Structures of violence and oppression – as well as specific sociopolitical outbursts or projects that stand out in the scale and intensity of their brutality (from lynchings and pogroms to full systems of apartheid and/or genocide) – rely on the systematic dehumanization of certain groups (usually marginalized, but not necessarily). This process of ideological and cultural socialization isn’t limited to the media: for example the family, religious practices/institutions and school/primary education are even more fundamental in shaping people’s worldview and cognitive/interpretative predispositions than whatever one reads in newspapers or online. Nor is it solely about dehumanization, e.g. the cult and culture of authority – i.e. legitimizing relations and norms wherein certain individuals, groups and institutions hold supreme domination and power over people’s lives and agency – is just as important. But the way dehumanizing narratives, framings, rhetoric, etc are produced, diffused and “consumed”, is still a key part of this overall sociocultural propaganda (or production/reproduction) that rationalizes and provokes violence and oppression.
I choose to call it reactionary propaganda in a loose/broad sense in order to prevent the depoliticizing effect of more abstract/sociological/seemingly neutral terms like cultural/ideological ‘production/reproduction’ and ‘socialization’. This also reveals something that’s rarely acknowledged in mainstream discourses and perceptions: the social, political and cultural status quo – as opposed to fringe outstandingly barbarous elements such as Nazis – in modern society is itself the main root and source of processes of dehumanization and the atrocities those enable. In a more straightforward sense, the existing order is in many ways just as reactionary – or far right – as extremist forces that are singled out as extraordinarily monstrous in hegemonic political categorizations/conceptions. Here I focus mainly on the production and propagation of such dehumanizing ideology through and by specific political and media actors/discourses. But it’s important to always bring it back to the broader sociological context (which for instance isn’t limited to the micro or meso levels, but has a structural dimension).
From a sociological point of view, it’s important to add that this doesn’t mean the media cause such systematic attacks on specific social groups. Indeed, this would be denying or minimizing the social and cultural underpinnings of reactionary/violent/chauvinist ideology. But what the media is overwhelmingly responsible for is contributing to the framing of certain socio-political issues, and the depiction and shaping of the public image of certain groups (or even individuals). And in that way they both reinforce/validate/amplify existing forms of dehumanization and social violence, and provide new tools for the specific actors trying to use them for their own gains and radicalize their audience/base.
Studies have consistently shown that the media (newspapers, television or radio news, online platforms, etc.) has significantly contributed to the dehumanization of migrants, including through the generalization of these eurocentric categories that “symbolize state-regulated relations of governance and difference”, as Harsha Walia put it in her book Border and Rule. See the studies concerning Switzerland (other study), Canada, the UK, the USA/France/Norway, and the European public. And needless to say, this is by no means a new phenomenon.
This process of dehumanization and brutalization is of course rooted in a failure – nay, a refusal – to problematize and analyze critically the system that violently differentiates the value of human life based on state citizenship/non-citizenship, nationalism and the global border regime. It’s unsurprising that some of the most virulent forms of xenophobia happen in Europe and Western/Global North countries, from which not only the (post)colonial structuration of the world but also this logic of chauvinist and statist categorization and separation of human life, originated.
Europe’s borders, like all borders, are the materialisations of socio-political relations that mediate the continuous production of the distinction between the putative “inside” and “outside,” and likewise mediate the diverse mobilities that are orchestrated and regimented through the production of that spatial divide. Thus, with respect to the abundant inequalities of human mobility, the borders of “Europe” are simultaneously entangled with a global (postcolonial) politics of race that redraws the proverbial colour line and refortifies “European”-ness as a racial formation of whiteness, and a comparably global (neoliberal) politics of transnational labour mobility and capitalist labour subordination that produces such spatialised (and racialised) differences, above all, to capitalise upon them.
Nicholas De Genova (2016) The “Crisis” of the European Border Regime: Towards a Marxist Theory of Borders.
There’s nothing self-evident about ‘illegal’ migration. When borders become a spectacle of migrant deaths, discourses of migrants’ ‘victimisation’ by ‘smugglers’ distract us from the real causes of migrant illegalisation.
Nicholas De Genova (2015, May 20) The border spectacle of migrant ‘victimisation’
Xenophobic propaganda in The Daily Telegraph, Tuesday, July 18 2023. This rightwing Australian tabloid is owned by News Corp.
April 18 2023 cover of the Serbian tabloid Informer, which is backed by far-right president Aleksandar Vučić’s regime. They spew constant ethno-nationalist and racist sensationalism/propaganda against Albanians, Bosniaks, and Kosovans. [Source: Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura’s tweet; Nedad Memić’s tweet]
During the horrendous wildfires in Greece from July to early September 2023, Pavlos Roufos pointed out the danger of fascistic narratives becoming predominant in public discourse and media:
While the police and fire department have officially declared that this wildfire was caused by lightning, the prevailing narrative is that migrants started the fires. This propaganda is spreading faster and wider than the fire itself.
Likewise, and in part related to this demonization of (non-white) migrants, for more than a decade activists, journalists and scholars alike have highlighted how Muslims and Islam have been depicted negatively – both as an internal and an external “threat” – in Western media (see here (full report) for the UK, and here for the US). Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi of the Citations Needed podcast also analyzed the role of Hollywood in the dehumanization of Muslims after 9/11. As Adam said in the first part of the series:
Along with American news media’s constant fearmongering over scary Muslims lurking in the shadows (…) a major pillar propping up this moral pretext is pop culture — namely the cultural products coming out of Hollywood. Our decades-long War on Terror would no doubt be much more difficult to sustain without a constant reminder from television and film that, despite the fact that the average American is more likely to be killed by vending machines than a terrorist attack, the threat of Islamic terrorism remains ever-present and existential, marked by an inevitable clash of civilizations devoid of context or notion that the U.S. is a primary driver of violence across the globe.
- Episode 113: Hollywood and Anti-Muslim Racism (Part I) — Action and Adventure Schlock. Links: pod/transcript.
- Episode 114: Hollywood and Anti-Muslim Racism (Part II) — Oscar-Bait Imperialism. Links: pod/transcript.
- Episode 115: Anti-Muslim Racism in Hollywood (Part III) — How the Pentagon & CIA Sponsor American Mythmaking. Links: pod/transcript.
Moral (and other) panics constitute a particularly violent and dangerous form of this kind of reactionary phenomenon, and although some examples of it do represent “extraordinary” situations or escalations, arguably they are far more common and a recurring (if not defining) part of the fluctuations of political and cultural life. This page created by Katie Lottermoser, Rowan Queathem, Max Tetrick, is a useful resource on the sociology of moral panics in the U.S. context.
In his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen (…) defined a moral panic as the following:
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough but suddenly appears in the limelight (Cohen 1972:9).
