Totally Plucked

Chicken Littles and Big Lies

A few months ago, I stumbled upon an animated short film I’d never seen before. Produced by Disney in 1943 as anti-Nazi propaganda, Chicken Little is based upon the familiar folk tale of a naive chicken, who, when an acorn falls on his head, becomes convinced it’s the end of the world. “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” he cries, inspiring terror in his fine feathered community. The tale warns against false alarms—in our modern parlance, misinformation—that can trigger dangerous mass hysteria. Disney worked its signature escapist magic for wartime moviegoers with Chicken Little. For the kids, a farmyard of silly, anthropomorphized animals; for the grownups, the critters lampoon stereotypes of 1940s American life. But beneath the fun and frivolity lies an ominous lesson about the insidious power of propaganda—wielded to devastating effect by Nazis bent on destruction and world domination.

The film opens on a bucolic scene, the farmyard, where Henny-Penny, Turkey-Lurkey, Goosie Poosie, and of course, dim-witted, yo-yo wielding Chicken Little and other poultry are coveted by the ravenous Foxy Loxy, eating his heart out on the other side of the high, impenetrable fence. He turns to his book of Psychology (in the wartime cut of the film, the book was labeled Mein Kampf) for inspiration.

First, the book instructs the fox to identify the least intelligent and, therefore, most suggestible denizen of the farmyard. Chicken Little is singled out as the useful idiot through whom Mr. Loxy can manipulate the entire flock. Next, the book advises telling “a big lie.” Foxy Loxy convinces Chicken Little that a storm is coming, then drops a hunk of wood on his head as he assumes the “voice of doom,” warning that the sky is falling—run for your life! Chicken Little freaks out, alerting all of the impending apocalypse (shades of Greta Thunberg). His hysterical message is quickly debunked by the pompous leader of the avian community, the cigar-puffing Cocky Locky, who holds up the hunk of wood that had conked Chicken Little on the noggin—proof that their fears are unfounded. Nothing to see here.

Determined, Foxy Loxy cracks the book again for help. “Undermine the faith of the masses in their leaders,” it reads, so Foxy Loxy starts a whispered propaganda campaign inside all the various groups in the bird community, sowing the seeds of doubt about Cocky Locky’s intelligence and leadership. With Cocky Locky’s position on shaky ground, Foxy Loxy builds Chicken Little up, flattering him and encouraging his challenge to Cocky Locky’s authority. Chicken Little declares himself the new leader, the salvation of all from the impending apocalypse—just as Foxy beans Cocky on the head, knocking him out, and convincing everyone that Chicken Little had been right all along! The sky IS falling! Pandemonium ensues, as the farmyard erupts in mass hysteria. Foxy suggests Chicken Little throw open the gates, and lead everyone “to the cave” where they’ll all be safe. Of course, the cave is where they’ll all be…supper.

Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, is often falsely credited with inventing the term “the big lie,” but it was Hitler himself who introduced the idea in Mein Kampf. According to historian Jeffrey Herf, Hitler used the big lie technique to turn sentiment against the Jews, with propaganda depicting Germany (a nation traumatized from its defeat in World War I) as an innocent, besieged nation under assault by insidious Jewish forces engaged in a covert war of extermination. Playing upon old anti-Jewish tropes and stereotypes, the Nazis convinced the people that annihilation of the Jews would be an act of self defense.

A war of extermination. It wouldn’t be until the Nuremberg Trials that we’d have a term for it: genocide—a deliberate and systematic extermination of an entire race of people.

Today’s big lie is eerily familiar: that Israelis (see: Jews) are waging a war of extermination—a genocide—against the Palestinians. They’re waging a war, yes, against Hamas—a terror organization that’s embedded itself within (or under) the civilian population, which is, tragically, being hard hit as a result. There is no genocide; no ethnic cleansing. Israel is trying to fight a foe that uses civilians as human shields, while seeking to destroy Hamas after the monstrous provocation of October 7th. Was America’s response to 9/11 “proportional?” Or the actions we took after the attack on Pearl Harbor? Is such a thing as a “proportional response” even possible in war? I will leave it to smarter and more expert voices to argue the history and the complexities of the Middle East conflict, and the stats and information coming out of Gaza, but I’m stunned by the lack of understanding, especially amongst those of us who were alive on 9/11, about how Islamist terror groups operate—and what they think of Americans, let alone Jews.

