Marco Rubio-linked thinktank produces “fascist” anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda

America 2100 — a right-wing thinktank launched by Mike Needham, the former chief of staff of anti-LGBTQ+ Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — has produced videos that promote anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theories.

Some of the thinktank’s videos were produced by Mason Prickett, a man who produced videos for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter and election denialist. The videos are mostly voiced by Nate Hochman, a rightwing political operative who lost a fellowship for recording a friendly conversation with white nationalist antisemite Nick Fuentes. Hochman was fired from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign after he reportedly produced a video featuring neo-Nazi imagery.

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In one America 2100 video entitled “How Pride Month Is Destroying and Replacing American Symbols and Identity,” the narrator claims that “the fundamental purpose of Pride Month” is to replace symbols like the U.S. flag with “new symbols and new traditions to shape a new moral, cultural, and political order.”

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Of course, Pride began as a protest against anti-LGBTQ+ police brutality and institutional queerphobia. It has since morphed into a community celebration of solidarity and social progress despite decades of continued oppression from Republicans and Christian conservatives.

“It’s no coincidence that the customs and symbols of the LGBTQ+ movement are so viscerally offensive to so many,” the narrator adds while showing footage of the drag nuns from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a drag queen reading books to children, a man in a g-string, and queer activist with her breasts exposed.

“It’s meant to scandalize and offend,” the narrator continues. “The Left has to mock, undermine, and delegitimize the old moral code before they can replace it with their own.” The video then compares the LGBTQ+ movement to Chinese communism, claiming that queer people want “every institution” to “bend the knee,” “every building” to “fly the flag,” and “every American” to “affirm the symbols and beliefs of the new order.”

“That is the true meaning of Pride Month,” the video states. “It’s not live and let live. It’s not inclusion. It is the symbol of a revolution.”

In another America 2100 video targeting the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Hochman falsely claims that the national LGBTQ+ advocacy organization has advocated for “pornography in elementary schools, the destruction of women’s sports, and sex changes for children as young as three years old.” None of these things are true, and doctors don’t perform gender-affirming procedures on toddlers.

The video also claims that corporations need a high score on the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI), a measure of companies’ LGBTQ+-inclusive workplace policies and social practices, in order to secure high-dollar loans “to keep them afloat.” This too is a lie: Business loans are based on a company’s solvency, not just inclusivity efforts or public activism.

HRC spokesperson Sam Lau spoke out against the videos, telling The Guardian, “Fascists and authoritarian sympathizers target the Human Rights Campaign and the LGBTQ+ community for the same reason they target people of color, women, immigrants and anyone who doesn’t think and look like them – because they are desperate to cling to power.”

“They know we are the majority and that the American people believe in equality,” Lau added. “[The videos use] inflammatory, false rhetoric to try to demonize our communities and scare us out of public view.”

The aforementioned publication quoted two professors who have specialized in fascist rhetoric as saying that the videos focus on “conspiracy theory motifs … of dark, hidden forces at work behind the scenes” and a “fixation on sexual perversity and demasculinization” that evoke “a glorious, mythic past,” a “utopian vision of a future cleansed of infiltrators and corrupters” and “the complementary narrative of victimization at the hands of degenerates and ‘globalists.’”

Marco Rubio has long opposed same-sex marriage and supports overturning the Supreme Court ruling that legalized it.  He supports Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law that bans LGBTQ+ instruction in schools, has called gay adoption “a social experiment,” and voted against legislation to ban anti-LGBTQ+ employment discrimination.

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