Since Cohen’s book on moral panics, more scholars continue to expand on this work. For example, McRobbie and Thornton (1995) claim that creating moral panics has become the way in which the media presents the public with everyday events. They state that politicians and businesses alike use faulty logic to appeal to the public’s emotions which, in turn, serves their political and corporate agendas. This manipulation of moral panics leads to moral entrepreneurship: When a group claims that it knows the cause of and best solution for a societal issue (Critcher 2003). The media also play a role in such manipulation. They create a signification spiral in which they associate different social problems and raise alarm in the public (Hall et al. 1978). In a signification spiral, the media reduce deviant people to an easily recognizable–and often disturbing–image to create a scapegoat for a social issue. The link between moral panics and deviant subcultures is strong because many moral panics center around the creation of a caricature of a given subculture; a caricature that is often misinformed and that instills fear of the subculture into the public consciousness (Ben-Yehuda 1986).
In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the public reaction to the phenomenon of mugging in the UK and theorized that the “rising crime rate equation” performs an ideological function relating to social control. Crime statistics, in Hall’s view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes; moral panics could thereby be ignited to create public support for the need to “police the crisis”. [Wiki] We can see a similar phenomenon with the propaganda against the homeless in the U.S., cf. Citations Needed:
- Episode 85: Incitement Against the Homeless (Part I) — The Infestation Rhetoric of Local News. Links: pod/transcript.
- Episode 86: Incitement Against the Homeless (Part II) — The Exterminationist Rhetoric of Fox News. Links: pod/transcript.
- Episode 173: How to Sell Police Crackdowns on Homeless People to Liberals. Links: pod/transcript.
One of the famous examples of a moral panic was the Satanic Panic, or as Robert Evans called it, “America’s first QAnon”. Twitter polymath @yungneocon used it as an example to further define panics in sociological terms:
The Satanic Panic, like previous sex, youth, religious, moral, demographic, and related panics, are a result of this political process of contestation, the confrontation or conflicting worldviews & social groups, & reactions to underlying social change.
The satanic panic in the 80s/90s like the Pizzagate & Groomer panics now, aside from being the result of opportunistic actors, are the result of certain social groups seeing social change alongside declassification of certain things & reclassification of others as abuse.
In the 80s or 90s, for example, single parenthood, non traditional families or secular & liberal upbringing stopped being seen as abuse, at least for many groups & the law, while other things, like spanking or tight knit religious communities or violent gender norms, now were The baby boomers and hippie generations came of age alongside the new religious fundamentalists, labor market, media & cultural changes were irreversible, children spent more time in school, parents in labor markets & less time in religious education or parochial home life
Therapy, self help, and self esteem culture had been spread to the masses by media and the rest, and therapy became a dominant idiom. Religious fundamentalists became a powerful cultural & political force just as many of their underlying goals became impossible.
Criminalization, drug hysteria, and youth culture had ballooned (ironically just as violence rates began to fall). Suburbanization & white flight had reached new peaks and social alienation grew. Mass media & television penetrated more places than ever before.
Satanic, occult, new age and spiritualist symbolism pervaded culture, largely as a byproduct or Americas religious & individualist past (even as these were seemingly against them), and NRMs, cults, sects, revivals & counter cultures had recently been in the media.
Obsession with serial killers and so on had become common, conservative & reactionary slasher films were paradigmatic, and so on. All of a sudden the Satanic Panic starts to look not only explicable but over determined.
Panics aren’t always based on completely fictitious issues. For example, sexual violence against young people – children, teens and young adults – is a massive problem, part of the largely unquestioned social domination of adults and of course inherently based on cisheteropatriarchy. For example, in the case of the USA, the latest NIBRS[1] report – data on criminal offenses in 2019 collected by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program – shows that a staggering two-thirds of sex offenses were done against children and teenagers (<20yo). Knowing that sexual violence is hugely undereported (not to mention unsanctioned, unpunished, and so on), this is genuinely devastating, even if it’s not surprising (and obviously we could say more about this, looking at gender, racism, and so on).
| Crimes Against Persons: Types of Offense | Total Victims | Age | ||||||
| 10 and Under | 11-15 | 16-20 | 21-25 | 26-30 | 31-35 | 36-40 | ||
| Assault Offenses | 1,736,992 | 60,686 | 108,978 | 179,038 | 228,047 | 241,991 | 209,286 | 177,336 |
| Homicide Offenses | 7,495 | 346 | 120 | 915 | 1,061 | 1,083 | 820 | 730 |
| Human Trafficking Offenses | 1,246 | 48 | 283 | 323 | 125 | 103 | 58 | 59 |
| Kidnapping /Abduction | 25,445 | 2,758 | 1,702 | 3,209 | 3,855 | 3,755 | 2,881 | 2,508 |
| Sex Offenses | 121,331 | 24,914 | 33,098 | 22,174 | 10,651 | 7,770 | 5,988 | 4,779 |
This specific table is copied from here.
But the only thing panics against child abuse have done up to this point is to give a free pass to the real perpetrators of such atrocious violence – the parents, family members/adult caretakers, close relatives, parents’ friends, authority figures in the central sites/institutions where kids socialize… – and find a group of the population to make a scapegoat out of. In other words, they’ve done nothing but hinder the fight for justice. Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail studied the “media manufacturing of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ crisis” in the UK. While there are undeniably some legitimate problems of patriarchal sexual violence and exploitation, child abuse and so on, within British South Asian communities – specific social relations that need to be examined as such (obviously by centering the needs/voices/safety of the actual victims – who are most likely largely part of these same social/demographic groups) instead of using and distorting the real facts as a way to scapegoat whole minorities -, needless to say this was (and is) simply a racist campaign of dehumanization, serving as the “construction of a [new] racial crime threat” in the form of the “Asian sex gang predator”, in order to incite violence against people from those communities.
The question(s) of human trafficking and fears about sexual exploitation and kidnappings/abductions, is similarly messy. I can’t address those topics at length here (and I need more time for reading, research and so on), because there’s a whole lot to talk about, but I recommend checking out the work of Michael Hobbes/Sarah Marshall, Elizabeth Bernstein, Ine Vanwesenbeeck, Jo Goodey, Janie Chuang as a starting point. The renewed global concern about “human trafficking” (as opposed to drug, arms, etc trafficking) emerged during the late 1980’s and the 1990’s in the context “increased population movements in the wake of war, civil conflict and, in Central and Eastern Europe, the fall of communism; events which were often accompanied by the illegal movement of people and exploitation of vulnerable populations at the hands of organized crime” (Goodey). Largely ignoring labour trafficking and exploitation which are a much bigger “trafficking” problem in terms of scale, “it has been the far less common instances of sexually trafficked women and girls that have stimulated the most concern by conservative Christians, prominent feminist activists, and the press” (Bernstein). As Bernstein writes:
evangelical and feminist anti-trafficking activism has been fueled by a shared commitment to carceral paradigms of gender justice (a notion that I develop as “carceral feminism”) and to militarized humanitarianism as the preeminent mode of engagement by the state.
