We don’t do a lot of “culture war” stuff on The BradCast. But today we just can’t help ourselves when it comes to the hilarious — literally Nazi-like — MAGA and Fox “News” attack on what they were describing last week in advance of its release, as a new “woke” Superman movie. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
BUT FIRST UP… Some quick news on the reported results from yesterday’s Special Primary Elections in Arizona‘s 7th U.S. House district, in the contest to fill the seat vacated by Raul Grijalva who died in March after serving more than 20 years in Congress. On the Democratic side, his 54-year old progressive daughter, longtime Tuscon official, Adelita Grijalva appears to have easily won a 5-way race. On the GOP side, a private painting contractor, Daniel Butierez, easily won a three-way contest, though he is a long-shot to win the September Special General Election in the deep “blue” 7th CD that runs across the southern border of the state.
ALSO… While everyone (justifiably?) has their eyes on Donald Trump‘s hilariously bizarre falling out this week with his own MAGA supporters over his Administration’s refusal to release the “Epstein Files”, tens of thousands of federal workers are being systematically laid off from American institutions such as the Departments of State, Education, and Health and Human Services following several corrupt, opinion-free, pro-Trump, emergency docket rulings from the Supreme Court‘s corrupted rightwing activist majority.
THEN… In the hours prior to the “Epstein Files” explosion of recent days, MAGA and their representatives on Fox “News” had found their newest all-American institution to turn against. From the NFL to Barbie to Budweiser in years past, last week’s turn was against another one of the most American of American institutions: Superman.
Apparently MAGA and Fox “News” wrath against a supposedly “woke” Man of Steel was touched off by comments from James Gunn, the director of the new Superman film, in advance of its weekend release
“‘Superman’ is the story of America,” explained Gunn quite reasonably. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country. But for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”
And, with that rather anodyne remark, a thousand MAGA Fox “News” heads exploded, leading to show after show, panel after panel, whining about a “Superwoke” movie that they had yet to see. Former Senior Trump White House Advisor Kellyanne Conway was bereft, because “we don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us.” Others on Fox complained: “We’re being told not to love our country”; “This is a pro-immigration movie!”; “They are blowing the Superman franchise!” Really? With a kind and pro-immigrant Superman? The kind that has always existed since his creation in the 1930s?
Of course, all of that is absurd, as our guest today, NICHOLAS GROSSMAN, National Security and Political Science Professor at the University of Illinois explained in an article last week headlined, “Why MAGA Hates Superman”. It’s sub-title offers a hint as to why: “He stands for truth, justice, and an American way that Trump is tearing down”.
In fact, as we discuss with Grossman today, Superman has always been both pro-immigrant and pro-diversity, as the WWII-era creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, two Jewish kids from Ohio, one an immigrant himself, the other the son of immigrants. They invented the character of a literal “alien” who came to America with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, but who attempted to blend in. He used his powers for good, in a never-ending battle for truth, justice and, according to the 1950’s Adventures of Superman TV show, the American Way.
Superman battled Nazis during the war and the KKK in the years that followed. A 1949 poster for schools instructed kids that “like our country”, their schools are “made up of Americans of many different races, religions and national origins.” He goes on to tell the group of multiracial children: “If YOU hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin””don’t wait: tell him THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN.”
No wonder MAGA and Fox “News” have decided to hate this guy. He stands for American values that literal Nazis — in a 1940 newspaper for Hitler’s elite SS troops during World War II — tried to disparage with comments very similar to those heard last week on Fox!
None of this is new or suggests some sort of a newly “woke” Supes. This is what he has been all along. So why did the MAGA Right react this way last week, before the movie opened nonetheless to boffo box office numbers?
“The core feature of fascism is to misremember, to have this nostalgic, not accurate version of the past and to say that we have lost that and we need to get back to it,” Grossman tells me. “But that thing that they are trying to get back to was never real, never really happened. You can see this in many different variations on different fascist systems.”
“They’re misremembering Superman. He has always been pro-diversity, pro-immigrant. He’s always been someone who fights for and cares about and protects the weak against the powerful.” And, perhaps worst of all, Grossman observes, “the main villain, Lex Luthor, is a billionaire.”
“The reason why Superman was so iconic and why it fits so well into that old slogan of ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way,’ is because things like immigration and diversity were the American way. So, Superman was representing the American way. It’s only this MAGA fictional past that they are trying to get back to that is saying otherwise.”
“Superman is a nice guy,” argues Grossman. “It’s only this made-up version that they somehow have in their head that Superman in the past was, I don’t know, like a white supremacist nationalist, somehow?”
Much more on all of this in a fun conversation with Grossman today, on how this idiocy highlights how the Christian Rights is opposed to empathy; on how that allows them to support deportations and violations of due process rights; on how their own cult leader, Donald Trump, is the very “opposite of Superman” as MAGA is attempts “to rewrite the American story.”
It’s a fascinating conversation! And I promise, if you haven’t yet seen the new Superman movie (it’s fun!), we will give away NO SPOILERS!
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