The Conspiracy Theory at the Center of the Far Right’s Violence Against LGBTQ+ People – By Michael Feola (Slate) / June 16, 2022
On Saturday, police arrested 31 members of the white nationalist organization Patriot Front for allegedly plotting an attack on a Pride festival event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. In the aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the group has become a muscular presence at anti-government and anti-abortion events. Its rise to prominence is fueled by its fascist aesthetic and the aggressive project announced on its online platform: to “reclaim America” for members of the “European race.”
The thwarted attack on a Pride festival and the subsequent mass arrest of Patriot Front members calls attention to a broader feature of the contemporary far right: its widespread hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities. In 2020, for instance, the memorial to the homophobic mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was defaced by Patriot Front stickers.
This hostility is not new, nor is it accidental. Instead, it reflects the far right’s deepest anxieties over an increasingly diverse nation, rooted in lurid fears over race and reproduction.
At the center of the far right’s homophobia and transphobia lies the same conspiracy theory that led to the killing of 10 Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in May. These seemingly disparate episodes of violence are connected by a single narrative of white population panic: the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
