One of the highlights of recent travel was seeing the Queen of Ireland, Panti Bliss, perform at the Soho Theatre. This esteemed drag performer was pushed to the fore of Ireland’s 2015 marriage equality campaign and came to lead it to its successful vote.

Rory O’Neill, her creator, describes her as a “giant cartoon woman,” but her most recent performance is less “transgressive, punk underground” Jessica Rabbit and more Grande Dame. Panti is the glamorous aunt you wish you had.

The story that unfolds over the “If these wigs could talk” show is brilliantly crafted. It is a stand-up routine and monologue that makes the audience fall in love with Panti before sharing what it was like to grow up illegally gay in Ireland, and so much more that you must experience without spoilers.

O’Neill began his adult life in art school, but Panti became his living, breathing, evolving work of art. Far more influenced by the vaudeville spirit of British drag and the oral tradition of Irish drag than the glamorous and polished version commonly seen from the USA, Panti has a long history of outrageousness. O’Neill’s creation has also done more than most of her compatriots to foster the embrace of LGBTQAI+ existence in Ireland. Her Noble Call at the Abbey Theatre is one of her most, and justly, famous contributions.

In the documentary about Panti, Queen of Ireland, O’Neill describes the marriage equality campaign as the final battle for equality even though, at the time, he felt uncertain that the Queer world needed this badge of bourgeois normality. What O’Neill knew is that the worst brute could marry, but somehow Queer people were not considered worthy.

It is deeply frustrating that this recent achievement of legal equality in 2015 in Ireland and the USA, and 2017 in Australia, is not the final battle after all. Queer people are once more at the barricades – if they are paying attention – as the Christofascists emanating out of America and Europe lead the battle to erase LGBTQIA+ existence.

The ultraconservatives made it clear at the time that the sky would fall if access to marriage was broadened to same-sex couples. In fact, the sky remained in place, but the billionaire-funded groups that mobilised against extending access to marriage then are now funding the fight to ensure only “traditional” gender and sexuality are legal.

Their initial targets are an intentional conflation of two different categories of people: drag performers and trans people.

Trans people are their gender. Drag, by contrast, is a performance art. In mainstream representation it is largely carried out by cis gay men, but many drag performers and traditions are trans. Performative gender such as drag is at least as old as the theatre itself. And trans existence pervades history and societies; scientific research is illustrating that gender is much more complex than conservative faux-science likes to pretend.

Drag, however, can be outrageous and sexy. Trans people are a tiny minority and can be very visible making them an easy target for cowards. Fewer people know a trans person than know lesbian and gay people. All of these factors enable propaganda manipulating confusion to find fertile soil. Cis people, firmly embedded in their birth-allocated sex, can find it impossible to understand gender dysphoria.

This makes it easy for Christofascists to combine these two categories with all the lies and myths that were told to keep gay men persecuted. None of these categories are dangerous to women or children. Groomers and pedophiles are found in churches, scouts and youth groups, not at drag story hour. The primary threat to women, children – and trans people – remains bad cis men.

Australia has not fully descended into the US attack on LGBTQIA+ people broadly and the UK’s persecution of trans people. The fact that Neo Nazis have joined the women pretending to support women by demonising another vulnerable group alienates most Australians from this toxic bigotry. We cannot, however, be complacent: both Media Watch and 4 Corners recently platformed people of suspect reputation.

The right is more cunning than the centre and left. It sees that history is bending towards diversity and inclusion; it’s determined to fight that development with every word, act and dollar. It coopts the language of rights while aiming to rob everyone except themselves of rights. It exploits the media’s attempts to play fair and balanced by promoting disinformation-heavy bigotry and exterminationism as just another perspective.

Organisations in Australia illustrate the international blurring of goals in their efforts to drive us towards ultra-conservative social positions. The Australian Marriage Alliance body converted its pre 2017 focus on defeating marriage equality to its new manifestation – Binary Australia – which campaigns against any blurring of strict male and female categories.

Citizen Go has recently begun to include Australia in its global far right campaigns. It is a Spanish ultra-conservative Christian platform designed to counter progressive petition sites like Avaaz, Change.org or Get Up. Its funding and board boast a grim roster of figures. Its site shows that it is combining campaigns against the “UN’s LGBT agenda” with fighting against the Voice to Parliament (alongside other ultra-conservative Christian bodies).

Far right groups are eager to use unsuspecting women as gateways to their brutally patriarchist ideology to broaden support. We saw women drawn into the space over covid, combining concern about pandemic health measures with conspiracy stories of tunnels full of abducted children being farmed for hormones. These issues have been subsumed into a campaign based on disinformation about trans healthcare. These women often do not realise that their own human equality and independence is threatened by these far-right fellow travellers.

