Far right protests targeting the LGBTQ community show a troubling correlation with violent attacks

• 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%

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.

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com