Can You Spot the Propaganda?

Propaganda is defined as the propagation (or spreading, multiplying) of an idea or set of ideas or doctrine, done in the interest of those who are advocating for that doctrine. In today’s day and age, we understand the word “propaganda” as a negative, or bad, or evil thing.

We often think that propaganda is a 20th century issue, something that can be found only alongside the tyrants and dictators of its time. Hitler even had a Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda – otherwise known as the Minister of Propaganda – Joseph Goebbels, whose job was to create and distribute propaganda across Nazi Germany, and Nazi-occupied territories. His job didn’t stop there, however. Goebbels’ job as Minister of Propaganda was also to control all media, including books, film, music, radio, and theater (he considered film to be the most important and influential). It was up to Goebbels to create a culture in Nazi Germany that promoted Nazi ideologies. In other words: he needed to recreate their culture and make the ideas of antisemitism and white supremacy more normal and easier to digest. Nazism had to be normal and culturally accepted.

You must keep in mind that at this time the word “propaganda” was a rather neutral word; it didn’t insinuate anything negative. So having the title of “Minister of Propaganda” wouldn’t have meant anything negative to the German people; nothing worse than having the title of “Minister of Culture.”

Here are a few quotes from Joseph Goebbels on propaganda to illustrate his efforts:

“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." 

"Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will."

"This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it."

"There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be ‘the man in the street.’ Arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology."

Those quotes sound awfully familiar, don’t they? These ideas aren’t new, and we still hear and see them in practice today. We hear the lies that men can be women and women can be men often. We hear it on the radio, on TV shows, in music, in the press, on news channels, and in movies. What does all this exposure do? It tells us, and the individual affected directly by it (that is to say, the person considering the ideologies of transgenderism), that he can choose to be a woman if he wants to. It is not only his free will, but his right to do so. His human right, even.

Additionally, we know that transgender ideologues don’t use logic and science to back their ideas. No, they use emotions. Ever heard the line, “Would you rather have a dead son, or a living daughter?” It’s a common, and sickening, question, and it’s a scare tactic that the transgender community uses on parents who are fighting against their child’s desires to claim transgenderism. The question isn’t scientific or logical, it’s emotionally aggressive, and is used to threaten parents into handing over their children.

Many of the claims made by the transgender community are unfounded or, in more than a few cases, outright lies. The article “Gender-affirming surgery brings benefits” from Harvard Medical School, written by Kelly Bilodeau, Former Executive Editor of Harvard Women's Health Watch, is one example. The author discusses a study on gender-affirming surgery and how beneficial it is to people who identify as transgender.

“The researchers compared people who had undergone one or more types of gender-affirming surgery in the past two years and people who said they wanted to undergo surgery but hadn’t yet. They found that those who had surgery had a 42% reduction in psychological distress, 35% reduction in cigarette smoking in the past year, and a 44% lower likelihood of having thoughts of suicide. The study authors said that the findings provide more support for gender-affirming surgical care.”

Do you see it? Read it again and you will find the absolutely critical part of Bilodeau’s entire article: “...in the past two years…” Now, what is so problematic about this? It’s the same problem all of these pro-gender-affirming surgery arguments have: the studies only cover a year or two. I’m sure that a year after someone gets the surgery, or otherwise does irreversible damage to their bodies to fix the problem they think they have, they are happier than before, but what about 5 years after? What about 10 years after? 20? There’s no studies there, except one that I found published by the National Library of Medicine (a government organization) which had apparently did follow-ups on people 40+ years post-op. The issue with this study, however, is that they only did follow-ups with 15 people, which is not nearly enough to make a claim as bold as “gender-affirming surgery helps the overall mental health of transgender individuals.”

In other words, there’s nothing to support the idea that gender-affirming surgery or treatment helps these individuals. And the reason there are no studies? Because transgenderism isn’t something that’s existed for thousands of years, like the transgender ideologues tell us, but instead has only existed for about the last five minutes. And this is all coming from Harvard, a place once home to the greatest minds in America but now publishing nonsensical articles on pathetic studies done solely for political virtue signaling. One of our most prominent institutions has become another pawn in the propaganda machine.

