A Quarter Century of Entertainment — and Propaganda
When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, almost everybody was familiar with the prime-time schedules of the major networks. In those long-ago days before cable TV, the Internet, home video recording, and DVDs, broadcast TV was the only game in town. TV Guide was the bestselling magazine in the country. All TV was appointment TV. And, certain shows became “watercooler programs” that pretty much everybody would watch and then, the next day, discuss eagerly with their colleagues at work.
Nowadays I sometimes forget that the broadcast networks still exist. And having lived abroad for a quarter of a century, I’ve long since lost track of what’s on in prime time across the pond. Perusing the current schedule on Wikipedia, I see that certain warhorses — 60 Minutes, The Simpsons — have hung in there.
Reality competitions like Survivor and The Voice and The Bachelor and Dancing with the Stars are also still around. There are reboots of old standbys like Matlock and Night Court. There are even new versions of vintage game shows, such as Jeopardy, Hollywood Squares, and The $100,000 Pyramid, that used to be staples of daytime and early evening syndication. And then there are the police procedurals that seem as if they’ll never go away: NCIS, Criminal Minds, and the Big Daddy of them all, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, now in its 26th season.
Now, I’ve seen a few episodes of SVU over the years. As you surely know, it’s about an “elite squad” of the NYPD that investigates sex crimes. Since its outset, it has starred Mariska Hargitay as Detective Olivia Benson. Christopher Meloni, who plays Detective Elliot Stabler, has also been around from the beginning, although he took a ten-year hiatus along the way. Dann Florek played Captain Donald Cregan from season one until 2021. For many years B.D. Wong played George Huang, the psychiatrist attached to the team. Other actors, including the rapper Ice-T and comedian Richard Belzer, have served long stretches on the series.
Like millions of other viewers, I’ve found SVU to be highly watchable; but I’ve also been put off by its none-too-subtle politics. The other day, noticing that several seasons of SVU are available on Netflix, I decided to sample a few episodes in order to get a clearer sense of the mentality that has shaped this immensely popular series over the course of its more than quarter-century run.
Take the 2005 episode “Raw” (Season 7, Episode 6), in which our heroes’ investigation of a school shooting leads them to a gun store where there’s a huge Nazi flag hanging in the basement and where the proprietor’s homeschooled son Kyle (Cody Kash) and friend Star Morrison (Marcia Gay Harden) rant cartoonishly about “killer spics,” “coons,” “coloreds,” “Jew lawyers,” “porch monkeys,” “sambos,” and so on. Message: gun ownership and homeschooling equal obsessive bigotry.
Ultimately, we learn that the white couple whose adopted black kid died in the school shooting actually arranged to have him killed for the insurance. At one point Mariska tells Kyle that his dad has “completely brainwashed” him. But the episode itself is nothing but a heavy-handed attempt to brainwash viewers into believing that murderous white supremacists are a major problem in today’s America — even in New York City.
In the very next episode, “Name” (Season 7, Episode 7), the remains of four Puerto Rican boys murdered by a white man in the 1970s are discovered, prompting someone to comment: “You think if it was four white boys missing the case would still be open?” Yes, it’s yet another left-wing fantasy of right-wing racism. (Black gang crime? Never heard of it.)
In “Unorthodox” (Season 9, Episode 13), the rape of a pubescent boy leads the team to the Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which gives Detective Munch (Belzer) an opportunity to say things about Hasidic superstitiousness and self-segregation that none of our SVU heroes would ever say about Islam. In “Rockabye” (Season 7, Episode 9), the villain is a doctor who opposes abortion — an issue that also figures in “Hammered” (Season 11, Episode 4), which depicts pro-life activists as dangerous psychopaths. And “Disabled” (Season 11, Episode 17) holds up for admiration a prosecutor who quits her job to work for the execrable International Criminal Court.
The episode entitled “Transitions” (Season 10, Episode 14), originally aired on Feb. 16, 2009, was very much ahead of its time, although not in a good way. It’s about a violence-prone pubescent boy, Henry, who’s convinced that he’s a girl — he calls himself Hayley — and who may or may not have tried to kill his father. His mother supports Henry’s delusion about his gender identity and wants Henry to take puberty blockers; his father, Mark, doesn’t. Huang, parroting trans ideology, explains to the cops that “Hayley’s anatomy is irrelevant” because “her brain is female.” Buying instantly into this nonsense, our heroes immediately start calling Henry “she.”
In the end, it turns out that Mark’s attempted murderer was Hayley’s apparently female guidance counselor, Jackie Blaine, whose lawyer smears Mark for preferring to have “a dead son” rather than “a beautiful, sensitive, loving daughter.” After Jackie admits on the stand to having been born male, Mark, rather than recognizing that this “trans woman” has twisted his son’s mind, “realizes” that Henry’s puberty blockers are indeed “a matter of life and death” and that “none of this would have happened if I’d just listened to my daughter.” By opposing Henry’s wish for puberty blockers, says Mark, “I was just thinking of myself.” Hargitay and Meloni agree readily.
Mind you, this was fifteen years ago before trans madness had conquered our culture. How much of a role, one wonders, did propaganda like this play in making clueless TV viewers accept the dangerous lies of gender ideology?
Finally, in “Anchor” (Season 11, Episode 10), three children, all of them “anchor babies” for illegal immigrants, are killed. Dropping in on an agency that helps illegals, the cops learn that the agency is frequently subjected to bomb threats and the like. (Other episodes tell us the same thing about abortion clinics.) The episode leads us into an underworld of jingoists who scream things like “Dirty immigrants!” One of the murder suspects, a white male, talks about nonwhites in a way that sounds (again) right out of a cartoon, addressing Ice-T, for example, as a “coon.”
The cast even includes a TV host named Garrison, obviously based on Alex Jones, who encourages another character to kill children, who uses terms like “wetback” and “camel jockey,” and whom a defense attorney equates with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly.
Just as SVU wants us to see New York as a city where most murders are white-on-non-white, it wants to teach us that it’s not illegal immigration that threatens law and order but its critics. Recall that, until not long ago, opposition to illegal immigration was the consensus position among both Republicans and Democrats.
Would SVU ever run an episode inspired by the real-life story of any one of the many Americans — among them 22-year-old Laken Riley, 12-year-old Travis Wolfe, 10-year-old Alex Wise, and 11-year-old Aiden Clark — who’ve been killed in the last couple of years alone by illegal aliens? Does the question even need to be asked?
READ MORE from Bruce Bawer:
Sandra Gilbert and Feminism’s Endless Rage
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