What does the manga character Ino have to do with the fake trans mailers in the Texas midterms? My hunch is quite a lot.
But first, some background: In case you missed the most recent fake transgender mailer controversy, BNG contributor Josh Olds has a great story on it. Essentially, the week early voting began in Texas, thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of voters received a mailer addressed to “The Students of ___ Family.”
The pamphlet purports to be from an organization called Texas Transgender Student Union, uses the logo of an actual nonprofit called Transgender Education Network of Texas, and provides intentionally false information about how kids in Texas can get gender-affirming care without their parents’ permission.
Ino Yamanaka
The whole thing is a set up playing on lies and falsehoods about the Right’s boogeyman-de-jour — trans people — to rile up Republicans to get out the vote.
Several Texas reporters have tracked the company to a Wyoming building where 26 commercial registered agents office, including the second largest one in the country. Northwest Registered Agent LLC registered Texas Transgender Student Union on Sept. 2, and as the shell refuses to disclose who the actual owner of the company is.
Similarly, SnailWorks, a Maryland-based mail-tracking service provider, whose services include “political mail tracking to help coordinate campaign material disbursement” has a contract with whoever is behind the mailers. SnailWorks’ Mailer ID is on the mailers, and the company has confirmed it has a contract but have refused to disclose who hired them.
It seems, then, that until criminal charges or a lawsuit persuade these two entities or Google (who hosts the email tied to the effort) are compelled to cooperate, the identity of the individual or group behind this multi-million dollar psychological operation will remain unknown.
Thursday, a West Texas GOP district attorney, Sarah Stogner, opened a criminal investigation into the matter, looking at the mailings as possible forgeries — a state jail felony under Texas law. Perhaps definitive answers will come soon, but undoubtedly after the election and after election interference already has happened.
However, for those paying attention, a clue to the culprit(s) or at least their motivations is hiding in plain sight.
Whenever a company applies to the U.S. Postal Service for a bulk rate postage insignia, they fill out a lot of paperwork. CBS News is trying to track that down. But even more interesting is what the insignia for this mailing is missing.
Bulk rate postage insignias include always include the USPS permit number and city. Guess what? This one doesn’t. Instead, it simply has three letters “INO.”
Undoubtedly, until the USPS is compelled by a Freedom of Information Act request or a subpoena to release the paperwork for the bulk rate application, many folks will attempt to tie those three letters to some sort of acronym.
I have a different theory. I believe the insignia anomaly is paying homage to the Manga character Ino from the Japanese manga series Naruto, which was made into an anime series.
Naruto was Japan’s most popular manga magazine from 1999 to 2014. The original anime cartoon series ran on television from 2002 to 2007 and a reboot ran from 2007 to 2017.
“Manga” refers to comic books and graphic novels originating from Japan, written in Japanese and translated globally.
Ino is a supporting, recurring character in both the manga and anime series, but an important one. In the Naruto series, she’s the heir of the Yamanaka clan, which specializes in mind-control techniques. Her signature move is the Mind Transfer Jutsu in which she is able to project her own spirit/consciousness into a target’s brain and control their actions.
When Ino and her team succeed, their minds invade and completely control their targets. They can move their targets, speak through them, make them attack their own allies. It’s a brain-capture mechanism that is super helpful in combat. Manipulating the actions of others — especially a large group of people — is the ultimate weapon in combat.
“When Ino and her team succeed, their minds invade and completely control their targets.”
We know fear and anger are powerful motivators, and GOP operatives have become masters of this. In order to motivate their base, they continue to pedal the lie that nefarious liberals are turning kids trans.
While my theory about the dark humor behind the mailing’s postal insignia is purely speculative, it seems whoever paid for and executed this psyops attack clearly intended to interfere with the election and motivate conservative voters to become so enraged that, rather than sit out the election, they will go to the polls.
Producing and sending these mailers wasn’t cheap. Costs include creating and printing the slick glossy brochures, the purchase of a voter mailing list, the mail house costs and all the postage.
There’s a lot of speculation online that Elon Musk is behind these mailers. He’s now the single largest donor to the midterm elections with nearly a half-billion dollars donated so far to keep Republicans in power.
Musk hates trans people (his own trans daughter can attest to that). In fact, he announced on X in 2024 that California’s support for trans individuals was why he was packing up and moving to Texas.
Musk also loves anime. His earliest post about loving the genre appeared in 2018. He’s also posted about his favorite anime shows, posted about anime Bitcoin and used X’s Grok to create anime memes.
Perhaps all this is just a coincidence. But if the bulk mail insignia INO turns out to be a reference to a mind-controlling anime character who forces people to act out in ways they wouldn’t normally, and if the wealthiest man in the world who just so happens to love anime ends up being connected somehow, remember I told you so first.
Mara Richards Bim
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as the first Justice and Advocacy Fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas where she recently was ordained to the gospel ministry. She earned the master of divinity degree and a certificate in spiritual direction from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company, which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.
Related:
Fake trans mailers and texts aim to scare Texans to vote for Paxton | Analysis by Josh Olds