Sowing gender panic on the right. How a far-right party generates moral panic on gender issues and establishes its own "truth"

Gender issues are far from being peripheral in the discourse and ideology of the populist radical right. On the contrary, they are often "trivial and pivotal", because gender and sexuality highlight the major elements of those parties' political messaging, while evoking populism (the "people" vs liberal elites imposing feminism and gender ideologies), authoritarianism (the quest for restoring traditional family and "ordered society"), and the major policy issues (especially anti-immigration policies – defending native women against immigrant men) (see Spierings, 2020). However, nowadays, far-right parties have become particularly active in the digital space, concentrating their mobilisation efforts online while spreading their ideologies and establishing their own version of "truth" on gender. The proposed paper will focus on how the Estonian far-right party EKRE (Conservative People's Party of Estonia) uses various discursive techniques in generating moral panic on gender issues and spreads anti-gender ideology ("truth") on its digital platform "The New News" (Uued Uudised), which is the party's major webzine and news portal. The empirical analysis of the paper is based on a comprehensive text corpus of the "New News", published over the last ten years (2015 – 2025), containing ca. 700 gender-themed articles. First, we will employ the concept of "moral panic" (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994) and analyse how the editors/authors of the platform use various topoi and discursive framing strategies (see Wodak, 2021) in inciting moral panic on gender issues while highlighting the controversial news and borderline incidents across the world (in sports, in education, transgender issues, etc.), and creating an image that the cases like that have become a new (unwanted) "normality". Second, we will explore how the far-right actors on the platform attempt to establish their own "truth" to counter those "harmful tendencies". Here, our preliminary analysis has identified three major strategies: (1) undermining the very foundations of so-called gender ideology while using different discurusive argumentation and framing techniques, but also challenging scientific autorities (the latter has become most evident in the gender wage-gap issue, which is one of the largest in Europe in Estonia, but EKRE constantly tries to downplay the problem and assualts the experts researching the subject); (2) cultivating its own cadre of homegrown intellectuals (nationally well-known writers, conservative public intellectuals, religious activits and thinkers, etc.) who often write columns on gender-related topics; (3) amplifying the "truths" via algorithms – even if the "New News" is a relatively simple online platform, it is still possible to see how some gender-related articles/news get later amplified via EKREs online ecosystem especially on their Facebook groups. The paper seeks to contribute to two strands of scholarship: research on the politics of truth and gender issues within the far-right context. It will demonstrate that EKRE's case is far from unique (see, e.g., Scrinzi, 2025; Santos and Roque, 2021; Dietze and Roth, 2020), and thus we are rather studying a much broader transnational phenomenon here.