Trans Santa, Gender Neutral Cookies, and Other Stories for Adults

(Editor's note: This is an opinion piece posted by a Patch reader. If you'd like to post on Patch yourself, find out how here.)

Is the Clinton Foundation funding a socialist sleeper cell of MS-13 affiliated migrants who plot to steal Christmas, force your children to bake gender-neutral cookies, and convert the town to Sharia Law?

Probably not. But thanks for clicking on my article.

That's a 40-character assessment of U.S. media in 2018. Distracting? Yes. But in a cable and digital landscape where every story, video, meme, comment, share and fear is in direct competition with one another for the precious view time of an overworked, over-stressed, over-medicated, undervalued American public, it makes you wonder about the loss-side of the equation.

Ask yourself this: if given the choice between this headline, and a headline about Brookhaven's impending $35 million fiscal crisis when the town landfill is capped in 2024, or the plague of perpetually ignored potholes in Centereach and Selden, which would you choose?

Sensationalist media is nothing new. Historically, it has been deployed as a weapon of suppression, of distraction, or as a tool for profit. But what if today's brand of sensationalism is a unique strain - a Swiss army knife of suppression, distraction, and profit, that is designed to both feed off and quicken the demise of local news, and deform civic engagement?

Take this alternative headline I considered using: "Trans Santa and the Gender Neutral MS-13 Gingerbread Monsters".

As far as sensationalist click-bait goes, I'll never come up with something better. It's a fear-mongering delicacy of race, crime, gender identity, and their suggested transformational effect on religious holiday tradition. If only Patch allowed me more word space, I could have added a sprinkling of Black Panthers and government-funded rifle confiscation, and won the gold medal.

But alas, I am a mere imitator, my work a pastiche forgery of the master craft regularly seen on FOX News. Last week, sensational news pornographer Tucker Carlson featured on his show a segment about gender-neutral gingerbread man cookies, because a single bakeshop in Scotland labeled their cookies "gingerbread people".

Par for the course, for FOX. They've also tackled crucial holidayChristmas-themed topics like Black Santa, White Jesus, and offensive Starbucks cups that neglected to say "MERRY CHRISTMAS, THIS IS A CHRISTMAS CUP, THE 1950s WERE A SIMPLER TIME, CELEBRATE WHAT I TELL YOU, also this chai latte is for Emma?"

That's just the "War on Christmas" variety. Their year-round hits include: Black Panthers at the polling precinct, mosques at Ground Zero, college feminists handing "call-out" cards to harassers, a handful of protesters chanting "we want dead cops" that was incorrectly linked with Black Lives Matter, and MS-13 recruiting at elementary schools.

FOX News might be the innovators of American culture war sensationalism, but they aren't the originators, as Rush Limbaugh and Morton Downey Jr. had been perfecting the recipe over the radio and day-time TV since the 1980s, while Matt Drudge was the first to market on what was then niche internet "outrage reporting" in the late 1990s. FOX took the recipe, applied it to CNN's format and business model, and shipped culture war news to millions of homes every night.

With the advent of media balkanization and the rise of alternative digital news, came slicker, edgier imitators. Glenn Beck's "The Blaze" network was the first to feature Tomi Lahren, the White Power Princess whose viral rants aimed at black athletes and protesters lit up Facebook with shares, likes and comments, carrying her to instant fame.

Stephen Bannon's "Breitbart" online went even further, repackaging white supremacist philosophy into "nationalism that advocates for Western Civilization". Breitbart popularized the panicked headlines on white women being raped by Muslim immigrants in Sweden, Germany, and the UK, and gave rise to provocateurs like Milo Yiannpolous and Ben Shapiro, who together have almost single-handedly created the modern day equivalent of the "Satanic Panic", featuring campus feminists.

These aren't just pundits giving hot takes. There is a common theme to their narratives: storytelling. They convey events that are supposedly happening, though the actual details never quite fit the delivered context. And each event is an isolated incident, with almost no wider social or policy consequence. These are events that "could happen" in your community, if you are not vigilant. Sort of like a culture war lottery ticket.

What else do these stories have in common? Look at the subjects.

Feminists. Trans people. Muslims. Black protesters. Mexican gangs. Immigrants and asylum seekers of various legal status.

Now look at the victims in each story.

Emasculated men. Violated white women. Oppressed Christians and desecrated Christian holidays. Police whose lives are threatened. Veterans whose sacrifices are dishonored.

According to the narrative, these victims are the cracked pillars of a society and civilization on the decline.