In looking back at the Irish marriage equality debate, Rory O’Neill joked that he hoped Queer people “don’t end up becoming as boring as everybody else.” The frightening developments that dominate the discussion now make that moment seem a golden age of acceptance. Panti Bliss is asking you not to allow these forces to win, driving us back into the dark ages of persecution of LGBTQIA+ people.

It’s now up to the rest of us to become radical, resistant and irritating. Don’t let the Christofascists drive Queer people back towards the disdained fringe, to exile, to suicide. Whether you are standing up for people’s right to live their gender or embrace their art, you need to be out there standing against the threat alongside those under attack.

One of the most hated aspects of the Morrison government was the secrecy. Over and again, we continue to shock to revelations of hidden wrongdoing long after their defeat last May.

It was a crucial aspect of the Coalition government’s efforts over a decade to diminish our democratic structures, shifting us towards competitive authoritarianism, and minority rule. It was integral to the malfeasance that caused us to sink 12 points – equal with illiberal Hungary – on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.

Scott Morrison’s deeply secret 5-ministry scandal was partly orchestrated to keep still more secrets.

In one manifestation, Morrison stood as the only permanent member of a cabinet committee so that any meeting with others could be designated cabinet-in-confidence. Documents were wheeled into cabinet meetings or stapled to cabinet reports to grant cabinet-level secrecy.

The Coalition aimed to make acts of journalism and whistleblowing liable to up to 20 years imprisonment in 2018. AFP raids on journalists and media organisations took place as a result of the government’s fear of transparency.

Repeatedly the public has asked why people did not reveal the offences and norm violations.

Part of the problem was draconian restrictions and punishment imposed on people in the public service and working for contractors.

Australia has 849 secrecy restrictions criminalising the release of various kinds of federal government information. The publication of “government information is restricted by 11 general secrecy offences in the criminal code, 542 specific secrecy offences contained in 178 separate commonwealth acts, and 296 non-disclosure duties in 107 commonwealth laws.” Breaching any of these attracts criminal liability.

The point of sending asylum seekers and refugees offshore was in large part to keep Australians from seeing that these are people like us, particularly children with whom we might more easily empathise. The appalling abuses and crimes perpetrated against them, leading to children almost dying of Resignation Syndrome, were amongst the Coalition government’s darkest secrets.

The immigration department set the AFP on “Save the Children” workers who had made a covert submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission regarding the fact that they believed “the children have been subjected to multiple violations of their human rights and wrongdoing from multiple parties.” Workers had been blocked from speaking out by draconian confidentiality provisions in their contracts imposed by the immigration department.

Morrison devised the label of “on-water matters” to keep so much about our disgraceful disregard for international law and convention secret. Journalist Paul Farrell was pursued by the AFP at immigration department instruction for revealing Australian security boats’ incursions into Indonesian waters as part of repelling asylum boats.

Many of the best people in the public service have left a career where they had come to be treated as a servant class to political whims and ideologues’ missions. The fine people of the immigration department, with their nation-building role, left in droves over the Morrison and Dutton years, replaced with customs personnel who worked to keep out any potential non-white citizen as if they were pest-bearing woodwork. These small minds flaunted their new paramilitary uniforms and pointless medals, just as Scott Morrison did his grotesque trophy celebrating (wrongly) that he stopped the boats.

Most of the people working in immigration by the end of Morrison’s government had nowhere else to go, and many should face investigation for implementing inexcusable instructions. Obeying orders is never a valid excuse for human rights abuse.

The Robodebt Royal Commission revealed how desperately battered the Public Service in Canberra has become after years of Coalition disdain for their function. Professor Glyn Davis of the Thodey panel investigating the public service crisis described it as transforming away from a partnership with politicians to a “command and control system” where “public service becomes the delivery arm of political goals.”

Too many appointments were political. Too many senior people narrowed their focus to the task in front of them, to politicians’ demands, and ignored their duty to the nation. Too many people intimidated those who asked whether what was happening was legal or ethical.

Morrison ignored the findings of the Thodey report setting out the importance of a strong public service able to give frank and fearless advice. His government had little interest in policy supported by empirical evidence or the general good. As John Hewson said at the time, the government’s intent seemed to be to “consolidate political power.”

In the face of these threats, the last decade’s whistleblowers ought to be greeted as heroes. Public servants who strode against the humiliating tide of capitulation by their peers ought to be treasured.

