The 'Trans Ad' That May Have Cost Us Our Democracy

And shows us just how stupid we really are.

Courtesy of LA Progressive

A sixth-grade reading level means a person can follow narratives, character development, and plot structures. The reader can compare and contrast ideas and identify themes. However, 54 percent of Americans are not at a sixth-grade reading level.

A Gallup analysis published in March 2020 looked at data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2012, 2014, and 2017. It found that 130 million adults in the country have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab (Do More than Half Americans Read Below a 6th-grade-reading level).

Literacy is an essential criterion for a healthy democracy. Russians are literate, but thanks to over a century of extreme propaganda, they are eternally misinformed. I can tell you that what is universally accepted as being up will, in Russia, be considered down — black will be white, round square. Russian leaders created the truth they needed because it permitted them to do whatever and whenever they wanted. In the modern era under Putin, it has only gotten worse.

Fox News and the Republican Party have done to the American public what Russia did to its people. Harris and Trump voters are as far about on the basic tenets of reality and truth as Americans and Russians. Quite incredibly, Trumpists and MAGidiots are closer to the Russian voter than they are to Harris voters.

The Trump campaign has spent more than $19 million on two television ads that have aired nearly 55,000 times since Oct. 1, according to data from AdImpact. Make America Great Again Inc., the leading super political action committee supporting Trump, has spent more than $1.1 million during the same time period on a similar ad that has aired more than 6,000 times.

The campaign’s ads are playing in all battleground states and airing during NFL and college football games, a Trump campaign official said.

The ads focus on taxpayer-funded gender transitions for people in prison and immigrant detainees. They use Vice President Kamala Harris’ comments from 2019 in which she said she supported transgender inmates having access to gender-affirming surgery. She made similar comments in an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire in 2019, saying she supported “medically necessary care” for federal inmates and detained migrants (Trump Campaign Has Spent Millions on Anti-Trans Ad).

Organizations like GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) conducted polls before the election, showing that the Trump ad wasn’t swaying undecided voters. Maybe those people who participated in the survey hadn’t been, but the opinions of millions of Americans were shaped by the ad’s mangled truth. For the record, Kamala Harris’s position on tax-payer-supported surgery for inmates in prisons was the same as that of Donald Trump. In an interview in 2020, Harris said she would abide by the law.

The Trump ad used a strategy that has worked for decades. One of the most famous manipulations of a political ad was the famous “Daisy Ad,” run by the Johnson campaign against Barry Goldwater. The message being delivered to viewers was that either you vote for Lyndon Johnson or die during a nuclear holocaust.

In 1988, the Bush campaign scored an advertising coup when it showed then-Democratic nominee Mike Dukakis riding in a tank. Dukakis was successfully labeled weak on defense, so his people decided to put him in an Abrams tank.

Courtesy of 538

John Kerry suffered a similar fate when the Swift Boat veterans ran an ad in support of George W. Bush, showing how Kerry, a war hero, was, in their opinion, a traitor. The ad, which featured former prisoners of war in Vietnam, claimed that John Kerry’s appearance before Congress in the early 1970s made their time in enemy prisons more intolerable. Kerry’s admissions that American troops were committing crimes in Vietnam, they claimed, was treason. Many Americans agreed. Claiming to have been merely a group of veterans concerned about the country, it was later learned that a wealthy right-wing Bush supporter funded the Swift Boat Veterans.

The country has changed a lot since the days of the Daisy ad. Then, people were worried about nuclear war. When Dukakis was mocked for his ride in the tank, the Cold War was hot but potentially ending. Americans thought a World War II hero and former vice president could better guide it through the complexities of a tumbling world empire. The Swiftboat ad was a lie that prevented the better-qualified person from becoming president. John Kerry could not recover after the ad ran. The election was close, but when Ohio went for Bush, he was pushed over the 270 electoral vote threshold.

We will be discussing for a long time why Kamala Harris lost the election. Liberals, always afraid to admit that their causes could be offputting, won’t be ready to accept that the push for transgender rights is hurting the party. A lot of undecided, not-so-informed voters with 6th-grade reading levels find the focus on transgender rights offensive. Whether Democrats are really pushing for the rights or not is less important than the truth. Trump and many on the right are saying they are, so that makes it accurate.

The transgender ad, which shows Harris in 2020 saying she would support the taxpayer-sponsored gender reassignment surgery for prisoners, also claims that she wants transgender women to play female sports. The ad shows a Yeti-sized transgender woman playing basketball for a cis women’s team. Harris’s view was not radical and mainstream for her party. It was even aligned with Trump’s view 50 percent of the time — his views change depending on the audience.

America has used ads for decades to manipulate facts and embellish lies. The Trump transgender ad doesn’t break any new ground. It does, however, show you how radically our priorities have changed. It used to be communists and terrorists that worried us; now, the enemies are our fellow citizens struggling to figure out how best to live their lives.