There is another word for this narrative: parable.

Parables are human stories that illustrate an instructive moral lesson. They are often used to convey these lessons to children, through books, film, and religious text. While parables can be based wholly or partly on true events, their historical accuracy is secondary to the merit of the lesson. To impart its morality with effectiveness, the narrative must manipulate the emotion of the reader or listener with a combination of fear, hope, heroism, betrayal, self-identification, and reverence for authority.

The fairy tales of old, such as those written by the Brothers Grimm, were much darker and tragic than what you would find in the children's section of a bookstore today. But these tales pre-date the eras of primetime TV and radio news, cable networks and alternative internet media.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a famous tale about a colorfully-dressed piper who performs an extermination service by leading a town's rats into the river with the hypnotic melody of his music. When the townspeople refuse to pay him on grounds of extortion, he returns in disguise, and leads their children away to drown with the rats.

This was a fictional tale, presumed to be based on historical accounts of children being sold into labor to pay debts, or being lured into slavery by silver-tongued extortionists during an era of Germanic expansion into Poland and the Baltic region of Europe.

European fairy tales also featured anti-Semitic parables (Grimm's "The Good Bargain" comes to mind), conjuring tropes like "the swindling Jew" and "the penny-pinching Jew".

Not all "moral lessons" are moral, as it were.

In the 18th century, fantastical parables were an effective delivery for imaginative propaganda and moralizing.

Today, those same tales come without a book cover. They are episodic stories, told by Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, FOX & Friends, Breitbart, and Drudge. They are memes on twitter. Rants on Facebook.

These sources used inaccurate reporting and emotional pleas to weaponize the popular imagination against Black Lives Matter, convincing a large segment of white Americans that BLM was an anti-white, anti-cop, anti-military, pro-crime movement.

How would the Brothers Grimm have told the story in 18th century fairy tale format? Probably something like this:

"In the village of Ferguson, there was a violent offender who a police officer killed in the line of duty. This offender was black, and the politically correct people of Ferguson protested the offender's killing on the basis of his race, claiming 'injustice'. This inspired protests across the land. The police did warn the good people that the killing and others like it were justified, but the people did not listen. They formed a group called "Black Lives Matter", who started a chant imploring for dead cops. Lo and behold, two non-white police offers were shot in their cars, inspired by this movement. And later, a popular athlete and many like him kneeled during our country's great anthem, in support of Black Lives Matter and its disregard for police and country. Though it was too late, the people did learn that there is a difference between 'us' and 'them'. When you protest bad police, you protest all police. The only justice is the law that stands between human dignity and human animals."

Grimm's could have written a similar passage about MS-13 recruiting children in elementary schools, warning against the welcome of immigrants at the risk of criminals being smuggled in to rape, kill, and steal from American taxpayers.

Or perhaps a tale about trans-acceptance leading to the desecration of holiday traditions?

Today's sensationalist media has moved into an advanced category of cultural shock-narrative. The disposable shock of prior decades, stories like "Satanic-inspired killings", celebrity scandals, serial killers, and murder trials, dominated the news cycle based on eternal human interest in sex, death, and celebrity. For the most part, these stories did not meaningfully divide the population.

"Culture War Media", on the other hand, has rediscovered the storytelling of pre-industrial society, when fact and fiction co-mingled to produce moral lessons, and not evidence-based conclusions. It baits implicit bias into the open by stoking irrational fears of the "other", hardening cultural partisanship which is both its creation and its lifeblood.

You might call this "Parables for Adults".

Moral lessons for a diminishing cultural majority, who no longer feels shame for desiring a return to the old ways, when the majority did and said whatever it wanted, and marginalized people, frankly, kept their damn mouths shut.

Culture War Media has become the bed-time story for a generation of curmudgeons who dream of resentment and hope for reprisal. That reprisal wish was temporarily granted with the election of Donald Trump, and the subsequent resistance to his presidency has hardened their desire for reactionary lawmaking.

Trump himself has mastered the art of culture war mythology, placing himself on the pedestal of the Village Sheriff who declares, "The stories are true, the monsters are real, and I'm here to rid them at any cost, folks."

Of course, a popular rebuttal to this theory is that "progressives/liberals/the Left" are just as bad. Culture War Media is a weapon wielded by "both sides."

This, on the surface, is a tempting and logical argument to buy in an era of hyper-partisanship where the two clearest actors are opposing teams with contrasting uniform colors.

