Charles R. Davis
Sat, December 10, 2022
The white nationalist group Patriot Front attends the March For Life
Right-wing extremists have held at least 55 protests targeting LGBTQ people this year, ACLED reported.
That is up from just 16 such protests in 2021, an increase of over 340%
According to ACLED, a monitoring group, far-right activity is "strongly" linked to violence.
Across the country, right-wing extremists with guns have been showing up at libraries and churches to intimidate parents and children attending drag queen story hours. Groups such as the Proud Boys conflate the reading of books by members of the LGBTQ community with the predatory "grooming" of kids.
Hospitals that provide gender-affirming care have received death threats after being targeted by social media influencers like Chaya Raichik, the former real estate agent who runs the "Libs of TikTok" account on Twitter, and featured in prime-time diatribes by Fox News's Tucker Carlson.
Other soft targets for the hard right have included gay pride parades. Over the summer, 31 members of the neo-Nazi Patriot Front were arrested in Idaho after a concerned citizen reported seeing them loading up a U-Haul with what looked to be a "little army" of men in riot gear.
By the end of November, far-right activists took part in at least 55 public actions targeting members of the LGBT+ community — up from 16 the year before, an increase of some 340% — with a corresponding rise in violent attacks on people perceived to be gay or transgender, according to a report released this week by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED.
Open white nationalism is still the most common feature of far-right protests and militia activity, according to the group, which began monitoring the American far-right in 2020 after years of reporting on political violence abroad. Of the roughly 750 far-right events that have taken place this year — on track to exceed the 780 held in 2021 — some 21% have been explicitly racist in nature, a finding that comes after the FBI issued a report warning that white supremacists continue to "pose the primary threat" of domestic terrorism, account for more than half of all politically motivated killings over the last decade.
While racism remains the primary driver of the far right, anti-LGBTQ actions have "fueled the largest increase in far-right protest activity," the report states, with the rise in such activity "strongly" correlating with a rise in violent attacks, of which there have been no fewer than 20, including the murder last month of five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. Though we don't have a specific motive the suspect has a history of online and offline bigotry.
Such deadly attacks are often carried out by self-styled vigilantes who are not formally members of any far-right group, Roubadeh Kishi, director of research at ACLED, said in an interview. But where those groups are most active is tied to where attacks then take place.
"They have been inspired by the rhetoric that they might be seeing online, and by the mobilization they might be seeing offline," Kishi said. "Those people are then deciding to take matters into their own hands and engage in violence."
It is almost impossible to link any one act of violence to a specific instance of hateful propaganda to which the perpetrator was exposed. It is also hard to pinpoint the beginning of the latest moral panic: Are those on the extremist fringe doubling down on anti-LGBTQ activity because of its established salience as an issue among the mainstream right, or are they in fact driving the conversation?
"The reality is that there is a bit of a feedback loop here," Kishi told Insider. If a mainstream platform airs an attack on a minority group, then radicals will increase their activity around that sort of attack as a means of recruitment — while perhaps masking their other views, such as organizing under the guise of merely standing up for "free speech," a strategy known as entryism (ACLED's data shows that, despite such rhetorical appeals to the First Amendment, a far-right presence at a demonstration makes that protest "nearly five times more likely to turn violent or destructive").
The issue of the day will change over time. In 2020, it was pandemic restrictions, Black Lives Matter, and false claims of voter fraud. In 2021, anti-racism in education, dubbed "Critical Race Theory," was the issue that brought mainstream conservatives and right-wing extremists together. In light of a generally disappointing 2022 election for candidates who dwelled on issues of sex and gender, the next year will likely bring something different — if not altogether new (think "political correctness" in the 1990s becoming "wokeness" in the 2020s).
"It usually ends up being a resurgence of some kind of old narrative, packaged in a new way," Rishi said.
Alejandra Caraballo is used to seeing anti-transgender hatred.
As an LGBTQ rights advocate and a transgender woman, she has received death threats, and her and her family members’ personal information has been published. When she goes to her favorite bar in New York, she sometimes wonders what she would do if someone came in shooting.
