Actually, I don’t want to have to sit here. I don’t want to have to give this lecture, in which I will talk about the relationship between antisemitism and LGBTQ hostility. Because the fact that I’m sitting here talking about this topic is primarily a reaction to the worldwide increase in attacks against the queer community, which has become the number one enemy of the global right in recent years. And the brutal extent of the attacks against the queer community is actually far too enormous to be able to adequately address everything that is going wrong in a fifty- or sixty-minute lecture. We have the illegalisation of queer lifestyles in Uganda. Under the mullah dictatorship in Iran, gays are being murdered by the regime’s henchmen. In Chechnya, there are camps for homosexual men that one eyewitness compared to concentration camps. In Russia, Vladimir Putin passed a law against ‘homosexual propaganda in public’ ten years ago – and thus continued to work on consistently undermining liberal democracy. In Poland, neo-Nazis have set up ‘LGBTQ-free zones’. In the UK, ‘concerned mums’, conservative politicians, and publications like the Daily Mail are waging a massive disinformation campaign against trans people’s bodily autonomy, supported by public figures like Graham Linehan and JK Rowling, who is not above publishing an entire novel packed with trans-hostile tropes. In April of this year, the Supreme Court in the UK declared that gender should be determined by chromosomes, accompanied by a sardonic comment from a once-popular children’s author – but you just had to buy Hogwarts Legacy. Here in Germany, too, a community consisting of the CDU/CSU, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the remnants of the lateral thinking movement, neo-Nazis, trans-hostile, wannabe ‘feminists’ are agitating against the – in my opinion relatively tame – self-determination law, drag queen story hours or the display of kink at pride parades. And all of these actors generally have a great deal of financial clout, political influence and excellent contacts. We also have radicalisation and networking via the internet: explicitly anti-trans troll forums such as Kiwi Farms or Lolcow, whose users carry out coordinated hate campaigns; image boards such as 4chan, where misanthropy is celebrated as a cynical joke; and normal social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter, which do not consider queer-hostile content to be problematic. Twitter, in particular, which was bought up by billionaire Elon Musk, who is increasingly inclined towards fascism and conspiracy ideologies, in an act of narcissistic offence (his wife left him for a transgendered whistleblower; being rejected at Berghain), has become a fertile breeding ground for anti-queer propaganda. Accounts such as ‘Libs of TikTok’, whose operator Chaya Raichik proudly describes herself as a “stochastic terrorist”, have over four million followers. ‘Libs of TikTok’ regularly shares outrage material about, say, hospitals allegedly performing gender reassignment surgery, or libraries organising readings with drag queens for children – and the mob follows her lead with actions such as sending bomb threats to said children’s hospital. Influencers like Andrew Tate turn anti-feminism, misogyny and LGBTQ hostility into a lucrative business model and teach teenagers the systematic devaluation of everything that is not chauvinistic, cis-hetero-‘alpha masculinity’ – whatever that actually may be.

Slides from my power point presentation

In the United States, we can clearly see what happens when online radicalised edgelords come to political power. During his election campaign, US President Donald Trump declared everything that falls under the label ‘woke’ to be public enemy number one. Since the beginning of 2025, over 500 (!) pieces of legislation targeting homosexual, bisexual, transgender and intersex people have been discussed in the USA. Anti-feminists like the ‘theocratic fascist’ Matt Walsh radicalise bourgeois conservatives into right-wing radicalism on the basis of queerphobia. Republican Party events can hardly be distinguished from the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in 2017, where protesters chanted “Jews will not replace us”. Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their party of bootlickers are working flat out to turn the USA into a fascist state, and the CEOs of major companies are willingly joining in – Holocaust Memorial Day, for example, can no longer be found on the Google calendar. The ‘fight against diversity, equity and inclusion’ is now item number one on the presidential agenda: companies and universities must adapt to a Christian nationalist, patriarchal and white supremacist ideology, Photos with Black or female soldiers from the photo database are deleted.

In short, the war against the LGBTQIA+ community has become one of the most important aspects of the culture war from the right. And its goal is – this may sound dramatic now, but it is actually the case – the repression, even the eradication, of queer existence. The draft laws in Republican states in the USA in particular make this very clear, and show that when the queer community speaks of a ‘war’, this is not exaggerated scaremongering but a concrete and cruel reality.

