INTRODUCTION
The
phrase ‘Pop Culture is Soft Power,” carries with it an implication that the
influence and impact of the media we consume has an indelible effect on our
decision-making and framing of our social world. Indeed, we often use and
reference popular culture, sometimes sub or unconsciously; to help ourselves and
others understand our point of view, situations and experiences. Simultaneously,
pop culture is often weaponized to condition or convince us of a particular
social organization, regime or socio-political ideology by using nostalgia.
Yet, to recognize this takes a degree of media literacy that most people do not
possess. In fact, many perspectives are so inertly calcified by uncritical
media engagement that it results in what the youths of 2025 call “brain rot”.[1] This lack of
acknowledgement of, and therefore acquiescence to the power of pop culture, has
left us vulnerable to manipulation that results in the creation of a reality
that is too similar to some of the most dire dystopian cautionary tales ever
created. This paper will interrogate the weaponization of popular culture
leading to a lack of media literacy which allows for administrative actions,
orders, and behaviors that concludes with a political and social reality
rivalling the narratives of dystopian fiction.
FOUNDATIONS
Before
there can be a comparison between our current domestic and foreign policy with
popular dystopian fiction, popularity itself being an indicator of the story’s historical
and cultural relevance, there must first be an understanding of the sociological
impact of the media and the reasons for nostalgia-marketing beyond the blatantly
belligerent chicanery of capitalism. The power of the media must be understood
if it is going to be respected, let alone for anyone to become a pop culture polyglot.
Thus, there needs to be an assessment of the media’s impact on socialization
and the use of nostalgia in entertainment and advertising.
The
Media as a Powerful Agent of Socialization.
As
I have mentioned in previous essays, the power of the media is
ineffaceable. Its ability to shape the perception and understanding of the
world is second to none. Certainly, no other agent of socialization has the
same reach and relentless virulent expansion as the media. But it is important
to pick these ideas apart if we are going to understand where the fiction of
our media ends, and our reality begins.
The
media is one of the core “agents of socialization”. It is one of the
individuals, organizations and institutions that assist in the social learning
process throughout a person’s life course. Unlike other “agents” (namely the family,
schools, peer groups and the workforce), the media is not socially integrated
to be a part of the individual life course. In a sense, the media as a social
learning tool, is unincorporated in the trajectory of the bureaucratic
mechanism of conformity. There is no set timeframe where we are first
introduced to the media and thereby become acclimated to living in its presence,
with a clear understanding of all its benefits and consequences. Instead, other
agents are often called upon to be the arbiters of media literacy, most likely
education and the family. Unfortunately, few individuals report getting minimal
formal media literacy training in schools (a staggering 38-42%), while parental impact on the media
literacy of their children are only measured through media intervention (Haywood
and Sembiante 2023). This means that typical parents only talk about media
consumption with their children when there is a perceived problem. This lack of
media literacy learning in families is an extension of the facilitation of the
media in the home. Much of the media consumption during youth is enabled by
parents as a form of distraction, without care or thought to the psychological
or social ramifications. As their number of hours of media consumption
increases, by the time children reach school age and get their first crumb of
media literacy, schools engage in heavy deprogramming of what children learn
under the authority of their parents.
Granted,
it should be stated that parental disengagement and enabling of problematic and
harmful media consumption practices is not just a function of disaffected and
absent (minded/tee) parenting. It is the results of the demands of social,
cultural and economic norms that weigh on parents to do and be… everything. The
media becomes a parenting life raft that is often used liberally to keep lives
afloat. Media literacy is sacrificed on the altar of more practical family
necessities like food preparation, the paying of bills and other domestic
chores. In the present, media literacy does not seem like a necessary skill
compared to the other demands that need to be met. This can illustrate the
difference between “prepared” and “protected” childhood.
In
the structure of family socialization, the range of behaviors taught and
deployed to achieve the overall goal of the social learning process, which is
to produce a conforming, law-abiding, productive member of society is a
spectrum between “protected” and “prepared” childhood. “Protected childhood” is
the prioritization of fostering a child’s imagination and protecting them from
the aspects of society that parents deem dangerous. “Prepared Childhood” is a
method of familial social learning that recognizes that children will
eventually become adults, therefore it is important to shape childhood
experiences that will best serve them as they age. This type of social learning
from families emphasizes skills that allow for an easier transition into
adulthood (finances, basic home and car maintenance etc.). Each is necessary.
But, among families of different generations, differing cultural values, social
class levels and family construction (Single families, gay and lesbian
families, polyamorous families etc.), many people fall along different parts of
the continuum. Some may lean a little more into “prepared childhood” whereas
others may engage in more protective practices.
There
are several social factors that impact the likelihood of parental tactics leaning
toward one of the poles of protection or preparation. A higher social class may “afford” parents to
be a bit more protective by being able to shelter their children from the
dangers of the world through their wealth. Conversely, families that must deal
with the abhorrent horrors of structural and individual racism, daily, must prepare
their children on how to properly interact with police, not just to instill a
level of compliance to authority, but to increase the likelihood that their
children will survive the encounter. Because according to scholar bell hooks
(2000), living in a white supremacist heterosexist ableist capitalist
patriarchy, as a person of color, it is not a matter of if but when an
interaction with police will happen. Thus, there are several factors that are
unique to the family unit and the historical context that they are living in, which
shape where on the child-rearing spectrum they fall.
