Keep Stupid Politics Out: 6 Ways Popular Media Bungled Their Political Messages
Regardless if you feel that popular media should be political or apolitical, we should all agree that stupid politics have no place.

Recently, Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski created controversy when he said his company’s comics “can’t get too deep into politics.” His statement reinvigorated the on-line debate about whether comics, movies, and video games should be “political”, or whether they should “keep politics out.”
On the one hand, many people insist that no piece of media is truly “apolitical.” “Everything is political”, they argue, explaining that all media is created within a political system and thus either reflects or refutes the values of that system.
As Bob “Moviebob” Chipman explained in his video on the subject, “Just about anything that has value or draws interest has a political dimension simply by virtue of existing within a culture, and even if you don’t want to dwell on [their politics], you can’t very well pretend they aren’t there either.”
On the other hand, while art can certainly send a powerful political message if done well, if done poorly, it can either send a bad message (intentionally or unintentionally) or undermine a good message.
As Lily Orchard explained in one of her videos, you can fill your writing desks with people with bad political motivations and they won’t mess up as badly as one person with good political intentions who can’t create a good story.
So perhaps instead of arguing that we should keep politics out of popular media, we should be arguing that we need to keep STUPID politics out of them. As a demonstration, allow me to present six examples of popular media that tried to convey a serious political message but messed up either because that message was bad or it was expressed badly.

#1: No, Thanos Does Not Have A Point In Avengers: Infinity War
In Avengers: Infinity War, it’s finally revealed that the Big Bad of the MCU wants to kill half the universe in a Malthusian attempt to curb population growth. Obviously, what he’s doing is bad, but because he’s doing it for allegedly “benevolent” reasons, even if Marvel fans disagree with his methods, they still insist that he “sort of has a point.”
Many fans argue that this makes Thanos the most complicated Marvel movie villain. He isn’t. He’s still the same egotistical megalomaniac he was in the comics. The only difference is that he’s seeking the Infinity Stones, not to impress the living embodiment of death in an attempt to get into her panties, but to solve overpopulation.
Now I could go into great length arguing against the very concept of overpopulation and why it isn’t a real problem. In fact, I plan on writing a future think piece about it. But until then, I’d advise watching Peter Coffin’s video essay on the subject. He does a good job explaining in great detail why overpopulation isn’t real — though I disagree with some of his political views and conclusions.
But for the sake of this argument, let’s assume that Thanos does have a point. Let’s assume that he’s right that the world is being overpopulated (it isn’t!) and that there aren’t enough resources for everyone (there are!). Even if he were right about all of this, his plan still wouldn’t make any sense.
Currently, there are more than 7 trillion people. Cutting that population in half would reduce that number to 3.5 trillion. That’s roughly the population we had back in 1970 — more than 40 years ago! It would only take a generation or two for our population to return to where it was.
Thanos’ plan isn’t a solution. It’s a reset button, and a temporary one at that. So no, not only does he not have a point, but his solution does nothing to address it. Thanos is both evil and stupid, and no amount of tampering with the reality stone can change that.

#2: Real Government Shutdowns Prove The Purge Wouldn’t Work
I’ve already written in length about why The Purge is dumb and its politics are dumber. It’s pure Hobbesian propaganda that pushes the old lie that people will turn into wild animals if removed from under the oppressive thumb of government. Because some dead old white guy said so!
But perhaps the best refutation of this movie about the common people going wild during a government shutdown are actual real-world examples of government shutdowns, none of which involve people dressing up in masks and forming roving gangs to loot, kill, and plunder.
The U.S. government has shut down several times in recent years. Most notably it shut down for 16 days in 2013, the same year the first Purge movie was released. Unless you’re younger than five years old (in which case, how are you even reading this?), you probably remember that shutdown well, and you know that nothing remotely resembling The Purge occurred during that time.
In short, there were no riots, no looting, not plundering. Nobody dressed up in Halloween costumes from Hot Topic to kill people left and right. There was no rise in crime and violence. In fact, most American citizens decided to step up and do the jobs left undone by the government, like mowing the lawn for the Lincoln Memorial.
But that shutdown only lasted for a few days. What if the government stopped working for much longer? What if it shut down for weeks, months, or even a year? We don’t need to imagine that happening. That already happened in Spain.
In 2016, Spain went more than 300 days without a government. The result wasn’t a Spanish Purge. As with most other real-world government shutdowns, life continued on as normal. In fact, Spaniards experienced an economic boom with unemployment falling 18.9 percent, the lowest rate in six years!
Now do any of these examples prove the real-world application and feasibility of long-term anarchism? Probably not. But if people never devolved into murdering psychopaths within the span of 10 months, why would they become that way within the span of only 12 hours?