(…) Various commentators have also noted the similarities between the moral panic surrounding sex trafficking in the current moment and the so-called “white slavery” scare in the postbellum years of the nineteenth century (Saunders 2005; Soderlund 2005; Agustín 2007). While this earlier wave of concern engaged a similar coalition of “new abolitionist” feminists and evangelical Christians, it is interesting to note that, prior to the Progressive era, the goal of eradicating prostitution had not seemed particularly urgent to either group. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, as tensions mounted over migration, urbanization, and the social changes being wrought by industrial capitalism, narratives of the traffic in women and girls for sexual slavery abounded. Though empirical investigations would eventually reveal the white slavery narrative to be largely without factual base (the evidence suggested that large numbers of women were not, in fact, forced into prostitution, other than by economic conditions) anti–white slave crusaders were nevertheless successful in spurring the passage of a series of red-light abatement acts, as well as the 1910 Mann-Elkins White Slavery Act, which brought the nation’s first era of widespread, commercialized prostitution to a close.
During the past decade, the term “trafficking” has once again been made synonymous with not only forced but also voluntary prostitution, while an earlier wave of political struggles for both sex workers’ and migrants’ rights has been eclipsed. According to observers both laudatory and critical, this displacement has been facilitated by the embrace of a certain version of human rights discourses by abolitionist feminists, who effectively neutralized domains of political struggle around questions of labor, migration, and sexual freedom via the tropes of prostitution as gender violence and sexual slavery. The shift to the human rights field in the mid-1990s was crucial to relocating a set of internecine political debates among feminists about the meaning of prostitution and pornography—one that had divided the U.S. feminist movement throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and in which the nonabolitionist factions were emerging triumphant—to a global humanitarian terrain in which the abolitionist constituency was more likely to prevail. As one of the founding members of the feminist NGO, Equality Now, described it to me, by resituating these issues in terms of the “traffic in women” overseas and as a violation of international commitments to women’s human rights, they were able to wage the same sexual battles unopposed.
And Vanwesenbeeck who adds the following takeaway:
The radical feminist position that sex work is, by definition, a form of violence against women has grown into the proposition that all sex work is, by definition, a form of trafficking. Sex work policies have been reduced to morality-based policies against trafficking, with ample attention to restrictions on migration. Anti-trafficking politics target prostitution as the problem, not the concrete problems and inequalities in and behind prostitution that lead to sexual violence and (labor) exploitation in their many forms As much as “the trafficking problem,” use of the phrase “the prostitution problem” contributes, in its negativity, one-sidedness, and lack of nuance, to unrealistic cultural myths about sex work. There is, however, nothing mythical about the actual exploitation and abuse of women (and men) in sex work. But framing the whole industry as “the problem” is fueling stigma and its consequences. It forecloses effective strategies to fight exploitation and assist its victims. Dottridge (2017), an ex-director of Anti-Slavery International, makes this point on the framing of sex work as Modern Slavery: “The types of exploitation implied by Modern Slavery encourage many government officials to stop paying attention to conventional techniques for protecting workers such as regulation, workplace inspections, and trade unions. By creating the impression that they are helpless slaves who need rescuing from the hands of criminals, they propagate a myth that all informal work that helps migrants to survive is illicit and should be prohibited, thereby denying migrants the lifeline on which they often depend.” Demonstrably effective strategies to fight and prevent labor exploitation in sex work, encompass full decriminalization, community building integration, and collective governance (cf. Amnesty International, 2016; Östergren, 2017; Vanwesenbeeck, 2017; Wagenaar et al., 2017). And any effective fight against exploitation should involve the workers themselves, not dismiss them. Fortunately and increasingly, sex workers do claim voice and will not let themselves be silenced any longer (e.g., GAATW, 2018; Mgbako, 2016; Stevenson & Dziuban, 2018). Hundreds of organizations worldwide are now members of the umbrella Global Network of Prostitution Projects and a couple dozen more are estimated to operate more or less independently. Sex workers’ migration networks have also been formed (Hwang, 2017). The representation of the sex worker movement in policy making is hampered by a notion of prostitution as “the” problem. Sex workers should not be seen as part of the problem but be acknowledged as essential and valuable partners in the solution.
Panics about trafficking rely on pretty shocking misinformation and false tropes/misconceptions that miss the fact that sexual trafficking, just like rape and child sexual abuse, is primarily and overwhelmingly done not by violent strangers and thugs in dark alleys (although of course that exists too), but as previously mentioned, by parents/adult caretakers, as well as close relatives or other adults in parent’s and kid’s immediate social environment/circles (e.g. neighbors, parent’s friends or colleagues visiting, authority figures at church, etc).
Human trafficking is not children being kept in sea trains, and it is not children being kidnapped off the street being forced to live a life of sexual servitude under the thumb of a random stranger who becomes their trafficker. It is important to realize that, generally, human traffickers and pimps tend to groom and lure their victims over a span of time, and often this grooming is accomplished over the internet. Stealing a victim or kidnapping someone for purposes of trafficking is too risky of a proposition, and in most cases, victims are recruited, manipulated, and eventually made to be 100 percent dependent on their trafficker after a period of grooming takes place. Statistics indicate that abduction for the purpose of forcing someone into human trafficking is not very common. It is commonly stated that a vast majority of human trafficking victims are runaways. Some statistics say up to 95 percent of victims come from this sort of situation.
…The reality of what human trafficking actually looks like on the Central Coast is not crime syndicates or organized crime rings operating at our supermarkets or shopping centers, and it is not online furniture retailers selling children using some sort of secret code. It is not kids being kept in shipping containers or children being snatched up from under our noses on our main streets.
The reality is the same here locally as it is across the country – local Americans are buying Americans for their sexual gratification, and the market here is thriving. Our neighbors, friends, and perhaps family members are paying for sex with exploited humans. They are buying sex from trafficked adults and trafficked children. As evidenced by a recent case where a 15-year-old runaway was being trafficked on the Central Coast, it should be clear that there is a clear and present demand for sex with child sex trafficking victims locally; otherwise, that 15-year-old would not have been trafficked here in the first place. That is and should be the shocking reality of what sex trafficking looks like here locally as well as across the country. It is not a rumor, innuendo, or conspiracy theory. It is a fact that exploited children, as well as adults, are being sold to our neighbors, co-workers, and friends on a regular basis.