And I would be lying if I didn't concede that there is a cottage industry of progressive cultural outrage. Websites like "Jezebel" and "Vox", which have published their share of good work, have also been known to sensationalize headlines, and run with seemingly innocuous stories like unearthing celebrity tweets from eight years ago to deny them some award or honor in the present day, for the sake of getting a social media call-out trending. There are bloggers on all sides of the cultural spectrum who make a living on the Culture War, which means that if they aren't outraged, they don't eat.

But when we look at the historical context of Culture War Media, the "both sides" equivocation falls apart.

The early Culture War Sensationalists like Rush, Downey, and Drudge, as well as the early days of FOX News from the late 90s to early 2000s with commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, were not responding to progressive cultural sensationalism. They were capitalizing on resentment towards societal shifts of power in the post-Civil Rights era.

From the 1970s through the Reagan years, government programs that were once championed as helping to uplift the impoverished and middle class, were now regarded as "drains" on working people - welfare scams that benefitted people of color, i.e. the "welfare queen" trope.

Hard reporting on civil rights abuses by police officers, particularly in Los Angeles and New York City (i.e. the beating of Rodney King, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo), and abuses committed by SWAT Teams in enforcement of the War on Drugs, stoked resentment from people who are unwilling to empathize with communities of color, support the militarization of police, and believe the job of the authorities is to protect "us" from "them". Early conservative media were the first to paint all civil rights proponents as "anti-police". As media coverage of civil rights abuses intensified in the social media age, so too did the response from conservative Culture War Media.

The escalating growth of documented and undocumented immigrants from Central America into the United States transformed the Republican Party from a pro-immigration party (Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush once debated about who had the better platform to turn undocumented immigrants into citizens), into a nativist faction that now supports a border wall and harsher barriers on legal migration. Culture War Media largely stoked the popular resentment that led to this change.

The prominence of LGBTQ Americans on network television, particularly in the early 2000s, helped normalize those who do not identify as "straight", and strengthened the popularity of state-by-state support of gay marriage. Culture War Media pivoted to sensationalist stories about "gay and trans culture" being forced onto children.

Women, who prior to 1980 did not vote in proportion to the number of male voters in the U.S., have consistently turned out to vote in greater numbers than men for the last 38 years. During that same time period, from 1980-2018, women also began to enroll in college at a higher rate than men, a trend that spiked dramatically in the 2000s and is estimated to result in women accounting for 57% of college students by 2026. The trope of the "campus feminist" or "feminazi" popularized by Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s could be seen as a response to these demographics, and the accelerated growth in women's graduation rates and enrollment in recent years has been mirrored by an explosion of conservative media panic about rampant political correctness and feminist indoctrination on campus.

Is there legitimacy to stories about maniacally righteous social justice warriors pushing the envelope too far on college campuses? Yes, without question. But think about it: college is inhabited primarily by teenagers and people under the age of 21. This may come as a shock to readers, but teenagers have a tendency to be unreasonable in their beliefs, even if those beliefs are essentially correct.

College is a learning institution, but also a trial ground for testing new beliefs, dispatching old ones, and communicating opposing view points. The results are often messy, but valuable. If we all accept that teenagers have a tendency towards being unreasonable and hard-headed, and as the number of women and minorities attending college continues to grow, shouldn't we also expect that the number of women and minorities who are unreasonably militant about their newfound progressive ideals will also grow?

Can't all the media hype about students calling for professors to be fired, and handing out feminist call-out cards be chalked up to young people acting like...young people? Can't we parse the difference between having good beliefs, and acting on those beliefs in sometimes troubling ways?

According to Culture War Media, we cannot. The minority of unreasonable feminists, gang-member immigrants, police-hating minorities, and over-vigilant activists who do something silly in the name of acceptance (like gender-neutral cookies), represent the rule, and not the exception.

The Culture War Media has risen in response to key demographical shifts and the closing of historical inequities. It wants us to believe that equality is a zero-sum game; that when women, immigrants, minorities, and people of LGBTQ preference gain or achieve, the "rest of us" lose. It is, in a word, the inevitable resistance to history and progress.

So my answer to false equivocation between conservative and progressive media sensationalism is this: one is David, and one is Goliath. David does not become Goliath's equal on account of slinging a stone against injustice. When you argue that both are stone-slingers "so what's the difference?", you inadvertently prop up Goliath, because David needs his stone to gain equal ground with his oppressor. Two entities cannot simultaneously oppress each other. And proof that a small percentage of David's followers are jerks, is not sufficient enough evidence that we should default back to Goliath.

