The (Pop) Culture Wars: How Video Games, Movies and Comics Were Ground Zero for Trump's Victory
Politics are downstream of culture, and that grows truer by the day. And it’s become especially true with regard to pop culture.
Entertainment and technology are key parts of pop culture, so we’re taking you to the front lines of the culture war by addressing some of the best — and strangest — stories from that world in this recurring column exclusive to members of The Western Journal.
When President-elect Donald Trump won the 2024 election in dominating fashion, it triggered a number of responses from all across the political spectrum.
Normal Americans who don’t drink the establishment media Kool-Aid reacted with joy and celebration, as the country — once on the precipice of disaster — seems poised to make a comeback as big as Trump’s own triumph.
Leftists, Democrats and the otherwise anti-patriotic branch of America reacted as one would expect: unhinged meltdowns, finger-pointing and nary a bit of introspection.
(In fact, conservatives have probably been more analytical of the Democrat demise than screeching race-baiters like Joy Reid.)
And while all these folks are unilaterally responding to the present and future potential of what Trump brings to America, it’s also worth looking a bit toward the past to learn how exactly Trump won in such a dominant fashion.
And one big theme of Trump’s 2024 victory? A complete repudiation of the vile, festering “woke” or far-left ideology that has pervaded far too many spaces in America.
It felt like America collectively told the far left, “No, we don’t think boys can be girls with surgery and drugs, no we don’t think unconditionally supporting Hamas (a freaking terrorist organization, for crying out loud) is a good thing, no we don’t think the LGBT agenda needs to be a part of children’s curriculum, and no, we don’t like being persecuted for refusing to acknowledge ‘xe/xim’ as pronouns.”
While it’s clear America is fed up with this nonsense, one can’t help but wonder when exactly this disdain and frustration first began to bubble up.
And to that point, this writer can’t help but point to the pop culture sphere.
Yes, yes, the pop culture scene does involve longtime leftist entities like Disney and Mattel, but that’s sort of the whole point: Far-left ideology has been infesting the pop culture space for so long, it truly feels like that’s where Trump’s red tsunami of frustration first began to bubble up.
Again, it’s impossible to pinpoint an actual beginning to this stuff (many would argue that it was Gamergate, but that’s a complicated piece for a different premium article), but just look at some of the major pop-culture-war issues of late and how they indirectly tied into Trump.
Video Games: There’s no question that video games, as a medium, have shifted to the left in recent years. This writer loves video games, but can still acknowledge it’s an inherently anti-social endeavor — and anti-social behavior does lend itself to radical incels and blue-haired leftists alike.
Therefore, the gaming sphere is especially ripe for leftist nonsense, and you don’t have to look much further than the Sweet Baby Inc. scandal from just last year.
SBI is a consulting firm that basically operates in lockstep with leftism, and gamers noticed that SBI was influencing its favorite companies to make all manner of nonsensical narrative decisions in the name of wokeness.
Gamers pushed back on this, and all of a sudden, companies are dubious of being associated with SBI and its DEI flavorings.
Comics: If you need any more proof that transgenderism has literally run amok, look no further than a bizarre throwaway storyline involving the acclaimed Batman villain, the Joker.
Warner Bros. and DC made him pregnant back in early 2023. Seriously. It’s just nonsensical pandering made all the worse because it was a throwaway side story.
Comic book fans let their voices be heard, and Batman is focused on more traditional crime-fighting these days.
Movies: Lo and behold, turns out that moviegoers and families don’t appreciate being lectured to or otherwise having far-left agendas forced down their throats when they’re just trying to relax and watch a movie — which they paid for, by the way.
The entire year of 2023 was proof positive of that, and has since spawned a series of suddenly not-so-woke movie success stories in 2024.
Each of those instances involves just one way in which swathes of moviegoers, comic book readers and video gamers were fed up with this leftist shame campaign. Trump represented an end to that, and the electoral results speak for itself.
Look it’s naive to boil down Trump’s impressive presidential victory to any one tenet or thing. Trump won because of a confluence of things, issues and grievances, cresting into that aforementioned red tsunami.
Part of that tsunami undoubtedly involves the culture wars, which have become a mainstream topic now. But those wars used to be fought on the fringes of “nerd” or “geek” activities.
And until the left comes to grips with the fact that it’s losing its grip on that culture (and no, Tim Walz playing “Madden” isn’t going to fix that, clearly), and assesses why it’s losing its grip, the entire cause may actually be hopeless at this point.
(For shame.)
Americans largely just want to be left alone and allowed to enjoy what they want without being reminded about how they’re racist, or how there isn’t enough “trans” representation, or how Hamas are actually the good guys.
Trump and right-leaning nerds clearly understood that.
It’s time for the rest of the country to catch up.
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