[source]
Not only does mainstream/”centrist” media reproduce the dehumanization of oppressed social groups and the cult worship of society’s elites, but they’ve always had a fundamental role in directly normalizing more extreme far right ideas and forces, by making them part of everyday media. Sometimes, it’s outright puff pieces for fascists. In 1922, the New York Times wrote:
Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
In 1925, The Times – the British daily newspaper, nowadays owned by News Corp. (Murdoch Group) – wrote an editorial praising Mussolini:
On the whole the experiment of Signor Mussolini has been regarded with a very open mind. The fact that by a remarkable demonstration of organized national purpose he liberated Italy from a state of utter confusion has always been counted as an asset in his favour. He himself – with his courage and his amazing energy – is an obvious asset to his country. He is identified with Italy, and it is his personality that lends exceptional interest to the experiment that he is now conducting.
Oh, and they supported “appeasement” with Germany in the 1930s; their editor Geoffrey Dawson was a close ally to Neville Chamberlain. But wait, there’s more: in an editorial on May 8 1920 they endorsed the most famous anti-semitic text of that era: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.[2] We could go on, these are just a few easy examples with some of the most prominent historical figures (and/or fascists). And there are tons of contemporary examples of this mainstreaming of hardcore reactionary ideas, figures and movements. In line with these examples, see this thread compiling some media reactions to the election of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, on September 26 2022.
The postwar metamorphosis of fascist and far right ideology relied on thinkers such as Julius Evola or Maurice Bardèche, but perhaps the most influential source was what came to be known as the European New Right (ENR), which emerged in France in the late 1960s with the founding of the neofascist think tank GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne, meaning ‘Research and Study Group for European Civilization’) by various far right French figures.
The leading figure and intellectual of the GRECE and ENR was Alain de Benoist, who came to prominence in French culture during 1970s. What is less well known is the role the mainstream media and institutions played in this: de Benoist “came to the fore mainly due to his collaboration with the widely read weekly Le Figaro Magazine, and because, in 1978, the Académie Française awarded him with the Grand Prix de l’Essai (for his book Vu de droite)” [Andrea Mammone (2015) Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy, p. 158]. In fact, Louis Pauwels, who decided in 1978 to create Le Figaro Magazine as the weekly supplement to Le Figaro, recruited “many GRECE members to the project: Alain de Benoist, Patrice de Plunkett (chosen as the assistant chief editor), Jean-Claude Valla, Yves Christen, Christian Durante, Michel Marmin, Grégory Pons” [source] The GRECE continued to have major influence on the magazine until 1981 and, according “to political scientist Harvey Simmons, “from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, the doctrine of GRECE had a major impact on the ideology of the entire right” in France” [Tamir Bar-On (2016) Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, p. 38. Cited here].
There is a clear pattern of mainstream French media and institutions contributing to the rise of the far right and its ideology/talking points. Again, Le Figaro Magazine is a telling example. In October 1985, they published an article by Jean Raspail titled “Serons-nous encore français dans 30 ans?” (“Will we still be French in thirty years’ time?”), which peddles one of the foundational ideas of modern far right ideology: the myth of the “Islamization” of Europe, closely tied to (and basically another term for) the theory of the “Great replacement”. Jean Raspail happens to be the author of a very famous piece of far right racist literature, which has been praised by the likes of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Steve Bannon: the extremely racist and xenophobic novel Le Camp des saints, from 1973. And ALSO like de Benoist, Raspail was awarded a major literature prize by the Académie française (in 2003). [Reza Zia-Ebrahimi (2021), p. 125-131]
France’s mainstream media also played a similar role in the rise of the Front National (National Front, recently renamed to “Rassemblement National”), but the most recent example is Éric Zemmour, which probably embodies this pattern better than anyone.
The rise of Zemmour (…) is a media phenomenon in two ways. First, he has spent most of his professional life working for newspapers and television, where he has been able to exercise his vitriolic style and make reactionary arguments. Second, he has benefited from extraordinary media coverage of his scandalous statements. Not only was he on the cover of the conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles five times in the first nine months of 2021, but, according to the media observatory Acrimed, he was mentioned 4,167 times in all French outlets in the month of September alone: 139 times per day.
Didier Fassin (1 December 2021)
He is a particularly ugly outgrowth of the radicalization to the (far) right of French media, culture and politics as a whole in recent years. This movement rightwards has been demonstrated starkly in the behavior of the media, both its normalizing or ‘whitewashing’ of Éric Zemmour and a more general willingness to show and legitimize far right ideas or figures to a huge country-wide audience, as analyzed here by Pauline Perrenot (see also here). Perrenot argues that:
In addition to the case of Éric Zemmour, in recent years we have witnessed the trivialisation and embedding of extreme right-wing, Islamophobic or racist discourse in the mainstream media. This is particularly the case on the talk shows of news channels.
C-News, a rightwing TV channel, has been criticized recently for willingly spreading far right notions to the French public. One of the supporters of Zemmour is Renaud Camus, the first author to articulate the “great replacement” far right theory, which is probably the most influential recent example of both what Reza Zia-Ebrahimi called “conspiratorial racialization”, and of this process of mainstreaming the far right.
- Sian Norris (20/12/2021) How the Great Replacement Went Mainstream.
- Steve Rose (08/06/2022) A deadly ideology: how the ‘great reaplcement theory’ went mainstream.
- Matthias Ekman (2022) The great replacement: Strategic mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy claims.
In France, Pierre-André Taguieff – who is, weirdly enough, widely recognized in academia as a preeminent scholar of the far right, conspiracism and populism – has not only promoted anti-leftist and anti-muslim explanations of contemporary antisemitism (the thesis of the so-called “new antisemitism”, as mentioned in this post), but was also one of the original sources of the reactionary and paranoid discourse about so-called “Islamo-leftism” (Islamogauchisme) in France. As Reza Zia-Ebrahimi has pointed out, his anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic standpoint explains why he shares many views with Bat Ye’Or, who also sees Palestinians – and Muslims in general – as a permanent existential threat to the state of Israel and to Jews as a whole.
Bat Ye’or, aka Gisèle Orebi, actually influenced Renaud Camus, whose now widespread and extremely dangerous “great replacement” theory was inspired by her theory of “Eurabia.” She is the theoretician of the notion of “Islamization”, which should remind you of PEGIDA, a far right European group whose name literally includes the words “against the Islamization of the Occident.” Taguieff has not only refused to make a critical analysis of her work, but “has quoted her approvingly, published her writings in publications he edited and promoted her theory of ‘Eurabia’.” In fact her 2005 pamphlet Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis is used by Zia-Ebrahimi alongside The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous antisemitic forgery from 1903, as the most explicit examples of what he calls “conspiratorial racialization”, saying that “despite some differences in format, the two texts display strikingly similar discursive dynamics in their attempt to racialize Jews and Muslims as the ultimate Other determined to destroy Us.”
Another example of both cultural ‘postcolonial’ racism and the penetration of far right ideas into and promotion by mainstream media/culture, is the legacy of anti-Arab and Islamophobic neoconservatives Bernard Lewis and Samuel P. Huntington, who are most famous for their ‘clash of civilisations‘ argument (criticized by Edward Said here). This is indistinguishable from the New Right’s language:
Racialism – a discourse steeped in scientism and biologism – has given way to a culturalist prejudice that points to a radical anthropological divide between “Judeo-Christian” Europe and Islam.