Instead, only one of the whistleblowers has been rescued from continuing persecution in the processes set in motion by the last government. AG Mark Dreyfus felt that the persecution of Witness K’s lawyer Bernard Collaery was unconscionable and intervened. Public servants Richard Boyle and David McBride continue to suffer the financial, emotional and psychological pain of the system’s retribution. If convicted, they face lengthy prison terms.

Richard Boyle attempted to impress upon his superiors his concerns about the ATO’s “aggressive debt collection tactics.” When that failed, he went to the inspector general of taxation. There was no action on his justified complaints. The whistleblowing that followed the system’s failure to act on its own brokenness is still being vindictively pursued. We can only wish that Robodebt’s agents would have acted with such courage, but his persecution hints at why they didn’t.

David McBride, a former military lawyer, will be tried this November unless Dreyfus chooses to intervene. The revelations that he ultimately took to the ABC, when the internal system failed him too, became “The Afghan Files” revealing war crimes accusations. We need further military whistleblowers if soldiers did not merely, allegedly, act on their own bloodied impulse.

As Kieran Pender of the Human Rights Law Centre details, “Australia is a better place because they spoke up when they saw something wrong.” He has said, the failure of the Public Interest Disclosure Act to protect these men shows that the law is “utterly broken.” AG Dreyfus could act at any time but apparently does not want to be seen repeatedly to interfere with the actions of the courts.

We know there are 849 secrecy provisions in federal government because of an Albanese government report revealing it last month. Mark Dreyfus intends that to be the basis for extensive reforms.

Dreyfus has spoken about the crucial role of the public service in its ability to offer expert frank and fearless advice to politicians and their staffers. He has promised to extend whistleblower protections as part of his integrity framework. All this is admirable. It is not acceptable, however, for reforms to take so long that two of the best public servants continue to be tormented in the courts because of the Attorney-General’s department’s slowness to act.

A crucial part of extending whistleblower protections must be swift action to end these two prosecutions. Every politician and public servant must act knowing that they will be able to hold their heads up in the face of public scrutiny: secrecy is our enemy.

On some level, it is straightforward for a Neo-Nazi protest to be easy for police to handle. As we saw on the streets of Melbourne last weekend, and repeatedly over recent years, a high five for white supremacist protesters is an easy gesture for some police officers.

It’s not just that there can be shared ideology. Certainly, some police are sympathetic to the white supremacists’ cause. These share a loathing of non-white people or leftie issues. The “woke,” as they now call progressives, are a disgusting, dirty rabble who make trouble. Some police are highly conservative and repulsed by difference. Some sought out a police career because it gave them the odd chance to thump an enemy. Active ethno-nationalists join police forces and armies around the world, often to gain the military training they need for the race war they seek. Not all are filtered out in the selection process.

On the streets though, Neo-Nazi protesters can be easy to handle. They appear, give or take their presence at freedom rallies through COVID-19, in small enough numbers to know they can’t institute direct violence – so far. So they play to their personality.

Most of the young men who step onto the path to Neo Nazism are aggrieved at having lost centre stage to women and others who ought to know their place. Core to that step too, is the spirit of trolling.

A certain kind of young man loves the opportunity to shock and appal those around him. There is laughter to be achieved at the pain of the target and the horror of empathetic bystanders. Your tears are their glee. Your softness is their signal for a boot in the guts. On the internet, active Neo Nazis have used cruel jokes and memes to tempt teens and young men from this path of bullying hilarity to ethno-nationalism. Message boards, of the sort that spawned the QAnon joke, have been used to radicalise youth who don’t get the respect – or girlfriend – they deserve as a man, and white.

This isn’t to say there isn’t pain and passion amongst the Neo-Nazis. There is. Resentment and bigoted loathing fill many of them. Others are more there to shock and bully those they designate as “weak.” Some truly believe that white, straight men are the most powerless of identities at this moment, overwhelming evidence to the contrary unseen because it is the static landscape of our lives.

Knowing the far right is a minority, the clever minds amongst them deploy democracy’s weaknesses to end it. Libertarians emphasise the utmost freedom of speech and association implicit in the concept of western liberalism. Some argue that toxic speech is best seen rather than kept hidden, best shrugged off as a minority position rather than given undue emphasis. This suits Neo Nazis very well indeed. The problem with this for the rest of us is that community grievances (and conspiracies) can be harnessed to the mission. Thus we see incels (involuntary celibates) melded into the far-right cause over shared misogyny.

