How One Florida Woman With Twitter Problems Plunged Us Into a Nightmarish National Conversation About “Grooming”

Grooming—a sexual abuser’s effort to prepare a minor for abuse—has become the buzzword of the season for the right-wing media figures who both channel and create the concerns of the Republican Party’s base voters. In the tweets available via the document Jones posted and the snapshot of Pushaw’s April 7, 2021, timeline that the Wayback Machine happens to have saved, Pushaw accused Jones of “grifting” and “lying”; argued that Jones was “Fatal Attraction–level obsessed” with her; retweeted another user calling Jones “crazy”; referred to Jones as an “unstable grifter,” a “stalker,” and a “pathological liar”; and responded approvingly to other users who referred to Jones as a “sociopath,” a “hot mess,” and a “shyster.” Pushaw also posted a screenshot that appeared to show her making a stalking claim against Jones in civil court in the District of Columbia, and urged her followers to contact authorities in both Leon County, Florida, and Montgomery County, Maryland, if they felt Jones was harassing them. Her account remains inactive, but in a Wayback Machine snapshot from March 2021 she refers to Pushaw as a “stalker,” “harasser,” and “alt-right smear campaign coordinator.” OK. Also in the spring of 2021, as summarized in a National Review piece, Jones filed for a restraining order in Montgomery County, Maryland, against Pushaw, then filed a second claim alleging Pushaw had violated the first order by engaging in continued “online stalking and harassment.” Per National Review’s interview with a Montgomery County prosecutor’s office public relations officer, though, both claims were dismissed because there was insufficient evidence to justify an order. It was in this context that a few conservative accounts with large followings, like this one from the managing editor of the evangelical Christian satire site Babylon Bee, started suggesting that the bill was actually about preventing grooming: DeSantis supporting a bill to prevent the sexual grooming of kids in schools and the Left is really, really mad about it for some reason — Joel Berry February 9, 2022 DeSantis should come out swinging and call this an “anti-grooming bill” and demand that Leftists explain why they support the pedophilic grooming of children — Joel Berry February 9, 2022 The conservative Heritage Foundation said something similar in a Feb. 14 website post and a Feb. 24 tweet: Liberal activists are claiming that Florida's parental rights bill would harm kids. She has since sent at least 26 tweets related to her accusation that “Slate assigned @benmathislilley to write a smear piece about me, including the falsehood that my Georgian profit ‘only existed on paper.’ ” Needless to say, Slate did not assign such a story, nor did I ever assert to anyone as a fact that her nonprofit “only existed on paper.” In fact, I had already drawn the tentative conclusion that Pushaw may be unlike many figures in the Trump-era Republican Party in that she appears to have both substantive expertise on a government-related topic and a willingness to sometimes admit that she has made a statement in error.