Enzo Traverso 2015, Revue du Crieur, translated
And indeed, in the 1990s Bernard Lewis (who shared Taguieff’s idea that the “new” antisemitism comes from the left and muslims) was saying that terrorism was a product of migration. There isn’t much of a difference between the ‘respected’ figures like Huntington and Lewis and the fringe (initially, before the media found it would be a great idea to interview him) ideologues like Renaud Camus…
Similarly, we can see this process of normalizing far right ideology and politics in the fact that a disgustingly pro-colonialist author like Niall Ferguson – author of the book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, in which for example he minimizes the Tasmanian genocide – is considered as a respectable “historian”, at most characterized as “conservative” or “controversial” rather than far right and completely unacceptable.
In 1995 Jim Naureckas criticized how the U.S. media had normalized and promoted Charles Murray’s and Richard Herrnstein’s 1994 pseudo-scientific racialist/eugenicist book The Bell Curve. The “research” they relied on for this book came from an eugenicist and neo-nazi organization (literally founded in 1937 and inspired by the Nazis’ Lebensraum program) called the Pioneer Fund: as reported by ABC in November 1994 (hey, an example of actual proper responsible journalism, yay!), “Close to half the footnotes citing authors who support The Bell Curve‘s most controversial chapter that suggests some races are naturally smarter than others, refer to Pioneer Fund recipients. Historian Berry Mehler charges that the Pioneer Fund’s interest in race differences made The Bell Curve‘s arguments possible” (and they had said historian on to talk about it). They reported that public documents showed “Pioneer Fund contributed $3.5 million to researchers cited in The Bell Curve.”
Here’s one last example. In the U.S., Cornell University Press – presumably a respected academic institution – published a book on anti-fascism by “paleoconservative” far right author Paul Gottfried, who (among other things) coined the phrase ‘alternative right’, helped launch the antisemitic conspiracy theory about ‘cultural Marxism’, and was Richard Spencer’s mentor.
Of course, right-wing outlets – such as Fox News in the USA – and tabloid/sensationalist/populist (so-called) journalism are some of the biggest and worst promoters of panics, authoritarian/reactionary propaganda and creeping fascism. They’ve been very popular across the world and have consistently reinforced authority/oppressive structures and all forms of hatred, especially against poor people and oppressed minorities. The UK’s Daily Mail has peddled reactionary views and conspiracism for decades, including racist anti-migrant fearmongering, anti-leftist and antisemitic propaganda, pro-Brexit talking points, and rape-apologetic victim-blaming tropes. Oh, and they also supported fascism during the 1930’s. Lord Rothermere, the paper’s owner who defined their editorial stance towards fascists, went to Munich in 1930 to interview Hitler, and supported Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. More recently, Cam Wilson and Crikey revealed that in 2021 Sam Duncan, a Daily Mail reporter, secretly ran a popular white supremacist Twitter account who spread anti-Semitic conspiracism.
The international media empire of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, which includes major rightwing outlets like Fox News and The Sun (but also 21st Century Fox until 2019, and Sky until 2018), is omnipresent, especially in the US, UK and Australia. See this in-depth investigation by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg at the NYT; and this piece by Sally Young, who wrote Paper Emperors: The Rise of Australia’s Newspaper Empires. By the middle of the 2010’s, the Murdoch Group had a 7,9% market share in the worldwide daily newspaper industry (Source: Noam, Eli (ed.) Who Owns the World’s Media? Media Concentration and Ownership around the World, Oxford University Press, p. 1110-1112). To put this into perspective, that means that the 175 newspapers they owned in 2003 all rallied in support of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, one of the worst atrocities of this century.
A horrendous upsurge of anti-trans propaganda and violence has occurred globally for some time, especially in the past 5 years or decade. I think it’s crucial to address both the social relations and historical-cultural context behind the (longstanding) dehumanization and oppression of trans people on the one hand, and the specific networks of reactionary right-wing forces that have deliberately prioritized this anti-trans panic as a pillar of their current political strategy. In a brilliant piece in the magazine Parapraxis, Max Fox provided much of the necessary social/critical context regarding the interlocked anti-trans panic and above-mentioned paraonoia about “trafficking” and child sexual abuse:
The current panic over trans people presents itself as a concern over the proper relation between adults and children. The phobic objects of the panic, as is often the case, appear somewhat threadbare under the apocalyptic light in which they’re cast: children’s books with queer or trans characters, drag queens hosting library readings, schools issuing guidance to call children by their self-affirmed names. These are supposed to represent elements of a widespread plot to either coercively transition children to some unnatural gender or inure them to sexual predation—“grooming.” Reading to children, speaking to children, even speaking about children have all been brandished as evidence of this predation. Because grooming is understood as a kind of sexual interest that hides in objects remote from any sexual act, this panic can seize on any relation to children or transness as its sign.
The ground for this fantasy was well prepared by the popular delusion known as QAnon, a paranoid quest to narrate the international movement of capital as a conspiracy to traffic and harvest children for forbidden sexual pleasure. This tendency gained its considerable community of adherents via posts on the imageboard 8chan (now 8kun), notorious for its commitment to hosting child pornography and mass shooters’ manifestos. Ron Watkins, an administrator of the site and one of the purported authors of Q’s “drops,” described QAnon as a way to make “intelligence training” available to “normies,” giving a mass base the very tools of social manipulation that have buoyed their persecutory belief. An audience ready to respond to such stories of abuse has been groomed, if you like, for just this moment.
An audience ready to respond to such stories of abuse has been groomed, if you like, for just this moment.
The primal scene of the current panic involves a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact. The panic this inspires is not necessarily over not having an answer—right or wrong, and irrespective of the person whose gender is in question—but over the child asking the question at all. The concept of gender here is apparently so fissile that when exposed to the curiosity of a child this scene doesn’t ever need to actually take place for the entire structure of parental authority to threaten melting down.
As the resistance to an imagined answer to an imagined question, this panic, in fact, conveys a number of presumed certainties that run together: that talking about sex is sexual activity, that gender nonconformity is sexual perversion, that children have a fixed gender but no sexuality, that to recognize someone’s gender is to be implicated in it, and that trans people cannot be children. The panic is not about ignorance or uncertainty, then, but about the demand, in the panic-stricken adult’s mind, to give the answer to a question they believe should go without saying.
…But the pattern this type of panic exhibits might be better accounted for as the inverted apprehension of a real social event or disruption. Given the role that the image of the child plays in securing psychic integrity for adult subjects, whose human capacities and attributes are constantly being stretched, inflated, stripped away, and sold back in parts to meet the demands of the endless expansion of production, when this image of the child comes into crisis it may be a sign that the relations that make and remake capitalist society are in crisis, too.