Aspects
of media literacy vacillate between prepared and protected childhood. There is
a common desire among parents to limit overall screentime for their children
and to vet what media they are consuming. These are protective practices. Parents
struggle over limiting time on digital devices and minimizing content that does
not fit with their family values. Given that according to Barry Glassner (2018),
we are afraid of “the wrong things”, it is possible that several of the media
dangers identified by these protective practices are misplaced and/or overblown
(e.g. the censorship of nudity vs. the acceptance of gun violence). Thus, from
a protective standpoint, the media is seen as a danger. At the same time, prepared
practices regarding the media would include more behaviors surrounding media
literacy. These practices would focus on the purpose for advertisements and what
their intentions are, how to spot things like native advertising and sponsored
content, or trying
to understand the themes and messages of the content we consume. According to scholar
Jean Kilbourne (1999), the basics of media literacy begin with the
understanding that advertisements don’t just sell products, they sell culture. Ideals
about beauty, masculinity, honor, femininity, courage, popularity, desirability,
love etc. are messages that we infer from both the advertising and media content
we consume. What is often frustrating for many families is the imbalance between
protection from and preparation for media consumption. This protective
perspective often does not include communication and other social learning
tools to provide children with a healthy or informed understanding of the media.
Here,
Capitalism is once again the culprit. Not only is the need to make a wage a
necessity that keeps parents distracted with the maintenance of the family
structure through their consistent and constant employment, but a lack of media
literacy in the next generation is capitalistically advantageous for
corporations that both produce entertainment and advertising. There is money in
the ignorance of the public, especially if you control the mechanism by which
that information is disseminated. This is the structure of the propaganda model
and the control of media messaging (Chomsky 2002). With this message being
filtered through social media platforms and the delivery devices of mass market
cell phones, there is in an integrated network of overlapping and entangled
economic interests from a collection of corroborating caustically cancerous
companies that are driven by the profit motive. Thus, much in the same way that
basic literacy was a threat to religious and monarchical power leading to the
attempted suppression of the printing press, to have an informed and media
literate public is a direct threat to the profit and power of several
multi-national conglomerates.
The
Power of Nostalgia
Often
defined as sentimentality for the past, nostalgia is a key factor in marketing
and media socialization. Through social media nostalgic advertising, a sense of
loss and longing is created, and due to the proliferation of these images and
techniques, a person does not have to have the memory of time, to feel
nostalgic about it. Defined as “Vicarious Nostalgia”, this is the wistful
yearning for a time that is outside of the period that someone experienced (Merchant
and Rose 2013). This longing is created through the consumption of media
itself. The cycle of art, music and film styles can shape the public perception
of the past through media consumption; even supersede the memories of those who
lived through historical events (Lizardi, 2016). Thus, not only are individuals
who are born after a historical event shaped by the nostalgia for that event,
but even those that lived through an event or time have their memories
retroactively shaped by the nostalgic marketing that they consume. This is
primarily due to the consistency and volume of the nostalgic content as it blends
with real memories.
Additionally,
as memories fade, and age fueled senility pulls our own experiences just out of
reach, pop culture is there to fill the gap, as it is easier than memories to
recall and be refreshed with a simple search or recent rewatch. It is well
documented that people’s wistfulness for a time gone by is less about the
actual historical events or memories of the period itself. It is more so a
poetic waxing for an illusion constructed by the media that they consume.
Outside of open or closeted white supremacists, those that are the most vocal
about “going back” to a different time, do not describe the actual social,
cultural, economic or political history of any period in the past. Most of them
have been deceived by nostalgia-marketing to the illusion of the time-period,
which softens the reality for either narrative purposes or wider audience
appeal. People look back and they see Norman Rockwell Paintings and Ralphy from
“A Christmas Story” on a quest for a red rider BB-gun; they don’t see the Jim
Crow south, or post war reconstruction. Instead, they want the fiction they
were promised.
Sociologically,
there are clear reasons why nostalgia works: The past’s relationship to
childhood, especially if that childhood was more protective than prepared, the
reduction of complexity, fond familiarity, and suppression of the scary “other”
are all reasons to wax nostalgic. Firstly, the way that nostalgia bids time
return, harkening back to a time-period that, for most people, especially middle-class
white folk, childhood was a simpler and easier time by the nature of their
privileged childhood itself. Regardless of whether that childhood was
protective or prepared, most children had an existence through youth where they
were spared most adult responsibilities. Even if responsibilities began to
compound through various rites of passage, that progression and development
happened gradually, usually over a span of years. Therefore, when looking back
on childhood, it is often done with a feeling of reverence because of its
perceived personal simplicity.
Compounding
with this sense of personal ease, in the past, the world was also less complex in
terms of both social policy and technology. When many white people desire the
past to be reforged into the present, they, intentionally or not, desire the historical
suppression of social justice movements and rights for all people. If indeed
purposeful, it is a vain attempt to
avoid a reckoning with their own multi-faceted forms of bigotry, and their
acquiescence, ignorance or complacency to more structural and systemic forms of
racism, misogyny, ableism, classism and xenophobia. Technology too was easier
due to the reality of being a digital native to the technology as a child, as
opposed to being a digital immigrant as an adult. Children through their
primary socialization learn about the world alongside (and often through) the
technology of the time. Therefore, there is a near nonexistent learning curve
regarding the understanding and implementation of technology into children’s
lives. More acutely, a child’s brain develops differently depending on the type
of technology that they were exposed to in their youth.[2] We emerge from the womb
into a technological world that primes us to understand the world through its
current technology. But as we age, technological advancements are too quick for
all of us to keep up. This is partly due to the cultural lag between technology
and society.
Basically,
cultural lag explains how a piece of technology always exists, often for
government purposes, long before it is made available to the public for private
use. Then, as technology is diffused, our desire to create a culture around it leads
to its eventual necessity in our everyday life. CDs, DVDs, the internet and Wi-Fi
all existed and were used by the government and other institutions far before
they were made publicly available. It is only after the public gained access
that we developed language, rituals and norms around the specific use of technology.
This added language, and the way new technology is woven into social life,
often alienates older adults from the behaviors of concurrent existence. For
example, most applications for jobs are done not just online, but require engaging
with a specific digital application (app). This may require an individual to
know how to set up a username and password for the service and navigate its
interface. As ageist and ableist this may be in practice, it also illustrates
the necessity for adults not familiar with a piece of technology to digitally
immigrate into its use at the risk of being left behind; thereby reducing a
person’s ability to be independent. It is no surprise then that nostalgia pulls
on our emotions to a time that felt easier, safer, and more familiar. Yet, this
comfort comes at a cost.
