The deadly victory of transgender propaganda

If you won't see it, you can't fight it

The impact of propaganda at its best—that is, at its most effective—depends on our not seeing it for what it is, mistaking it for “news” or “entertainment,” and/or some other content that appears to have no covert intention. Thus disguised, propaganda works far more efficiently, and often for far longer, than when it comes at us as propaganda—as, say, in TV and radio spots, ad banners on the Web, billboards, videos in taxicabs, or any other medium that bluntly sells a product or a candidate. So bald a pitch—known, among the spooks, as “white propaganda”—tends to provoke resistance, as when a telemarketer calls, or a panhandler approaches. By contrast, winning propaganda—as Edward Bernays explains in his eponymous classic (1928)—neutralizes your suspicion by working its “persuasion” into some comic or suspenseful narrative, or journalistic exposé, or (seeming) “fad” or “craze,” so that such “gray propaganda” sneaks past your defenses, lodges in your mind without your knowing it, and stays there until you somehow learn the truth, and—crucially—accept it.

Such truth can hurt, so that accepting it is often difficult—unless, of course, it tells you what you want to think is true. We have no trouble spotting propaganda from “the enemy,” whoever that may be: propaganda that we disagree with, and therefore call it “propaganda” as that word is commonly deployed, as a mere synonym for “lies.” If, on the other hand, the enemy says something true, and (naturally) we want to think it’s false, our dismissing it as “propaganda” in the pejorative sense is itself that very kind of propaganda, meant to have you thinking that true claims are false, and falsehoods true. (Not everyone who does this is aware of what s/he’s doing, but speaks out of wishful thinking, tribalistic and defensive.) If, however, the enemy’s propaganda comes at us disguised as something else—something thrilling, beautiful or fun—we can absorb it just as easily as we often do with propaganda hidden in domestic news or entertainment. (Dr. Goebbels was especially adept at managing that sort of masquerade, such as the films of Leni Riefenstahl, and other spectacles with no explicit hints of pending war or genocide.)

For some time—especially since the birth of “the coronavirus,” although it started years before—we’ve been submerged in propaganda, white and gray, our hearts and minds suffused with it, since it pervades all media, so that it’s largely inescapable (except in prisons, monasteries and convents, Amish communities and, of course, the wilderness), and never stops. This is not the first time we’ve been thus assailed—sharp observers have been noting the ubiquity of advertising in particular since the late 19th century; and, in the Thirties, the permeation of our atmosphere with fascist, communist and New Deal propaganda, among others, prompted much uneasy commentary in the press, and inspired the founding of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis at Columbia, set up to teach the public how to spot such propaganda, and test its claims. (The Organisation for Propaganda Studies, on whose board I’m proud to sit, attempts to follow that example.) Although it’s been a problem since the rise of the commercial press, however, what’s pelting us nonstop today is vastly more sophisticated, and, thanks to the Internet, and “social media” in particular, far more aggressive and contagious, so that it overwhelms us, and misleads us, more than ever in our history, politics and journalism having largely ceased to counter it, or even question it, since it’s now downright dangerous to tell the truth.

Thus beset, we all have trouble seeing through the guise whereby the propaganda infiltrates our minds, and conquers them, much as the Trojans couldn’t see the Greeks concealed in that big wooden horse. Some of us are quicker than others to catch on, while some never do; but if “COVID” has taught us anything, it’s that winning propaganda can fool even the very savviest among us, at least initially, and sometimes fatally. Vince Salandria, the heroically perceptive student of the JFK assassination (he knew from the start that the official story was absurd) as well as 9/11, fell hard for the “coronavirus” scare, masking so religiously that, in the summer heat of Philadelphia, he dropped dead while briskly walking his dog. And I myself have likewise fallen for deft propaganda lies. After (credulously) watching An Inconvenient Truth, and a lot—too much—of “Democracy Now!”, it took me years to realize that the threat posed by man-made “climate change” is just as bogus as “the virus,” and that Al Gore and Amy Goodman were (and still are) propagandists serving elite interests, intent on our total deprivation. I also had to learn that vaccination has been wildly oversold, and that that “cure” is vastly worse than the disease—by design, in furtherance of our near-extinction. These examples of belated understanding teach the urgency of spotting propaganda, and then looking into it, to determine if its claims, or implications, are the truth, or partly true, or just another lie.

