Are you an ally? Do you speak and show love toward people who are being silenced?
Create a safe space.
manipulation | məˌnipyəˈlāSHən |
noun
1. the action of manipulating something in a skillful manner: the format allows fast picture manipulation | [count noun] : conscious manipulations of oral language.
2. the action of manipulating someone in a clever or unscrupulous way: there was no deliberate manipulation of visitors’ emotions | [count noun] : he saw through her manipulations.
Why am I writing about manipulation in a blog post?
Have you had somebody who knows you’d never drink Bud Light, Michelin Ultra or IC light point out the Bud Light advertisement in the past few months? Is this a successful advertisement since it has created so much hype? Is this part of AmBev’s long term business plan? Will this impact the buying habits of existing customers? How does this one marketing campaign play into a larger scale social manipulation that we can’t even talk about without spouting pre-programmed talking points. Where did we lose the humanity in conversing about our differing viewpoints without various parties becoming defensive and pulling away from an open conversation.
My response has been standard. Who drinks Bud Light, Miller Light, Natty Light anymore unless their water is polluted? Followed by I guess it’s a really good advertisement if you are talking about it?
I look at this topic being raised to a national level all as part of a bigger narrative that is going on across the globe, just not the United States.
Sometimes exiting a conversation instead of pointing out inaccuracies is the best option, especially when you know what you know and you’re not sure how to tell somebody that they have been manipulated.
Who is doing the manipulation?
Extremist groups are feeding their agenda through television, social media and newsletters. The manipulation they are doing mirrors something called Mirror Propoganda.
The invention of mirror propaganda has been attributed to Joseph Goebbels. Yes that Joseph Goebbels the famed Nazi propagandist. The earliest identified deployments of this technique are by Goebbels and Himmler in 1940s Germany, targeting Jewish people.
Pittsburgh is currently reliving a hateful attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue as the gunman is currently on trial. The details and the trauma of those impacted that day only reinforce the impact on the Jewish community.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/alliance-defending-freedom
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/anti-trans-transphobia-gender-critical-mirror-propaganda/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/anti-trans-anti-abortion-activism-playbook.html
https://time.com/5903931/christian-right-conservative-agenda-europe-report/
He came dangerously close to exposing organised transphobia’s core campaign strategy, something they don’t want people talking about. In collaboration with mainstream media, its main strategy has been to liberally platform anti-trans narratives, hermetically exclude trans perspectives, and at the same time accuse trans people of ‘silencing’ transphobes.
For example, a transphobic group holds a rally somewhere – maybe a couple of dozen transphobes in a draughty church hall. There’s a protest outside. A journalist, with confected faux-indignation, then claims trans people are ‘silencing’ them.
Those claiming to be ‘silenced’ are then featured in every national mainstream media platform, something that caught the ire of Sara Ahmed, an independent academic and former professor of race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths University of London: “Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.”
There is a name for this mechanism of power: ‘mirror propaganda’. Mirror propaganda means doing to your enemies what you are falsely accusing them of doing to you. So the media creates the myth that trans people are silencing anti-trans activists, while the reality is that every major national media outlet in the UK, from The Guardian and The Times to the Mail and BBC, almost never includes any trans voices.
Be kind, listen, become an ally for humanity.
Transphobic rallies often struggle to get attendance into double figures, but mainstream media reaches millions. Our exclusion from the media contrasts with a huge number of anti-trans articles every month – often five or six in the same newspaper on the same day.
In fact, no means exists by which trans people can silence anyone; there are no trans media editors, media CEOs or university vice-chancellors, and precious few trans politicians. There have never been any trans commissioners in the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Yet the media pretends trans people are able to silence anti-trans activists at any time.
This means that for anti-trans activists it has become almost a duty to be faux-silenced. In their hired venues, joint rallies with the far right, online astroturf actions, even in unsuspecting academic publications, they theatrically perform silencing whenever they can to provide material for mirror propaganda.
When you see anyone claiming trans people are silencing them, it’s part of a mirror propaganda operation.
For mirror propaganda to work, you need complete control over mainstream media. It is a hardcore, military-grade propaganda technique now being deployed by some of the most powerful people in the country against one of the smallest minorities. In a situation where mainstream media is entirely one-sided, its writers can no longer be considered ‘journalists’, but propagandists. Those who platform them while excluding those they target are not ‘editors’, they are censors.
Hopefully you made it this far?!? Did you click any of the links? Just think about what is going on instead of joining the parade.