Inside Europe’s billion-dollar anti-gender movement

[eyekaytee@aussie.zone]

why do you ask this question knowing anyone who answers you will get a ban?

[floofloof@lemmy.ca]

The investment in demonizing scapegoat groups does seem to pay off for the far right. It helps them sell their own ideology as a solution for people's woes, if they can convince people their problems are caused by the designated scapegoats. It effectively distracts people from the plunder of their lives by rich kleptocrats, while filling them with the kind of misdirected hatred that fascism thrives on.

[wanderingthoughts@europe.pub]

It's the far right conveyor belt. Strart with some influencers with reasonable arguments, push towards slightly more extreme viewpoints blaming minorities until they're truly radicalized and never believe anything from outside the bubble.

[scoffinglizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

If this works in Europe, then Europeans are not smarter than Americans. The whole "why don't Americans do something" rhetoric goes right out the window.

[fullsquare@awful.systems]

this sounds more like another org with ties to a couple of conservative oligarchs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Congress_of_Families

[gwilikers@lemmy.ml]

Wealthy American conservatives and Russian oligarchs previously spent the bulk of the money on anti-gender advocacy in Europe. Today, 73% of the overall cash pot comes from EU donors, with Hungary, France, and Poland standing out as the countries with the largest funders.

Hungary — a country whose prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has styled himself as a defender of Western Christian civilisation — has been at the forefront of that effort.

“If you dig enough, you can find that they [conservative entities] are all funded by some Hungarian state entity of some sort,” Datta, the author of the EPF report, said.

Overall, the European donor base spans a heterogenous alliance of moneyed aristocrats, ultra-conservative tech entrepreneurs, and ideologically aligned businesses. Alongside private donors, the report uncovered that a critical amount of money — at least $171 million or 14% of the total amount — stems from EU public funding.

When it comes to public funding, the political patronage model outlined by Datta showed that not only governments, but also the EU itself has systematically channelled cash to anti-gender groups disguised as youth organisations via its Erasmus programme — including the World Youth Alliance (WYA), a Catholic NGO that lobbies against abortion in family planning, since 2009.

So here's the targets:

Moneyed aristocrats, ultra-conservative tech entrepreneurs, and ideologically aligned businesses.

The question we have to ask here, if we want to help, is how can we subvert and counteract their efforts.

I want to add before I continue that these are just some kernels of ideas. I'm not a specialist in all these areas. And I'd hope that others could take some of these ideas and bring their own skills ans input. I dont expect everyone reading this to have the ability to do all of these things; but I think its a fair assumption that collectively, with he enough people who give a shit about this cause, we can actually make some difference by working together.

Bring Money to the Cause

Obviously you can donate to groups that fight to promote LGBTQ rights, and particularly trans rights. But I doubt you're all that wealthy.

I think its pretty obvious looking at the targets, that they're not all that ideologically motivated, but rather, monetarily motivated. So if we want to counteract this, we need to draw more wealthy monitarily motivated people to the trans cause.

I appreciate that this is deeply cynical. But frankly, the people who are suffering because of this need actual help, not principles.

Syphon Money from the Anti-Trans Cause

It occurs to me that when you have this much money pouring into a movement, then there's the oppurtunity for exploitation.

• Set up fake anti-trans groups. Seek funding. Funnel the funding back to the trans cause.
• Set up fake anti-trans sites and promote them. Take the donations, funnel them back to the trans cause.
• Look for exploitations in current anti-trans sites and attack them.

  DDoSing to bring the site down.
  XSRF to get the database and identify the doners.
  XSS to trick doners into giving us money.
  There are people who know a lot more about this shit than me. And guess what, you can pay them to do this.

Attack the Source

Looking at the figures, we can see that the majority of money here comes from Hungary. So, how can hurt these people?

I'm not familiar enough with the current political situation in Hungary (aside from Orban). But I assume there is an opposition.

Can we get money to mainstream and extremist opposition factions? I'll leave this one for someone who knows more about it than me.

[shinkantrain@lemmy.ml]

There's anti-gender movement, and anti-gender movement

[anomalocaris@lemm.ee]

time to start an anti gender organisation, and get donations for everyone.

[floofloof@lemmy.ca]

No one is immune to a concerted propaganda campaign. American propaganda has just been a bit more extreme than most, for a bit longer.

[totallynotjessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

That rhetoric has always pissed me off for the same reasons as Americans not understanding why fascism took Europe in the 30s. Nowhere is special and nobody should think "it won't happen here."