#3: Idiocracy Scapegoats The Poor And Promotes Social Darwinism
If you do nothing but watch Radio Dead Air and read the latest tweets from our current president, it’s easy to assume that Idiocracy is accurate and that people are getting so dumb that they’ll one day flock to theaters to watch farting anuses for two straight hours. However, if you actually research objective metrics, you’ll learn that the opposite is true.
Rather than being dumbed down, people are actually becoming smarter. In fact, the current generation, millennials, far from being mindless zombies who stare at their phones all day, are much more educated than their grandparents were, and the next generation, Gen Z, could very well be more educated.
But even if Idiocracy were correct about the world getting dumber, the implications behind its premise should come across as rather alarming — not merely because of the prospect that Americans may one day become stupid enough to suffer massive food shortages due to watering their crops with Sports drinks, but because the movie inadvertently implies solutions to this problem that are rather, well, genocidal.
The movie starts with a mini-documentary explaining how the world became so dumb. The reason? Natural selection failed by allowing stupid people to outbreed smart people. Of course, by “smart” people, it means the rich upper class, and by “stupid” people, it means the poor working class.
The movie’s example of smart people are an upper-class couple waiting for the right time to have children, while it’s example of stupid people are dumb redneck characters who can’t keep their own genitals in their pants and thus end up breeding like bunnies.
This analogy already reeks of classism, but imagine if instead of using white rednecks, the movie had chosen to depict it’s stupid people as poor black folk from the ghetto. Not only would that have made the problematic analogy even more obviously problematic, but that could have also unintentionally highlighted the racism of intelligent quotient.
So if we accept the movie’s premise at face value, the reason why the world is getting “dumber” is because dumb poor people are out-populating smart rich people. What logical conclusion could you draw from that other than eugenics?
As Matt Novak states in his Gizmodo review: “Idiocracy lays the blame at the feet of an undeserved target (the poor) while implicitly advocating a terrible solution (eugenics). The movie’s underlying premise is a fundamentally dangerous and backwards way to understand the world.”

#4: Harry Potter And X-Men Are Bad Allegories For Racism
Both Harry Potter and X-Men are stories about characters marginalized by society due to prejudice against their super-powered abilities. As such, both stories have a strong appeal towards people within marginalized communities, especially people of color and LGBTQ identities.
On the surface, the comparison of mutants and wizards to such marginalized groups makes sense, and thus their stories almost serve as good analogies for racism. The key word there being “almost.” Just like most allegories, the analogies aren’t always perfect, and it’s their discrepancies that prevent them from being proper analogies for real-world racism.
Take Harry Potter, for instance. The Mary Sue already published a good article detailing how the series makes a mess of its commentary on racism. It’s biggest blunder? “If you want to build a narrative about fighting prejudice, maybe don’t make all the major players in the story white.”
Then there’s the antagonist. Voldemort is a villain who wants to maintain blood purity within the wizarding world by purging it of “muggleborns”, or people born to wizards and “muggles” (non-wizards). He essentially wants to “make the wizarding world great again.”
So obviously Voldemort is an expy of Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, or any other fascist leader driven by racial purity. His followers, Death Eaters, resemble racist groups such as Nazis and the KKK. (In the movies, they even have KKK-style robes). So obvious racial metaphor is obvious, right?
The problem is that while Voldemort and his Death Eaters can be visually compared to Hitler and the Nazis, the power dynamics cannot. The Nazis and KKK were members of a dominant class (whites) trying to maintain their dominance over members of an oppressed underclass (non-whites).
Voldemort and his followers, on the other hand, are members of an underclass (wizards) fighting against members of a dominant class (muggles). They’re not really oppressing people as much as they’re fighting against their own oppression, though still oppressing people by doing so. He’s less Hitler and more Magneto.
Speaking of Magneto, the mutants from X-Men are also rather iffy metaphors for marginalized communities. On the one hand, they’re the target of prejudice from larger society; but on the other hand, these are characters that possess deadly powers.
Let’s not forget that most of these characters can shoot lasers from their eyes, manipulate the weather, tear through metal with metal claws, and even fry people’s brains with their mental powers. Be honest: if these individuals existed in real life, you’d be worried about them, too, and for good reason.
While the government oppression against mutants is indefensible, it’s also not unprecedented. These are dangerous individuals with dangerous powers, some of which can (and have) leveled entire cities. Of course the government would want to keep a close eye on them. What sane person wouldn’t?
That’s the problem with these racial analogies: they too often provide a rationale for the racism to exist. Both involve individuals with super powers that most normal people would be wary of. That’s bad because it makes prejudice seem rational, and real-world prejudice isn’t rational. It’s irrational.
In fact, if you really think about it, both Harry Potter and X-Men can be interpreted as being less about left-wing anti-racism and more about right-wing Objectivism. Both stories involve “superior” individuals possessing great abilities marginalized by “less superior” people who are secretly jealous of those great abilities. That outlook seems more akin to Ayn Rand than Martin Luther King, Jr.
Of course, that’s just an interpetation. These stories weren’t clearly written from a Randian viewpoint. After all, it’s not like one of the original Marvel writers for X-Men was an avowed objectivist. (Oh wait!)