Now let’s take another elite propaganda drive whose purpose is obscured by its disguise. This drive is one that I did not fall for at first; although, at first, I didn’t know it was a propaganda drive, but thought it just a “natural” expression of egalitarian concern, although it seemed to me that there was something odd—some might say “warped”—about it.

I got my first snootful of this propaganda back in 2014 (the year of the CIA’s “Maidan Revolution,” another propaganda coup disguised as something else), when the women’s prison drama Orange Is the New Black was in its second season as a Netflix sensation, in part because of the voluptuous Laverne (born Roderick) Cox, who shot to sudden fame not so much for her acting (which was fine) as for herself—a real trans woman playing a trans woman (Sophia Burset, doing time for credit card fraud) and otherwise advocating non-stop for “trans rights”: “Cox’s role in Orange Is the New Black provides her a platform [sic] to speak on the rights of trans people,” notes Wikipedia, casting her as a sort of Rosa Parks: “Cox was the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award,” and then, in June of 2014, “Cox became the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine,” which—like all the media spotlighting her—treated her celebrity as comparable to the Montgomery bus boycott, or the march on Washington in 1963: “THE TRANSGENDER TIPPING POINT: America’s next civil rights frontier,” read that cover:

Wikipedia goes on to add that Cox “is the first transgender person to appear on the cover of a Cosmopolitan magazine,” and “also the first openly transgender person to have a wax figure of herself at Madame Tussauds.” We also learn that, in October of 2014, Cox furthered her campaign (or was used to further it) with Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word, an hour-long documentary about herself and others like her, executive-produced by herself, and narrated by herself, and which premiered on both MTV and Logo (both owned by Paramount).

The Wikipedia entry was, of course, a retrospective bio, written some years after my first views of Cox, primarily in Orange, and then on the cover of Time, and, subsequently, many other glossy magazines—a multitude of glamorous cover-shots that, back then, struck me as indicating merely that Laverne Cox was a simple fad among the liberal editors of all those magazines, of which the following are just a few:

In 2015, Cox’s one-trans-woman campaign to defend “the rights of trans people” was quietly enhanced by the limited release (only in New York and LA) of The Danish Girl (2015), a sombre indie drama (very) loosely based on the marriage, in 1920’s Copenhagen, of the Danish painters Einar (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander), husband and wife—until Einar, turned on by his experience posing for his wife in women’s clothes, finds that he’s a woman, too, albeit one trapped in his willowy male body. The film follows Einar’s transformation into “Lili,” who roams the streets and haunts the social scene in drag, miserably confused and ever more intent on undergoing sex reassignment surgery, at the time a new and very risky process, which—SPOILER ALERT!—finally kills him.

Although the film offers a subtle and ambiguous portrayal of Einar/Lili’s peculiar (narcissistic) agony, and Gerda’s desperation to hold on to her husband, yet also to help him find herself, The Danish Girl ends with an epilog that bluntly tags it as “movement” propaganda. Noting that Lili’s diaries served as the basis of Man Into Woman, a memoir posthumously published in 1933, the producers end rather jarringly with this upbeat salute: “Her bravery and pioneering spirit remain an inspiration for today’s transgender movement.”

Gerda (out of focus) paints a portrait of Lili looking at herself:

Back then, Cox’s glamorous ubiquity, and The Danish Girl, struck me as indications that transgenderism was merely gaining traction as the latest, most exotic push for civil rights, just as Time defined it. I felt the same about the large full-color photos of LGBT youth appearing on the windows of vacant stores, with no explanation, and, in the taxis, a video montage of such youth telling us how “proud” they are. (“We are the future,” said one of them—an impossible claim, if you think about it.) Such displays were unsurprising in New York City under Democratic rule, Mayor Bill de Blasio serving as the “wokest” mayor in the Big Apple’s history.

It was soon very clear, however, that all this hoo-ha over what Cox called “the T word” did not spring from mere hyper-liberal sentiment throughout the media, and in the city’s government, but evidenced a full-blown propaganda drive entailing far more than the rise of Laverne Cox, and, perhaps, The Danish Girl.

In November of 2019—ten minutes to midnight, one might say—Coca-Cola aired “Orgullo” (“Pride”), an epic TV spot for Sprite in Argentina, featuring a series of older kin tenderly helping their teenaged kids (pre-surgically) “transition.”