CanadaPolitics

Wait why are they passing anti-trans laws in Russia? Don’t they have bigger problems?

You hit the nail on the head here, albeit obliquely. Authoritarian governments around the world are banging the anti-gay/anti-trans drum because they have bigger problems, and they desperately need their voters' eyes off those bigger problems. It's easy to loot the piggy bank when people aren't looking.

We've had a really good run, especially if you're rich, but it's coming to an end, and the economy is breaking down on the poor first because the rich know it's coming to an end and they're panicking. They had almost twenty uniterrupted years of cheap money and neoliberal non-interference but the bill is coming due and we have a generation of wealthy folk who cannot imagine not making wheelbarrows of cash every minute. So they're putting in the squeeze on the rest of us: tax cuts, service cuts, price increases--you name it, it's on the table.

Poor people are noticing this, and they're starting to get upset, especially when COVID kind of tore the veil away. The last thing the rich want is a left-wing government to get in and renegotiate the social contract, so they're hoping to keep the current state humming along by blaming economic issues on social policy. LGBTQ issues are a great one for this: LGBTQ people make enough fascist-curious and vulnerable voters uncomfortable enough that they're safe to dogwhistle (we can't say "Jews" just yet).

What will be the acid test is how companies respond: for the last decade, the rainbow dollar has been worth more than the Nazi dollar, and it's important we keep the economic pressure up. Voting is great, but it only happens every four years or so, but you buy stuff every day, and the companies that actually whisper in the ears of the government pay attention when people stop buying their stuff.

So yes, by all means, punch a Nazi when you see one, but also make sure you let the businesspeople who are potentially Nazi-curious because the Nazis are promising tax cuts know that the Nazi dollar is toxic.

You might laugh, but German industrialists were full-throated in their support of Naziism in the 1920s because they saw it as a useful way to increase their wealth, bust trade unionism and suppress Marxism. Naziism didn't start with the gas chambers, it started with things that looked the the Convoy, especially the "backed by business" part. So yeah, boycott companies and burn their social equity when they kowtow to right-wing harassment, and give your explicit support to organizations that are Allies. Make sure that the momentum we all spent decades building doesn't get rolled back.

Side note: something that is going to make this harder is that we've lost a lot of platforms in the last five years: Twitter is now a Nazi bar, Facebook...was never great, Reddit is coming unglued and media consolidation has favoured the right-wing (TorStar sold to a conservative a while back, and is looking to merge with PostMedia). I really hope people wake up and realize we're actually really close to getting kicked back to 1970 in terms of what kind of a voice we have.