I’m so old I remember when that book caused the religious right to have a hysterical meltdown. Good times.
Salon’s Kathryn Joyce takes a look at this emerging coalition of conservative American Muslims and far right Christians protesting gay rights. She notes that one of the hotspots of this activism is oddly in Southern California where there has been a number of large protests.
“In covering the far-right in LA and Southern California,” tweeted local photographer and journalist Joey Scott, “[i]t is always the same people who have been fixtures since even before 2020.” Others noted that many of the concerned “conservative parents” cited in media reports didn’t seem to “even know which school district they are protesting.”
“From Los Angeles to Glendale, it is clear that organized white-supremacist, fascist forces such as the Proud Boys, the Patriot Front and potentially others are specifically targeting LGBTQ+ students, families and educators,” wrote the labor union United Teachers Los Angeles in a statement. “They have put our schools on the front line of their hate; preying on existing fears and prejudices in our communities. We expect the tactics at Saticoy and Glendale to be replicated.”
Indeed, the day after the Glendale brawl, a right-wing social media account from Temecula shared a tweet about the protest clashes, writing, “Get ready Temecula.”
On the right, however, these protests became instant fodder for jubilant claims that liberal extremism on social issues was driving some of the Democrats’ most stalwart supporters to make common cause with Christian conservatives. Right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo, who has frequently made false or misleading claims about left-wing activists, celebrated the fact that the Glendale and Saticoy protesters included members of the area’s large Armenian-American community, as well as Latinos. In a tweet, Ngo claimed that Armenian-American men “want to fight #Antifa outside the school board meeting” because “immigrant families oppose pride celebrations in schools.”
In another tweet, Ngo claimed that Armenian Americans, who are mostly Orthodox Christians, were specifically outraged by an Instagram picture of a Pride collage on one Saticoy classroom door, which Ngo described as combining “Armenian colors/symbols mixed with LGBTQI+, pup play pride in the shape of a Christian cross.” Ngo’s specious claim that the elementary school was promoting “pup play”— a niche form of BDSM role-playing — was apparently based on the fact that the classroom door bore a stenciled image of a paw print. Locals on Twitter quickly pointed out that the school’s mascot is a bear, and the paw print logo is featured elsewhere in the school. That didn’t prevent the false claim that an elementary school had decorated its classrooms with “fetish” imagery from spreading widely on right-wing websites and social media.
Christina Pushaw, the flame-throwing spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, now an announced presidential candidate, breathlessly shared the “pup play” charge as well, among nearly a dozen tweets about the Glendale and Saticoy protests. “I know this community well,” she wrote in one, noting that she grew up in the area. “[T]he leftists made a big mistake trying to indoctrinate these kids behind their parents’ backs.” In another tweet, she continued, “Armenians in Glendale will never tolerate the alphabet indoctrination of their kids.”
This emerging narrative was soon reinforced by additional protests elsewhere. Also on June 6, in Rockville, Maryland, a group of roughly 50 people — many of them Muslims, but also familiar right-wing factions like Moms for Liberty — demonstrated against a recent decision by the Montgomery County school district to stop sending parental notifications for every school reading that makes reference to LGBTQ issues. Maryland law requires districts to allow parents who don’t want their children to attend sex-ed classes to opt out, but in March the district declared it would no longer offer that opt-out choice for other classroom discussions of LGBTQ issues. In response, the right-wing legal advocacy network Becket Law has filed a lawsuit on behalf of an interfaith group of parents. Two activist groups, Family Rights for Religious Freedom and Coalition of Virtue, began holding rallies outside the school district offices.
At one such demonstration on June 6, author and activist Asra Nomani (who wrote for Salon in the early 2000s) was on hand to record the protests for Twitter and present them as evidence of a coming tectonic political shift: “The hard-left came after the kids and Muslim parents aren’t having it.” Touting the thesis of her recent book, Nomani went on to argue that a longstanding “Red-Green Alliance” between “Marxist” liberals and “establishment” Muslims was coming apart.
“Muslim parents are waking up to the fact that that unholy alliance now means that their children are in the crosshairs of the WOKE ARMY,” she wrote. “And they aren’t having any of it, just like parents in other communities, from Armenian immigrants to Asian Americans.”
After the protest in Montgomery County, Maryland, Richard Hanania, a right-wing academic provocateur who recently suggested that the U.S. needs “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people,” tweeted that this offered a golden opportunity for Republicans. “Selling immigrants on hating liberals would be the easiest thing in the world if conservatives had a real interest in winning,” he wrote, sharing a video of a Muslim girl in Maryland talking about religious liberty in ways that, he said, “could’ve been written by Moms for Liberty.”
