The scripted Republican attacks on Superman 2025 don’t seem to be working. It’s cleaning up at the box office.
“He’s creating a moat of woke, enlightened opinion around him. He’s got a woke shield,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld whined as an on-screen graphic proclaimed that the “Superwoke” movie embraced “pro-immigrant themes.”
Fox News has always peddled such ugly fascist trash propaganda aimed at destroying empathy and decency. Previously, Fox News called Captain America, Wonder Woman and Superman “un-American,” while describing the children’s gentle champion Fred Rogers as “evil.”
In its constant quest to gaslight its willing victims, Fox News uses panic mongering, character assassination and ad hominem arguments, psychological projection and flipping, the rewriting of history, scapegoating, conflation of violence with power, bullying, confusion, populism, invocation of the Christian God, saturation, the disparagement of education, guilt by association and diversion.
Fox News’s most basic propaganda technique is simply to lie about facts, and it does so constantly.
Fox News is where Phineas Taylor Barnum meets Paul Joseph Goebbels.
Bruce Kanin:
ReplyDeleteImagine having such a venomous scorpion/spider/snake-infested mind to think the way MAGAs do with Superman and other superheroes. Beyond pathetic.
Joshua Fleurant:
ReplyDeleteHe was beating up the Ku Klux Klan a few years after World War II wrapped up. Even before that, his first comic had him beat up a literal wife-beater and subsequent comics had him frequently terrorize those who themselves lorded power and authority over others to force submission to their unjust whims, showing such people what it’d be like on the receiving end of that kind of power. Despite later comics and eras and their attempts to somewhat sanitize him so “concerned parents” wouldn’t get mad about him teaching young readers to defy (unjust) authority, something that’s remained a constant in his character is that he’s never had much in the way of tolerance for bullies.
At some point, though I sincerely doubt it’ll be soon enough, these people who decry Superman as a character for his compassion and empathy and try to twist that into something bad should do some serious self-reflection and ask themselves why they’re siding with a corrupt, narcissistic billionaire who doesn’t give a crap about any of them outside their usefulness to his agenda of self-gain and profiteering. (I leave it to individual interpretation whether that billionaire is Lex Luthor, who is fictional, or an all-too-real and noxious excuse for a human being.)
Jacobin: "Special attention in these scenes is devoted to the clusters of children who are going to be slaughtered if some miracle — that is, Superman — doesn’t save them. The deliberate targeting of Palestinian children by Israeli forces has been perhaps the greatest agony of witnessing the many reports of this US-backed horror show."
ReplyDelete"But infuriated conservatives like Fox News hosts Jesse Watters and Kellyanne Conway and former TV Superman Dean Cain are right about one thing: it ain’t just a movie. They’re freaking out for a reason: the possibility of the tide shifting increasingly against them in public opinion on a number of hotly contested issues, reflected and fostered by pop culture phenomena like Superman. For conveying persuasive ideological values, beliefs, and attitudes, it’s hard to beat the immediate emotional impact of popular cinema." https://jacobin.com/2025/07/superman-reactionary-morality-film-review