Jay Ulfelder

In late 2022, I guessed that the surge in anti-LGBTQ+ right-wing protests we saw in the summer and fall of last year would ebb after the elections. Over the past few years, right-wing protests have tended to cycle through focal issues every few months, and I figured that 2022’s flurry of actions targeting the broader queer community was, for the most part, an instrument organizers were using to try to mobilize voters for the midterms. I was wrong.

In 2022, Crowd Counting Consortium recorded more than 5,700 right-wing protests, counter-protests, rallies, demonstrations, and direct actions across nearly 1,650 different U.S. cities and towns, where “right-wing” includes everything from Republican partisan rallies to demonstrations by alt-right and far-right extremists. This post summarizes a number of patterns and trends we gleaned from those events.

In 2022, the American right has sharply escalated its attacks on gay and transgender people and the broader queer community. This escalation shows up in the Crowd Counting Consortium’s data as a steep and sustained increase in the rate of right-wing demonstrations pushing anti-LGBTQ+ claims.