“For an authoritarian state, this coronavirus is paradise,” warned an unnamed Western diplomat in Moscow, where police are now deploying controversial facial-recognition tools to catch people violating movement restrictions.

Neo-Nazis are warming to the crisis too. “Now is the time to push when things are already teetering on the edge”, argued a recent Telegram post, openly discussing how to use it to recruit people to violent white supremacy.

“In quarantine, we’re all tradwives”

Donald Trump’s religious conservative supporters have found reasons to delight in coronavirus restrictions, too. Many are celebrating the ‘return’ of women to their homes and to ‘traditional’ gendered roles.

“It’s just the way God intended it to be”, argued Lori Alexander, author of a Christian conservative blog that teaches women to “be sober, love and obey their husbands”, and who has defended Trump’s behaviour and “nasty tweets” by arguing “God works through sinful, fallen man”.

About the COVID-19 crisis she celebrated on Facebook: “The virus is clearly showing the great value there is to having mothers at home.”

“In quarantine, we’re all tradwives”, added Amber Athey, Washington editor of the right-wing Spectator magazine, encouraging more women to take up “homemaking skills” like cleaning and sewing. “Hopefully,” she says, some of these “traditional values” will stick with us beyond this emergency.

“Let’s stay at home and have a baby!” cheered the Italian ultra-conservative ProVita & Famiglia group. (This group co-hosted the controversial World Congress of Families summit in Veronal last year, which brought international religious conservatives together with many of their far-right allies).

For these ‘traditional values’ movements there is, of course, no space in families for LGBTIQ people, or for anyone who lives outside strict gender roles. And in recent years their views have been increasingly echoed by authoritarians and far-right populists across the world.

In Verona last year, Salvini mocked feminists and promised to ​“fight the theory of gender until it changes.” Brazil’s openly sexist President Jair Bolsonaro once told a congresswoman: “I would never rape you because you do not deserve it”. In Russia this month, Vladimir Putin promised: “As long as I’m president [gay marriage] will not happen. There will be Dad and Mum.”

Today’s crisis is giving these ‘traditionalists’ new optimism – and power. Take for example how they’ve celebrated the delay of crucial women’s rights debates. “Coronavirus may have just saved countless preborn babies in Maryland,” read one headline after an abortion rights bill was withdrawn.

“They wanted to legalise death and death came to visit them,” tweeted a conservative politician in Argentina, where the coronavirus crisis has stalled historic promises from the president to legalise abortion.

Anti-choice activists were similarly “thrilled” that an abortion referendum in Gibraltar was postponed. And in the US and the UK, some are demanding that governments “halt abortions to free up resources for coronavirus”.

Conservatives are also seizing the initiative by providing services that are suddenly in high demand. In the US, the Home School Legal Defense Association (which has lobbied for years against same-sex marriage as well as any public regulation of homeschooling) has recently launched a ‘quick start’ guide to homeschooling during the coronavirus crisis.

Its online academy, taught by “Bible-believing Christians”, doesn’t appear to offer any form of sex and relationships education, and teaches students biology from an anti-evolution “Young Earth Creationist view”. Unsurprisingly, its new quick start guide points includes links to free online curricula that appear to include no mention whatsoever of LGBT people or women’s rights.

“It really isn’t the end of the world,” says a blogpost on the website of a linked ‘parental rights’ campaign, which also opposes smacking bans and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Under current COVID-19 restrictions, the website cheers, “family has once again become the centre of everything”.

A global ‘corona-coup’

Across the world, we’re seeing sudden and sweeping restrictions on democratic freedoms. Our movements are increasingly controlled. Public gatherings have been banned; states of emergency declared; legislative debates postponed and a growing number of parliaments suspended.

Globally governments are ramping up digital surveillance. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has just won new dictatorial powers, to indefinitely ignore laws and suspend elections and referenda. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enacted an emergency decree preventing parliament from convening, in what the Haaretz newspaper has dubbed a “corona-coup.”