He’s called on his handful of supporters to pull similar stunts by confronting people themselves and recording the interactions, as he did at an LGBTQ-friendly church in Phoenix in early April. But his rhetoric is also a worrying symptom of the growing number of people who label their opponents as “pedophiles” and then explicitly advocate for violence against them, using bizarre turns of logic and layers of misinformation in their mission to depict queer culture and sexual education as a threat to kids.Īt various points in the past two years, Schmidt has reportedly dabbled in anti-Semitism, anti-Blackness and support of explicit white nationalists, all while racking up bans from social media platforms and crowdfunding platforms for a range of speech and activities, including allegedly assaulting people and trespassing in order to assert his anti-mask rights as well as getting banned from the Arizona Capitol earlier this year after reportedly harassing a Democrat with slurs and throwing Nazi salutes in its halls.
#ANTI GAY FLAG EMOJI MEME SERIES#
In a vacuum, Schmidt is a tiny personality fighting for approval in a vast sea of right-wing agitators, many of whom have realized that the American conservative movement can grow through a series of disinformation campaigns and willfully ignorant moral panics.