From the other direction, the threat posed to the family by children’s gender self-determination may be that it reveals the image of the child to be a social object parents cannot alone control. Any real, living child’s ultimate gender is a mystery which unites its material body and social existence, synthesizing uncountable contingent encounters and their traces into something that coheres and persists. It is the image of the child, not their real, particular one, that these parents fear to lose. The more the panicked wail about the threat to children’s innocence, the greater their investment in the image of a child that is not theirs, and the more inconsolable their sense of loss.
For the image of the child to circulate between adults and bind the private life of families to a society that determines them, it must correspond to the shared condition of domination of actual children by their parents in the family. The abstraction of the image then confronts both the parents and real children as a concept beyond their control. This inversion, which Rose describes as the misrecognition of the chimeric child for the unconscious self, also conforms to the illogic which Marx finds in the fetishistic misrecognition of commodities that is the hallmark of capitalist society. This inversion could be described as the misrecognition that commodities can form social relations between themselves as things, obscuring the social relationships between people that actually constitute value.
The misrecognition in fetishism is not of one object for another, but of how commodities come to carry value at all. To Marx, they appear as the bearers of value through an inversion proper to the capitalist production process, where private producers of commodities bring their concrete activities into relation with each other only through the equation of their common element, human labor in the abstract. The worker expends their private, concrete labor in the production of a commodity, which can only be valued and exchanged as the bearer of a unit of this shared, indifferent element. Fetishism is the name for the misapprehension that follows from this inverted process, in which each commodity appears as the guarantor of its own inherent value. For the fetishized commodity to appear valuable, it must block the perception of the social process which constitutes it. Instead of seeing the commodity as a shard wearing the handprints of the total human world, the fetishized view of commodities imagines it gazes at objects which have animate social existence on their own. This comes closer to grasping the movement of the image of the child.
In the crisis of children’s gender self-determination, the family is stripped of its pretension to cohere the totality of social meaning. Dizzy, destabilized, its partisans grope for a concept which promises fixity. Ready to hand is the idea that the social meaning of gender is given by natural law. This psychic investment in a biological substrate of gender is a component of what Jeanne Neton and Maya Gonzalez in the journal Endnotes call the “gender fetish,” which locates the distribution of sexually differentiated roles in the creation of value in some natural attribute rather than the social arrangement which compels it. For them, gender is bound up in the division of labor: women are those workers who are compelled to perform the unproductive work of reproducing labor-power under private domination, both at the daily level for their wage-earning partners in the family and at the generational level by replacing the cohorts exiting the labor market with fresh sellers of labor-power, their children.
Since it is the role of those assigned to the gendered sphere of nonvalue to reproduce capitalist relations as if following natural laws, crisis appears in the form of the non-natural operation of gender. In a crisis, capitalist order appears threatened by the treacherous sabotage of reproduction by those entrusted with it—or the perverse operation of denaturalized gender. Those committed to a fetishized understanding of capitalist relations will fail to recognize any image of this as the function of abstract social processes. So they will seek the cause in fictional agents they take as real.
The image of the child in peril is an expression of the unspeakable threat posed to familial reproduction by capitalist crisis and vice versa. Faced with this crisis, reactionaries root around for proof of the permanence of capitalist relations of production, whose reproduction relies on the family. Fortunately or unfortunately for the forces of reaction, these relations will always be undergoing transformation. Capitalist production is constantly in flux as competition undermines and re-establishes the conditions necessary for profitability, but this unreliability at least offers the consolation of a reliable threat. For the committed losers of the right, devoted to their own persecution, this can supply organizationally useful excitement. The permanent revolution in relations of production faithfully strokes their wound, the chasm in their most intimate belief: that their private life is private, that interiority is self-generating, that society is merely a fetter on the individual, that the family orders the nation, which orders the world.
This is the fetishist’s view of capitalist society, but this time from the perspective of circulation, which cannot see its dependence on production. So it sees the family, the site of production and reproduction of capitalism’s single crucial commodity, labor-power, as standing apart from other social relations. This misrecognition of the role of the family in the production of labor-power allows for the fantasy of a fixed social order, one where social domination flows from personal qualities of birth and development can be kept within supposedly natural limits. This fantasy is evident in the conviction of the possibility for fixed symbolic meaning, which requires a petrified social field. The QAnon-style enthusiasm for decrypting secret messages is one expression of this fantasy. So, too, is the fixed, fetishistic image of the child.
This general background – i.e. the preexisting cissexist/anti-trans, child-oppressing, patriarchal domination(s) and hegemonic ideology/culture that shapes contemporary society and politics – is fundamental because reactionary forces/actors aren’t creating a new panic out of whole cloth, rather they’ve successfully built an accelerated anti-trans political movement on the anti-LGBTQ social relations and socially prevailing ideologies. As historian Jules Gill-Peterson said:
There are immense energy reserves in Western culture to target people who transgress gender boundaries, and sexualise them, and on that basis justify violence against them. QAnon can only exist in the social media era… but it certainly didn’t invent the animus, didn’t invent the hatred.
In other words this is a movement of fascistic and genocidal politicization in backlash against the (relative) progress and liberation of LGBTQ lives. Indeed, this is precisely the same logic/dynamic as the contemporary rightwing backlashses against feminism, gay liberation and antiracism (in other words, a backlash against the emancipation/liberation of oppressed social groups).
Although so-called “TERFs”[3] have become a recurrent topic of discussion, they are far from representing the core or most influential component of the anti-trans movement. As French transfeminist group Questions Trans & Féministes wrote, the far more dangerous anti-trans forces are the traditional right (and the far right), including religious reactionaries (in the case of France, Catholics), as well as the authoritarian medical establishment:
We must not lose sight of the groups that inflict serious and very real violence, mainly on minors and young trans people, by focusing solely on anti-trans ‘feminists’, however stinking their rhetoric may be. (…) The groups promoting conversion therapy are well aware that they need to present themselves as “the voice of reason”, “a nuanced opinion” – it’s good for their image and their business. It’s imperative not to play their game. When a “radical feminist” shouts to anyone who will listen that trans people don’t exist or that it’s a transhumanist plot by big pharma, the shrinks who talk about “over-diagnosis of gender dysphoria” seem reasonable, but they’re the worst. Let’s not forget that the aim of all these people is to greatly reduce the number of people who transition. Their first targets are the most fragile among us: minors, people with questions or at the start of their transition. The argument that “trans people don’t exist” is obviously dangerous and betrays a desire to eliminate us (…) but this is only the final stage of their movement. Long before systematic elimination, there were the refusals of treatment (e.g. for pregnant men), conversion therapies for children and teenagers, restrictions on freedom of expression, particularly for people working in schools…And behind all this we can already spot the traditional obsessions of the right: the defence of the “traditional family”, the privatisation of education (to the benefit of private religious schooling), the privatisation of health care and the restriction of sexual and reproductive health care.