But last weekend, it became too much. Members of the Proud Boys and other extremist groups, many of them armed, converged outside a planned drag event in Columbus, Ohio. Neo-Nazis protested another event in Lakeland, Florida. There was an anti-LGBTQ rally in South Florida, also attended by the Proud Boys. All of this just two weeks after the killing of five people — two of them transgender, a third gay — at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
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“I had a full panic attack and breakdown,” said Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. “It’s one thing knowing there’s this extremist hate on the internet and seeing it in the abstract, and I can kind of compartmentalize. When this hate becomes manifested in real-life violence and there’s a celebration of it, is when it becomes too much to stomach.”
It was one more month in a year in which intimidation and violence against gay and transgender Americans has spread — driven heavily, extremism experts say, by inflammatory political messaging.
Since far-right social media activists began attacking Boston Children’s Hospital over the summer for providing care for transgender children, the hospital has received repeated bomb threats. Doctors across the country who do similar work have been harassed. The Justice Department charged a Texas man this month with threatening a Boston doctor; it also recently charged at least two others with threatening anti-gay or anti-transgender attacks.
Twelve times as many anti-LGBTQ incidents have been documented this year as in 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, which tracks political violence.
“Being a trans person in particular in this country right now is walking around thinking that it’s possible this could happen any day,” said Sam Ames, director of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention organization, adding, “We are hearing every day from trans youth who are being impacted by that political rhetoric.”
The rise in threats has accompanied an increasingly vitriolic political conversation.
Over the past couple of years, it has become routine for conservatives to liken transgender people and their allies to pedophiles, and to equate discussion of gender identity with “grooming” children for sexual abuse — part of an intensifying push, reminiscent of campaigns against gay rights dating back to the 1970s, to turn increasing visibility of transgender Americans into a political wedge.
Just before Florida prohibited instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis, called the ban an “anti-grooming bill.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has accused President Joe Biden of supporting “genital mutilation of children.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., declared that “communist groomers” wanted to “allow a for-profit medical industry to chop off these confused children’s genitals.”
Representatives for Cruz and Greene — both of whose comments falsely characterized the treatment transgender minors receive — did not respond to requests for comment. Pushaw said, “My tweet did not mention transgender people.”
Conservatives say they are trying to protect children from irreversible treatments and ensure women’s sports remain fair; in midterm election ads, right-wing groups argued that transition care amounted to “radical gender experiments” and that allowing transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their gender identity would “destroy girls’ sports.” (The treatments offered to transgender children are endorsed by medical associations and have been shown to reduce suicide risk, and few transgender women and girls seek to participate in women’s and girls’ sports.)
Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster, said he believed those two arguments could pose a “liability” for Democrats — though, he said, they were far from priorities for voters this year.
But experts on political violence say incendiary language has made attacks more likely.
“We know that they are animated by what they’re seeing in online spaces,” Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said of anti-LGBTQ attackers. “Those online narratives, the propaganda that is disseminated by these bad actors, is informed and often legitimized by other voices in our public discussion, whether it’s elected officials or others.”
The false specter of child abuse has long been a way for anti-LGBTQ campaigns to attract “people who otherwise would not join what they consider a homophobic movement,” said Eric Gonzaba, an assistant professor of American studies at California State University, Fullerton, and co-chair of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History.
It gained prominence 45 years ago, when singer Anita Bryant founded Save Our Children. Accusing gay people of “recruiting” children, the group persuaded voters in Miami-Dade County, Florida, to repeal an anti-discrimination ordinance months after it was passed. Then the movement took its case nationwide.
“Her rhetoric was almost always about the sexualized danger of gay men against children,” said Tina Fetner, a professor of sociology at McMaster University who has studied how the religious right shaped LGBTQ activism. “That’s ‘grooming.’ They have a new term for it now, but it’s the same rhetoric.”