The big lie is repeated and repeated; accepted as truth by indoctrinated, radicalized Chicken Littles at our captured universities. Hamas is waging a successful PR war here on American campuses, playing upon the deeply rooted oppressor-oppressed narrative that today’s young adults are saturated in. Palestinians = Muslims = Brown People = Victims. Israelis = Jews = White Colonists = Oppressors. The simpler the message—and the less knowledge of the facts of this conflict 10,000 miles away—the better.

Nazi Propaganda Tsar Joseph Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels, in a speech delivered in Nuremberg in 1934, extols the virtue, utility and “art” of propaganda:

“Political propaganda in principle is active and revolutionary. It is aimed at the broad masses. It speaks the language of the people because it wants to be understood by the people. Its task is the highest creative art of putting sometimes complicated events and facts in a way simple enough to be understood by the man on the street…It is a question of making it clear to him by using the proper approach, evidence, and language.”

Language is key, is it not? The more I look back to the years leading up to the pandemic, the more I see the machinations that ideologues employed, and how they began exerting power in our culture and politics. It started with language: words one can’t say; words redefined. Words as “violence.” Victor Klemperer, in his book The Language of the Third Reich, writes:

“Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed upon them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Are you calling today’s social justice warriors, and pro-Palestine protestors Nazis? Of course not, oh triggered one. I don’t fling around such terms. I’ll leave that to leftist activists—hyperbole is part of their playbook. Anyone who questions them is branded a Nazi, a fascist—a convenient way to demonize dissenters, activate the online mob against them, and shut down investigation of certain ideas and activities. Not only does this render the label of ultimate evil an empty caricature, it provides a cover for today’s authoritarians to do their work. What I’m talking about is indoctrination—and the Nazis were particularly adept at it.

“I begin with the young,” Hitler said. “With them I can make a new world.”

When Hitler’s National Socialist Party took control, they instituted a nationwide overhaul of the education system. Race science was taught to the young children, emphasizing the superiority of German Aryans. Students were made to stand in front of the class and have their physical features analyzed for Aryan racial purity (actual calipers were used to measure the size of students’ skulls, for instance). Educators were free to teach race science in their own ways. Textbooks and children’s story books became primers in Nazi ideology. And today…? Primary school teachers separate students by race, shaming white kids for the “original sin” of racism, while teaching black kids to believe in their victimhood; even rewarding them for it. Today, “sensitivity readers” censor the books of my childhood, while Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby is read to kids. Cartoons depict Klan rallies and cross burnings; cuddly, animated characters with baby-talk voices preach gender ideology.

Goebbels anticipated advances in technology as a powerful tool for the propagandist:

“The effective propagandist must be a master of the art of speech, of writing, of journalism, of the poster, and of the leaflet. He must have the gift to use the major methods of influencing public opinion such as the press, film, and radio to serve his ideas and goals…The nature of propaganda remains the same, but the means provided by advancing technology are becoming ever broader and far-reaching.”

He was a monster, but he was prescient, was he not?

You might argue: well, the Nazis were the government! This was a national, government-mandated overhaul of education! True. And there’s a government at work today, too: it’s a bureaucratic, corporatized, billion dollar industry—an institutionalized, unelected government called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Under the Nazis, college professors had to join the National Socialist Lecturers Association, and undergo a compulsory six-week course of political indoctrination. Teachers who didn’t comply were subject to public shaming, dismissal and blacklisting. Today, Ivy League universities like Harvard require all applicants for teaching positions to present a DEI commitment statement; essentially a loyalty pledge to critical social justice ideology and its objectives.

