How a City Council Candidate’s Online Bigotry Exposed Cambridge Children to Far Right Danger
You may have learned recently that Cambridge City Council candidate Robert Winters has a long history of online bigotry he’s directed against a number of groups, including the LGBTQ+ community (in particular the transgender members of our community), people of color, Muslims, women, and more. As someone who has been calling out Robert’s hateful online behavior for some time, I’m grateful that more folks are finally starting to stand up and notice. However, as bad as the tweets and messages now circulating are, I’m sorry to say that you probably haven’t even heard the half of it yet.
Robert’s “Libs of TikTok Incident” has been referenced briefly in recent tweets, reddit threads, flyers, and Cambridge Day articles, but I’m going to share the whole story here because I think it’s important for Cambridge residents to know about. This incident is far from the only reason to be wary of Robert as a candidate and a neighbor, but it deserves extra consideration among the litany of Robert’s years of vile behavior both because it flagrantly exposed vulnerable Cambridge residents to the potential for real world violence and because it illustrates just how clueless Robert is to his own bigotry.
What you need to understand first is that Robert regularly interacts with and boosts content from a number of far-right social media accounts online, including a particularly vile anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter account called Libs of TikTok that has over 2.5 million followers. Libs of TikTok is notorious for posting identifying information about LGBTQ+ individuals, institutions supporting the LGBTQ+ community, and allies, which regularly and reliably inspires its followers to subject the target to online and real world “harassment, threats and violence,” according to the Anti Defamation League. Like a KKK leader directing a knowing follower to violence while never explicitly saying the words that would meet the legal standard for incitement, it is all too predictable for a Libs of TikTok post about an LGBTQ+ target to be followed by flooded switchboards, protests, bomb threats and even protracted intimidation campaigns, such as what took place when the account waged an online war against Boston Children’s Hospital last year. Other common targets include local schools, LGBTQ+ spaces, and public libraries. Often, local Proud Boys chapters and other violent, white nationalist groups will show up to intimidate LGBTQ+ people and allies going about their lives.
In June 2022, Libs of TikTok was putting together one such harassment campaign by publicly building an online list of Pride events around the country that were being marketed as age-appropriate for children and families. Such events are common, a regular part of most cities’ Pride Month programming. After all, LBGTQ+ kids exist, most of your queer friends will confirm that they knew who they were before they turned 18, and children deserve to feel proud of and loved for who they are just as much as any adult.
Libs of TikTok disagrees, and put out a call for its followers to add events in their own communities to a running public list. Robert Winters quickly complied and provided the Libs of TikTok list with a date, time, location, and link for a Drag Queen Story Hour event for LGBTQ+ children and families being hosted by the Cambridge Public Library during the first week of Pride Month. The Libs of TikTok list, on which anyone could see Robert’s post, quickly spread to other incendiary far right sites like InfoWars, which has its own history of inspiring violent disruptions of LGBTQ+ events. InfoWars commenters combed through the list, denigrated members of the LGBTQ+ community as pedophiles and groomers (an old anti-LGBTQ+ slur brought back into popularity in large part by Libs of TikTok), and called for event organizers to be killed (“Any man dressing up as a woman and twerking in front of children should be murdered,” one said to approval, dramatically misrepresenting what goes on at G-rated Drag Queen Story Time events).
Robert was playing with fire.
I saw Robert’s post to Libs of TikTok and, immediately recognizing how dangerous it was, emailed him to delete it. I then called the library and alerted staff to the threat and its significance, and followed up with Cambridge Police Commissioner Elow, who informed me that she’d been made aware of the threat by someone else and that the Department would be taking every step to ensure that the event would be secure and safe from violence.
Robert, in contrast, apparently did not see a problem with what he’d done, and did not delete his post for a day if not longer, a lifetime on Twitter and more than enough time to attract the attention of Libs of TikTok’s violent followers.