White supremacists use Christianity too to whitewash their ugly bigotry (just as other ethno-nationalists around the world are using their dominant faith). Christianity, like white men, is becoming challenged as the societal norm, and this shift is portrayed as being “under siege.” Thus loathing of Jews or Muslims can be depicted as an honourable defence of the Christian tradition. Old bigotries can be made pure by depicting an assault on women’s equality, or LGBTQI+ erasure, as obeying God’s laws (as the radicals define them). By depicting Queer existence or feminism as a threat to children’s welfare, the radical right can make themselves seem the protectors of the innocent.

The best disguise for these ethno-nationalists is the adoption of a progressive veneer. Even from its origins in the mid-twentieth century, a defence of the environment was inherent to fascism. An attack on the scientific knowledge about trans existence was one of the great book burnings carried out by the Nazis, and homosexuals joined Jews and Gypsies and dissenters in the concentration camps. In the modern world, this presents as a faux–progressive movement notable in feminist circles that would define a woman by her biology. (Didn’t we just spend centuries overcoming that limitation?)

In the world of internet partisanship and the lightning travel of conspiracies woven together to shape a created world with only a passing resemblance to the real one, it is easy for the disaffected to be drawn into the far-right sphere. The pandemic has given a masterclass in how yoga mums and Neo Nazis could become part of the same movement, bonded by “saving the children” from mythical elite cannibals. A joke for the white supremacists became a mission for deluded women.

By contrast, refugee activists see their friends in Australian indefinite detention suffering hideous torments, since indefinite detention alone is defined as a form of torture. Our leaders and their contractors compounded that torture at every turn. Refugee supporters are passionate about the pain we see in nightly conversations with people driven to the brink (or beyond) of suicide that we can’t help.

Climate activists too, tend to be passionate, even desperate. We see the damage in Lismore and Pakistan, in roiling wildfires and rising prices of food. We know that our future looks bleak. The intransigence of government, just as with refugee policy, in the face of this knowledge is infuriating, frustrating and frightening. Government panders to short-term budgetary concerns and the pressure of lobbyists while we see the trillions of debt accumulating from the permacrisis and the millions displaced, thousands even here in Australia already.

Many in the LGBTQI+ community, and particularly those who are gender diverse, see their own current oppression becoming their extermination in the very near future. The models emerging from America, compounded by the bigotry spewing from British women, make this an immediate and justifiable terror. Depicting LGBTQI+ people, wrongly, as a threat to children, and trans people, wrongly, as a threat to women and children, is a powerful way to provoke violence against them. This is already being codified into hundreds of laws in America. American models are followed here; we must not disregard it as a foreign perversion.

So climate protesters, LGBTQI+ protesters, refugee activists – all will be deeply passionate and frightened about very real and immediate harms.

By contrast, Neo-Nazis are there as much for the banter and the chance to intimidate those they define as weak. Both can be deployed to recruit new young men (and sycophantic women). There is no downside for them in these protests so far. A bit of a joke with some sympathetic police officers is a given. The jokes that make them easy work for the police act as recruitment.

The cunning recruitment tactics help them build into a danger. That’s why we saw “feminists” supported by and chatting with, Nazis on Melbourne’s streets.

Victoria’s police leaders and government need to communicate how they will handle the presence of Nazi memelords on our streets, and the confusing fact that they are easier – currently – to handle than protesters who are frightened and angry about real and immediate harms.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Why do police high five Neo-Nazis?

Over this last weekend, the latest American CPAC convention took place in Maryland. This one did not host the autocrat Viktor Orban, CPAC’s poster fascist. Instead it gave an anti-electoral integrity microphone to Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s defeated autocrat in the making. And two long hours were dominated by aspiring-autocrat Donald Trump.

Maryland featured a series of speakers attacking trans existence in lurid terms. The worst propaganda is the lie that trans people (and LGBTQI+ people in general) are intrinsically child predators. The ugliest such speaker pontificated that transgenderism must be eliminated. To make that clear, he was speaking of the elimination – or extermination – of trans people.

This was just the clearest statement of an agenda by the Religious Right in America to return “traditional” sex roles as part of returning America to purity and greatness. No LGBTQI+ existence will be tolerated. Currently it is only outlier preachers calling for the death penalty or lynching of LGBTQI+ people, but the threats are made on the street: “I can’t wait til I’m legally able to hunt you down.”

Note the overlap with Putin’s grotesque homophobic rhetoric about his motivations for invading Ukraine. Eastern European “traditionalists” have been working with regressive “family values” activists from the American Religious Right since the end of the Cold War, and disinformation sources on the internet promote these prejudices.

