Dylan Mulvaney is not a grassroots phenomenon at all. He is “a product of a carefully-oiled media machinery that begins with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), widely considered the most powerful talent agency in the world and representing Mulvaney,” Julian Vigo reports at Savage Minds.
CAA “also represents Drew Barrymore,” which explains their repulsive interview in March. The “Trans TikToker” was a data-driven choice aimed at brands looking for youth appeal.
Like, say, a crappy beer brand that has lost market share to the microbrewery revolution, and a tampon maker whose customers increasingly use menstrual cups, or else stop menstruating while on testosterone shots.
A leftist spurned by the left over “gender identity,” Vigo has more than receipts, she has an insider, “Zoey,” dishing on the collaborative process by which Mulvaney became a White House invitee.
Zoey historicises how Droga5 was eventually acquired by William Morris giving other examples of acquisitions in mergers stating, “I’m suggesting this as a very good example of how different types of media companies, brands and talent agencies are merging. The end result: a made-up character such as Dylan is created. He is the whole package and everyone profits.”
In another age, this would be a front page Adbusters article. Today’s radicals are too busy defending Dylan Mulvaney from Posie Parker to bother crashing gates or burning down the system, anymore. Vigo points to Nike’s awful record with female athletes and notes that Mulvaney seems like a strange choice to advertise athletic footwear — until you notice that it makes all the hard questions about their business practices vanish behind rainbow branding.
As regular readers know, here at The Distance we approach the “gender identity” phenomenon as an emergent faith movement. We look to history, literature, and culture for our clues. However, profit and prophecy have always gone hand in hand, in America. I have written about that relationship here before, and now I have composed an article for Julian Vigo’s Substack highlighting that relationship. She will post it soon, perhaps tomorrow, and it will preview some of the research I am doing for the weeks to come.
Also! Tomorrow night, I am joining Donovan Cleckley and Eva Kurilova, my co-writers, to talk about all of this in a Twitter space with Theo Jordan. If you cannot access the livestream, or have audio issues during the stream, it will be recorded for your later listening.
https://twitter.com/Theo_TJ_Jordan/status/1645797453814444039
We’ll be back next week.
Whatever Happened to Baby Drew?
Aside: why no comments on the two Clementine threads?
I have a suggestion for how he could save a lot of money on his transitioning.