What they want you to believe, and continue to propagate, is that the attempted-suicide rate in the transgender community – which is about 19x higher than the national average – would be solved if these individuals claiming transgenderism got these affirming surgeries. The idea that there is a deeper, more significant mental and emotional issue that needs to actually be addressed is never considered. In fact, in 2012 the DSM removed “gender identity disorder” from their list of mental disorders and replaced it with “gender dysphoria,” claiming that it is not a disorder and should not be stigmatized as such. They go on to say the following:

“DSM-5 aims to avoid stigma and ensure clinical care for individuals who see and feel themselves to be a different gender than their assigned gender. It replaces the diagnostic name ‘gender identity disorder’ with ‘gender dysphoria,’ as well as makes other important clarifications in the criteria. It is important to note that gender nonconformity is not in itself a mental disorder. The critical element of gender dysphoria is the presence of clinically significant distress associated with the condition.”

We can see here, yet again, how the transgender ideologues are propagandizing the DSM and controlling how we think about mental disorders. They changed the definition of “gender identity disorder” to something that is more in line with what culture is demanding.

What these people need is real help from real professionals. They believe that they are men in women’s bodies or women in men’s bodies. They don’t need people affirming their disorder and confusion, they need real help. Instead, we’re made to believe that if we want to save their lives, they absolutely need to be affirmed and get whatever surgery or treatments they want, and we are all obligated to go along with it. The world is trying to pull us deeper into the propaganda and many people are in so deep they just believe it to be true, even though it doesn’t make any sense (go back and read those quotes from Goebbels again). 

My goal here isn’t to refute the false claims of transgender ideologues, but rather to show you how they either explicitly lie or twist real, truthful data to make it look like something that it isn’t. That is propaganda in its truest form. This doesn’t stop with transgender ideology either. We see this done in the pro-abortion argument too. They don’t use data, these use emotions and exposure to trick people into thinking that murdering children is okay. They don’t refer to the child as a baby, but a “fetus” or an “embryo” or “a clump of cells” (ignoring that we’re all just clumps of cells). They say that it’s not a human, it’s a parasite; it’s not a baby, it’s tissue; it’s not living, it’s just a mass. Then they go further to tell you that science is on their side.

Now, any rational person would know that the child in the womb is a human and is living. But the pro-abortion crowd is so deep in their own propaganda that they truly believe that it’s okay to kill a child because, well, it’s not really a child. They proceed to go on about stealing the bodily autonomy from the woman (bodily autonomy which none of us truly have anyway, but they don’t get upset about any of the other laws forbidding us to do many things with our bodies). They’ve been groomed into thinking that this is a matter of life and death for the pregnant woman. They’re not told that women have the choice to not have sex in the first place. In fact, not having sex isn’t even an option they consider. They’re told, however, by culture, by society, even by our own government leaders, that it’s their choice to kill their child and it’s okay because it’s not human. Goebbels did this very thing with the Jews. This is all done with the propaganda that we all see and hear every day. 

Something I think Goebbels missed was the art of redefining words to fit your narrative. Where once “mass-shooting” was defined as any instance in which 6 or more people were killed is now legally defined as any instance in which 4 or more people are simply shot at. Not hit, not killed, but shot at. While I’m not defending mass-shootings regardless of their definition, what I’m trying to point out is that the culture, the government, society, is redefining words so they can get the data they want. Now, when anti-gun advocates go to the data, since they have redefined what constitutes a mass-shooting, they get to conclude that suddenly mass-shootings are at an all-time high!