The religious objection to LGBTQI+ existence which has largely overwhelmed the American Right is met and matched in the UK by a normalising of ghastly rhetoric about trans existence. “Gender critical” (GC) thinkers, styling themselves as feminists, declaim variations on the idea that there are only two sexes and they must stay put. In denial of the history of humanity, cultural variety and scientific evidence that these binaries are culturally created and imposed, “feminists” claim that women must be women in the manifestations these bigots designate. One ugly result is women-born who reject feminine trappings being chased out of women’s public bathrooms, just in case. These ideologues believe they can call themselves feminists despite this patriarchal outcome.

According to these “thought” leaders, people born as women who transition are mentally ill. In this disinformation, men who reject their birth designation are predators or deceivers and intolerable.

It has just been revealed that the Australian “Let Women Speak” tour, featuring a leading GC propagandist from the UK is being part funded by Australian CPAC. This tour is largely an effort by Feminism-Appropriating Radical Transphobes (FARTs) to spread the toxic British message that to be pro-woman is to be virulently anti-trans.

The fact that CPAC Australia is willing to fund the tour underlines the fact that, while many GC thinkers believe themselves to be progressive, they are actually no more progressive than the fascist ecological movement. Both have, incidentally, roots in fascist Europe from the mid-20th century.

It is a classic strategy of the deeply racist and generally bigoted far right movement to use previously more progressive people to assist in disguising the minority nature of their hateful position. These including journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, and women (as with Pastel QAnon) to make their talking points acceptable to a broader coalition of the public.

Australians might be tempted to think that British FARTism is the only threat to our LGBTQI+ community. We already have FARTs here in the Greens, as well as the Victorian Liberal Party cohort, as well as in academia. We also tend to think of ourselves as more laissez faire and secular than America.

Over this last weekend, however, a bunch of thugs in black hoodies rather than brown shirts marched through Newtown to disturb World Pride celebrations, intimidating LGBTQI+ people, all the while incongruously waving their rosaries around. The man credited with promoting it is a Maronite Christian, but it is uncertain which denominations accompanied him.

Non-denominational Christians (whom we deride as happy-clappers) tend to be firmly in the LGBTQI-exterminationist contingent, promoting the eradication of “non-traditional” roles as an impediment to the return of Christ in End Times. Your personal immoralities prevent their religious rapture. This cult-offshoot of Christianity is arguably taking over the world, including Australia.

This weekend’s “prayerful” intimidation of LGBTQI+ Australians compounds several Neo-Nazi intimidations of Queer events in Australia already.

In America, the minority is imposing its harsh morality on the majority. The majority is struggling to protect its freedoms, rights, universities and schools, its very existence from the militant Christian fascists. It is barely worth debating whether British “feminists” spouting anti-trans bile were more responsible than manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and his various bigotries, for the murder of 15 year old trans girl Brianna Ghey in the UK.

There is no separating the risk posed by the various factions of the radical Right in Australia, as well as internationally. Whether they are cynical culture war mouthpieces, dupes, or messianic preachers of the existential threat of (ostensibly) non-traditional roles, they are here. Brought through the internet to echo America’s groypers, or on speaking tours, they are here.

We cannot ignore them: they are here and coming for people you know.

Australia is transitioning from our old colonial master to a self-selected new colonial master. We have those with power nostalgic for the glories of imperial Britain. Many more, however, are starry-eyed at the thought of the mastery of the USA. The America of which they wish to make us the 51st state existed largely in its marketing, and certainly does not exist any longer. Australia must cease following America’s lead into hell.

America sold itself as the shining light of democracy, freedom and reason in a troubled world. Disastrous economic and military imperialism abroad was in fact matched by subjugation of its masses at home. The American Dream was reserved for the white working class and a few outliers. Its systems ensured the vast majority was trapped in versions of slavery and its post-abolition variants. Developing anti-abortion policies will not least provide a larger desperate underclass able to provide wage-slave labour at costs competitive with Mexico or China.

These Australian leaders fixed on America’s self-depiction see Biden as a return to the rational America they admire, after the cringe-making chaos of the Trump years. In fact, this is likely to be a brief hiatus.

America will probably descend into a new stochastic civil war, opening salvos perhaps already fired. An aroused minority, funded by authoritarian-leaning plutocrats, is stripping both the freedom and reason from the American civic space. From school board to the Capitol, groups ignited by conspiracy and loathing are plunging America away from enlightenment. Democracy, as flawed as it has always been in America, is being further crippled to prevent the majority having its say. The radicalised Right is trying to legislate for election overthrow, as well as voter suppression. Fire-eyed theocrats and bigots are working to subjugate anyone whose identity, life or thought denies them full humanity. The forces of modernity are depicted not just as woke, but literally demonic. It will take exceptional effort from the majority to prevent this takeover by the fringe. It already controls the Supreme Court, the House in Congress, too many state Houses, money and considerable media sway.

