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Just in time to ruin another generation of toddlers’ enjoyment of Christmas, the Barbie Liberation Organization are back! But…who the hell are they? By now, you have probably long since forgotten these Grinch-like weirdos ever even existed.

The BLO (close twins of the PLO) first emerged in the early ’90s, aiming to save Barbie from the malign corporate patriarchy who supposedly then ran her manufacturers, Mattel. They have been hiding away deep underground ever since, but, as the new Barbie movie set box office records earlier this summer, the time finally came for the BLO to reemerge from their bunkers to undertake a fake PR campaign upon Mattel’s supposed behalf. According to a wholly false media operation, the toy-makers were about to abolish all use of plastic pollutants in their products forever, replacing Barbie’s traditional plastic essence with recyclable eco-polymers derived from lovely Green mushrooms and fungi instead.

Once the hoax was revealed, hardened BLO operatives released a terror-video warning that, if Mattel knew what was good for them, they had better turn fantasy into reality anyway. “This is a message to Mattel and every other company,” they warned: “Stop making plastic crap!” Sadly, this particular warning did not also apply to those companies currently doing great business making fake plastic breasts for men or strap-on polymer penises for women…

Barbie Army
The key founder of the BLO, Igor Vamos, is an artist and merry prankster who today teaches video and media arts at the Rensselaer Institute outside New York. Vamos is a proponent of the art of “culture-jamming,” the idea that, by inserting subversive little messages into wider normative society, you can plant the mental seeds that will later help pull it apart.

Vamos’ pranks are insignificant in themselves, and at first seem harmless or funny. As such, an amused mainstream media often help spread them more widely, like memes. These subversive seeds then take root within people’s minds, where, with fair cultural weather, they may later blossom.

Is this really a plausible way of transforming society wholesale? Maybe. All ideas must come from somewhere, and in 1993 Vamos was one of the figures who helped launch the early transgenderist movement onto an unsuspecting world. And the particular media weapon of mass destruction he chose to unleash this deadly social plague? The Barbie doll.

Barbie was already being obscenely subverted by some obscure demimonde activists. Yet most small children do not read the obscure far-left art periodicals or attend the radical fringe-theater shows where (as we shall see next week) Barbie herself was first being queered by weird Commie radicals. Therefore, Igor Vamos’ great innovation was to take such art activism out of the academy and into Toys “R” Us and the newsrooms of CNN and ABC.

Look Who’s Talking
In itself, the first and most famous act of toyland terrorism ever perpetrated by Vamos and his paramilitary operatives was generally considered fairly amusing, even by Mattel executives of the day. Exactly thirty years ago, in a mass act of “reverse-shoplifting,” the BLO entered California toy stores prior to Christmas 1993, bought various Mattel Teen Talk Barbies and Hasbro G.I. Joe figures, took them home, and swapped their electronic voice-boxes around. Then, BLO foot soldiers quietly replaced the doctored toys on shelves.

Now when kids pushed Joe’s buttons on Christmas Day, the apparently queer-converted soldier would say stereotypically girly things like “Let’s go shopping!” “Let’s plan our dream wedding!” “Will we ever have enough clothes?” “Do you have a crush on anyone?” or “Ken is such a dream!” Barbie, meanwhile, had gone butch, shouting, “Eat lead, Cobra!” “Dead men tell no lies!” or “Vengeance is mine!” Never had the phrase “military camp” enjoyed such wide resonance.

Also inserted inside the dolls’ boxes were special promotional leaflets claiming BLO responsibility and providing outraged parents with the phone numbers of mainstream media outlets to complain to. When they did so, TV news immediately recognized the entertainment potential of the story, creating a temporary sensation.

Some BLO hacktivists employed their own kids as underage terror operatives, too, one little boy telling cameras he didn’t want to swap his new G.I. Gay doll for a normal one as, by spouting soppy Valley Girl teenspeak, “He’s teaching me not to fight.” Igor Vamos had correctly identified one of late capitalism’s chief internal design flaws: that, even if any given product had the potential to destroy it, if it only turned a profit, fat cats would still line up to sell it anyway. “Capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction,” as Marx once predicted.

Hello Dolly!
Ostensibly, the BLO’s actions were prompted by the fact that one of Teen Talk Barbie’s many preprogrammed phrases was “Math class is tough!” which was widely seen as reinforcing backwards stereotypes about blonde female bimbos.

So, the BLO argued that Mattel’s prominent early-1990s attempts to market Doctor Barbies and Astronaut Barbies were all just an insincere commercial sham, aimed at screwing a few extra dollars out of young girls with lefty feminist parents. By swapping around Joe and Barbie’s voices, Vamos’ troops were just trying to ensure gender equality, nothing more…or so they said.