Weaponizing Nostalgia
The
use of nostalgia in media marketing and content creation not only is simple
consumerist manipulation to further the profit of a company, but the manufactured
deception of nostalgia can be used to shape public opinion. As I mentioned
above, the media has a way of shaping how we think about and remember the past.
This is because, in a greater attempt to relieve people of their wages, much
media content mirrors real life. This verisimilitude is important to socially
construct reality through the media (Berger and Luckmann 1966). The media is
created by individuals that use their experiences to make their media content
relatable to be consumed. Then that media is used by the masses to make sense
out of the world in which they live.
This
cycle is both symbolic and reciprocal. We both use the media to learn about the
world through news media and then use entertainment media to help us explain
and interpret the world through the content we consume. For instance, pop cultural media is often used to
bring attention to a political issue as well as Sitcoms, films and TV being used as
illustrations or hyperbolic examples in judicial
opinions. As this cycle filters through our internalized
selves, the most intimate relationships people develop with reality is through
the media. Inevitably, that relationship
is designed to neutralize meaning and produce a lack of informed people outside
of the messages the media they consume presents. We become media parrots with a
lack of critical thinking and an unwillingness to take in information that challenges
our proscribed world view. This constant state of meaning and counter-meaning, allows
for the media to be used as a political weapon that “exacerbates into a
catastrophic resolution” (Baudrillard 1994:84). A ‘clear a present’ instance of
this weaponization of the media and nostalgia is Donald Trump and the MAGA
movement.
The
Manipulating Effect of the MAGA Myth
“For Trump everything is
nostalgia and nostalgia is everything, because he knows it sells. It is indeed
the cornerstone of conservative political thought and especially at its most
extreme, authoritarian end. The seedbed of fascism, after all, is the idea that
the nation was once great, a pristine and noble place from which all good
things flowed. But then it was hijacked, its glory squandered it’s promise
sullied by evildoers who have despoiled the once bucolic state. If we could
just get back to the way things were, all could be good again. Enter the Strong
man (Tim Wise: 2020:108).
The
phrase “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), was first uttered by President Ronald
Reagan in the 1980’s. Donald Trump formally began using the slogan, that he
later trademarked, in 2012, simultaneously co-opting a similar sentiment that
was invoked by the Tea Party movement in 2010 to “take our country back” after
the election of Barrack Obama. Both slogans have a racist undercurrent. Initially,
these slogans were primarily invoked after the election of the first Black man
to the office of the President; thereby implying that because of such an event,
“‘Merika” was no longer great, and that the country needed to be ‘taken back’. Thus,
these statements have a revolutionary connotation in addition to their contextual
racism. Shortly after Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator to announce
his candidacy for president in 2015 (and then proceeded to go on a racist and
xenophobic rant about Mexico and the border), the MAGA phrase gained in
popularity. Therefore, Donald Trump being an excellent marketer, as well as a
rancid trash bag of a human being, slapped that logo on everything. Yet, he and
others who used the phrase were never quite sure what time they wanted to turn
America back to.
The historical nebulousness of the MAGA phrase
is intentional. By not specifying a year, the phrase plays on the feelings of nostalgia.
This past-preference allows for the MAGA phrase to mean anything: anyone’s
childhood, any time that someone felt less burdened, completely unburdened, or a
time that they felt safe. Yet, this nostalgia is exclusively marketed to middle-upper
class white people. Those that widely acknowledged and accepted the myth of
“The 1950’s family” as fact, or those that remember and are blissfully fond of
the heterosexual two-parent family form. Yet, according to Stephanie Coontz (2016)
the image of “the 1950’s family” was always a myth because white people’s
memory/perception of that time period is shaped by contemporaneous advertising of
families at beaches and going on bike rides, while shows like I Love Lucy,
Father Know’s Best and Leave it to Beaver configured their
understanding of the family.
Conversely,
as other journalists and scholars have pointed out, “America” wasn’t
always great for everyone. Going backwards in any era only benefits white men. There
was always a time in the not-too-distant past that someone other than a white
man faced persecution. Slavery, Jim Crow Laws, the rape culture, non-voting
rights for women, the incarceration/sterilization of the disabled/mentally ill,
use of child labor, immigration detention and removal, bountiful hate crimes
against the LGBTQAI+ community and all manner
and number of other policies and practices that existed in the past, harmed the
human rights of everyone while convincing the white men whom either directly or
indirectly benefited, that it was just. By using nostalgia as a weapon, it transforms
diversity and progressiveness into existential threats that need to be
eradicated.
This eradication began in full swing
on Jan 20th, 2025. In the first six months of his second term,
Donald Trump has indicated which period he believes was the last time
“America was Great”. According to Trump,
the last time we had “A Great America” was during the tail end of the 19th
century; The robber baron
era. This focus, combined with following the crypto-Fascist think tank, The
Heritage Foundation, and their Project 2025 playbook, since his inauguration, Donald
Trump has constructed an oligarchy of tech bros that included Jeff Bezos, Mark
Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. This gaggle of goons has been nicknamed
“the broligarchy” because many of its representatives are either a part of, or
revered by members of “The manosphere.” These tech billionaires have
acquiesced to Trump, motivating him to use his position as President to enrich
himself through naked corruption. Since taking office, Trump has engaged in
several Cryptocurrency scams which allowed anyone to gain access to the most powerful
man in the world, for the right price.
This has extended to his dedication to creating a crypto reserve, again designed to enrich himself
through his new family cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial.
