag queen events:

You’re not imagining it. Threats against these communities are increasing.

Targeted threats canceled Pride events and forced people out of their homes in the last week.

It’s part of a new anti-trans “machine.”

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) June 17, 2022

“First of all, they’re focused on pride month, they don’t like the concept that corporations, for example, are backing LGBTQ causes,” Collins responded.

“However, this has been going on for months and months. This whole groomer panic. The idea that Disney movies are grooming children to become gay or trans. This was a big thing in the last few months. The difference is now they are targeting very specific events because it’s pride month. There are a lot of pride month events out there hosted by things like local libraries and schools and private companies, as well,” Collins explained.

“You’re talking about extremism online and a link to the real world and there’s a political piece of it, too, because 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced across the country according to the Human Rights Campaign and we cover that on our show, and I wonder if you can speak to what we’re seeing in the state capitols and how you see that connecting to what we see online, not a direct connection, but in the overall discussion?” Jackson then asked.

Collins answered by explaining the growing anti-LGBTQ fervor on the right, noting its similarity to “The infrastructure of the critical race theory panic where people would find these examples in local schools and they would blow them out of proportion or take them out of context and say this is proof that they’re trying to indoctrinate your children and that’s what happened, there are some accounts that have come out of that and they have shifted their focus entirely to anti-LGBTQ causes.”

“For example, there’s this account called “Libs of TikTok” which is a big driver in the space and they are constantly showing what they believe to be examples of the excesses of the LGBTQ community and adding sentences “We live in Hell” or “We are in Hell” to the end of it and it drives these communities, these anti-trans communities to action, and now they identify very specific events. Coeur D’ Alene was one of those events,” Collins continued.

“The Proud Boys event at the drag queen story hour is another one of those events. They are telling people that these are real-life spaces where these things are happening, that ‘They’re trying to indoctrinate or groom their children in these spaces’ and they want to get those things shut down,” Collins concluded.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC