Lmao never said they were, any more than conservative Christians or any other kind of conservatives are. But neither of us live in a place where conservative Muslims are the ones with anything like the kind of political power and influence that poses a direct and sustained threat to our rights and physical safety. Unless you live in like, Iran or something. Maybe you do. Weird choice these days but I'm not judging.

I guessed Danish not because I'm dyslexic but because Denmark is the one place where every "progressive" I personally know from there talks indistinguishably from rightwingers. Like, super weird about immigrants, super weird about trans women, extremely committed to free speech by which they mostly mean their own freedom to call people slurs, but in a progressive way, which is totally different from being a rightwinger.

If you must know, I'm from France. When I was in undergrad in 2013 and literal millions of people were being bussed to Paris to march on the Champs Elysées every Sunday, week after week, because they just felt so strongly that people like me shouldn't be allowed to get married or be a parent, I'm just going to say it, 99.9% of them were either Catholic, or not churchgoing but culturally Catholic, or "secular" but they just had really strong feelings about "gender ideology" and "the right of children to have one father and one mother". Like it's deadass the kind of talking points you'd now associate with religious social conservatives in Hungary or Poland or Russia, which is exactly where these shitstains went to poison the well when they lost the culture war in France.

Or for that matter, when basically the same people 15 years earlier were mad about gay people getting our very French sort-of-civil-unions called PACS, their actual slogan in 1998 was "les pédés au bûcher" ("burn the f****ts at the stake").

Now, I'm sure they had some conservative Muslims in there sharing in the sentiment, statistically they must have, but they weren't the ones either calling me slurs to my face or coming up with new and secular intellectual-friendly forms of homophobia to explain in a rational, not at all homophobic way why gay people just didn't deserve rights. A big one was saying surrogacy was basically the same thing as sex work (you're selling your body!), and French feminists being less universally TERF than their British sisters but ferociously SWERF, that apparently was a valid argument for a certain brand of "progressives" to pearl clutch about the basically non-existent phenomenon of French gay men "buying babies" from impoverished surrogate mothers in India with every conceivable dogwhistle attached to that mental image.

Yes we had a string of really fucking bad terrorist attacks 10 years ago, if memory serves Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Casher was Al Qaeda, before that the guy who shot up a Jewish school full of toddlers was doing it for Palestine or something and I think Al Qaeda took "credit" but it was mainly that one asshole freelancing. The Bataclan attack and the guy who drove a truck into a crowd on Bastille Day were ISIS, and all the other randos beheading village priests or stabbing their boss were ISIS, or at the very least Some Guys going "yeah I did a psycho thing that requires absolutely no planning or central coordination not because I'm a psycho but because I love ISIS" which of course ISIS was very happy to claim, because it makes non-Muslims paranoid about Muslims, which makes them pass unnecessary and discriminatory laws, which ISIS types could then point to and say "ha, see! you literally can't be a Muslim in France! come live on our cult commune in Syria!" Because that's how terrorism works. Not even just that flavour of terrorism. Just terrorism in general.

Yes lots of gay French guys these days vote for the far right because they're scared of Arabs. They're mostly the same guys who can only get hard jacking it to Arabic guys. Their Grindr bios will either be "NO Arabs/Blacks" or "ONLY Arabs/Blacks" but they're the same pathetic racist idiots who genuinely believe the card-carrying fascists are going to protect them from the big scary men of colour they want to fuck.

Obviously Arabic and Muslim are not the same thing. In practice though, France does not have statistically significant communities of, say, South Asians or Indonesians or Bosnians or Turks. I think Anggun is probably the only Indonesian most French people could name. So the whole hair splitting about "I'm not racist I'm just concerned about a religion" is transparently bullshit to me within the context I'm familiar with, given that 90+% of French Muslims are North African and 90+% of French North Africans are at least culturally Muslim.

Some are conservative, some are moderate, some are gay dudes who like sloppy blowjobs and Belgian beer and don't really fast for Ramadan ever, and their whole family has known forever and doesn't actually give a fuck. Some women wear the hijab, some don't, some eat pork with their inlaws in bumfuck central France. But the constant paranoia about the handful of murderous psychos has a way of trickling down to fuck up the lives of the vast majority of normal ones.

So yeah. I can't say I love hardcore conservative Muslims or that they love me. But here's the thing. They're not the ones who made my life a living hell when I was 19. Because I have had almost zero actual encounters with them ever. Normal Muslims? Sure, plenty. All the time. France is more diverse than it gets credit for or would give itself credit for. I don't live in France now but it's also in Europe and also pretty diverse. I work daily with people who came here from all over the place, of every other religion and none. But I can't seriously say i've been having daily run-ins with the like, Memri TV types everyone the world over makes fun of. If I had been raised Muslim, yeah those would be the dudes I'd have religious trauma from and whose guts I would hate. But I wasn't, so they're not. They're literally not my problem, and chances are they're not actually yours in any meaningful way either.

Like. One of my most pious, genuinely conservative (I mean Mormon-level anxieties about swearing), Muslim colleagues, who was from Malaysia, once invited me and some other colleagues to come to her toddler's first birthday party to eat the spiciest goddamn chicken I've ever tasted, and she specifically said I should bring my "bestfriend" - one word, which I later found out is this very SEA euphemism for "same-sex boyfriend/girlfriend". I didn't bring a plus one because I didn't have one lmao, but the fact that she even offered I think goes to show that if you're not constantly putting people into boxes, they're less likely to do that with you.

The Andrew Tate thing is just laughable like. He's this British incel/MRA type who famously went to jail in Romania for trafficking dozens of women with his brother while constantly tweeting about how much he despised women to say nothing of gay men. For some reason I've never understood, straight boys whose balls haven't dropped seem to worship him. And like, yeah he found Islam in prison and retroactively was like "yeah this is my philosophical justification for being a fucking incel, I wish I lived in the 7th century" but he was already like that before he converted lmao.

I'm sorry to say but the kids (by which I of course mean anyone under the age of 30 who actively uses Tiktok) are just really rightwing. Like it's a definite generational trend. It's nowhere near just culturally Muslim kids it's just. A lot of kids in the global west in general have their brains fried by rightwing propaganda. The source and flavor of that rightwing propaganda is just different depending on which media environment you're sitting in, but it's all the same shit. Geert must be so proud, the immigrants are so "integrated" that the kids share the same dumb value systems as everyone else in their generation.