A new movie about a new Civil War in America will be released in April of 2024 but it already has the usual, conspiratorial minded (RW morons) up in ‘arms.’
According to Vice:
The trailer has “….Right wing grifters online” already deciding “that the film is ‘predictive programming’—an example of shadowy deep state elites using their control of the media to prepare the population for an actual civil war.”
YIKES!:
Predictive programming is a long-running conspiracy theory that claims powerful Hollywood elites are using the media to program the populace. The idea is that, at the behest of the Illuminati or somesuch, Hollywood makes films like Civil War to normalize the idea of conflict between the states. Philosopher Alan Watt coined the term and it’s been used ever since to explain away the eerie similarities people find between art and the real world.
Second civil war stories help Americans make sense of specific moments in political time. Decades later, they often appear strange. In the 1990s, HBO aired a made-for-TV movie directed by Joe Dante of Gremlins fame. This largely forgotten black comedy starred Phil Hartman as an American president facing a populace worried about special interest groups and immigrants changing the electoral college. It’s essentially the Great Replacement Theory as a dark comedy.
More than a quarter century later, the racist conspiracy theory persists, and so does the country. These stories about America going to war with itself didn’t come to pass. The odds are good that Civil War won’t either.
Wait, Why Are Texas and California on the Same Side in A24’s ‘Civil War’?
But one aspect of the trailer is harder to swallow than the concept of civil war itself: the part where the president refers to “the so-called Western Forces of Texas and California.”
Texas and California, fighting side-by-side? What in the name of horseshoe theory is happening here? In what scenario would the two almost diametrically politically opposed states, that the L.A. Times just labeled “the liberal bastion on the left coast, and the conservative Southern garrison on the Gulf,” possibly secede together? Have Dodgers fans forgiven the Astros for sign-stealing? Have the Longhorns lain down with the Trojans and admitted that Vince Young’s knee touched the turf? Have lovers of Tex-Mex conceded that Cal-Mex is quite tasty too? “In this land, anything is possible,” Civil War’s tagline states. Apparently so!
Garland is far from the first to envision a future U.S. civil war, but speculative fiction and nonfiction devoted to that topic is more likely to forecast Texas-California conflict than accord. Uneasy coexistence is about the best they ever manage. In Marvel’s Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates, for instance, both states secede, but they form their own nations.
