Nick Moutos

BY DANNE WITKOWSKI

The Attorney General’s office in Texas is not exactly known for being a friendly place for LGBTQ people. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is NOT a fan, to say the least, and apparently Assistant Attorney General Nick Moutos thought that there was some kind of contest for who could be the worst and he was intent on winning.

His Twitter account has been a bastion of anti-LGBTQ, Islamaphobic, racist and threatening messages for quite some time.

He responded to a June 1 tweet by Present Barack Obama about the hurt caused by the killing of George Floyd by writing, “Shut your mouth you disgusting traitorous liar and keep your husband, Michelle Obama, where he cannot be seen. #Jesus. #2A.”

Get it, because Michelle Obama is, um, tall? And all tall people are men? Oh, that Moutos, just an anti-trans jokster, yucking it up. Also, Jesus loves guns and would be OK with someone killing the Obamas. At least I think that’s a pretty fair assessment of his hashtags, which also included, “LockedLoadedReady.”

In case you need clarification about his Michelle Obama Tweet, in May Moutos Tweeted, “The abomination of women being men and men being women is abhorrent.”

In July he tweeted that Black Lives Matter advocates “don’t care about ‘lives’ they care only about destroying the #AmericanFamily and spreading #Marxist #LGBTQ ideals and #NormalizingPerversion.”

This guy hates LGBTQ people, but boy does he love hashtags.

He’s also posted in support of QAnon, which the Dallas Morning News defined as, “a right-wing conspiracy theory that a cabal of pedophiles are attempting to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.” Twitter has tied to crack down on the group’s dissemination of baseless conspiracy theories.

According to a Media Matters report in January, “In response to Twitter’s announcement that it would take action against the spread of QAnon on the platform, Moutos tweeted, ‘#Q must be getting close to #OutingYou as a #Pedophile or #ChildTrafficker or perhaps involved with #PizzaGate.’ He has also retweeted content explicitly supporting QAnon.”

And this, it seems, is what got him into trouble with the AG’s office and led to him getting fired. Apparently the death threats directed at Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar were NBD? I don’t know. But somebody at the Texas AG’s office should be, like, doing a cursory glance at staff’s social media to make sure they aren’t violent and dangerous.

On Sept. 3 he Tweeted that Media Matters “considers QAnon & any supporters #ViolentExtremists My support for #1A & against #Censorship & #Purging of Q followers & supporters was used as a reason to terminate my employment. #FreedomOfSpeechMatters.”

He posted a side-by-side comparison chart listing QAnon on one side and Antifa, which he has laced as “Pantifa: Always in a bunch” with an illustration of red and black thong underwear. Get it? Because people who oppose fascism are whiners making a big deal about nothing. All of the American solders who fought and especially those who died in the war against fascism are “suckers” and “losers,” just as Trump said.

Anyway, in his comparison he has QAnon “exposing corruption (including child trafficking)” and Antifa “Inciting violence.” Nevermind the fact that the protesters being labeled as “antifa” are Americans who are responding to violence perpetuated by the police. Then there’s the fact that Trump has been credibly accused of rape and his big takedown of Ghislaine Maxwell, an actual child trafficker, was to “wish her well.”

If Moutos is sad that Twitter thinks that QAnon is a group of violent extremists, then he is going to be really upset when he finds out that the FBI has them labeled as a potential domestic terrorist organization. And while Pizza Gate, the baseless and completely insane conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex trafficking ring from the basement of a D.C. pizza place that has no basement, predates QAnon, it’s important to remember that this false story led a man to storm into that restaurant with a gun. QAnon’s lunacy is no less dangerous. In fact, it’s more dangerous because Trump sees the group as a Trump Fan Club and has given their lies an even bigger audience. All Creeps lead back to Trump. It’s Labor Day as I write this. Election day is not far away, so it’s a good reminder that of the two major political parties in the U.S., one party believes that people should earn a living wage and be protected on the job and the other party thinks that poor people are gross and anti-maskers have the right to assault Walmart employees for insisting on following the most basic guidance for stopping the spread of a disease that has killed 180,000 people in the U.S. and counting.

In other words, in honor of Labor Day, don’t vote for Republicans.

D’Anne Witkowski is a poet, writer and comedian living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBT politics for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.