Concurrently to this cronyism and
corruption, Trump has appointed individuals to run federal agencies and issued
a litany of executive orders that not only continue to weaponize nostalgia, but
determined to annihilate any structure, institution or individual that does not
financially benefit him. Ultimately, allowing him to hold on to or amass more
power. As of this writing[3], Trump has issued over 161 executive orders; many of which were reversing
Biden era policies and returning the United States to a time of non-union child
labor, zero vaccine mandates, and openly hostile misogyny and racism, all
wrapped up in blatant authoritarianism.
Some of Trump’s
most despotic Executive Orders
include:
·
The
targeting and ending of birthright Citizenship
·
The
use of the Alien Enemy’s Act to remove immigrants without Due Process and detain
them in an El Salvadorian prison
·
The
removal of DEI Programs in the Federal government (supplemented by Supreme
Court rulings for White student admission into schools)
·
The
threat of and removal of federal funds for major Universities: Columbia,
Harvard, and the Cal State and UC system in California
·
The
ending of federal funding for K-12 schools that teach racism and gender
identity
·
The
removal of the United States from the World Health Organization
·
The Federal acknowledgment of only two genders
and Trans exclusive policies (in Sports)
·
The
halting of clean energy programs
·
The
use of The Comstock Act which hinders the ability to ship contraceptive
medication through the mail.
·
The
re-establishment of the Hyde Amendment that prohibits federal funds from going
to any institution, non-profit, or company that provides abortion services or care.
·
The
creation of DOGE to gut federal oversight programs/committees and fire thousands
of government workers
·
Creating
a “golden dome” missile defense system
·
The
weaponization of Tariffs and the direct manipulation of the stock market for
financial gain
·
Declaring
English to be the national language of the United States
·
Dismantling
of the Department of Education
·
The
creation of a military appreciation Day resulting in a parade…on his birthday
·
Unilaterally
helping Israel attack Iran as both a distraction for the public and to make him
seem Presidential after no one came to his birthday
party
Trump’s
issuing a record number of executive orders is a function of both a desire to
avoid the political red tape of going through Congress (regardless of
republican control) and to make these actions “official acts of the presidency”,
which, now thanks to the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States, are immune from prosecution. Through this Trumpian reality, dystopian
fiction, often intended by the authors as a cautionary tale, has seen a resurgence in popularity
since his election.
Many of these once fictional worlds are now dangerously parallelling the world
Trump is creating with such horrific similarity, that it seems to be a model
for the United States under Dictator Trump.
CASE
STUDIES[4]
Because
“pop culture is soft power”, there is evidence that popular dystopian fiction
can affect political attitudes (Jones and Paris 2018). While not evidenced yet,
it is also conceivable that dystopian fiction can be used as an initial
motivating force for policy if not an actual road map for those that seek a
more totalitarian supremacist agenda. This speculation is supported by Donald Trump being the first
President that was a reality tv star;
elected, in part, for his familiarity with the public through his constructed
persona from the wildly popular television show The Apprentice. According
to Psychologist Shira Gabriel at the University of Buffalo: “Fourteen seasons
of hour-long episodes that presented Trump as a calm, infallible
decision-maker, who listened to others but came to his own conclusions, greatly
emphasized his success.” (Gambini 2018). Through this success, and to minimize pushback
in his second term, he has factored in this same populist trajectory when
assembling his Presidential Cabinet, which gave us such a cavalcade of caustic
cronies that they may need to be renamed “The Legion of Doom.”
Among
the highlighted villains, who have little to no experience in the position to
which they’ve been appointed, is Pete Hegseth, a Fox News media personality that Trump appointed to Secretary
of Defense whose experience stops at being an Army National Guard officer who also
seems to have a problem with
technology; Robert
F. Kennedy Jr.: known Vaccine denier and conspiracy
theorist with parasitic brain trauma tapped to run the department of
Health and Human Services; Steven Miller, White House Chief of Staff for Policy
and Homeland Security Advisor: who has cited white nationalists websites, been labeled a general ‘hatemonger’, and is the architect for Trump’s foreign policy
agenda; and Pam
Bondi, former Trump defense lawyer during his first impeachment trial, who’s opposed same sex marriage, and has become the enforcement arm of all Trump’s
policies. This
unqualified clown show of a cabinet was conjured because Trump requires sycophantic
loyalty, like a king (or a cult leader), over the following of either the
law or the constitution. It is through this group’s tenure in office (which as
of this writing has only been Five months) and the domestic and foreign policy
that they promote, champion, and litigiously defend, that the dystopian fiction
of the past, is becoming a stark reality.
Disclaimer
When
looking at the domestic and foreign policy of Donald Trump’s tenure as
President of the United States (2016-2020, 2025-) as it mirrors or becomes a
foundational precursor for the burgeoning reality of a once fictional dystopia,
it is important to remember that a lot of things were quasi-dystopian in the United
States prior to his election.
In fact, many of the dystopian fictions that will be cited in the following
case studies were written decades prior to Donald Trump assuming public office.
Yet, many of these authors and filmmakers were prophetic in creating their
content, seeing a political idea or government action and extending it to its
most despotic conclusions. Unfortunately, now, through the actions of Donald
Trump and his crew, the lines are beginning to blur, if not evaporating
completely.
Authoritarian Dystopia
Many of Donald Trump’s policies have
been described as ‘authoritarian populism’.
Gonzales
(2024) defines the term as:
“a form of politics that
combines features of populism and authoritarianism and is fueled by nativism
(favoring “native” citizens over “outsiders”) and anti-pluralism (opposition to
diversity). Authoritarian populist leaders cultivate and exploit fear of change
and perceived ‘Others’(often defined in racialized, ethnic, religious, or caste
terms) to justify practices that limit political competition and
accountability, all while claiming to defend a version of democracy that
prioritizes majority rule over minority rights (2)
The core
tactic of authoritarian populism is “othering”, a specific form of scapegoating
that creates a hierarchy and reinforces supremacist beliefs amongst those at
the top, vilifying those at the bottom (Gonzales 2024).