President Biden made a claim (on video that you can find and watch yourself) that a .22-caliber bullet (the smallest that is available, about the size of a BB, a little less than 2g in weight, and used for hunting small game such as squirrels, rabbits, etc.), “...will lodge in a lung, and we can probably get it out and save a life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body,” This is an absolutely nonsensical statement. A 9mm bullet (which is generally used in most handguns, and is used by police) will not “blow the lungs out of a body”. There is actually no round that will do this. Our own president, the constitutional leader of our military, is spreading lies about what guns can do. This isn’t a lack of knowledge. This is a malicious use of false information.

So much of what we are being told is a lie. We are told that men can be women, and women can be men; we are told that, not only is it okay to kill children, but they’re not actually children, or that they’re not even human or alive in the first place; we’re being fed false data and made-up statistics from every platform; the government pushes the statements they want the public to hear. Twitter admitted within the last couple years that our government told them to censor certain information about COVID and the vaccines that didn’t fit the public agenda.

Something we joke about in our family is that we love listening to the best comedy station on the air: NPR. National Propaganda Radio as I like to call it. NPR is one of the greatest embarrassments to journalism. They are a consistent source of propaganda – which makes sense seeing as they are funded by the federal government. And, as of recently, is officially labeled as “Government-funded Media” on Twitter. This may be the only truthful statement you will find on their Twitter page. I think if Joseph Goebbels listened to NPR, he’d be inspired.

Something that I want to teach my children when they are older is how to discern information they hear. I want them to be skeptical and ask questions, to question everything. In a world filled with propaganda, how can we navigate it? How can we trust anything we hear? Is anything even true? Luckily for us Christians, we have been blessed and gifted with the Lord’s wisdom. Proverbs 2:3 says, “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.”

And James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” When we are shuffling around in the propaganda of this world, we Christians have our God ready to bless us with His wisdom if we ask Him for it, for it is only God’s wisdom that can help us sift out the lies and corruption that plague our world.

It’s a skill that has never seemed more important than it is today. We need to teach ourselves and our children how to spot false information in any statement we hear. The world may never speak clearly, but we need to learn how to hear the real message they are trying to get across. We need to learn how to observe the information we’re being told and how it could be either incorrect or be used incorrectly.

When you read an article online, or watch a news segment on TV, or listen to a headline on the radio, your first question should always be: what is the bias of this source? For example: no matter how many times NPR claims that they are a balanced and fair news source (following Goebbels’ advice from his first quote I listed above), I know for a fact that they are not, and that they are very liberal. That being said, I already have an idea of what and how they will report information. Now, the next most important thing to do is respond to all of their points with the following question: “Does this logically make sense?” and “Did they use real, verifiable, and empirical data to back this claim?” Generally, they do not.

We must think critically about all the information we hear. We need to be wise with the content and information we absorb every day. Matthew 15:10-11 says, “And He called the people to Him and said to them, ‘Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.’”

We’re going to take in a lot of information every single day from the people and media around us, but where Biblical wisdom and understanding come into play is what we do with that information. It’s not the information that we see and hear that defiles us, but what we do with it; how it manifests in our lives. We can shape ourselves and our faith to it, like much of the world has done, or we can stand against it and remain steadfast to the truth of Scripture.

I think 1 John 2:15-17 provides very good instruction on how to interact with the world through this mainstream propaganda we face:

“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” 

Also Ephesians 5:11-14:

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light.”

We as Christians need to always remind ourselves that what we often hear is the voice of the world. It’s the voice of the enemy in the media, in politics, in culture and society. As the days go on, it becomes increasingly more difficult to discern what’s true and what isn’t. I believe this is a real skill we need to learn and know. First and foremost, we must be in God’s Word. We must know what God says about the world. We must know what the Truth is, or we’ll never be able to know what the lies are. We must know where the Light is, or we’ll never be able to know where the darkness is. My call you to, brothers and sisters: consider getting off social media entirely and having nothing to do with it. Get off the internet when it is not necessary. Do not trust any news you hear at face value; always be skeptical. And, finally, when you don’t know what’s true or not, pick up your Bible and read it and pray, asking our Father for wisdom, which He will grant you.