When Australian leaders say we ally ourselves with the American project because of our shared values, the shared values they imagine are now beaten to a pulp as the forces of fundamentalist religion and bigotry destroy freedom and equality across swathes of the country.

When the theocratic bigots retake power in the US, with Donald Trump or a less chaotic authoritarian at the helm, the sovereignty Richard Marles has ceded to them will remain ceded. Their Spiritual Warfare–driven foreign policy will become even more our problem. Israel must be protected so that End Times can begin there: will that drive us to military action against Iran?

Australia was, at the outset of the 20th century, a proud model of strong labor rights, where visitors came from around the globe to see our social democrat experiment at work. We had nationalised services for those resources the community depended upon to function. Our unions protected workers from exploitation by capital. (We see in America and Britain today the chaos that results when unions are crippled or erased.)

The neoliberal era that made Milton Friedman its god has pushed us towards the extinction of our civilisation. His truism that the stock market was the ultimate measure of a good business has made care for the environment, the workforce, the populace barely relevant. Payouts to the families of the dead are a “cost of doing business” and if those harmed are the powerless, that’s profit maximised. The train disaster and chemical fire that threatens the lives of East Palestine, Ohio, was largely caused by corporate policy that bowed to stock market pressures: no investment in infrastructure, workforce or safety. Only profits count. Stock market metrics lead to money spent on lobbying politicians. President Trump repealed the half-hearted measures implemented by President Obama to limit such catastrophes.

Our Reserve Bank is a tawdry affair whose intellectual heft is embarrassingly meagre compared to the central banks of equivalent nations. Philip Lowe leads a board of business minds, not those keeping abreast of intellectual developments. They implement policy based on 1970s conditions to deal with our different world and different understanding of financial policy. Almost all the inflationary price surge we see in Australia is caused by price-gouging by power, supermarkets, banks and business more broadly. The residual rise lies within the Reserve Bank’s allowable band. At the same time, the workers’ buying power is savaged and their wages are declining in real terms.

Neoliberal ideologues do not allow any measures to cap or chasten price-gouging sectors. Windfall tax is anathema. The profits are celebrated by the stock market and by its ambient media spruikers. While the CEOs toast their victorious quarter, the populace is forced into painful decisions between fresh food and medications.

Milton Friedman’s acolytes turned the free market “think” tanks initiated by Brit Anthony Fisher into rampaging lobbyists for the wealthy. As a result of their dominance of political economy, the the plutocrats’ share of national wealth has rocketed into the stratosphere since the 70s, while the workers’ wages stagnated.

The result has been a bottomless well of fury and resentment that has been exploited by the media handmaids of the wealthy, misdirected against the alleged “undeserving” poor, against women taking jobs, against refugees, and now against the LGBTQI+ community. The Murdoch empire funnels American “idiot ball” culture war distractions to structure the jealous guarding of privilege by the wealthy and the resentment of the disenfranchised. These wars are in the process of breaking America and might well break Great Britain, but the true targeting of fury against the plutocrats banking our common-wealth offshore is undesirable.

The British NHS has been destroyed by neoliberal ideologues delighted at the chance to sell off its carcass to the largely American private health sector. Labor in Australia needs to shore up Medicare and chase off these predatory corporations that have begun buying up Australian medical businesses. In the American model we see the principal: outstanding care for those who can pay the extortionate prices. Bankruptcy and early deaths for those who can’t.

These American values are not our values. Business, with their politicians and media would love them to be, despite the ravages we see in America and the UK. A dragon’s hoard is in the offing.

Our defence department immersing itself in America’s militarised foreign policy can only bring us harm. We would become the cannon fodder, as colonial subjects always are. Our resources have far more important uses than astronomically-priced weaponry.

Australians must see the culture war distractions for what they are: a protection for a profoundly broken system. It is time we reclaimed our proud social democrat past. Those with the levers of power must look accurately at what neoliberal ideologues have done to the US and Britain, and reject both colonial masters for our own healthier path.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations

Australia must not allow our politicians and “thought” leaders on the right to push us down the destructive path being pursued by the Republicans.

The American right is waging war on modernity. The radicalised right alliance is sacrificing empirical evidence and truth for theocracy, tribal games and lies. It is determined to reverse the achievements of the Civil Rights era: white Christian man will return to his rightful place as delineator of truth. The contingent is destroying America’s standing to achieve it.