In addition to the structural violence caused by reactionary legislation and permanent demonisation by traditional and social media, there is also very specific violence against lesbians, gays, bisexual, trans and gender-nonconforming people in general. In rural areas in particular, many people are familiar with this: after the euphoria of the Pride Parade or queer parties, it’s time to go home, and with that comes the removal of glitter from the face and rainbow pins from clothing, while rainbow flags are quickly stuffed into pockets for fear of causing a stir with the wrong people. In Germany, offences against queer people have been steadily increasing for years. This violence can extend to murder and terror – just think of the trans man Malte C., who was beaten to death after CSD in Münster in 2022. In addition, two explicitly LGBTQ-hostile terrorist attacks shook the queer scene and its allies: in October 2022, a right-wing terrorist radicalised via the internet shot two visitors to the Tepláreň bar in Bratislava; his manifesto was a collection of LGBTQ-hostile and antisemitic murder fantasies. Just one month later, a young man murdered five visitors to Club Q in Colorado Springs, where an ‘All Ages Drag Brunch’ was taking place at the time. In Minneapolis in 2023, there was also an armed attack on a queer punk show, killing the musician August Goldin.

In a better world, I wouldn’t have to research and lecture on this violence. Audiences wouldn’t spend their evening listening to me and having their mood spoilt. But we have to do it. We must not close our eyes to what is happening. The goal of any progressive political work should be the abolition of this violence – and so it is with mine. I work in memory of all the victims of queer-hostile violence, and to do my little bit to help curb it. And I’m glad I’m not doing this alone. So thank you very much for the invitation, to the organisers and to the audience who accepted this invitation. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to talk about all the topics I’ve just touched on – a book of several hundred pages could be written on each of them. I will talk about the connection between LGBTQ hostility and antisemitism, which are closely interwoven, both historically and ideologically. First, I’ll give a brief historical overview, then I’ll talk about current examples of the connection between antisemitism and queerphobia, many of which come from my intensive monitoring work on neo-Nazis, conspiracy believers and transphobic trolls. I will also try to categorise and explain these ideologies from a socio-psychological perspective, because in order to adequately combat queer hostility, we need a fundamental understanding of its ideological background and function.

Let’s take a look at the propaganda being promoted from the centre right to the far right: instead of being systematically discriminated against, queer people allegedly have billions in wealth, social influence and powerful allies. They have an extremely powerful LGBTQ lobby that has its fingers in every pie, as a patron of protection. The gender mania financed by billionaires like George Soros is spreading worldwide, with the sole and declared aim of sacrificing traditional gender roles, the bourgeois nuclear family and, above all, the well-being of our children on the altar of postmodern gender madness. And these homos and trans people are everywhere: at universities, in Hollywood, in parliaments, editorial offices and NGOs. Using diabolical weapons such as ‘diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)’, ‘cancel culture’ and a ‘woke opinion dictatorship’, they silence any criticism, no matter how quiet (that is, except for interviews, lectures, lead articles and expressions of solidarity on social media, but otherwise you are REALLY NOT ALLOWED TO SAY ANYTHING).

Slide from my power point presentation

Wait a minute: a sexually deviant and overpowering minority controls world events to serve its own interests and brainwashes humanity in the process – doesn’t this narrative sound a little familiar? It is no coincidence that LGBTQ foes regularly utilise structurally to openly antisemitic narratives, as the fight against gender and sexual self-determination and anti-feminism is historically and ideologically closely linked to these. Since the fin de siècle, a specific image of German masculinity (or femininity) has been established as the antipode to either the effeminate Jew or the masculinised Jewess. Here, the white, Christian, bourgeois, heterosexual and cisgender man is understood as the norm, and everything that deviates from it as the ‘other’. (By the way, I don’t want to equate queer hostility with antisemitism here; that would be ahistorical and would level out the specific ideology and violence. My aim is to show the interconnectedness and demonstrate that LGBTQ hostility operates on a massive scale with antisemitic resentment and conspiracy narratives).

These gender concepts were cemented above all under National Socialism; they still live on in the radical and extreme right. In antisemitic discourse, Jewishness is still equated with queerness and perversion. Examples of this are the depiction of the Jewish woman as an intellectual, cigar-smoking ‘man-woman’ or the portrayal of the Jewish man as unfit for military service and therefore not adequately masculine, and as nervously and physically weak, i.e. feminine. Both ‘the Jew’ and ‘the woman’ were attested the inability to participate in political discourse, the mental inability to have a say in politics, which was determined on the basis of physical characteristics.