These
practices also include:
·
Spreading
Disinformation
·
Aggrandizing
Executive Power
·
Quashing
Dissent
·
Scapegoating
Vulnerable Communities
·
Corrupting
Elections
·
Stoking
Violence
In both terms, The Trump Administration has exhibited the hallmark qualities of authoritarian populism. The Trump Administration has spread disinformation through the creation of “alternative facts”, specifically used to undermine the confidence in elections (through “the big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen). It has sought to undermine confidence in our Judicial system by attacking family members of the court, and the judges involved in the Trump indictment for incitement during Jan 6th, and again during the hush money trial that ended with Trump being convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records. As these cases were ongoing, Trump consistently violated gag orders during the trial, effectively weaponizing the press in his favor. The Administration aggrandized executive power by relying on Executive Orders and The Unitary Executive theory to govern, rather than go through Congress or the Courts. Through these executive orders, and motivated by the black heart of Stephen Miller, The Administration has scapegoated vulnerable communities (predominantly brown skinned individuals) through the ignoring of Due Process and the proposed suspension of the rite of habeas corpus in their attempts to push for mass detention and deportations; even going so far as to kidnap people on the street by unidentified masked-wearing individuals. The Trump Administration also regularly engages in the quashing of dissent by threatening dissenters with litigation, or attacks them through Trump’s supporters. Lastly, Trump has stoked violence through his use of the military and the National guard to Protect ICE agents as they raid businesses, schools, churches and immigration court hearings across the country.
Many of the actions that we are
seeing play out with The Trump Administration’s domestic and foreign policy, we
were first warned about through both classic and contemporary dystopian
fiction. George Orwell classically discusses the use of authoritarian
doublespeak, and
mass surveillance in the landmark novel 1984. However, in looking at the arc of The
Trump Administration’s rise to power, a better literary allegory might be Orwell’s
Animal Farm. The book was initially written as an allegory of the
Bolshevik Revolution that transformed Russia from Socialist Leninism (Old
Major) to Stalinist Authoritarianism (Napoleon). But also illustrates the rise of
authoritarian populism under Trump.
In the context of Animal Farm, Old Major is Biden and Napoleon is Trump, especially during that disastrous debate in 2024.
The
Orwellian allegory pairs particularly well with The Trump Administration’s use
of the media and the current creation of a
surveillance state run by Palantir.
A Theilian venture, this is a company that purposefully derives its name from
the “all seeing orb” wielded by Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. It should also be of little
surprise that both Peter Theil and JD Vance, current Vice President of the
United States and business scion of Theil, are really big Lord of the Rings fans. But, given the evidence of both the name of Theil’s
company, and JD Vance’s policies, it is clear they are misreading Tolkien,
oblivious to his social commentary and societal criticisms in the text. Yet, it
is equally possible that the allegory to evil is purposeful because in the
minds of men like Theil and Vance, cruelty is the point.[5]
Octavia
Butler’s Parable of the Sower published in 1993, is near a one for one prediction of Authoritarianism
under Donald Trump.
The gating of neighborhoods and unequal resource distribution, scarcity of water, the monopolization of pharmaceutical companies and privatization of schools are all happening in real-time. Even
Butler’s Presidential Candidate, Christopher Donner, is elected through the
promise of dismantling the government and increasing jobs…sound
familiar? The book is part of a duology titled “The Parable Series” that took on the issues of late-stage capitalism,
climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence and the tech
industry. Absolutely worth a read.
The
graphic novel V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and its later
film adaptation written and Produced by The Wachowskis and directed by James
McTeigue, identifies
the use of “social dominance orientation”. This is defined as a personality
trait measuring an individual's support for social hierarchy and the extent to
which they desire their in-group be superior to out-groups, a common belief
among Trump supporters (Womick, Rothmund and Jost 2018). Additionally, the
government in “V”’s world also orchestrates crises in a similar way that Trump discusses
immigration, as he did with the Caravan myth, and the myth of immigrant pet eating. The Government in both the graphic novel and the film,
rose to power on a wave of xenophobic hatred and an othering of nonwhite, non
cishet groups as a scapegoat for deprivation and economic insecurity. Similarly,
in 2024, Trump ran on a platform of reducing grocery prices, removing Trans kids from sports, the dangers of an unsecure border, economic insecurity, scapegoating
and vilification of “the other”. These are the despotic authoritarian
structures that exist in dystopian fiction and are no longer
make-believe.
Gender Dystopia
In 2022, The Supreme Court ruled in the Dobbs
decision to end the federal protections for body rights for women. The decision
reversed a nearly 50-year precedent allowing a federal right to abortion access
in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and later codified in Planned Parenthood v.
Casey in 1992. Both cases, now overruled. Although this decision came down
while Trump was out of office, his actions during his first term seeded the
dismantling of this landmark human right protection. Predominantly, Trump’s
contribution to this dismantlement was in the form of his appointments to the Supreme
Court; namely Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who all
voted for the repeal. This was the result of blatant partisan hypocrisy that
led to Coney Barrett’s appointment in 2020, the final masterwork of hell-bound
human husk Sen. Mitch McConnell.
In
Feb 2016, Justice Anton Scalia, an Originalist[6] in legal philosophy, and one who used the character of Jack
Bauer from the tv show 24
to justify the validity of using torture on detained terror
suspects, died.
This was 236 days before the 2016 election from which Donald Trump was the
Republican front runner. Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, and 30 other Senators were
stalwartly resistant to allowing the seated President at the end of his second
term fill the court vacancy. The rationale that was chosen: it was “just too
close” to the election to hold a hearing, and that “they should let the
American people decide” by allowing the winner of the next election to nominate
a replacement. To curry favor, and ease resistance, then President Barrack
Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a middle of the road centrist Justice with a history
of both conservative and liberal judicial opinions. However, all nominations must
be confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which at the time was helmed by
Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republican majority leader and all-around putrefied demon.