The Hitler Youth were idealistic kids, completely brainwashed at youth camps, where healthy outdoor activities and athletics were coupled with training to build up their moral and racial superiority. These radicalized young people took over college campuses, where they wielded enormous power over their teachers and administrators, intimidating Jewish students and faculty; initiating book burning. Students dissatisfied with their grades, or who bore grudges against certain teachers, would start rumor campaigns, raising questions about their politics or ancestry—or simply report them to the Gestapo, leading to their dismissal, or worse. The emptying of the universities of Jewish and politically dissenting professors via student vendetta led to eleven Nobel Laureates being dismissed. The Nazis had to put a stop to the student purges when most of the science, physics and chemistry professors had been ejected; something that threatened the war effort.

We’ve all seen today’s student mobs engaging in cancellation campaigns against teachers and administrators. Professors are subjected to “sensitivity” trainings and struggle sessions simply for uttering the wrong word in front of the wrong students. Take the case of Jason Kilborn, the University of Illinois Chicago professor who used the “N” word, anecdotally, in a law class about race discrimination in hiring. For this he was suspended, placed under investigation, and, after pressure from students, made to undergo months of sensitivity classes, where the training manual used the very same slur words for which Kilborn was being punished. I jokingly refer to today’s activist coeds as “children of the corn,” but their resemblance to the Hitler Youth and Mao’s Red Guard is pretty clear, and shouldn't be ignored simply because their causes are perceived to be “progressive.”

So, how did we get from pink-haired climate-activist, Thunberg acolytes tossing cream of tomato soup at paintings or super glueing themselves onto roadways, to well organized, well funded pro-Hamas encampments at elite colleges, guarded by a menacing mob of masked kefiyeh-wearing thugs, intimidating Jewish students and taking over buildings, whilst holding custodians hostage?

It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole trying to piece together the steps that led to where our culture and our young people find themselves today. But think about it: an entire generation of adolescents who’ve had smart phones in their faces literally from the moment they left the womb, who live a great deal of their lives online, are suddenly put in lockdown, terrified of a world outside contaminated by lethal invisible germs. These kids exist in this anxiety ridden bubble with their liberal parents and—via zoom—their liberal teachers, all of whom are traumatized by Trump and his administration, and for some very good reasons. Then a presidential election ups the ante, followed by the horrors of January 6th, the George Floyd killing and subsequent race riots, and more.

These little chickens are convinced to believe that speech they disagree with or that challenges their views is actual violence; that being in the presence of such speech can do “harm." They’re taught to mistrust science and statistics. They’re convinced that gender is a social construct. They’re applauded for hating male and female “binaries,” and even for hating their own bodies. They’ve been filled up with existential terror such that everything becomes a genocide—a “genocide” of unarmed black people at the hands of police; a trans “genocide;” and now, a “genocide” of the Palestinian people by their “white oppressors,” the Israelis (see: Jews). That is one point on which they diverge from the Nazis: the Nazis never saw Jews as white; now suddenly Jews are not only white, but “Nazis” themselves. Perhaps the sky is falling.

Imagine living through all that, in an incubator of stress and impotence, at one of the most intensely stressful times of one’s life: high school. A student graduating college in 2024 began their college career from that incubator. When lockdown was lifted, these high strung young adults—who’ve been learning to hate their country, hate its founders, question its history (or rather, see its history through a distorted, revisionist lens); whose self esteem is completely dependent on the approval they receive on social media—suddenly, they have to deal with each other, and with other real humans, with other real ideas, in the real world. I’d be hysterical too, and, as Oscar Hammerstein II wrote, “you’ve got to be carefully taught.” The teachers, administrators and “consultants” who indoctrinate our youth are to blame—but so are those within our institutions who’ve kept silent and looked after their own survival and self interest as these corrosive ideas proliferated.

So, what becomes of Chicken Little and his feathered friends? Well, they become a neat graveyard of wishbones inside Foxy Loxy’s cave. As he licks his chops, the narrator breaks the fourth wall: “Hey, wait a minute! This isn’t right! That’s not the way it ends in my book!” To which Foxy, puffing on Cocky Locky’s cigar and playing with Chicken Little’s yo-yo snarls, “Oh yeah?? Don’t believe everything you read, brother!”