This development of the sexist ‘gender character’ (a term coined by the feminist sociologist Karin Hausen), the development of religious anti-Judaism into racist antisemitism and the idea of the ‘effeminate Jew’, which linked the two, coincided with the peak of nationalist endeavours at the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century (see, for example, the Treitschke controversy). Shortly after the turn of the century, the ardent antisemite Otto Weininger wrote in his highly regarded dissertation Gender and Character: “The fact that the Jew has not only been alien to the state since yesterday, but more or less from time immemorial, already indicates that the Jew, like the woman, lacks personality [...] For only from the lack of the intelligible ego can, like all female egos, the Jewish unsociability be derived.” In this text, Weininger establishes the image of the ideal man, who is diametrically opposed to what Weininger understands as both the ‘ideal woman’ and the Jew.

Slides from my power point presentation

In the German Empire, the ideal image of German masculinity ALWAYS went hand in hand with the idea of militarism and nationalism. The cultural scientist Klaus Theweleit describes in his dissertation Male Fantasies that this combination of masculinity, commitment to the nation and glorification of soldiering and war formed the breeding ground for National Socialism. Because, when we talk about fascism, we HAVE to talk about the hatred of the non-masculine – and also about the fact that the ‘Jew’ was automatically equated with ‘non-masculine’.

The fact that the Germans suffered a brutal defeat in the First World War was accompanied by a massive break in the nationalist self-image. This is why the German national psyche worked collectively to rebuild its own self-image, by establishing the Jew as the culprit behind the German failure – keyword ‘stab-in-the-back legend’. Even though Jews had of course fought on the side of Germany in the First World War, the image of the Jew as an anti-soldier was established – too effeminate to go to war, he had contributed to the downfall of the German Reich. For example, he was said to be ‘narrow-chested’ or ‘Jewish flat-footed’, which was a hindrance to military drill or long marches; the attribution of an inability to perform military service was an elementary component of antisemitic images of the 1920s and 1930s.

In the Prussian state, however, where militarism was understood as part of being a man, the inability to do military service was, as it were, a denial of masculinity. As the body was considered to represent the mental constitution, this inability to perform military service was also a characteristic of the alleged ‘Jewish cowardice’, which was pathologised as a consequence of the weak nervous constitution of ‘the Jew’ – just as ‘the woman’ was often accused of a lack of mental composure.

Following Freud’s thoughts on psychoanalysis, I would just name the circumcised penis of the Jewish man as a partial cause of effemination – a circumcised man is perceived as ‘castrated’, the circumcised penis is compared to the clitoris, and by means of the seemingly omnipresent Jewish threat, however, he seemed to be able to perform a symbolic castration on the German man ‘in himself’ by taking over the German nation – as he had apparently done by stabbing the proud empire in the back.

Another aspect that Theweleit emphasises in Male Fantasies is the staging of the Aryan body – and thus the body of the people – as steeled, hard, clinically clean and pure – while the Germans’ enemies are often portrayed as explicitly ‘dirty’ and sick. Associating Jews with the spread of diseases – including sexual ones – is a classic antisemitic resentment, and this is repeated above all in the prejudices against men who desire other men.

In antisemitism, the Jewish man is portrayed as impotent, as it were, and as a rapist – sometimes a paedophile – who assaults not only German women, but even German children. This narrative is now experiencing a revival in the ‘grooming’ accusation that reactionary actors level at trans people and drag queens in particular. It is no coincidence that the AfD has chosen this very clear imagery. It suggests: ‘The deviant, degenerate, modern foreigner is attacking our German children, the most vulnerable members of our national body.’ This is also intended to convey that same-sex desire or trans identity is not something natural and normal, and that queer children are usually aware of their queerness from a very early age, but insinuates that queerness is brought to children from outside: they are ‘indoctrinated’ by an LGBTQ agenda and don’t know any better (keyword ‘early sexualisation’). It must therefore be the task of concerned parents and citizens to protect these children – through misgendering, the banning of puberty blockers and gender reassignment measures, physical violence and even conversion therapy. The narrative of the sexually assaulted trans woman who is just waiting to enter the pure halls of cis womanhood like a foreign body and commit offences against innocent cis women, goes in a similar direction. In both cases, images are evoked of groups in need of protection, whose physical and sexual safety is threatened by queer people, and this is accompanied by an indirect appeal to the upright, combative man to defend himself. A particularly drastic example is the call by the trans-hostile activist Kelly Jay-Keen, better known as Posie Parker, who in a stream called on cis men to patrol women’s toilets armed in order to defend visitors from trans women. But yes – this image of the sexually deviant ‘other’ as a threat to the generally white, cisheteronormative, bourgeois status quo, which specifically focuses on very basic fears such as the safety of women and children, is a classic in the right-wing repertoire of hatred. Incidentally, this fuelling of fear also serves to conceal the fact that sexual violence is primarily carried out in close proximity and primarily by cis men.