Just as he had done over the last two years of Obama’s second term, that maintained 106 Federal judicial
vacancies, McConnell
blocked the nomination by not allowing Garland a hearing in front of the
committee. Instead, when Republican Donald Trump got in office, McConnell not
only fast tracked a hearing for Trump’s nominee, Neal Gorsuch, but helped Trump
fill 288 US court of appeals and lower District court Judges in just 4 years;
having stalled those vacancies through the end of Obama’s second term.
Hypocritically,
when liberal Justice, Contextualist and Feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg died
just 46 days before the 2020 election, there was not the same reverence and
calls for “the will of the American people” to be honored by waiting to fill
the seat until after the election. In an act of nakedly blunt duplicity,
McConnell and other senators who opposed the nomination of Merrick Garland,
vowed to fill the seat before the 2020 election. With lightning speed, Trump
nominated Amy Coney Barrett, an originalist in the style of Scalia with ties to
The People of Praise, a Catholic/Christian Conservative religious group
that promotes female subservience to men, with Barrett once serving as a ‘Handmaid’.
In just 6 weeks, Barrett was approved by the Senate by one of the slimmest
margins (52-48) as opposed to her Predecessor Justice Ginsberg, getting the
widest of approvals (96-3). Yet, the shift in the court structure had been set,
and Trump and McConnell achieved their legacy with both reshaping the Supreme
Court to be more conservative and undermining the judiciary all together.
In
addition to these judicial appointments that led to the landmark rollback of
Federal body rights for women, In Trump’s time as president he has also supported:
·
The
18 State Trigger Abortion bans that went into effect the minute Roe was
overturned, stating that he was “giving the rights back to the States”.
·
The
Hyde Amendment-
the denial of federal funds for any organization or institution that provides
abortion care
·
The
Comstock Act-
which he is attempting to use to limit access to contraceptive drugs
·
The
undermining, and defunding of public health insurance programs and Medicaid
that assist people who are low income from accessing healthcare
·
Restricting
LGBTQ content in Schools
·
The
refusal to defend The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act- which allows
for abortion in cases of extreme Pregnancy complications
·
Freezing
funds for healthcare services at community clinics
·
Censoring
medical information on Government websites
·
Ending funding on Women’s health research
·
Ending
access to hormone blockers and access to Testosterone and Estrogen for Trans
individuals
·
A
Military service ban for Trans individuals
·
Government
ID that lists the individual’s biological Sex (Anti-Trans)
·
The
Promotion of having more biological children
·
Removal of women in the military
If
this sounds really familiar, this is because a lot of these policy decisions are
the backdrop framework for Margaret Atwood’s 1984 classic novel A Handmaid’s Tale and it’s 2019 sequel The Testaments. When developing the story of an oppressive
religious cult of Christian fundamentalist white supremacist heterosexist
ableist fascism that rises out of political turmoil in the United States Atwood
used Reagan era policies and the perspectives of fringe religious groups of the
1970’s and 80’s as a basis for practices behind the walls of the fictional
country of Gilead; whose sole goal is to procreate a white Christian Nation
after an infertility crisis that stricken many with sterility. Later, The Testaments was written in the context of Donald Trump’s first term. As the
television adaptation
depicts in its first season, women are stripped
of their paid labor, their money being controlled by their husbands, while the Country promotes general illiteracy;
going so far as to remove books about history, gender and diversity. Not only is this paralleling the shift in culture
under the Trump Administration,
we have seen an increase in a backsliding of cultural gender progress with the
rise in the “Trad wife” aesthetic that is a perfect encapsulation of
the patriarchal bargain, where women choose/encouraged/coerced to exalt masculine
dominance and power in hopes to glean power through their relationships with
men. The less democratically egalitarian a society is, the more this “bargain”
becomes an unfortunate necessity for women and other marginalized groups. Now,
with a Trump second term turning out to be more fascistic than its first
iteration, we are that much closer to the misogynistic future of Atwood’s work no
longer being hyperbole.
For more on The Sociological Analysis of Atwood’s duology check out: Episode 29: The Handmaid’s Tale Franchise with Dr. Rebecca Gibson of The Sociologist’s Dojo Podcast
Health
Dystopia
In
providing evidence for case studies in which the Trump Administration’s
domestic and foreign policies result in a fair comparison to a variety of
dystopian fiction, under the subject of health dystopia, we have direct non-allegorical
evidence of the critical failures of The Trump Administration’s
policies through
their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, The United States was
ill-prepared to handle the Covid-19 pandemic, and Donald Trump being President
at the time, made it unbelievably worse. From the beginning, Trump provided inconsistent
messaging about covid
and it’s looming and eventually imminent threat. He repeatedly and consistently undercut and contradicted experts about nearly everything: from the importance of masking, the misinformation about the
benefits of taking Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin,
suggesting that injecting disinfectant might help, or that it would just simply “go away”. Trump attempted to downplay and
ignore this crisis as much as possible for the sake of the economy.
As
a (failed) businessman running the country like a business, for Trump, the economy
was of chief importance. Therefore, Trump suppressed scientific data, delayed testing and suggested testing be stopped to
“lower our numbers”
of the infected. This was all done to keep the economy open as long as possible[7]. This gaslighting
continued even though, due to the slow/ nonexistent response to the pandemic,
the economy was already slowing down as people limited their time in public places
and began consuming less. Even as the lockdown orders were begrudgingly put in
place, the definition of “essential workers” became sexist and racistly suspect. Regardless of their relevance,
many of the jobs listed as “essential” by state were primarily done by part
time women of color: whether that be hospital workers, agricultural workers,
and even grocery store workers. This disparity continued even in jobs listed as
“essential” but had no practical necessity; jobs like general, non-perishable
retail and fast food workers. Working conditions got so bad that many of
these workers faced a breaking point, leading to burn out that resulted in workers not showing up
for work. By the time President Trump left office the
first time, 400,000 people in the United States
had died from covid,
many of whom died alone or teleconferencing with their loved
ones via Zoom and
then had their bodies stacked and stored in refrigerated trucks outside of the hospital. All
around, it was considered a colossal catastrophe that cost Trump the 2020
election.