But was there more to it? A subsequent BLO video showing a Barbie doll with animated human lips mouthing their message specifically frames the voice-box swaps as being a form of “corrective surgery” and “sex-change operations.” Just a joke? Look at this BLO flyer in which Joe and Barbie, like newly released terror hostages, complain that:

“WE WERE FORCED TO SAY THINGS WE DIDN’T WANT TO. LUCKILY, WE CHECKED OURSELVES INTO A SPECIAL HOSPITAL AND HAD THE DAMAGE REVERSED. YOU CAN HELP US! GIVE US NEW VOICES! LIBERATE US!”

G.I. Jane
Perhaps the BLO would say it’s just coincidence, but you can hardly fail to notice that this is precisely the same kind of language now used by militant trans activists today. One contemporary approving online write-up of the 1993 prank swooningly calls these miniature human grenades “gender-bending Trojan Horses,” and it is hard to disagree.

Head to the official BLO website and you can view a “CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT” that it is advised you should “Eat after reading,” but presumably only if you’ve actually printed a copy out first. Here, the BLO speak of how their members share “a common commitment to challenging malign systems”—not only capitalism but also, one must presume, gender normativity. Via “subtle acts of subversion, the BLO endeavors to redefine cultural boundaries and empower [certain chosen] individuals”—i.e., trannies, presumably.

“The BLO’s mission was twofold: to challenge deeply ingrained gender stereotypes and expose the insidious influence of consumerism,” we are told. Therefore, they sourced “consenting GI Joe donors” and transplanted their maleness into female Barbie dolls and vice versa, at special “regional toy-surgery centers” in order “to confront the issue of enforced gender stereotypes and societal assumed norms.” Or, in my own rough translation: “We did it to queer your kids.”

Photos of BLO-liberated dolls being operated on strongly recall images of obscene old Nazi medical experiments. BLO Dr. Mengeles even provided detailed soldering instructions so wannabe Klaus Barbies could “carry out the surgery at home” with a screwdriver and putty: “If done carefully, Barbie need never know she’s been under the knife.” Just like Ellen Page.

Child’s Play
The ultimate level of success enjoyed by Vamos’ tactics is best shown by the fact that, where once Mattel viewed BLO gender-swapping antics as a mere joke, they are now engaging in similar stunts themselves. Disturbingly, Mattel now actually have their own specific line of Trans Barbies—sort of.

2019 saw Mattel launch their “Creatable World” line of gender-neutral dolls, which come with indeterminate hips, waists, and facial features, together with two wigs of short and long hair length, and several wardrobe options allowing them to pose as male or female, or a mixture of both, at the literal drop of a hat. Promotional photos show them split schizophrenically in half down the middle, one half male, the other half female, like Two-Face from Batman (or indeed the transvestite on the poster for Ed Wood’s 1950s high-
camp B pic Glen or Glenda?).

These dolls did not possess any political propaganda function, said Mattel. They were purely “relatable,” not “aspirational.” Kids were not meant to look at them and decide they wanted a sex change; instead, the causality was supposedly the other way around. Small children were increasingly becoming gender-neutral all by themselves, apparently, it was not the result of having any sinister ideology pushed upon them from above by activist adults. Mattel were simply responding to consumer demand and market forces, like capitalist companies are supposed to do: It was their financial duty to shareholders.

This was “all about play and not about politics,” said robotic, battery-operated Mattel spokesdolls, whilst simultaneously gushing that their new toys were being created “to celebrate the positive impact of inclusivity,” a nakedly political message in itself. When designing the Creatable World crew, Mattel had worked with “physicians and experts knowledgeable about gender identity”—and we all know precisely what kinds of “physicians and experts” they will have been.

No-Man’s Land
Doll-designers had also canvassed the opinions of infants themselves, concluding that “The kids didn’t want to be told that boys had to play with cars and girls had to play with dolls.” Indeed not. But it is a great leap from finding some little girls prefer Hot Wheels cars to Barbies, to claiming this means they therefore want to become hermaphrodites.

Purportedly, Mattel were creating a new doll line “free of labels,” but the term “gender-neutral” is in itself a label—the very idea of gender neutrality itself is not neutral, it is a key aspect of a new far-left ideology merely disguised as impartiality. By promoting it to kids through plastic playthings, you implant it in their tiny little minds, helping the cult spread ever further.

Clearly, culture-jamming can work. It is not as if Igor Vamos’ 1993 voice-swapping stunt caused the current trans-mania amongst teens all by itself, it is more a case of the BLO’s prank playing its small but useful part in the process of death by a thousand cuts.

So widely has the transgender spore-cloud now spread that even Mattel themselves have co-opted these ideas and begun spreading them too. As to precisely why: Who knows? It could be the presence of identitarian political proselytizers amongst its staff, or it may just be a cynical move to turn a further profit by irresponsibly selling new left-wing toy ranges to certain new target demographics of left-wing activist parents.

Whatever Mattel’s motive may be, the ultimate effect on children will be just the same. Combing their synthetic hair with tiny plastic hairbrush accessories, innocent little girls of the past used to groom their dolls. Now their dolls groom them instead.

Steven Tucker’s new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets is out now in hardback (Pen & Sword/Frontline Books). Buy it here (U.S.), here (U.K.), or here (direct from publisher).