Daily Wire podcast host Ben Shapiro likewise declared, “Essentially what you have is a cadre of upper-class white liberals who have a particular set of morals that do not match the morals of particular ethnic minorities in the United States, and the backlash is going to be very, very strong.”
In videos from the Ottawa protest, Muslim women in hijab can be seen chanting “Leave our kids alone” and encouraging their children to stomp on a string of mini-Pride flags.
On June 9, these claims got another boost by the first Ottawa protest, which had been planned weeks in advance by Canadian anti-trans activist Chris Elston, better known as “Billboard Chris” for his campaign of wearing sandwich-board signs with anti-trans slogans around the U.S. and Canada. It gained additional steam after the school district recommended that staff use gender-neutral pronouns for students until they clarified which pronouns they prefer, and a recent controversy elsewhere in Canada after a teacher admonished Muslim students who’d skipped school to avoid Pride celebrations.
In videos from the protest (including one video viewed nearly 31 million times), a number of Muslim women in hijab can be seen chanting “Leave our kids alone” and encouraging their children to stomp on a string of mini Pride flags. Conservative Canadian columnist Rupa Subramanya tweeted that “Chants of Allahu Akbar and Christ is King” had come from the same side of the demonstration. The protest also devolved into scattered violence, including contested claims about whether a provincial legislator had been punched.
In another photo shared widely online, a white woman in a pink polo shirt and a Muslim woman wearing a multi-colored hijab held up opposite ends of a peculiar flag: black with a white slash running across it. It was the flag of the “Diagolon” movement, which emerged during the 2022 “trucker convoy” protests in Canada as a mock-serious call for a new right-wing country, stretching diagonally across North America from Alaska to Florida, comprising states and provinces that rejected mask mandates, Marxism, globalism and “moral degeneracy.”
The subtext to that image, however, reveals why the notion of a “Diagolon Muslim Ottawa chapter #LMAO,” as Subramanya tweeted — or of an alliance between Muslim immigrants and the far right more broadly — is problematic. The white woman in pink on one side of the flag, it turned out, was Stephanie McEvoy, a Canadian far-right activist with a long track record of supporting vehemently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups and positions (including an unintentionally hilarious online complaint about encountering a Muslim cashier at a Victoria’s Secret).
As for the Diagolon movement, frequently described by conservatives as nothing more than an amusing meme, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) has called it a far-right separatist movement “with militant accelerationist overtones” that endorses “the formation of an illiberal republic, a halt to ‘mass immigration,’ and the maintenance of Euro-centric societies.” According to CAHN, movement “founder” Jeremy McKenzie and his followers have shared content from far-right influencers, including white nationalist “groyper” leader Nick Fuentes, and has promoted the white supremacist book “The Day of the Rope,” which depicts “a guerrilla war against a ruling class or pedophilic elite.”
In an editorial about the two protests, CAHN’s Evan Balgord noted that Canada’s 2022 “trucker convoy” movement, which drew together many threads of the far right and has since shifted its focus from COVID-19 to LGBTQ rights, originated with “anti-Muslim organizing that took the the streets to protest M-103, a motion broadly condemning Islamophobia, in early 2017.”
Nonetheless, after the Ottawa protest, McKenzie responded to a pro-LGBTQ Muslim woman counter-protester by declaring on a podcast, “I am more Muslim than you,” claiming that his right-wing values were more aligned with Islam than were hers. (Adopting an ambiguously “foreign” accent, McKenzie continued, “Women no talk-y in Islam; women shutty-uppy.”)
What a lovely person.
Joyce finds that according to most activists in the Armenian and Muslim communities this is a small hyper-conservative faction and points out that polling shows Muslim acceptance of LGBTQ people has grown quickly over the past few years to over 50%, with most young Muslims supporting it in even higher numbers. In other words they’re just like everyone else.
I suppose one might call this progress since it was just a few years ago that their Dear Leader was instituting Muslim bans and these folks were shrieking about “sharia law.” But it does figure that the most authoritarian, patriarchal sects of both the Christian and Muslim religious would eventually find common cause. They are on the same cultural page.
I suspect that at some point these Christians will remember they hate the Muslims and vice versa. But for now they are brothers and sisters in hate. Isn’t that something?
Read the whole thing if you’re interested in this subject. Joyce goes deep into the subject and it’s fascinating if creepy.