Guest post: Here’s the Alliance Defending Freedom again

Comments

2 responses to “Guest post: Here’s the Alliance Defending Freedom again”

1. 

   M. Scott

   Apr 23, 2026 5:32 PM

   This just feeds into the propaganda that’s always being hurled at the GC movement that we’re funded by and part of the far right. Of course, that confuses cause and effect. The ADF doesn’t care one whit about girls or women’s rights. They just see an area where the left has gone insane and are jumping on the bandwagon to score easy political points. It’s such an own goal for the left, but they insist on blaming everyone but themselves. It frustrates me to no end to see them allegedly on the same side as I am, but no more so than seeing only Fox News and other right wing media be the only ones to cover this properly. I just wish the left would wake up. If the traditional left wing organizations and media got onside, you’d see the ADF dropping this like a hot potato.
2. 

   Artymorty

   Apr 23, 2026 6:13 PM

   The problem is (and I learned this the hard way, after being in denial for far too long how the tentacles of influence were tightening), much money and support backing the gender-critical movement does indeed come from the organized right, including the organized *far* right and the *religious* right.

   Think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute (both are I’d say probably more libertarian-right rather than their more extreme brethren) have people who advise the boards of the grassroots activist groups; they’re in the Zoom meetings and the WhatsApp group chats; they’re cc’ed on the email chains. They’ve got the ears of all those little groups’ leaders, most of whom are new to organized activism and are very grateful for the help, the attention, and of course, the access to donors. People like that help make connections with the media to get stories commissioned at the papers; they help connect meetings to politicians and donors. And you can’t not believe that they put their weights on the scale against the too-outspokenly liberal gender-critical voices…

   But from there, there are also networks of European far-right populist political parties who are all over the GC scene, extremely eager to align it with the Orban cadre (well, at least now he’s gone, but there’s a small constellation of others like him across the EU).

   The UK television station GB News, home to far-right extremist Nigel Farage’s primetime nightly propaganda broadcast, is closely aligned with the GC scene in the UK, regularly hosting GC commentators (including many of my friends!). Russia’s state-controlled propaganda network, RT Russia Today, for a while wooed many GC types and gave a lot of broadcast time to the issue for a while.

   A certain prominent gay-and-lesbian GC group set up its offices at the most right-wing address in all of the UK, the British equivalent of Mar-a-Lago: a small, notorious Westminster townhouse known to be the headquarters of the Brexit movement and also closely associated with tobacco lobbyists and the Koch Brothers. They swear it’s all just a coincidence that they ended up there; it was just a matter of office space coming available — of all places on an island of some 65 million people! Sure, sure. Coincidence, not influence. Heavens, no!

   (Years later, despite howls from many grassroots gays and lesbians, their leadership has consistently refused to decamp for a less politically toxic address. Fishy much? I’ll say no more…)

   Many people played along with these right-wing allies, probably believing they’d probably be temporary and narrow-focused alliances of convenience. But what’s happened, clearly, is that the political influence of the right spilled into the GC movement just as much as the other way around.

   Some of the louder voices in the feisty GC social-media bickering-and-hollering scene became blatantly more right-leaning, even far-right extremist. Some always were (eg the Reduxx founder).

   I saw it all happen, bit by bit, and it drove me to a near nervous breakdown because no one would speak up about the obvious shifts in political allegiance, it felt like, except for me.