The Burnzo Diaries: March 2021

Most people are familiar with the old folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes, right? The story is about two con-artists posing as weavers who convince an emperor that they will weave him “special clothes”, clothes that are only visible to smart people while invisible to stupid people. The joke, however, is that there are no clothes, but the emperor is too afraid to admit that he doesn’t see them, lest people think he is stupid. So, he walks around naked and his subjects are also afraid to admit the clothes don’t exist because they don’t want to look stupid, either. Eventually, it takes the courage of a little girl who doesn’t care about looking stupid to call out the fact that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

Now, there are many ways this simple but brilliant folktale can be broken down and analyzed, but what I think is most fascinating about the story is its lesson in human psychology. In particular, this is a fascinating case-study in gaslighting.

Gaslighting, if you don’t know, is basically a manipulative psychological tactic where you convince a person they’re crazy for believing or stating the obvious. In the case of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the emperor’s subjects see—clear as day—that the emperor is buck naked with no clothes on, but the emperor is able to gaslight them that he is, indeed, wearing clothes, the most splendid clothes ever to be worn, and he’s able to get everybody to sign on to this unreality because people are too afraid to state the obvious. This is how manipulative power-hungry personalities work: if you can convince people that unreality is reality and vice versa, you can literally convince them of anything. Once you accomplish this, you can get away with anything. Literally anything.

This lesson in psychological manipulation is, of course, timeless and perhaps more relevant than ever right now in the current political climate. What we are witnessing today is an overwhelming amount of policies coming out of a Biden administration that defy common sense and, frankly, defy reality. There are many examples of this (a wide-open border policy during a pandemic, continued school closures that contradict science, cancelling Dr. Seuss etc.), but perhaps the most glaringly obvious one is the federal mandate to allow transgender women to compete in women’s college sports.

Now, this is a controversial and sensitive topic, but let me just say from the outset that this is America and I believe everybody has the right to live their life in any way they darn well please, so long as it doesn’t infringe upon the rights of others. There are many people born who don’t feel right in their own skin—there’s no denying this and there’s nothing wrong with it. They feel compelled to switch genders, at least to the extent that man-made hormone treatment and surgery have allowed them to.

The problem, however, is that these man-made medical procedures can only take their sex change so far. Based on what we know, it appears as though hormone treatment can potentially reduce bone density and muscle mass to a point that is near or close enough to a biological woman’s; however, science has also shown that muscle mass can be easily rejuvenated afterwards because of “muscle memory”.[1] Either way, hormone treatment still has little to no effect on a male’s bone structure, muscle fiber composition, larger heart, larger lung capacity[2] and the other 6,500—yes, 6,500—genetic differences between men and women.[3]

In short, transgenders are still unavoidably built like a man in many ways that cannot be changed or at least cannot be guaranteed by science to be changed. So is it fair for them to be allowed to compete against biological women in sports? No, doesn’t seem very fair to women, does it? Because there are still significant biological differences at play and the transgenders could have significant advantage over the biological female competition. If anything, much more research has to be done on what, exactly, hormone treatment does to a man’s body before we give the situation the benefit of the doubt and assume there is a level playing field between a trans-woman and a biological woman when it comes to sports.

That makes logical sense, doesn’t it? So why are we afraid to state the obvious? Well, because of the Emperor’s New Clothes phenomenon. Very few people want to state the obvious—that there are innate and unchangeable biological differences between man and woman—because they are afraid to do so. They don’t want to be seen as stupid or, in this case, bigoted or transphobic. So they agree to sign on to an unreality. And that’s what this is really about at the end of the day: inverting reality into an unreality.

That’s right: I don’t think the Biden administration or the political left in general really cares about transgender folks as much as they proclaim to. There is a much bigger issue at play here and that issue is POWER. Remember: if you can convince people that reality isn’t really reality (as we see in The Emperor’s New Clothes), then you can convince them of anything. Once you have obtained the power to invert reality, then you have basically obtained absolute power. And what is absolute power but God? Plain and simple: it’s God.

So that’s the real goal here. Not to help out the transgender community but to put the American people into an “Emperor’s New Clothes” kind of psychological state, which is a state of easy manipulative control and absolute power over them. Once you accomplish this, you have accomplished the goal of every power-hungry emperor and that is to essentially usurp the role of God. This will mean people no longer answer to God as their ultimate ruler; they answer to you and you only. Instead of being one nation under God, America basically becomes one nation under the Biden administration.

To put this another way, what we’re witnessing today is a near-coup-like war against God. Because a war on biology, a war on nature, a war on science, a war on common sense, a war on “the obvious”, a war on reality is just that: a war against God.

What we need more than ever right now is for people to put their foot down and state the obvious, especially when we see so many policies being rolled out—one after another—that defy common sense. We need to fight against unreality. We need to have the courage to say, “THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!”

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MATT BURNS is the author of THE WOMAN AND THE DRAGON, which is a novella loosely based on chapter 12 in The Book of Revelation. He’s also the author of JOHNNY CRUISE, WEIRD MONSTER and a memoir called GARAGE MOVIE: MY ADVENTURES MAKING WEIRD FILMS. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.