Morning Briefing: Far Right Anti-LGBTIQ Groups Create 'Alert Systems' to Track
Morning Briefing: Far Right Anti-LGBTIQ Groups Create 'Alert Systems' to Track
Multiple far right extremists anti-LGBTIQ groups have created ‘alert systems’ to warn their acolytes when a drag performance is nearby,' and recently shut down and intimidated events in four states.
Morning Briefing: Multiple far right anti-LGBTIQ groups have “created ‘alert systems’ to warn their acolytes when a drag performance is nearby,” which have come in various forms including using reporting tools or crowdsourcing maps and event listing.
The Texas Family Project, a right-wing conservative group founded this year, launched a website with an online form to “report drag shows,” however, activists targeted the website flooded an online form with enough reports to apparently crash the site. However, as of this morning, the website is back online.
The host of a drag queen event in Columbus, Ohio “pulled the plug because of what they described as the intimidating presence of right-wing demonstrators,” and despite the cancellation reportedly “50 to 70 members of the Proud Boys and other groups had gathered on the sidewalk on roads leading to the church, shouting, chanting and holding signs.”
The far right targeted multiple events across the country, as “Neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, militiamen, Christian nationalists, and culture warriors in at least four states mobilized to shut down and intimidate events involving drag queens over the weekend.”
The dramatic increase in hate speech on the social media platform is occurring as there is reportedly a “surge in hate speech and disinformation about Jews on Twitter is uniting and popularizing some of the same extremists who have helped push people to engage in violent protests including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.”
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 groups, called on the Biden Administration to “stop broad surveillance of social media accounts, rein in the use of federal government terrorist watch lists, oppose new domestic terrorism laws and adopt greater safeguards on information gathering.”
The Leadership Conference and the Brennan Center for a Justice published a reported, which calls on the Biden Administration to “take an inclusive and more effective approach that accounts for and prosecutes white supremacist violence using the laws already on the books; implements tangible civil rights and civil liberties safeguards to constrain the use of counterterrorism authorities against protestors and communities of color; and does not further expand the footprint and authority of national security agencies.”
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Must Reads
Jeff Sharlet writes that “in 1973, a book appeared called Wisconsin Death Trip. It began as a staple-bound pamphlet and as a book became an unlikely mirror of its moment, even as it depicted the last 15 years of the previous century. History’s like that, sometimes, our faith in the forward motion of chronology suddenly evaporating. Death Trip was, on the surface, a benign album of seemingly ordinary photographs—portraits, patriotic displays, happy youth—from one small town in Wisconsin, Black River Falls, during the last decade of the 19th century. Interspersed are excerpts from the town newspaper, the Black River Falls Badger State Banner, and whispers from a ‘town gossip.’ In 1973, a year of crises as varied and vast as those of this year, most white Americans still imagined the previous century as an idyll, apart from a brief interruption for civil war, fought for reasons they thought ‘romantic.’ Virtuous country life, bustling urban industry. American greatness.” [Vanity Fair]
Spencer Hsu and Hannah Allam write that “the verdict and lengthy prison sentence [Stewart] Rhodes faces might amount to a knockout blow for one of the most visible leaders of the anti-government militia movement, extremism monitors said, but not necessarily for the interstate network he founded in 2009 to recruit military veterans and law enforcement officers to battle federal “tyranny.” The seditious conspiracy conviction Tuesday in a federal court in Washington made Rhodes the first militant not associated with Islamist extremism to be found guilty of the charge in more than 30 years. While Rhodes has long proclaimed the inevitability and necessity of violence against U.S. authority, that message found new resonance amid public anger stoked by then-President Donald Trump against the government in 2020 over pandemic restrictions, social justice protests over police killings and his false and incendiary claims of a ‘stolen’ election.” [The Washington Post]
Caitlin Dickson writes that “before last week, most Americans had never heard of Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist Holocaust denier who recently dined with former President Donald Trump and Kanye West, the Grammy-winning rapper-turned-outspoken antisemite, at Trump’s Florida estate. Since his pre-Thanksgiving meal at Mar-a-Lago, however, the 24-year-old’s name and laundry list of bigoted beliefs have been the subject of countless mainstream news articles, cable news segments and late-night talk show monologues. For extremism experts who study the far right and have been following Fuentes’s activities for years, the news of his meeting with Trump was particularly alarming, even in light of the former president’s own history of emboldening extremists. The meeting seemed to demonstrate the expanding influence of a white supremacist provocateur and his close proximity to people with enormous platforms.” [Yahoo! News]
What to expect from Radical Reports: Morning Briefing provides a daily round-up of reporting on the Radical Right; Extremist Links offers a weekly round-up of extremists activities including the white supremacist and militia movements; Narratives of the Right delivers weekly analysis of the current narratives in far right online spaces and promoted by right-wing media; and Research Desk provides monthly highlights research and analysis from academia on the Radical Right.