Ultimately the factions that make up the American right see non-white people, non-Christians, women and the LGBTQI+ community as not fully human nor deserving of equality. People who struggle financially, physically, mentally: none of them merit human dignity. The radical Christian right demands these lesser beings abase themselves before the laws of God (as defined by these extremists), and before the white men responsible for enforcing those mandates.

For the plutocrats who fund the right’s activities, the scandals and the progressives’ fight back are all part of a delightful distraction to conceal the funnelling upwards of the nation’s wealth. This group will be well-cushioned from the exigencies of the climate crisis they’re driving us into.

It is easy for progressive factions to see each of their struggles to retain rights as distinct. This is a gift to the right. Women’s right to control their own bodies is intricately interwoven with the LGBTQI+ communities’ battles to control their own bodies too. The threat to the survival of non-white people is analogous to the threat levelled at LGBTQI+ people. Those whose identities place them at the intersection of various categories know best how much more threat they face than, say, middle class white women. LGBTQI+ black and brown people are far more likely to be hurt, raped or murdered even by those appointed to care for them.

The faction nicknamed the Christian Taliban has no qualms about robbing the rest of the population of freedom, even while describing their actions as protecting liberty. The Alliance Defending Freedom, an extreme Christian organisation, bankrolls court cases to test the Supreme Court’s willingness to allow the creation of a segregated economy excluding LGBTQI+ people. Ultimately their goal is to recriminalise sexual acts between consenting LGBTQI+ adults.

The religious right in America is celebrating the overturning of Roe v Wade by working out how it can make abortion illegal nationwide. In the Dobbs case that brought down that partial right to control one’s fertility, Clarence Thomas made it clear that contraception access, marriage equality and even the legality of gay sex should be undermined by similar Supreme Court law-making.

The damage this is doing to women and more post-Dobbs is already apparent. Care for miscarriages has become fraught in red (Republican) states as doctors become too scared to heal, and pharmacists refuse to issue prescribed medication. Some pharmacies are keeping pregnancy tests behind the counter to monitor who requests one. Users have been warned to delete apps that monitor menstruation for fear they will be used for surveillance. Other social crises follow. Thirty six percent of US counties are already maternity care deserts and America has much higher maternal and infant mortality rates compared to similar nations. Indigenous and non-white people predominate in these deaths: one Louisiana senator said that the state’s appalling statistics cease to be such an outlier if one discounts black deaths, in an appalling confession of apathy.

Republicans are working on ways they can prevent all abortion healthcare (which cripples obstetric care). Strategies are being devised to monitor women’s travel between states to ensure it is not for reproductive healthcare purposes. They are also contriving ways to prevent the postal service being used to send the abortion pills that are making this era’s abortion ban somewhat less deadly than the past’s. People in Tennessee are being threatened with three years jail for “lying” about rape to gain access to abortion. Some politicians and activists are working out how the death penalty might be meted out to doctors or patients.

Donald Trump has begun his second run for President with an announcement that he plans to ban all gender medical (hormone) care for minors. Currently, many red states are introducing a flood of laws to prevent the care of youth wishing to delay puberty and transition (despite the clear evidence that it prevents despair and suicide) with harsh punitive measures for parents and healthcare providers involved. One state is looking to charge parents with felony trafficking crimes for taking their child interstate for care. The states are aiming to push the ban on healthcare up to the age of 25 because that is when young people move off their parents’ health insurance and are likely to face substantial obstacles to treatment. Others are looking to ban all gender-based healthcare for adults too. The plan is the total erasure of trans people, and the activists do not care how many people die to achieve this.

A lack of interest in the number of pregnant and LGBTQI+ people who die, plus efforts to impose surveillance and travel bans is only one of the overlapping aspects of the war. Proposals to check schoolgirls’ genitals to see if they are cisgender in order to play in female sporting teams is victimising them as much as the trans youth excluded from these activities. The plan in Florida to monitor female athletes’ menstrual history in detail is as much a way to monitor their possible access to abortion as it is to exclude trans girls. While too many on the right aim to have all LGBTQI+, and supporters, falsely known as groomers and pedophiles, many Republicans want no minimum age for heterosexual marriage.

The attacks on schools and teachers are emblematic of the unified nature of this war on “minority” populations. Florida pushed the College Board to have the AP African-American studies course stripped of its references to current struggles and to Queer and feminist black activists. The attacks on school (and adult) libraries and classrooms demands that any book that makes white students uncomfortable must be removed (including children’s’ books telling MLK’s life story) since only the white mythology of America’s history is acceptable. Any reference to gender or sexuality is also banned, so books about suffragettes are as likely to make the excluded list as books accepting LGBTQI+ existence. Unsurprisingly, The Handmaid’s Tale is on the list.