Culture War Media's escalating narrative for the past three decades has been, "David is oppressing us with stones." Or, if you prefer a less biblical analogy: "the American colonies are oppressing King George by resisting him."

There is merit, though, to the idea that the conservative Culture War Media's onslaught and the ensuing progressive backlash, sometimes executed through shortsighted means, together have changed the media landscape and created a trickle-down effect on regional and local news.

Outlets that once stayed away from hot button, partisan cultural issues, now push stories that stoke the flames. Culture War politics permeates all levels of media, right down to local news. The most shared stories from Newsday and News12 consistently involve race, gender, or immigration, right down to the crime blotter's headlines.

Newsday was cognizant of this, to the extent that they disabled their comments section, which had become a misanthropic cesspool of conservative cultural grievance. But it's the Facebook shares that really count, and in the case of Newsday and News12, their social media comment threads are a circus of filth.

Profitable filth, I might add.

Because all those Likes, Shares, and Comments feed into the social algorithm that ensures an article gets seen by more users, which increases readership and fuels ad revenue. American hyper-partisanship has been a great foodsource for media at all levels, if they were wise to embrace it.

It isn't just media - our local population and civic leadership has responded to these trends. Take, for instance, the fact that at a Brookhaven forum for local town and county candidates in 2017, one of the moderators asked the candidates what their position was on Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem.

What did this issue have to do with local governance? Absolutely nothing. But it inflamed the room and captivated everybody's attention.

With civic engagement down to the municipal level re-focused on cultural issues, is it any wonder why our nation is facing a crisis of historically low infrastructure funding?

Or why citizens are more engaged and passionate about sensational news items generated by the cable news and internet culture war machine, than they are about road, air, and water quality issues.

To be sure, cultural issues are important. The news should be covering these topics, but in a serious manner worthy of the subject.

The racial justice and equality message of Colin Kaepernick's kneeling during the national anthem is a critical discussion for America to be having during a transitional phase of heightened cultural awareness. Instead, FOX News intros its audience with coverage that is essentially, "WEALTHY BLACK ATHLETE DISRESPECTS AMERICAN MILITARY".

Issues of trans-acceptance do matter. Gender-neutral bake shops located halfway around the world, do not.

MS-13 is a legitimate problem on Long Island; a gang that preys on immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, who could cooperate and work with local authorities if they weren't terrified of being turned over to ICE. But instead of being treated as a criminal justice issue, cable news creates panic that MS-13 is on every street corner, in your schools, and hiding in your shrubs.

The Culture War Media has grown, incubated, and birthed a new type of consumer that no longer desires information, or even base entertainment, but wants to believe in monsters again.

Big brown, undocumented, gang-affiliated, #MeToo accusation wielding, cop-hating millenial monsters who should be addressed by their proper pronoun.

But sometimes, the monster isn't really a monster. Sometimes it's looming change - new voices, new faces, concerns being expressed that weren't paid a second thought years ago. People who want to be heard and counted, not through the filter of the cable news circus, but person-to-person.

Sometimes it's not the "monster", but the villagers who are the problem. A village of people being manipulated by the true beast: a profit-gorged conservative media industry that has perfected the hybrid storybook formula of arch-cultural outrage news, and weaponized it against communities of people who have more in common than is clickworthy to remind them.

Sadly, it's not those villagers who made it to the end of this column. If you made it this far, there's a better chance that you already agreed or sympathized with my position, and that is the tragedy of the modern media landscape. None of us at any level of content creation have a choice but to adhere to the sensationalist, culture war formula, even if our ideas are antithetical to conservative outrage.

The headline was designed to grab your attention. The description gave you a general idea of my direction. The first hundred words confirmed the idea. And so the very people whose minds stood to be changed, likely did not read past the headline and description, and went right to the comments section.

For that, I thank them. Their disdain for my ideas to the extent that they angry-liked, shared, or negatively commented, contributed to the algorithm that ensured my column would be delivered to a greater number of newsfeeds. This increases the likelihood that people who agree with or sympathize with my position see the column. Those who agree, share with sympathizers in their social networks. The sympathizers read, and move further towards my position (or don't) on the merit of my argument.

We no longer live in a world where the purpose of information is to shape ideas and change minds. Information is the new gun. Power in the hands of the willful, damaging when aimed at the opposition, seductive in its magnetic glamoring of the sympathizer without a cause.

Information for the sake of knowledge is now the exception, not the rule.

In its place comes narrative news, based on true events. Heroes and villains, monster and morals. Fear and reprisal.