Indeed, as already hinted above “the current anti-trans moral panic is calculated (…) the religious right openly discussed pivoting to anti-trans messaging in response to their failure on marriage equality” (@CaseyExplosion). For example, in October 2017 in the US, a panelist said the following during the Values Voter Summit, the annual political gathering sponsored by the intensely anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council:
For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.
Writing about the Australian context, Jackie Turner emphasized how the most recent of anti-trans campaigns often relies on pseudo-scientific rationalisations of their hatred and violence:
You have probably never heard of them before now, but these groups [Genspect and Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine] are some of the leading voices against trans health care globally.
Anti-trans disinformation groups like this have provided testimony in important court cases such as Tavistock v Bell in the UK, lobbied against bans on anti-trans conversion practices in New Zealand, Canada and the UK, and their work has been used as the “scientific” basis for legislative attacks on the trans community in the US.These organisations are not recognised medical bodies, do not work with established trans health organisations, and are not working in collaboration with trans communities. The issue is that these organisations give the impression of being reputable science to anyone unfamiliar with trans health.
Much like the ex-gay movement of the 1980s and 1990s, these organisations support a number of debunked, discredited, and bizarre theories. For example, the “trans social contagion” theory (simply repackaged gay panic) has been widely debunked and discredited as pseudoscience, yet the originator of the theory, Lisa Littman, serves as an adviser to Genspect. (…) This kind of organised disinformation poses a huge threat to trans people, the broader LGBTQIA+ community, and our democracy. In Australia, this disinformation has appeared on paid ads by Binary Australia (formerly known as Marriage Alliance, a group instrumental in the fight against marriage equality in Australia), is being circulated through far-right conspiracy groups, and is a key part of the ongoing media campaign against trans health care.
And as usual, all kinds of individual grifters have jumped at the opportunity to make themselves a reputation as “scientifc” voices of “reason” against the so-called “transgender ideology”. For instance, anti-trans propagandist Zachary Elliott is *checks notes* a twentysomething architecture student dressed up (see what I did there?) as a biology nerd fascinated by the “scientific study of sex and gender, specifically how the differences and similarities between men and women manifest themselves in society”. By that he means pretending to be credible and knowledgeable about biology without any training in it (unlike the wonderful trans activist and author Julia Serano, who is an actual biologist), which of course leads him to use nonsense pseudo-scientific claims about sex and gender. He’s self-published multiple books and created a fraudulent “institute”, in order to reaffirm and uphold transphobic gender essentialism (exactly like Christian fundamentalists do, but here it’s in shiny “science-y” colors from a guy who pretends not to be a bigot).
In France, the C·A·R·T·E collective (Collectif d’Actions et de Recherche sur la Transphobie et l’Extrême droite) have investigated the specific history, actors and networks of the anti-trans movement in that country, from the pseudo-feminist transphobic groups to the ultra-reactionary Catholic right. Two French transfeminist collectives/media – XY Media and ToutesDesFemmes also produced a brief documentary explaining how the reactionary right creates a “trans question”.
Map of the anti-trans network in France, by the C·A·R·T·E collective.
In the US, right-wing media and the Christian right – which is enormous and probably bigger than in most other Western countries – are at the forefront of the anti-trans movement; for more context I highly recommend this piece by Jules Gill-Peterson and It Could Happen Here’s excellent “The War On Trans People” podcast series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5). I’m not gonna go through every country obviously (although if people have additional resources mapping anti-trans networks and propaganda across the world, please send them to me! I’d be glad to add them here), but here is a concrete example of transphobic propaganda coming from the UK:
April 14 2023 cover of the Daily Mail, a tabloid in the UK with a 100+ years long history of reactionary, pro-fascist and pro-empire propaganda.
Here are a couple of noteworthy *checks notes* “rightwing politicians” (aka fascist pigs) who’ve said exactly the same in the past century:
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda chief, in a 1933 speech:
Looking back over the past years of Germany’s decline, we come to the frightening, nearly terrifying, conclusion that the less German men were willing to act as men in public life, the more women succumbed to the temptation to fill the role of the man. The feminisation of men always leads to the masculinisation of women. An age in which all great idea of virtue, of steadfastness, of hardness, and determination have been forgotten should not be surprised that the man gradually loses his leading role in life and politics and government to the woman.
Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists, in his 1932 fascist manifesto “The Greater Britain”: “We want men who are men and women who are women.”
Even if we leave aside right-wing media, the reciprocal relationship between mainstream media and far-right actors is striking in this context, with the platforming of far-right voices and the normalization and mainstream diffusion of their violent anti-trans ideology/propaganda/etc by and in the media, while reactionary forces/movements themselves then rely on the respectability of this disinfo/mainstream propaganda as tools for their political strategy. U.S. novelist Joyce Carol Oates accurately described how mainstream media contributes to this anti-trans propaganda:
Mainstream media seizes upon highly atypical, microscopic samples of an issue that affects virtually no one, amplifies it maniacally, continues to focus upon it as if it were some sort of threat to the commonwealth, & not an amplified paranoid-figment of media imagination.
From the “concerned parent” trope (which legitimizes adult domination and denies the agency of children, in exactly the same way as often happens to kids who are on the autism spectrum) to the reactionary “mistaken and regretted transition” narrative concerning detransition – needless to say both are connected, see the above-mentioned remarks from Max Fox -, mainstream media, centrist and liberal reporters/pundits have fueled/fed the anti-trans panic and thereby contributed to the direct attack and violence against trans people (including trans kids). The horrendous anti-trans coverage by the New York Times has been extensively analyzed – by If Books Could Kill (Michael Hobbes/Peter Shamshiri), Tom Scocca, You’re Wrong About (Sarah Marshall with Tuck Woodstock), It Could Happen Here (Mia Wong, Gare, with Evan Urquhart). Despite the fact that a large number of New York Times contributors and tens of thousands of their readers signed an open letter criticizing the newspaper’s coverage of gender-affirming care, it already had tragic consequences, and for instance the Attorney General of Missouri cited a NYT article to justify a horrific ban for the whole state. And when the NYT reported on this ban, they gave the story to a sports reporter(!) who unsurprisingly omitted the fact their own coverage directly contributed to it… In a brutal yet brilliant piece of satirical critique, The Onion targeted this kind of deeply sociopathic and unethical mainstream reporting:
We firmly believe that it is journalism’s sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible.
“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.
We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.
We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on trans people, which we believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as weird and gross. We remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic rights of the gender-nonconforming as up for debate, and we will use these same angles over and over again in hopes that this repetition makes them suffer. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives bigotry an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to fixate on the genitals.
It is against free speech to stop us from fixating on the genitals.
