The Kremlin’s LGBT Smokescreen: How the Radical Right Fell for Russia’s Trap
Moral panics about LGBT people aren’t new. They’re a weapon — dusted off, polished, sharpened, repurposed, and redeployed for every new generation with alarming efficiency. For decades, reactionaries have painted gay, bi, and trans people as threats to children, from Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in the 1970s to the AIDS-era hysteria that conflated homosexuality with predation. Today, social media turbocharges this old paranoia, with Russia acting as a key amplifier — just as it has before. During the Cold War, the KGB’s “active measures” spread fabricated stories about Western governments supporting apartheid and genocide, seeking to sow division and weaken alliances. That same strategy is being used to deepen fractures over LGBT rights. In the recent backlash against sexual freedom, the radical right has been only too enthusiastic to play their role, even as they remain unaware that it is, in fact, a role. Convinced they are fighting a globalist plot, right-wing populists have fallen headlong into a trap. In their frenzied crusade to “embrace tradition”, they have not defended Western civilisation, as they think — they have become Moscow’s unwitting pawns.
For years, cultural conservatives railed against the political left for its grievance-seeking, hypersensitivity to offence, and rigid ideological conformity, and rightly so. Yet in a cruel twist of irony, radical elements on the right have become a distorted reflection of what they once opposed. This new "woke right" movement is just as brittle, sanctimonious, and allergic to reason as its leftist counterpart. Worse still, in their fevered battle against perceived “degeneracy” and cultural decline, they have unknowingly become foot soldiers of a hostile foreign power: Russia. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the right-wing obsession with LGBT issues.
At the heart of being “woke” lies the belief that one has "awakened" to a hidden reality — a system of oppression operating beneath the surface of society. Left-wing activists claim to have unveiled an omnipresent structure of white supremacy, systemic bigotry, and colonialist cultural hegemony. The radicalised right, in turn, has conjured a similarly fantastical worldview, albeit in reverse. They believe in an omnipotent conspiracy infiltrating every institution, engineering mass immigration, moral depravity, and so-called “gender ideology” to corrode Western civilisation from within. LGBT rights, in their minds, are not about dignity or equality but a sinister ploy to indoctrinate children and dismantle society.
In this fever dream, shadowy elites orchestrate the erasure of their culture. It’s no coincidence that on the political right, views of Russia have warmed in recent years. Indeed, Russia has emerged in the minds of many right-wing culture warriors as the last bastion of Christianity and tradition, heroically resisting a NATO-backed, globalist-controlled cabal. Some on the Western right have even emigrated to Russia for this very reason. When Russia invades its neighbors or violates the airspace of NATO members, many on the right can register only bemusement. This is not conservatism; it is hysteria. And it plays directly into the hands of the Kremlin.
Russia does not promote a single ideology; it foments discord. It cares little whether its disinformation fuels radical leftism or reactionary extremism — so long as the West is left weakened and divided. Its goal is provocation, not persuasion; arson, not argument. Russia cannot invent Western culture wars out of whole cloth. They identify points of pre-existing division and exploit them. And in this, they have been devastatingly successful. For years, the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency has meticulously stoked both sides of the American racial divide, creating fake Black Lives Matter pages while amplifying white nationalist rhetoric. It turned COVID-19 vaccines into a battleground, spreading both anti-vaccine conspiracies and pro-Russian narratives about Sputnik V. The Kremlin does not pick sides; it picks wounds and infects them. Western culture wars are simply its latest arena of operation. Where the radical left has been conditioned to view Western civilisation as irredeemably oppressive, the radical right has been groomed to see every progressive reform as part of a vast subversive plot. Neither side engages in rational discourse; both merely react. And in doing so, they become marionettes in Moscow’s theatre of division.
The Kremlin has long sought to position itself as the vanguard of “traditional values”, and its domestic policy reflects this. The State Duma’s expansion of its “LGBT propaganda” ban is not simply a repressive measure — it is a blueprint for the cultural warfare it exports abroad. Domestically, the anti-LGBT conspiracy theories have gone mainstream among the Russian people. And after years of amplifying American culture wars, they have taken root among Russia’s greatest adversaries. In the US, the populist right he right now flails wildly at imaginary "groomers", "deep-state” agents, and demonic predators.
In 2024, a federal indictment revealed that the Russian state media company RT covertly paid far-right commentators to disseminate pro-Kremlin content, including anti-LGBT narratives. Russian-backed Telegram channels have spread fabricated stories about the threat of LGBT people. The watchdog group EUvsDisinfo has documented an extensive pattern of Kremlin-backed disinformation targeting LGBT rights, portraying them as a symptom of Western decline. Groups like "Gays Against Groomers" have latched onto this moral panic, perpetuating the baseless notion that LGBT individuals are inherently linked to child abuse — a grotesque falsehood that has been debunked time and again. Yet it persists, poisoning discourse, ruining lives, and fuelling violence. This is not a victimless game. The consequences are real.
LGBT people have long been scapegoats in times of social unrest, and Russia has weaponised this tradition of persecution for its own ends. The rise in homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic attitudes and attacks in the West cannot be divorced from the Kremlin’s disinformation machine. When a narrative is spread that LGBT individuals are predators, that they are indoctrinating children, that they are threats — it’s only a matter of time before such rhetoric spills into real-world violence. People are harassed, ostracised, beaten, even killed. Families are torn apart. Lives are destroyed.
Meanwhile, those who claim to be the defenders of Western civilisation seem not to notice that they are the ones burning it down from within. The radical right’s infatuation with Russian propaganda has weakened Western resolve in Ukraine, turned once-principled conservatives into apologists for Vladimir Putin’s war crimes, and emboldened every despot who seeks to erode democracy. The great irony of our time is that those who proclaim themselves the most ardent defenders of the West have become its greatest internal danger. They are not preserving civilisation; they are dismantling it, brick by brick. Not out of treachery, but because they have credulously fallen for a trap so perfectly disguised as patriotism that they cannot see the chains being placed around them.
There is no patriotism in being Moscow’s useful idiots. There is no honour in blind, unthinking reactionism. And there is no future for the West if its so-called protectors, in their desperate bid to fight left-wing excess, succumb to extremism themselves. As Abraham Lincoln once said, a house divided against itself cannot stand.
If these troubling and illiberal trends are to be reversed, moderate conservatives must take a stand against the Russification of the Western right. Genuine patriots cannot allow Russian propaganda to hijack their cause. Social media platforms must not fall asleep at the switch. And those concerned with defending human rights must be vigilant in exposing the disinformation that fuels anti-LGBT manias.
This is not a time for complacency. One of the West’s greatest adversaries has its tendrils burrowed deeply within it, whispering in our ears, stoking the fires under our institutions, and laughing as we turn on each other.
Published Sep 10, 2025
