How Conservatives Went From Demonizing Muslims to Wooing Them
In his speech at the Republican convention in 2016, Donald Trump spoke of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, where a man with jihadist sympathies murdered 49 people. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T.Q.
citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said. At the time, this sort of rhetoric was common among Trump and his allies, who fashioned themselves in the mold of European right-wing populists, demonizing Muslims as a threat to hard-won Western sexual freedoms.
Perhaps the hottest ticket at that year’s Republican National Convention was an L.G.B.T.Q. party called Wake Up! where the Dutch politician Geert Wilders warned about Shariah law in front of a photo exhibition featuring skinny, shirtless boys in MAGA hats, called “Twinks for Trump.” The photographer behind that exhibition, a reactionary libertine named Lucian Wintrich, briefly served as the White House correspondent for the far-right website The Gateway Pundit.
Seven years later, as the battle against wokeness has supplanted the war on terror in the right-wing imagination, conservative sympathies are reversing. “Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to protect them from L.G.B.T.Q.
