Recently a meme was making the rounds about transgender runner Glenique Frank, who competed in the London Marathon in 2023 and finished ahead of some 14,000 women. This meme and the media narratives that chimed in with it, suggested that this illustrated how transgenders have an unfair advantage in sports. (Narrator: they don’t.) Now however you may feel about Frank entering the competition, I hope you can see that it was highly disingenuous to mention finishing ahead of 14,000 women without mentioning that the race had more than 20,000 entrants. Frank finished in 6160th place. That doesn’t sound nearly as impressive — which is precisely the point. It’s easier to get people worked up over someone beating 14,000 participants if they don’t know that this individual was beaten by 6159 participants. This is an example of forced perspective, the next in our series of propaganda props.

Forced perspective is a term borrowed from the visual arts. Perspective, of course, involves the use of diagonals and relative dimension to give the illusion of depth and distance — to make 2D appear to be 3D. Forced perspective takes this a little further, creating illusions that are deceptive rather than merely representative. Disney employs the technique in its theme parks; for example, the top floors of buildings are disproportionately smaller than the bottom floors to make the structures appear taller than they really are. Michelangelo’s David has disproportionately large head and hands to make them appear more realistic when the statue is mounted at a height above the viewer, and more subtly commanding when viewed from a lower angle.

In propaganda, forced perspective can refer to anything that nudges the public to perceive something as being more or less of some quality than it really is. One way to do this is to omit relevant information, as in the case of the transgender runner, which dovetails with the technique we have dubbed decontextualization. You may recall that Republicans attacked President Obama for not appearing at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day one year during his time in office — and for instead taking a “vacation” in his hometown of Chicago. This, they proclaimed, was proof that Democrats don’t “respect our troops”.

There were at least three crucial pieces of information omitted from this narrative. First, Memorial Day is not and has never been a military holiday. It was intended to be an occasion to honor all the departed, not merely those who served in the military. Second, the president’s trip to Chicago wasn’t exactly a vacation, and he had scheduled an appearance at a military cemetery there. And third, he was far from the first president to “fail” to visit Arlington on Memorial Day; in fact, only one president had visited Arlington during every year in office — namely Bill Clinton. Which doesn’t exactly bolster the narrative that Democrats don’t care about veterans.

Another way to force perspective is to establish arbitrary benchmarks. After 9-11, certain Republicans began wearing flag pins as a supposed emblem of their supposed patriotism. Democrats, not wanting to be considered unpatriotic for not wearing such pins, began to do it as well. And soon, there would be prompt criticism of any politician who appeared in public without such a pin, and imputations against their loyalty. Today, there is an artificial norm under which none of them would dare to leave the pin off, for fear of being branded a commie.

You also may recall that during Obama’s term, Republicans tried to frame him as narcissistic by literally counting the number of times he used personal pronouns. (As you may have noticed, right-wingers are really REALLY obsessed with pronouns — they’ve been known to say things like “You may like to use your pronouns, but I never use mine myself.”) This was an arbitrary benchmark, because personal pronoun use is by no means an accurate gauge of either selfishness or selflessness. And Republicans no longer seem to be the least bit concerned about either narcissists nor the personal pronouns they use. In other words, arbitrary benchmarks can be used to effect double standards, another variety of forced perspective.

And this is extremely evident in the media’s handling of 45-47. As Van Jones commented during the 2024 campaign, “he gets to be lawless, she (Kamala Harris) has to be flawless.” This was not an exaggeration.

When President Biden was in office, his slightest slip of the tongue was widely proclaimed to be definitive proof of his mental unfitness; meanwhile That Other Guy constantly rambles in an unhinged stream of surreal references and dopey non-sequiturs, and he usually gets a total pass. Furthermore, he was hailed as a superhuman tower of strength for surviving a bullet to the ear — which is something that literally anyone could do.

The above cases also could fall under the heading of moving the goalposts, which involves changing the standards by which something is evaluated. But normally this means changing the standards for the same person or persons. I’ve run into this several times from readers who object to my debunking of gun myths. If I say, for example, that the role of firearms in self-defense has been greatly overblown with absurd claims of 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, they might say, “well, look, it happened a couple of times in the past month, so obviously you don’t know what you’re talking about”.

Perhaps the most comically ridiculous arbitrary benchmark/ goalpost shift I’ve ever heard was a comment made once by someone with whom I was discussing vegetarianism; this individual actually said, “well, I once knew someone who was a vegetarian for 40 years, but he still died”. This was not intended as a joke.

If you pay any attention to media coverage of politics these days, you’re quite likely on any given day to hear someone opine that the Democratic Party “has no message”, or some such. Apparently, promoting such things as justice, fairness, environmental responsibility and the preservation of democracy no longer count as messages. The GQP, on the other hand, is perceived as having a very strong message: “we’re king of the world, and THEY are out to get us”. The American public forum has devolved to the point that “strong message” is conflated with loud, obnoxious rhetoric. This is the kind of forced perspective that has been engineered by the past few decades of trash TV.

You can also force perspective by presenting a false dichotomy (or false choice). One famous example of a question that attempts to do this is “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Supposedly it’s a no-win, because regardless of whether you answer yes or no, the implication is that you are/ have been a wife beater. But the choice between merely yes or no is a false dichotomy; the correct answer (one hopes) is “I’ve never beaten my wife.” And as ridiculous as this example might sound, it’s actually quite similar to real survey questions you sometimes hear: e.g., “Do you oppose the war, or do you support our troops?” This type of question is the backbone of what is commonly called a push poll — i.e., a poll designed to produce a pre-ordained result.

Forced perspective also manifests rather often in the form of the fallacy of relative privation (the “not as bad as” fallacy) and the fallacy of relative merit (the “not as good as”) fallacy. An example of the first is “Black Americans have no right to complain about prejudice and bias; their ancestors had to deal with whips and chains.” An example of the second is “celebrities who volunteer their time to help the underprivileged are not heroes in the least; real heroes put on a uniform and die for their country.”

Which leads us, finally to forced perspective produced by manufactured contrast. You’ve no doubt seen the famous optical illusion in which two lines of the same length appear to be different (it’s formally known as the Muller-Lyer Illusion):

In the top image, the angles flare outward, tricking the brain into thinking that the line also is extending outward. In the bottom image, the inward flare of the angles causes us to interpret the line as contracting in that direction. Propagandists can and often do trick the mind with similar contrasts.

In April of 2025, the White House Occupant decreed that a tariff of 145% would be imposed on Chinese goods. A month later, he announced that tariffs would be reduced to 30%. And presto, everyone suddenly began discussing how he had magnanimously lowered tariffs, and ignoring how he had raised them.

This might have a familiar ring to it if you’re up on your literary classics. In 1984, the government seems to have a habit of adjusting the chocolate ration in such a way as to keep the public deceived. At one point, the government announces that the ration has been increased to 20 grams, and everyone rejoices and applauds the generosity. But in reality, the ration has been reduced to 20 grams from 30 grams.

It’s unlikely that the White House Occupant has read 1984, or any other book — especially not one that didn’t have his picture or name on the cover. But it’s a good bet that members of his inner circle have read it, and have learned the wrong lessons from it. Perhaps they’ve even learned the wrong lessons from Disney and Michelangelo.