Greetings, Dear Reader,
Nothing quite slaps you in the face like reality, except for its uglier cousin lately, unreality.
ELLEN PAGE’S MANFACE
Before taking all this on, I want to start with an admission.
I once made two critical decisions back to back that had far reaching ramifications, both concerning language and how the Daily Caller would use it.
First the good: I was the one who first suggested referring to “gender affirming care” as “sex changes” and “sex changes for minors” when children were involved. I felt that not only would it resonate in all the best ways, regardless of audience, but also that it was comprehensively accurate. School administrators quietly referring to Jane as Johnny and not telling Jane’s parents was as accurately a sex change as Jane getting stuffed with testosterone and suffering a mastectomy to boot.
An added benefit would be that the stigma around sex changes still registered among both sides of the debate. Adults getting sex changes was still shocking. Now imagine children?
It wasn’t long before the phraseology was widely adopted among conservatives. I considered it a win for reality. It was also edifying to the ol’ ego.
(It was only later that I came across the phrase “sex rejecting care” with some chagrin, but I still think “sex change” is more of a punch in the face.)
Now the bad. Admittedly, this was the mistake I most regret in my 25-year career, and I’ve made some doozies. In order to properly amplify stories around the treatment of children — which I had identified as a crucial focal point to beat back the increasingly menacing transgender craze — I suggested to my staff that we not refer to Bruce Jenner as “he.”
YIKES! To be clear, there was a caveat to not use pronouns altogether, but that gets awkward in copy quickly.
There were many reasons for this suggestion, and all of them were misguided, but if you’d allow me.
First, Bruce was among many adult transgender voices saying the most important thing: Do not do this to kids. He was routinely on Fox News and on stage lobbying for people to slow down on every aspect of transgender ideology and children. He wasn’t the only one. These are powerful voices when it comes to the public concern of child welfare because they are living the mistake.
Second, the censorship and suppression regime was annihilating all reporting that didn’t adhere to strict and newly upside down rules on gender. Didn’t matter what it was. A blog post or an investigation that took months to prepare. It would get downranked into oblivion.
To me, the most important thing was documenting and exposing how this ideology was being inflicted on minors, in some cases to the most grisly degree. He/She pronouns were an unnecessary distraction, I thought.
Third, and probably worst of all, I assumed that no discerning person would be confused about Bruce Jenner regardless of what we called him. The tollbooth worker in New Jersey who has no idea who Jenner is would meet him the first time and instantly know he was a transvestite. Therefore, he didn’t need my help on the fourth reference of Jenner in a story.
Thankfully, this internal debate over language was essentially killed in its cradle, but not before I’d had vigorous arguments with various stakeholders. I know now it was an essential part of the battle lines, and I regret the error in judgment.
Looking back, even if it was never really publicly visible (until now, lol), it was the only pockmark on an otherwise pristine and aggressive reporting posture that ultimately contributed materially to the significant degradation of the mentally ill left’s ability to sex change kids.
—
I wonder if Ellen Page ever ruminates over the story of Pinocchio. Does she consider just how closely it hews to her own life story?
A fake boy gets famous for performing on his way to meet a Blue Fairy who may or may not exist and may or may not be able to change him into a “real boy.” Along the way, he lies and misbehaves quite a bit.
But there’s also the story of the story of Pinocchio. Disney burnished the edges quite a bit (surprise!). The original Italian author wrote the story in 1883 as a warning about immorality and delusional obsessions. The “Blue Fairy” was actually a “girl with turquoise hair” who apparently died and was now haunting Pinocchio.
It’s not just a darker version than Disney’s, there’s also a ton more death. Early on in the story, the moralizing cricket — who’s spent the last 100 years in Gapeto’s workshop – is lecturing Pinocchio about his misbehavior. Pinnochio loses it. In a fit of fury, he kills the cricket with a hammer.
Later in the original story, Pinocchio saves up five gold coins to buy a suit. On his way, he’s approached by conmen – the Fox and the Cat – who convince him that burying the coins will eventually grow a golden coin tree. The con ends with the pair subduing Pinocchio, stealing his money, and hanging him from a tree.
After the story received a ton of backlash, despite being wildly popular, Carlo Collodi revised the ending to continue the story in order to add a redemption arc.
In it, Pinocchio realizes his mistakes and eventually becomes a “real boy.” The climax ends with his father’s house being turned into an expansive estate and him “looking down” at his puppet body and thinking how foolish it was for him to have behaved the way he did. (Sound familiar?)
As opposed to Disney’s version, in which the lesson was simply to be nice and generous, Collodi’s lessons were about industriousness, obedience, and rejecting a lazy, hedonistic lifestyle.
You think Collodi was a Roman Catholic or nah?
—
My sister stopped talking to me a long time ago.
In one of our last, most contentious conversations, I told her, “You’ll never be a man.”