Much of the recent debate concerns medical procedures, particularly in children, and whether things like hormone replacement therapy or gender-affirming surgeries are safe and appropriate. Indeed, there are critical questions to be asked about the social complexities of gender, as well as medical ethics in a profit-driven healthcare system. We are simply not interested in any of that. Instead, we will use flawed data and spurious logic to repeatedly write the same hand-wringing arguments asking whether there are suddenly too many trans people around. Journalistic integrity demands nothing less.
Naturally, courageous reporting like ours has its detractors. Our critics accuse us of transphobia and are trying to murder us online, with their online mobs. They want to destroy our right to free speech and have us arrested by all the police. What gives? Why would you arrest us, when it’s those deviant trans people you ought to be arresting instead? Do you know what the science says about trans people getting arrested, huh? What if we could find data saying trans people should be more likely to get arrested? What will our detractors say then? They’ll be silent, as well they should be, and free speech will survive one more day.
For more evidence of our time-honored journalistic commitment to endangering lives, please see our previous coverage of gay people, immigrants, Black people, and women.
Institutions with massive platforms like ours must be open to different ways of endangering the trans community. That might mean using the framework of medical care as a bogeyman to imply that trans people are engaged in something sinister. That might mean turning isolated instances of detransitioning into sweeping generalizations about children being groomed. That might mean identifying the worst prejudices that transgender people face—and encouraging our readers to adopt them.
Did you forget yet about how we wrote that there might be data showing that trans people should be more likely to get arrested? What if that were true? Or what if non-binary people are ten times more likely to traffic infants? What if puberty blockers are a kind of sex crime? What if doctors are climbing through windows to suture penises to sleeping cheerleaders? The next time you see a trans person, you ought to ask yourself these questions.
All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.
Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.
I’ll leave this (crucial and alarming) topic here for now, but I recommend checking out the Assigned Media project and their Trans data Library, both of which document and criticize anti-trans propaganda and disinformation.
I want to adress one last major form of reactionary panic and propaganda which is peddled by mainstream media, rightwing/conservative media and the far right: the widespread “fake crusade for free speech” and the moral panic about “leftism/political correctness/activists/wokeness gone mad”, which were both reignited especially in the mid-2010s. Contrary to what rightwing politicians, the far right/fascists and mainstream/liberal media/pundits pretend, it’s not about a recent surge of craziness and authoritarianism because of the supposed (but completely made up) hegemony of “the radical left” in society and particularly in universities. Instead it’s a long-term and transnational reactionary moral panic in the West, as Stuart Hall et al. defined it in Policing the Crisis:
When the official reaction to a person, groups of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when ‘experts’, in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians and editors perceive the threat all but identical terms, and appear to talk ‘with one voice’ of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress ‘sudden and dramatic’ increases (in numbers involved or events) and ‘novelty’, above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a moral panic.
And there is a two-way logic behind this moral panic – and the platforming and normalization of increasingly reactionary/far right elements and views that it leads to -, namely on the one hand the far right’s deliberate strategy of getting exposure and legitimizing their reactionary ideas via mainstream institutions and media, and on the other hand, the state’s, media’s and society’s ever-present policing and authoritarianism against a) minorities/oppressed groups, and b) leftists, activists and emancipatory movements or groups. What it’s not about is defending “free speech” in the positive, emancipatory sense (e.g. promoting the voice of the voiceless that are oppressed, censored and silenced), nor improving public/intellectual discussions or education about contemporary issues/events, and least of all defeating the far right by beating them in the so-called “marketplace of ideas” (here we’re yet again seeing the inherent and reactionary limits/contents of bourgeois democracy and liberalism; but I’ll not go into another endless rant about it here, I promise^^).
I’m not gonna go into tons of details about this history – which goes back to the 1950s and 1960s – or the recent stuff (2010s) here because a lot has been already written/documented especially concerning the US/UK context: see the writing/analysis by Nesrine Malik, William Davis, and especially Evan Smith who’s basically the expert historian on this topic. Evan’s in-depth research on this was published in his book No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech, and he’s written a couple of shorter media pieces in The Guardian (2020, 2021) and the New Humanist. Basically, the continuous legitimisation of the far right – since the 1950s, British media and universities have platformed the likes of Oswald Mosley (founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists), Enoch Powell (Tory MP notorious for his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech), Nick Griffin (former MEP and leader of the British National Party), Tommy Robinson (former member of BNP and former leader of the English Defence League) and Nigel Farage (former leader of UK Independence Party aka UKIP) – comes from a long-term (postwar) backlash against leftist/emancipatory activism (namely the student, antiracist, anticapitalist, anticolonial, antifascist, feminist and LGBTQ movements) on the one hand, and with the liberal/centrist/rightwing tendency to “[indulge] in controversialism and [fetishise] the performativity of debating”, on the other. And being familiar with the French context (where the recent buzzwords have been “Islamo-leftism” [islamo–gauchisme] and “woke-ism” [wokisme]), and to some extent other countries in continental Western Europe, I think it’s fair to say it’s similar across the West as a whole.
If “respectable” centrist voices didn’t constantly normalize these reactionary attempts to delegitimize the critique of traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, launder them for a mainstream audience, they wouldn’t be nearly as successful.
Thomas Zimmer (15/03/2023)
the transatlantic moral panic about the free speech ‘crisis’ on university campuses didn’t just start on the populist/far right in the mid-2010s, but was also heavily pushed by centrist publications worried about a new radicalism amongst students.
Evan Smith (17/03/2023)
The moral panic about a free speech ‘crisis’ in Britain was laundered by the right and targeted at students, environmentalists, the LGBTQ community, academics, etc. All while the real threat to free speech came from the government and the police with new draconian protest laws. (…) The fetishisation of free speech by the British right, embraced by the Tories in their anti-woke culture war, was never about free speech really, but protecting certain kinds of (often offensive) speech and dampening down opposition to these kinds of speech.
Evan Smith (06/05/2023)
[1] National Incident-Based Reporting System. By the way, fuck the FBI and ACAB!!
[2] Funnily enough, apparently they were briefly more sympathetic to the Soviet Union during the 1940s, provoking the fury of genocidal imperialist pig Winston Churchill.
[3] “trans-exculsionary radical feminists”, the issue with this term being that they’re usually neither feminist, nor radical ones (there are indeed a bunch of “radical feminists” from the postwar movements that turned transphobic, but it’s an insignificant minority). Similarly to femonationalism, this is far more about a rhetorical performativity of standing up for the feminist cause (which by definition includes and defends all women, whether cis or trans, and no matter their skin color, religion or geographic origin…) in order to promote reactionary politics, namely the demonization and oppression of other oppressed groups/minorities. This is similar to fascists pretending to “the real socialists” (as both Hitler and Mussolini did) and to defend the interests of the ordinary workers in the 1920s and 1930s.