An
interesting irony between the Trump Covid reality and health dystopia fiction,
is that there are few examples of health dystopia fiction that rests the size
of the calamity on ignorance and surgically weaponized incompetence. High rates
of infection, sure. Difficulty finding a vaccine and how to mass produce it,
absolutely. But it is a rarity to see a level of sociopathology in the pursuit
of capitalism in our fiction as we saw circa 2020. To reach this “imbecilic
perfect storm” in fiction, as we saw in the US, we would have to combine the
films Contagion, Don’t Look Up and Idiocracy.
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The virus featured in the 2011 Film Contagion
is eerily close to the SARS-Cov 2 (Covid-19)
pandemic in terms of source, transmission, and virulence. In the film’s narrative, there
were also similarities between a lifestyle guru peddling a homeopathic cure,
and the way that right wing conspiracy
theorists and ‘manosphere’ dude-bros
would promote Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine in real life. The basis of the
film was transmutability. Writer/Director Steven Soderbergh and Scott Burns
were interested in constructing a dramatic thriller around the development of a
pandemic. For accuracy, the filmmakers interviewed and consulted with Larry
Brilliant, whose work furthered the eradication of Smallpox, Laurie Garrett,
author of the book The Coming Plague and epidemiologist W. Ian Lipkin. As they were developing the story, Soderbergh
and Burns witnessed the 2009 influenza pandemic to which they saw first-hand
the issues of masking, school closures and treatment protocols, which they
eventually added. The film accurately portrays the time and difficulty of
fighting against the spread of a deadly unknown pathogen so much that the film gained
macabre popularity during the lockdown of 2020. Because of the similarities
between this film and the real-life Pandemic only 9 years later, we are left
with unique hindsight. If we valued and recognized pop culture as not only soft
power, but as a potential check against the hard power of government policies,
perhaps we could have avoided catastrophe.[8]
Adam McKay’s Disaster-satire Don’t Look Up is a political allegory for the Covid-19 Pandemic. Released on Dec 24th 2021, at a time when many industries were still literally plagued with Covid cases, under strict protocols and complicated by vaccine misinformation, and hesitancy that resulted in fraud through fake vaccines and fraudulent vaccine cards, McKay’s film focuses on the political divisions behind such a momentous event. The film’s narrative focuses on the threat of a comet that is set to wipe out all life on earth, and the difficulty that scientists have with trying to get the world to not ignorantly slouch toward annihilation. In this process, McKay highlights: class stratification, greed, apathy and oblivious hubris that becomes an impenetrable wall to salvation. In the film, the elite manufacture a way for them to survive and profit (Disaster Capitalism) through a satirical Elon Musk Proxy played by Marc Rylance, while leaving the rest of humanity to the fate they themselves had orchestrated for the entire planet. These plot lines illustrate the overall dangers of capitalism and the way that ignorance and incompetence is weaponized for profit. Witnessing this through Covid, many of us realized (though still not enough) that there is no profit margin for benevolence under such a system.
The bare-bones premise of the Mike
Judge film Idiocracy is paralleling reality in
real time. The
conceit of the 2006 film was what if educated individuals with high IQ’s
stopped procreating, and individuals with lower IQ’s continued to propagate.[9] In the film, this led to a
devolved dystopia of an anti-intellectual society where written language is
minimal and spoken English had “devolved into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley
girl, Inner city slang and various grunts.” (Judge 2006). During the 2016
election, the filmmakers made both direct and analogous connections between Donald Trump and his supporters and
their fictional President Dewayne Elizando Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Trump even seemed to lean into
the parallels, not only being a wrestling personality like the fictional
President Camacho, but promoting anti-intellectualism through his policies on diversity equity
inclusion and assistance, gender identity, and being generally anti-science. This culminated in his 2025 attack against colleges and
universities. Through
these actions, Trump is attempting to hold the public in an iron grip of
“Idiocracy” as we continue to outsource critical thinking to our
phones and generative algorithmic software. This is because Trump understands that having an inability
to critically think increases dependence and social compliance. Thus, the poor US
Covid-19 pandemic response from President Trump, enabled by his administration
in 2020, can be explained and illustrated through amalgamating parts of the
films: Contagion, Don’t Look Up and Idiocracy. Unfortunately,
with his reelection in 2024, Trump has continued his blundering of health
through the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Director of Health and
Human Services.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a bewilderingly
weird dude. This bear skinning, raw milk drinking, mercury poisoned ‘T-fiend’[10] was born the blue-blood
boy of American political royalty. RFK Jr. is the scion of Robert F. Kennedy
Sr. and the nephew of JFK. RFK Jr. grew up not only in the shadow of his famous
family, but after his father’s assassination, became the black sheep. In his
youth he was kicked out of two boarding schools, created a delinquent gang and engaged
in drug use that culminated in a heroin possession charge. After his two-year probation (a
sentence undoubtedly fueled by systemic white privilege and celebrity status),
RFK Jr. seemed to turn a corner. He began to champion indigenous rights, labor
rights, and environmental causes; even going so far as to create an
environmental law firm specializing in opposing projects that inhibit
environmental restoration. For a while, RFK Jr. was a respected Democrat. Then in 2005, his anti-vax beliefs and reliance on conspiracy theories started to immerge.
Prior to being tapped to be Trump’s
Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was known to believe
in false statements, and conspiracies involving:
·
Government induced Chemical
Castration and
Feminization (through Food)
Once
Kennedy’s name was put in the running for the position of Director of Health
and Human Services (HHS), there was significant opposition to the nomination
due to his vaccine skepticism. Yet, during his hearing, Kennedy hedged his bets
and was far more conciliatory to the importance of vaccines just to be approved
by the Senate. Each vote, both in the subcommittee, and the full Senate
approved Kennedy’s nomination with 51% of the vote, all along party
lines.