Slide from my power point presentation

As the antipode to the Aryan woman, the Jewish woman is constructed either as a beautiful seductress or an intellectual and often lesbian-coded ‘shotgun woman’, and with her striving for emancipation and spiritual fulfilment, as well as the promiscuity attributed to her, she is set as the antithesis of the simple, sincere Aryan girl who, instead of devoting herself to such gender-inappropriate pursuits as intellectual endeavours and permissive sexuality, naturally dedicates her entire body, especially of course her uterus, to the German people.

It can therefore be summarised that ‘Jewish’ sexuality is antagonistic to ‘German’ sexuality. If the disciplined German man is able to subordinate his own instincts to the good of the people, Jewish (as well as gay and lesbian!) sexuality, just like the rest of the Jewish ‘being’, is materialistic and selfish, concerned only with its own pleasure. However, unlike the racist attribution of ‘black’ instinctiveness, their ‘abnormality’ does not result from a lack of civilisation, but from ‘too much’ of it. Marxist theorist Bini Adamczak comments: “Gender relations in antisemitic discourse are described precisely as decadent, unnaturalised, perverse, modern” – in other words, precisely the same attributions that are directed at queer people today.

The interplay between queer hostility and antisemitism is particularly evident in the attacks on the Institute for Sexual Science, which was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in 1919. Magnus Hirschfeld was gay, Jewish and a socialist – the ultimate enemy of German fascism, which was characterised by the celebration of soldierly masculinity, eliminatory antisemitism and brutal anti-communism.

The Institute for Sexual Science was groundbreaking in its function as a scientific institution, as well as a place of international networking and activism for queer people – the first gender reassignment procedures for trans people were carried out there. During the Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld and his team attempted to decriminalise and normalise homosexuality and transsexuality – still referred to as ‘transvestism’ at the time – which were a thorn in the side of the Nazis with their ‘blood and soil’ policy. Hirschfeld was regularly attacked as a gay, socialist Jew. In 1907, the scientist found notes outside his house with the inscription “Dr Hirschfeld a public danger – the Jews are our misfortune!”, and in 1920 he was beaten up by a fascist after a lecture on the decriminalisation of male homosexuality. Even before 1933, the institute was regularly ‘visited’ by SA men, which the police dismissed with the excuse that “they must have been communists in disguise”. Hirschfeld’s lectures, as well as screenings of the gay sex-education film Different from the Others, in which Hirschfeld acted as an advisor and appeared himself, were regularly disrupted by fascist thugs, and organisers regularly received threatening letters (this also sounds bitterly familiar). Hirschfeld’s petition to abolish Section 175 of the German Criminal Code was also vilified early on as an allegedly Jewish project, and homosexuality – like feminism – was portrayed as a ‘Jewish invention’ for the ‘degeneration’ of the German people.

In May 1933, the institute was destroyed by Nazis – mainly right-wing extremist fraternity members – and Hirschfeld’s works were destroyed as part of the book burning. Hirschfeld was accused of spreading ‘pornography’ – the Jew as pornographer and pimp is also a classic antisemitic cliché – and of having an ‘un-German spirit’ in general, which the purifying fire of National Socialism wanted to put an end to. This went hand in hand with the closure of all queer establishments in Germany. We see history repeating itself in the United States under Donald Trump: the banning of books with queer, anti-racist and socialist content in Republican states like Florida. Anti-intellectualism is a core principle of fascism, and the banning or burning of books, especially from the fields of art and humanities, is an excellent indicator of a society turning away from democracy.

It is also noteworthy that Hirschfeld’s name was mentioned very prominently and frequently at the book burning, during which the Nazis destroyed the works of Jews, liberals, pacifists, democrats, communists, women’s rights activists and generally all those who were associated with a ‘modernity’ that always had Jewish connotations; Nazis had also visibly attached an antisemitic caricature of the man to a demonstration wagon – because Hirschfeld was gay, Jewish and a socialist.

