At this point, the right-wing grift is predictable to the point of tedium. Every time there’s a pop cultural phenomenon — a blockbuster movie, a chart-topping single, a hot new fashion trend — conservative media and MAGA influencers rush to denounce it as anti-American, anti-family or even demonic. Labubu dolls are Satanic. The “Barbie” movie is anti-male. Conservative men are being traumatized by rap songs informing them that women can experience sexual arousal. (Not that said conservative men are willing to believe it.)
The ultimate goal is to persuade people to reject movies, music, TV and other cultural artifacts as “woke” or “Satanic,” and turn exclusively to MAGA influencers for their entertainment needs.
The reasons right-wing pundits engage in this are transparent. The biggest is simple attention economics. Glomming onto popular topics is a good way to attract new audiences, especially those who may not be that political, and lure them into engaging with reactionary content. It also helps feed the paranoia that fuels the right, by propping up the narrative that all of pop culture is out to destroy them and their way of life. The ultimate goal is to persuade people to reject movies, music, TV and other cultural artifacts as “woke” or “Satanic,” and turn exclusively to MAGA influencers for their entertainment needs. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire even has a movie studio where they turn out subpar content that only has an audience because they’ve convinced right-wingers to eschew quality films as too “liberal.”
My initial reaction when I saw right-wing media conduct its all-too-predictable tantrum over the new “Superman” movie was that it’s just more of the same: Claim it’s “woke” propaganda, work the audience into a tizzy of boycott threats and reap the reward of alienating their base further from the rest of society so that the MAGA cult is all they have left. Which, to be fair, is bad enough. But the actual content of the complaints made this whole exercise even more sinister. The attacks on “Superman” are part of a larger effort by the right to completely rewrite history, so they can pretend that being a patriotic American means embracing authoritarian values.
The furor, for those lucky enough to have missed it, had nothing to do with the actual plot of the movie, which was about Clark Kent learning to love his poorly-behaved dog Krypto. (There was also some stuff about fighting Lex Luthor and saving the world, but let’s face it, the dog made the movie.) The MAGA talking heads are big mad that director James Gunn said that Superman is an immigrant. “Superman is the story of America,” Gunn told The Times of London. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.” They were also furious that Gunn said Superman stands for “human kindness.”
Immigrants and kindness are both canceled in Donald Trump’s America, so the right was outraged. Jesse Watters of Fox News “joked” that Superman should have “MS-13” on his cape. Co-host Kellyanne Conway agreed, wondering if the movie would fail on the assumption that American audiences also hate kindness and immigrants. Dean Cain, who played Superman on TV before finding a job better suited to his acting talents — right-wing punditry — was also mad. “How woke is Hollywood going to make this character?” I don’t remember Cain’s version of Superman, so maybe he did go around kicking dogs and sexually harassing women like a proper MAGA superhero. But honestly, I doubt the studio would have allowed that.
This is all very dumb, but what was striking was how brazenly dishonest it was. If there is one thing that everybody knows about Superman, it’s that he’s an alien who was smuggled to Earth. Being a refugee is as central to the character as the cheek dimples and the broad chest. It would be one thing if the Fox hosts were disputing the values of the movie. In the age of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Puppy Killer” Noem, we get that “be nice to dogs” is an ideology that MAGA loathes. No, what makes this next-level evil is they were denying a centerpiece of the character’s history as well-known as the date of Independence Day and the colors of the American flag.
Cain tried to hedge by admitting that Clark Kent is an immigrant, but he attempted to spin it anyway nonetheless, saying, “but there are rules,” and “there have to be limits, because we can’t have everybody in the United States.” If he’s trying to make this about legal vs. illegal immigration, well, we all also know Superman didn’t apply for a visa before crashing into the planet’s surface. This leads me to think Cain is hinting that the limits are about skin color, not paperwork. After all, in the same rant, he went off on how terrible it would be if the United States were “more like Somalia.”
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There have been a lot of dutiful, fact-check-style responses pointing out that Superman is an immigrant and the character was always “woke,” in that he has a history of fighting fascists and KKK members. But in a sense, that was unnecessary, because everyone already knows this. That’s where this Fox News gambit goes from being stupid to deeply sinister: They are asking their audience to deny not just the facts, but a fact we all grew up with, something woven into the DNA of our American identity.
This is part of a larger and far more serious effort by Trump and the MAGA movement to rewrite history, and therefore, to rewrite what the story of America even is. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been hyperfocused on erasing all acknowledgement that women, people of color and queer people have long served in the military, all to prop up his childish fantasy that the only real heroes are white men. Under the guise of stopping “DEI,” shorthand for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Republicans are waging war on libraries and museums, censoring books and displays that reflect the basic truth that the U.S. has always been a multi-ethnic society. Republicans are getting increasingly aggressive about spreading Christian nationalist lies that the U.S. was founded as a functional theocracy, when it was intended to be a secular nation.
The Superman gambit is the pop culture version of this. In one sense, it’s not as big of a deal as the Trump administration systematically removing Black historical figures from the public record. But it’s still deeply troubling, precisely because it’s an attack on a story that’s so fundamental to American culture. The right understands how crucial storytelling is to the way a society views itself. Superman’s origin story is as much a part of the American identity as Betsy Ross and Abraham Lincoln. Before most of us grow up and learn the more complex story of how the United States was built by waves of immigrants who often endured plenty of racist resistance, we were warmed up to the idea by learning that the Man of Steel is an immigrant who hid his true nature until he realized he needed to unveil it to be a force for good.
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Stories like “Superman” have helped build up the American immune system to demagogues like Trump, who cynically build their own power by exploiting the lizard-brain impulses to hate and fear difference. Trump got elected by stirring up irrational fears that darker-skinned immigrants are coming to rape women and eat pets. But in a hearteningly quick turnaround, polls already show that Americans don’t like Trump’s white nationalist politics when they see them enacted. A recent Gallup poll shows a shocking about-face in public opinion now that people are seeing horrific images of ICE raids and hearing stories of innocent people sent to concentration camps euphemistically described as “detention centers.” During the campaign, 55% of Americans said they wanted less immigration. That’s dropped to 30%. In 2024, 64% of Americans said immigration is a “good thing.” Now it’s up 15 points to 79% — the highest it’s ever been in Gallup polling.
That bounce-back to basic decency owes a great deal to the fact that Americans have long told ourselves a story about how we are a nation of immigrants, and the best of us are often those who come from far away to build their lives anew. We don’t just see our family histories in the immigrants who are now being rounded up by right-wingers, who threaten to feed them to alligators. We see our ancestral stories reflected characters like Superman. By trying to rewrite the history of the character that everyone knows, MAGA pundits are asking their audience to join in a collective lie, one whose purpose is to dismantle the core understanding of what America is — and replace it with their dystopian, fascistic vision for us instead.
Also, Americans love dogs. You can’t take that from us, MAGA. Krypto forever!