During his current tenure as HHS
director, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with no medical degree, has:
·
Promoted
the removal of Fluoride in public drinking water
·
Stopped recommending COVID 19 and influenza vaccines for mothers and children
·
Removed
all members of the CDC Vaccine Committee
·
Fired
5,200 healthcare workers from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). Hindering or completely
halting necessary medical research
·
Downplayed the Southwestern
Outbreak of Measles
in 2025 and was duplicitous as to the effect of the Measles vaccine, going so
far as to promote Vitamin A supplements which directly led to the Vitamin A poisoning of children in the region.
·
Proclaimed
that he would “ Find a cure for autism” by
September 2025
·
Delivered
a “Make America Healthy Again” report that was riddled with errors and seemingly
AI generated false citations; while the Press secretary at the
time called it only “a formatting error.”
Robert F.
Kennedy Jr as HHS director is equivalent to Jude Law’s character from Contagion
holding that same position; while simultaneously embodying the collective
health and wellness understanding of the entire Presidential Cabinet in Idiocracy,
which is Zero. RFK Jr. is wholly unqualified for the position he
holds. He uses logical fallacies and circular logic to justify opinions and cherry-picks
data for adverse effects to make a political point. This has caused 23 states to sue both RFK. Jr and
the HHS department
for the abrupt termination of medical grants and the rescinding of necessary
medical services. RFK Jr. is the one-man embodiment of a healthcare dystopia.
*Anyone
interested in more of these Case Studies and comparisons, check out the
podcast: Dystopian Fiction has been Moved to
Current Events*
CONCLUSION
This
paper portends the end and failure of dystopian fiction. The growing
similarities between current foreign and domestic policies with literary and
cinematic cataclysms, some with an eerily distasteful overlap, represent the
utter ruin of the genre. It’s inability to be a cautionary tale that evokes in
us such dread that we avert catastrophe is now laughable considering that prior
to The Trump Administration, domestic and foreign policies were used as a
foundation for hypothetical dystopias. Now, under Trump’s second regime, it
seems that dystopian fiction is a road map for their domestic and foreign
policy agenda. How can we get hopeful through the consumption of dystopian
fiction if we are too busy living in one? Having been stripped of all of its
meaning and importance, now, dystopian fiction has been relegated to a sobering
distraction. Content like Squid Game, Paradise and The Last of Us,
all just serve as conditioning forms of self-medication, to numb us to the real
dystopia that we live through every day that we draw breath. The final irony is
that, due to these policies that have wrought dystopian fiction inert, those that
survive will eventually need to “Make America Great Again” after Donald Trump
and his cronies have successfully eradicated it.
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Handmaid’s Tale New York: Anchor Books
_______________ 2019 The
Testaments New York: Doubleday
Baudrillard, Jean 1994. Simulacra and Simulations Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press
Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann
1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in The Sociology of
Knowledge New York: Anchor Books.
Butler Octavia 2000. Parable of
the Sower New York: Grand Central Publishing
Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Herman
2002. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media 2nd
edition New York: Pantheon Books
Coontz, Stephanie 2016. The Way We Never Were: American Families and
the Nostalgia Trap New York: Basic Books
Fogelman, Dan Creator Paradise United States: Hulu
Gambini, Bert 2018. “ Reality
Television Played a Key Role in taking Trump from ‘Apprentice’ to President” In
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from UB New York: University of Buffalo Retrieved on 6/11/2025 Retrieved
at: https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2018/02/034.html
Glassner, Barry 2018. The
Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things: New York:
Basic Books
Gonzales, Miriam Juan-Torres 2024.
“Fear Grievance and The Other: How Authoritarian Populist Politics Thrive in
Contemporary Democracies, Key Concepts to understanding politics beyond the
left-right paradigm” In Democracy and Belonging Forum Retrieved on
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Haywood, Alicia and Sabrina
Sembiante 2023. “Media Literacy Education for Parents: A Literature Review.” In
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_____________ 2004. Animal Farm 75th
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[1]
First, by use of the term “youths” one should correctly infer that I am no
longer a part of the current youth culture, and secondarily, I think “Brain Rot
is a great nickname for HHS Director Robert F. Kennedy
[3]
This essay was written, edited, between
June 9th and June 19th 2025, scheduled for release August
1st 2025.
[4] Author’s
Note: There are more of these comparisons than the scope of this paper and
the time allotted to write allowed. There is equal evidence to suggest that the
Trump Policies also parallel a Race Dystopia (fueled by a foundational racist
history) and Disability Dystopia (due to a lack of enforcement of Disability
laws and the proliferation of ableist policies.
[5] It
is remarkable just how this example crystalizes the issue of media illiteracy.
The Palantir was a tool o f the embodiment of evil in Tolkien’s universe. That
is assuming that there was a misunderstanding, and the Company choice wasn’t
intentionally aligning itself with the Dark lord Sauron…which is also possible.
[6] An
originalist in the legal sense is someone who has a judicial philosophy that believes
the law should be interpreted based upon the framer’s original intention; and
not see the law or the constitution as a living document up interpretation based
upon the social and cultural context the world finds them in; this would be the
legal framework known as Contextualism. It should be of no surprise that more
conservative justices tend to be originalists whereas more liberal justices
tend to be contextualists
[7] And the reasoning behind opening things
back up too soon
in May 2020
[8] I know
if I was a person in power in 2011 and I’d just seen Contagion; I would
use all the resources at my disposal to make sure the nightmare on screen did
not come to fruition. But alas, a lot of times people don’t think like that.
The best that we can hope for is to use the Soft Power of the movies to
encourage the public to pressure their representatives to give us answers,
assuage fears, and strengthen our defenses. Otherwise, we’ll vote them out.
[9] It
needs to be mentioned that this film falsy posits that IQ is an accurate
measurement of intelligence. It is not.
[10]
Testosterone