As we know, this hatred of all forms of sexuality that did not fit in with the Nazis’ ‘blood and soil’ ideology resulted in the systematic extermination of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people in labour and concentration camps. Incidentally, queer victims were not compensated after the Nazi era, but continued to be persecuted as ‘criminals’ under Paragraph 175 in the Federal Republic of Germany – further proof that there was never any real denazification in Germany.

That homosexuality and feminism are part of a sinister Jewish plot to destroy the white, heterosexual nuclear family, and thus the white race, is also a recurring element in the right-wing battle concept of ‘cultural Marxism’, which can be found in tweets by AfD politicians, in the manifesto of the mass murderer and right-wing terrorist who murdered over seventy people – mainly young socialists – in Oslo and Utoya in 2011, as well as in articles in conservative newspapers.

The catchphrase ‘cultural Marxism’ is very clearly based on the Nazi concept of ‘cultural Bolshevism’ and should also be understood in this antisemitic and anti-communist tradition. It was developed in the 1960s by US right-wingers and really became a part of public discourse after the far-right, anti-communist terrorist attack on Utoya: the perpetrator wrote hundreds of pages in his manifesto about how cultural Marxism was one of the main causes of feminism, the decline of the West and therefore also the acceptance of refugees and Islam.

The conspiracy behind cultural Marxism claims that after fleeing the Nazis to the USA, the representatives of the Frankfurt School – i.e. communist Jews – used their knowledge of social psychology and the culture industry to destroy the American values of freedom, apple pie and the patriarchal nuclear family of the 1950s. The members of the Frankfurt School would have established their corrosive ideas at universities and in Hollywood, thus fuelling the decline of American society. And the media and universities continue to be driven by this agenda; an idea that is fundamentally and deeply antisemitic.

Slides from my power point presentation

In the USA in the 1950s, a connection between anti-communism, queerphobia and antisemitism was articulated in the narratives of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare: communists would rule universities; homosexual communists would rule Hollywood. Structural antisemitism was a recurring undertone of this panic, which expressed itself in systematic repression against people branded as communist and homosexual.

Cultural Marxism, embodied above all by the sociologist and former professor Herbert Marcuse, is seen as the driving force behind progressive movements. According to this ideology, feminism, anti-racism, the emancipation of queer people or even labour struggles are not independent movements, but part of a larger plan to – what else – destroy the white race. Talk of cultural Marxism regularly ends in the far-right conspiracy narrative of the Great Replacement – which has been used by numerous right-wing terrorists such as the perpetrators of the Christchurch, Halle or Buffalo attacks as the reason for their crimes. This conspiracy narrative says, in a nutshell: cultural Marxism and its agents not only seduce women into feminism and men into homosexuality, but also channel streams of refugees into Europe and the USA so that they can multiply and overpopulate the country, while white women prefer to devote themselves to such gender-inappropriate pursuits as a career. It can’t possibly be that people are seeking protection from war, hunger and political persecution, but rather they aim to overpopulate the country as well as to commit offences against white women – an age-old, racist myth that is rehashed again and again. The racist hatred of non-white men is characterised by colonial racism and is pathological: they are envied for their supposed potency, drive and virility, as these are an expression of the ‘original masculinity’ that they themselves have supposedly lost. The white man, on the other hand, cannot fight against his wife being abused by the sexually virile immigrants, as he has been effeminised and emasculated by cultural Marxism and the PC dictatorship. Thus, it is precisely here that the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy, the anti-feminist demand for women to return to the role of mother for the people, the masculinist desire for traditional masculinity and racist attributions to men of colour coincide.

Slide from my power point presentation

The fact that Jews are accused of exterminating whites is a classic moment of pathic projection in antisemitism: in the course of the development of this pathic projection, the inner antagonisms are externalised and projected onto an external enemy – in this case, Jews. Freudian psychoanalysis understands pathic projection as the displacement of the repressed impulses of the id onto objects in the environment, in order to seemingly detach the ego from them. In short, the Jew is seen as desiring the annihilation of whites in order to be able to deny his own desire for annihilation and project it onto the other, which is then persecuted all the more vehemently. Fascists see themselves as victims of a ‘genocide against whites’, which is of course nothing more than a paranoid delusion. One name that crops up time and again is that of Holocaust survivor and billionaire Georg Soros, who has now become the number one enemy of the global right. Soros’s Open Society Foundation, which is committed to philanthropic causes, is then taken as supposed ‘proof’ that progressive movements do not emerge organically, but are coordinated ‘from above’ and with financial resources provided. In short: George Soros serves as a projection for everything that these people feel threatened by.