At the moment Manatee County, Florida, is at the forefront of implementing Governor Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke.” That means teachers’ personal classroom libraries of lovingly collected treasures are banned to students until a “media consultant” has checked every book for appropriateness. Whether Pulitzer Prize winning books for senior secondary students or bland references to two fathers in a picture book for small children, the dehumanised will not be visible to these students. Teachers are threatened with third degree felony charges (equivalent to manslaughter) if any book seen by students is judged to be “pornographic” but for the radicalised gangs in charge of banning the books, the definition of pornographic can be the mention of gender and sexual identities.

The full obscenity of these book bans is seen when contrasted with the enabling of mass shootings with assault weapons that these same politicians are abetting, even in children’s hands.

The non-white in America are seen as automatically guilty, denied the white man’s plaint that he is owed the presumption of innocence. The regular police lynchings of black men establish that they are presumed not only guilty of a particular crime at that moment but guilty of being a constant threat that can only be halted by death. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, instead of sending adequate aid for those abandoned, New Orleans police and the National Guard licensed an assassination program. People stranded with nothing in the disaster zone were to be shot or thrashed for taking an insulated cooler from a backyard in order to survive. Instead of being seen as worthy of saving, they were misleadingly portrayed as “looters.” There is no ability to reveal and repair this kind of constant slander and oppression in a world where the right demands that the crisis cannot be discussed in the mainstream for fear of making white people uncomfortable.

This automatic assumption that (white) man must be innocent and “minorities” are to be feared, monitored and controlled applies to women. To find an assailant guilty of first degree rape is a monumental project that very few survivors manage to achieve. It is, however, the only way in a number of states to prevent having the rapist able to claim custody of the child the woman was unable to abort. Whether it is an attempt to avoid paying as much parental support or a further effort to torture the survivor, these men are not the figures a state should want rearing children. The men governing these states (and their complicit radical right women accomplices) see the survivors as temptresses or liars.

The religious right does not see these attacks on the freedom of their country people as anything but essential. Partly they believe themselves under existential attack because the recognised existence of others as equal humans is an abomination and genocidal threat. They believe in a literal war of “good” against “evil.” This Spiritual Warfare is waged against the demonic forces of Satan.

Supreme Court judges (the third branch of government) recently described prejudice against LGBTQI+ people as honourable compared to dishonourable racism (although they build racist barriers at every step while disguising the intent). These national lawmakers described same sex marriage as “bad,” “false” and something fittingly loathed, as offensive to one’s beliefs.

The more secular right is exploring the post-liberal world order, dismayed and disgusted with the messiness of the post-Cold War world. The idea that the preferences of the nation bend to inclusion and acceptance is a toxicity rather than a suggestion that the formerly conservative need to reevaluate their beliefs and bigotries. LGBTQI+ equality is supported by up to 80% of Americans. Some access to abortion is supported by around 60–80% of Americans, and only 13% support a total ban. Just short of 70% of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter protests. The post-liberal thought leaders, including the national conservatism movement, believe this is evidence of the utterly dissolution of the nation into degenerate chaos as a result of liberal tolerance for others’ freedom of choice. If it takes authoritarian imposition of morality and discipline to retrieve America’s “greatness,” that is what must be imposed.

They are supported by a European hard right that is Western chauvinist, deploying Christianity as a trope for white superiority and the base for the imposition of “traditional” lives and “family values.” The most obviously fascistic contender for the next Republican presidential race is Ron DeSantis who is reported to draw on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’s actions for inspiration. It is not just Eastern Europe where this rages. Transphobia has hollowed out feminism in Britain creating untold harm. Combined with the deep misogyny and bigotry fostered by powerful influencers such as Andrew Tate, the threat is growing. A young British trans girls was just murdered by two teens as she sat in a park.

Australia faces all these same influences seeping in through our politicians, media and the internet. It builds on the fact we share the founding racism that mars American democracy (and the British colonial project). We are bigoted and misogynistic in great swathes of the country. As the right thrashes around, hollowed out by neoliberal extreme ideology, searching for a mandate, it will echo the American decline into division and hatred. That is, unless we make these forces irrelevant. We must make sure they know: we will not be America here.

We will only achieve this if we stand together, women and LGBTQI+ and BIPOC and all the intersectional identities disallowed and stripped of equal dignity.