The argument resurfaced in 1992, when two ballot measures sought to ban similar anti-discrimination protections. One, in Colorado, passed but was struck down by the Supreme Court. The other — which would have forbidden Oregon to promote “homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism” and required “a standard for Oregon’s youth which recognizes that these behaviors are abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse” — did not pass.
These tactics have been used and reused because they can work politically. But history and current events suggest limits.
Bryant’s group stoked a backlash that temporarily blocked anti-discrimination laws, but did not stop society’s gradual movement toward accepting gay Americans. In fact, historians say, it galvanized LGBTQ people to organize more forcefully.
“There’s just incredible resilience and resistance that come out of these moments of hatred and vilification,” said Jen Manion, a professor of history and of sexuality, women’s and gender studies at Amherst College.
Republicans underperformed in this year’s midterms, and several candidates who focused on transgender issues did poorly. Tudor Dixon leaned hard on them but lost the Michigan governor’s race by double digits. The American Principles Project, a super PAC, spent about $15 million on related ads in contests that Republicans also largely lost. (Representatives for Dixon did not comment, and the super PAC did not respond to an interview request for its president.)
In a post-election memo, Paul Cordes, chief of staff for the Michigan Republican Party, blasted Dixon’s campaign and backers for running “more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters.”
Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster, said transgender sports participation simply wasn’t a priority for voters.
“This is not the type of issue that helps Republicans win elections,” Hobart said.
Conservative commentators, however, have continued to focus on it. Tucker Carlson had a guest on his Fox News show after the Colorado shooting who said violence would continue unless transgender advocates’ “evil agenda” stopped. Commentator Matt Walsh told his 1.2 million Twitter followers that people were “soulless demons” if they responded to the attack by denouncing those “who don’t think children should be exposed to drag shows.” (Many drag performances aren’t sexual.)
In the three days after the Colorado nightclub shooting, interactions with public Facebook posts mentioning “pedophiles” rose 613%, and interactions with posts mentioning “groomers” rose 74%, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank.
And after a year in which local officials removed books that discussed gender identity from libraries, states passed more than 15 bills targeting transgender people, and Texas opened abuse investigations against parents whose children received transition care, lawmakers are preparing more anti-LGBTQ bills for next year.
Many focus on transition care for minors; some would even restrict care for adults up to age 21. Others would restrict drag shows.
A pre-filed bill in Montana, titled “Prohibit minors from attending drag shows,” offers a glimpse of what these legislative debates may look like.
“To put forward a bill targeting drag shows right after a mass shooting at a club that hosts drag-queen story hours is to further stoke the hate that is going to get my community killed,” said Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat just elected as the first openly transgender legislator in Montana. She said that friends had killed themselves in the past two years, in which Montana lawmakers voted to restrict transgender sports participation and tried unsuccessfully to restrict transition care, and that others had left the state.
Zephyr said she had spoken with several Republicans who did not want to pass bills focused on transgender or gender-nonconforming people. One, state Rep. Mallerie Stromswold, said in an interview that she found her party’s focus on these issues “disheartening.”
The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Braxton Mitchell, a Republican, responded to a request for comment by asking why it was “all of the sudden a critical requirement for someone in drag to be in every school,” but would not provide an example of any official calling for that. He described drag shows as adult entertainment; while some are, many are “story hours” where performers read books.
The advocacy group GLAAD has identified 124 protests and threats against drag events this year. Many were targeted after being publicized on right-wing social media.
In the long term, based on history, several scholars said they expected anti-transgender campaigns to fade.
“I think it’s unlikely that attitudes are going to become more negative over time,” Fetner said. “That hasn’t been the pattern for any discriminatory attitude.”
But short term, the effects loom large.
People tend to become more accepting when they know LGBTQ people personally. But Lindsey Clark, deputy director for the Human Rights Campaign’s Transgender Justice Initiative, who is transgender and nonbinary, said it was hard to ask transgender people to reach out when doing so could put them in danger.
Jay Brown, the Human Rights Campaign’s senior vice president of programs, research and training, said, “We need to hurry up history.”
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