I would like to talk about this sense of threat in more detail because it is integral to analysing antisemitism, racism, anti-feminism, anti-genderism and fascism. These are all ideologies of inequality based on the devaluation of others for the narcissistic exaltation of the self, and are therefore extremely attractive to people with a weak ego. Because these people are in a state of permanent fear for their own patriarchal, white, bourgeois ... supremacy. For ego-weak individuals, identification with this supremacy, and the position based on it of devaluing marginalised people in order to exalt themselves, is an integral part of their own personality and identity. As a result, they see feminism, or anti-racism, or anti-nationalism, or even just the demand for a speed limit, not only as a political programme that criticises their way of life and ideology, but specifically as a personal affront. When we talk about fascist ideology or misogyny or queerphobia, we must always bear one thing in mind: it is not rational. The whole thing is the result of pathological anger at no longer being allowed to be misanthropic without contradiction. That’s why the reaction is often so emotional, angry, even regularly articulated in fantasies of violence: it’s the panicked howling of people who are afraid that, in the worst case, the damned of this earth will demand consequences for what has been done to them.

Queer hostility in particular is based on the affirmation of patriarchal and thus cis- and heteronormative rule, which is usually articulated in the bourgeois nuclear family. This is charged and defended in a reactionary way as a ‘protective space’ against the ‘foreign’ and ‘other’. This always goes hand in hand with a defence of traditional gender roles – i.e. the man as breadwinner and protector, the woman primarily reduced to the roles of housewife and mother. The biological essentialisation of gender is inherent in these gender images. Queerness, and transgender in particular, is perceived as a threat to these gender images and is therefore vehemently rejected; cisgender, on the other hand, is defended affectively. Weak-ego men in particular, who build their identity on the systematic devaluation of the non-masculine, see themselves being threatened by feminist and queer emancipation – after all, they are denied the right to discriminate without consequences. Reactionary, and usually fascist, images of masculinity, on the other hand, offer the opportunity to regain sovereignty: “Feminism and cultural Marxism want to castrate me and make me gay and take women away from me, but if I swallow the ‘red pill’ and organise myself in male fascist groups, I will regain this masculinity that taken away from me!”

At this point, I would like to emphasise that it is precisely in view of this ideological connection that ‘playing off’ the interests of cis women against those of trans people reveals itself to be incredibly ridiculous; contrary to what anti-trans ‘feminists’ claim, both cis women and trans and inter* people are fighting the same battle: namely, the battle for bodily self-determination against a biologistic and patriarchally based, domineering body politics. The fact that women like JK Rowling play the struggles of cis and trans women off against each other is nothing more than the authoritarian stepping on weaker people in order to be able to play a little part in the patriarchy under the label of ‘women’s rights’ – but this pseudo-feminism only enforces the patriarchy instead of abolishing it.

Queerphobes constantly insinuate that they are no longer allowed to say that ‘there are only two genders’ because of a ‘woke dictatorship of opinion’. So they present themselves as an oppressed underdog who is prevented from telling the truth by an overpowering ‘lobby’ – which, as I said, is of course complete nonsense, because if this cancel culture really existed, we wouldn’t have to listen to constant queer-hostile rubbish. Those who shout about cancel culture are usually just complaining about the fact that their own misanthropy is suddenly being contradicted. Sociologist Volker Weiß describes this as an “authoritarian revolt”. Instead of facing up to the fact that they are opposing a group of people who are extremely vulnerable, especially trans and inter* people, they fantasise about being on the defensive. This is also rooted in the irrational sense of threat that I mentioned. Through this false but internalised narrative of standing up to a superior force threatening ‘our women and children’, queerphobes justify their hatred: they are not attacking extremely vulnerable people, they are defending women, children and their people as a whole from evil perverts who also have a billionaire like Georg Soros on their side. [This pathological-projective perpetrator-victim reversal is an integral part of conspiracy narratives, and the narrative that there is a powerful lobby deliberately indoctrinating society through propaganda is nothing other than a conspiracy narrative that is structurally and openly antisemitic. The fact that more and more people of all ages are coming out as queer is not the result of a targeted propaganda machine, but rather an indication that our struggles for safety and visibility against structural and concrete violence are finally bearing fruit, so that coming out is now – albeit not always – much safer and more relaxed than it was twenty years ago. And, by the way, if there is this overpowering lobby, why haven’t people like Elon Musk and JK Rowling been dispossessed by an army of trans women armed to the teeth?