Thankfully, the Cambridge Public Library event was able to go forward as planned, much to the credit of the Cambridge Police Department detail present. I personally counted 13 uniformed police forming a vigilant and visible perimeter around the library, which is a significant portion of the city’s total police patrol capacity for a typical Saturday morning. I have no doubt that there were more police units in the area as well, and CPD deserves all the recognition in the world for their ability to assess the true threat behind Robert’s action. Several events on Libs of TikTok’s list weren’t so lucky. According to media reports, some had to be canceled because they could not take place safely. Others were protested, harassed, and intimidated, some by armed militia members. A few of these mobs turned violent
After all, that was the point of the list. Libs of TikTok exists to inflict harm on the LGBTQ+ community.
Now, there is simply no way that Robert didn’t know what he was doing. Whatever else I may think of Mr. Winters, he is, by all accounts, a legally competent adult responsible for regulating his own actions. Libs of TikTok was not some obscure poster on the dark web that Robert bungled across before he accidentally divulged details about the Cambridge Library event. By the time of this incident, the account was notorious, and had been widely profiled in a number of mainstream news profiles all across the English speaking world and beyond. Robert was following Libs of TikTok on Twitter by Spring of 2022 at the latest, as evidenced by his likes on a number of Libs of TikTok tweets and conversations supporting Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Law passed in March of that year. He cheered Libs of TikTok on when it stoked outrage over a Brookline Public School forum on structural racism. He liked Libs of TikTok tweets mocking a school teacher for coming out as LGBTQ+. He knew what Libs of TikTok was at least months before he heard about the Cambridge library event.
In other words, he knew what he was doing.
Earlier this week, Robert offered a meager defense of his actions, which is to say that he doesn’t believe he’s done anything wrong at all. His long post contains no apology, and he stands by or even reiterates some of his more bigoted statements, such as his oft-repeated belief that “Islam and government do not mix well.” When he turns to the Libs of TikTok incident, he doesn’t deny giving details of a children’s event to a hateful mob, but describes in the most generic way possible as if it weren’t a big deal:
“I was surprised to learn that in some public libraries there were ‘drag time story hour’ events taking place that were publicly funded. On that same day I saw that one was taking place in Cambridge and simply made a note of this fact — and for this I was called a transphobe.”
This rather pathetic explanation simply doesn’t hold up given what we know Robert knew about Libs of TikTok. He wasn’t just exchanging schedule information with some random community bulletin board. Robert had been an enthusiastic participant in the account’s online frenzy of anti-LGBT demonization and abuse for months before the incident. He’d gleefully reposted Libs of TikTok’s horrific, dehumanizing content, and he went on to put Cambridge children and their families at risk.
But he’s never apologized or even acknowledged what he’d done or what the city had to do to defend against his actions. When asked to comment on this story before publication, Robert implied that he was the real victim and said, “I don’t feel that I have ever done anything especially
problematic and certainly never anything harmful.” In fact, Robert still follows Libs of TikTok and regularly boosts their hateful content, even as recently as two weeks ago.
So, while I’m sure that Robert knows what he’s done, I’m actually not sure that he knows that it’s wrong, and I’m honestly more concerned by that than I am by his bigotry. It wouldn’t be uncommon for an adult of Robert’s generation to be unfamiliar with LGBTQ+, and particularly transgender issues if they hadn’t been exposed to them before. I know many good people who’ve had questions and worked through them to get to a place of support and understanding. None of us ever learned much of anything in one sitting, and that’s fine so long as we can acknowledge when we might make mistakes and continue to try to learn.
But Robert’s refusal to listen, his refusal to onboard new information about the modern world, and his seeming inability to learn make him uniquely unsuited to represent the residents of a diverse and vibrant city teeming with a dazzling array of cultural uniqueness and brimming with new ideas. I hope that Robert will read this and reconsider his actions. I hope he’ll learn about what trans teenagers are going through at CRLS and consider how his words might be harmful. And I hope that the handful of folks in Cambridge who are still choosing to support Robert realize that they are supporting dangerous hatred.