#5: Supergirl Tries To Prove Immigrants Aren’t Evil With An Alien Invasion
Superman was created by Jewish immigrants. So clearly the story about a man who was sent to Earth from another planet has strong parallels to the immigrant experience. The CW Supergirl television series especially plays heavily upon these themes, with Supergirl being a refugee learning to adapt to her new life on Earth.
So when the second season was released in 2016, at the height of the national election with one presidential candidate running on anti-immigrant xenophobia, the series went into overdrive in its support of immigration.
The entire season’s arc involved a domestic terrorist organization called Cadmus that sought to rid the Earth of aliens like Supergirl. To them, when other planets send their people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing crime. They’re criminals. But some, presumably, are good people.
Supergirl thus spends most of the season protecting the aliens on Earth from unprovoked assaults by Cadmus and other forms of bigotry. One episode even involves her saving aliens from forced deportation — something that surely has no real-world relevance whatsoever.
So the message of the entire second season is quite clear. Not all immigrants — er, I mean “aliens” — are bad. Not all of them are criminals. Most of them are good people seeking a better life here in America — er, I mean “Earth.” And thus we should support their new lives.
And then the season ends with an alien invasion. No, I’m not kidding. This season, which, up until the last few episodes, had been pushing the message that not all aliens are bad, ends with aliens acting quite badly invading the Earth.
It’s like if a television series wanted to promote the idea that not all Muslims are terrorists, only to end with ISIS invading America and causing another Islamic terrorist attack. The season finale unintentionally undermines whatever positive message the season was trying to convey.

#6: Star Trek Isn’t The “Space Communism” You’re Looking For
Ever heard the term “fully-automated luxury space communism”? It’s one of the many buzzword phrases the far left throws around more often than “pure ideology” or “late stage capitalism.” It’s also a phrase they seem to think applies to Star Trek.
Yes, apparently far-left Trekkies consider the Federation a shining example of a socialist utopia. It only makes sense that they have to resort to citing a fictional example of socialism done right, as there are no actual real-world examples. (And no, the Nordic countries don’t count. Even Denmark’s prime minister said so!)
So ignore all of the real socialist countries where citizens are starving to the point of losing 19 pounds each. Socialism is cool and hip because of Star Trek. Also because the cool grandpa who can’t math good supports it. Also the Indian woman who believes requests for political debates are “catcalling.” That’s why we should embrace it and bring forth “fully-automated luxury space communism”! It has phasers and teleporters! *rolls eyes*
We could debate whether or not The Federation is real socialism. Many Star Trek fans would argue it isn’t. Even if it were, there’s one thing that it has that no other socialist country has, something that our own world doesn’t even have: replicators.
You know: those machines that can create almost anything out of thin air with the push of a button. Those exist within the Star Trek universe. They don’t exist in our world. We’ve since made new breakthroughs that hint replicators may exist in the near future, but we don’t have them now.
In a world where you can create anything out of thin air, you have the opportunity to create an economic system that achieves post-scarcity by giving everyone everything they need equally. In that world, socialism makes sense. But of course, that’s not the world we live in.
Maybe one day when we’ve finally perfected technology that can create resources out of thin air can we consider bringing forth “fully-automated space communism.” Until then, we should reject the economic system that forces people to hunt zoo animals for food and embrace the actual economic system responsible for reducing extreme poverty and increasing living standards across the board.
Also, it’s probably best not to emulate a socio-political system that engages in imperialism, nationalizes transportation, controls and monitors communication, subverts due process, and promotes collectivism over individual rights. That isn’t a socialist utopia. It’s a fascist dystopia. (But I repeat myself!)
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