Slide from my power point presentation

Now I’m going to point out a few contemporary examples of queer-hostile and antisemitic conspiracy narratives. I have noticed that the remnants of the lateral thinking movement have become a fertile breeding ground for virtually every form of reactionary outrage – from the energy crisis to hatred against climate activists to hatred against homosexual and transgender people.

This hate speech is increasingly culminating in anti-queer murders and even acts of terrorism. The manifesto of the Bratislava attacker is a particularly clear example of the interplay between antisemitism and queerphobia. This document shows so clearly what is inherent in the ideology espoused by the AfD, conspiracy ideologues, anti-feminists and right-wing radicals: the act of annihilation.

The Bratislava assassin’s manifesto clearly shows the almost paranoid traits of antisemitism. He writes on dozens of pages about the omnipotence and omnipresence of Jewish rule and control. One example: the federal ban on abortion in the USA was, he claims, actually brought about by the “Zionist-Occupied Government” in order to contribute to an increase in black birth rates – which would ultimately contribute to the Great Replacement. Hatred of Jews is the common thread that runs through the perpetrator’s work, be it in the form of swear words, conspiracy narratives, Holocaust denial, fantasies of violence or concrete instructions for acts of terrorism. The other common thread is queerphobia: several pages of the manifesto are directed against homosexual and especially transgender people, whom he pathologises, insults and denies the right to exist.

One page stands out: the perpetrator writes about a transgender boy, apparently from his circle of acquaintances. TikTok, a supportive circle of friends, and of course the propaganda of the Jewish trans lobby would have persuaded the teenager – who is consistently misgendered by the perpetrator – to take testosterone and have a mastectomy. The claim that social media corrupts young people into being transgender is well known and also widespread in the bourgeois spectrum. The perpetrator’s manifesto is a consistent ideological continuation of socially established trans hostility, in which he writes that queer people would weaken and “degenerate” society. The hate messages directed against trans women – “you can tell by your bone structure that you are trans, you will never be a real woman” – can be found almost word for word in the books, articles and tweets of bourgeois-conservative trans enemies.

Migration, feminism, queer visibility, Marxism, and all other aspects associated with modernity: for the perpetrator of the Bratislava attack, these are all instruments of Jewish domination. Not only is it meant to weaken the white race, but – here he quotes a post on the imageboard 4chan – to personally humiliate white men: “The enemy doesn’t want Pride parades on your street, drag queens in your adverts, your son transgendered, your parents dead from opioids, your daughter in a relationship with someone of a different origin [he uses a racist term, however], or your flesh replaced by bugs while the media laughs at you because he thinks it will do any good. He wants it because he knows you can’t stop him, because he wants to humiliate you. There is no other reason.”

But the classic question remains: what is to be done? I am not speaking here as a sociologist or journalist, but as a private individual, specifically as a member of the LGBTQ community. The last few months and years have shown that unfortunately, the authorities are often not very reliable. That’s why I appeal to the community to remember its history and its strength: our love and solidarity for one another. Yes, the situation is drastic. But that is precisely why we should put aside trivialities such as disputes on the platform X in favour of political organisation. Let us remember the struggles of Stonewall, the demonstrations against Paragraph 175, the lesbian women who took to the streets to fight for their gay brothers who, during the AIDS pandemic, were condemned to die by inactive governments. Despite all the repression, it is important not to forget the moment of liberation that is inherent in our movement and to draw strength and vigour from it. Because we will need that in the coming years.

Veronika Kracher is a researcher, writer and activist. Since 2015, she has been studying the intersection of online radicalisation, anti-feminism and far-right extremism, a topic she has also written numerous articles on and given lectures and workshops about. In 2020, she published her first book, Incels: Geschichte, Sprache und Ideologie eines Online-Kults, on the incel subculture. She is currently working on her second book, which examines the function of online misogyny and misogynistic hate campaigns – such as Gamergate or the campaign directed at Amber Heard – as an instrument of far-right culture wars.