I also begged her, through tears at one point, not to mutilate herself. I was, as far as I can tell, the only family member who did not “affirm.” It all ended in a giant, drunken shouting match and we’ve never really recovered since.
I know my father is mostly concerned about being cut off. I can understand that. Truly. She never talks to me, even when she’s briefly in the same town.
Somebody had to do it, and the eldest brother is probably that someone, no?
—
Ellen Page is back in the news lately because Christopher Nolan cast her in the Odyssey. There’s actual footage leaked online just today of Page running (“running”) around in Roman-esque armor before she’s likely about to be summarily (some would say hilariously) slaughtered. There’s also video of her in real life doing boxing training. She has good form, I’ll admit, but also she’s 5’1” and like 110 pounds.
The multifaceted effort to impose Page The NuMan on us is one of the more profound communications campaigns of the last 10 years. If you’ve been awake in that time, you know that’s saying something.
Page is not a man. In a recent appearance, she looks like two kids standing atop one another in Dad’s suit. Her security guard is towering over her as she scampers around awkwardly taking photos with fans.
Page was also at one time, not very long ago, a beautiful woman. She literally glowed. Now you can see the suffering and the awkwardness and you can hear the mental illness in her raft of media appearances to promote the movie.
She talks about being a man like a woman poorly pretending to be a man. The irony is she’s supposed to be an actor.
“Healthy masculinity to me is or even just something I’ve felt as, like, transitioning, is like leaning away from whenever there is some sort of impulse or expectation you’ve put on yourself to, like, shut down or conform in a way that usually feels like this, like I am closing off,” she said on some podcast. Page added that healthy, expressive masculinity “could just mean a good cry.”
Um, okay … No matter how hard they try, Ellen Page is not going to explain masculinity to me.
She didn’t go through male puberty. She has no idea what it’s like to bump into random objects because she’s suddenly six inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than she was three months ago.
She has no idea what it’s like living under the constant simmering threat of violence. She has no idea what the obligation to resort to violence feels like. She has no idea what that violence actually feels like when it actually happens. She was never bullied by other older males in eighth grade and she never overcame her fear to actually sock one in the face in the middle of the hallway only to have a mid-50s female guidance counselor level her.
She doesn’t understand what female laughter is, it’s different variations, and how it can reach into the soul of a man, good and bad. She doesn’t know male expectations and male failure, how much of it is required to actually become a man.
Perhaps the most profound part of the deranged media campaign is that Page is the finished product. She is the reality they always imagined.
—
Going viral along with her appearances is the claim that she’s appearing on next month’s cover of Men’s Health.
It’s one of those examples where the parody is excruciatingly close to reality. It’s fake, but she did in fact once appear on the cover of Esquire, another male magazine.
The subheadline bent over backward to use male pronouns to an almost comical degree.
“In his own words, the actor and advocate talks about his childhood, his career, his transition, and his life, though not necessarily in that order.”
I’m not sure why the order would matter, but you can tell they stopped thinking critically after the second or third “his.”
Along with the cover story was a series of images that sexualized Page as if she were a man. She was undoubtedly coached. It was undoubtedly not the first time she was coached through something that, with better judgment, might have been avoided entirely.
It won’t be the last.
The funny thing about the fake Men’s Health cover is how fake all the men are that usually grace that cover. Most of them, while outlining their “rigorous” workout schedules, omit just how much testosterone and boutique steroids they’re taking. Chicken and broccoli! They exclaim, without disclosing the $10,000 a month chemical cocktail right along with the specialized trainers.
The men on that cover are real men, but like Page, they’re all living a lie.
This is their finished product, a highly produced, highly dependent lie whose deep struggles and conflicts are worn in public, trumpeted even, without the least touch up. A tortured, broken woman, an exhibition in which you are all obligated to clap.
It’s sad and gross and fits perfectly for modern Hollywood.
The shame of it is that unlike Pinocchio, she’s real. Underneath the performance is an actual human soul.
MORE LINKS
Trump Uses Primetime Address To Claim China Meddled In 2020 Election
Allegations of Chinese machinations?
—
Foreign-Owned Bank Expands Reach In US As Americans Face Down Powder Keg Issue
SMH
—
Plucky Village Declares Independence To Avoid Being Overrun By Male Migrants
Defending home.
Like what you’re reading? If so, please consider subscribing to State of the Day or sharing this with a friend. You’d be supporting this newsletter and helping keep independent journalism alive.
If you are already a paid subscriber, make sure to join the conversation in our subscribers-only chat below.
In the pic you show of her, she clearly had an eating disorder; so she was already suffering. At least playing a "man", Hollyweird lets her eat.
Those who would take their kids to the Odyssey would be better off using that money to pay their kids to read the book, with the added benefit that they would not be rewarding the studio financially for trying to indoctrinate our kids by hiring a woman to play a male gladiator.
I hope your sister comes around, for her sake, and yours.