Will the hateful stupidity of the online right be its political undoing?

I grew up obsessed with Greek and Roman myth. In college, when I still had an attention span, I read and loved the Iliad and Odyssey.

But I still wouldn’t have gone to a theater to watch the Odyssey. At this point, we live in a scattered, siloed social media and media economy where even an epic film by a big director and starring every movie star in existence with a subject matter of interest to me — would still fall off my radar. I’d consider turning the movie on while bored on a long flight, but I wouldn’t have spent money to go to a theater which would then hold my battered, feeble attention span hostage for three hours.

Enter my social media timeline. For months idiot online right-wingers, including their Philosopher King Elon Musk, have been losing their minds because Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen in a minor role. “It should have been Sydney Sweeney!” they screeched. There’s the obsession with Elliot Page playing a Greek warrior because of his slight stature as a trans man. The fixation on the half-Black, light-skinned, Zendaya playing Athena. Nolan is forcing dreaded “wokeness” on us, the Online Outrage machine screamed.

Chris Nolan chose to destroy his career just to become eligible for the Academy Awards. This is the most embarrassing moment in cinema history.

He will be remembered as a weak man who bowed to a dying woke agenda and disrespected the Greeks.

Here’s another typical post accusing Nolan of sacrificing his own Western Civilization on the altar of woke, Dido style (talk about suicidal empathy!)

The main struggle for Nolan and his producer wife is that they can't make the ancient Greeks too heroic, masculine, iconic because that would uphold the Euro-supremacist roots of all Western Civilization

So you cast a woke manlet as the King.
A 90 lb femme boy as his son.
An African Helen
A tiny mentally ill female as a Greek soldier
Woke feminists in every scene

The story becomes not the struggle of man over adversity but the heroic struggle of women to deal with pesky ass men

You could, as many have, point out that Ancient Greeks had a different conception of race and its import on status and daily life. Our own concepts of race were, basically, invented to justify modern slavery and colonization. The ancients managed slavery and colonization just fine without demarcating people based on skin color. You could, and many have, point out that Athena popped out fully formed from the head of Zeus — which probably didn’t literally happen — so it’s bizarre to get mad about Zendaya being an unrealistic depiction of a literal myth.

I’d like to talk about how their hateful stupidity may signal the undoing of their hateful ideology. Now I’m going to go see the movie! Not as a political statement (my attention span would never forgive me) but because the algorithm, feeding as it does on rage, stoked my interest for months, making it feel like a can’t-miss event.

Despite calls for a boycott, the movie has become a raging commercial and critical success, at a time when the industry looked to be shifting to low-budget movies that started as clips on 4-chan or whatever, like Backrooms and Possession. A movie this expensive actually recouping its costs? Thanks, Elon Musk, for the new industry model. It should revive Lizzo’s career when she’s cast as Aphrodite in the next big production.

It’s a pattern that looks to repeat. A dynamic that may undercut J.D. Vance in 2028. Vance’s usual demeanor unpleasantly reminds me that men of my generation grew up on Beavis and Butthead. He telegraphs a crude nastiness matching the energy of the online right, the “manosphere” and all the idiotic podcasts that have infested our media landscape. It’s a vibe the algorithm faithfully delivers to normal people, who seem increasingly to recoil from it. Donald Trump’s nastiness works for him because he’s funny. Vance is slightly funnier than Elon Musk and less funny than Beavis and Butthead.

The outrage social-media cycle may benefit progressives, at the expense of the right-wing ideologies overstuffing people’s timelines, on a range of issues.

Today’s right-wing freak out has been over New York Mayor Mamdani saying that he is looking into whether it’s legal for him to order the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the United Nations. “I think Benjamin Netanyahu belongs in the Hague,” he told a New York Times reporter in an interview, the interviewer making faces as if Mamdani had told her she was going to the Hague.

The right-wing rage explosion, as predicted:

🇺🇸 The FJC 🇺🇸@The_FJC

Netanyahu is protected by the Secret Service when he's here. I'd like to see NYPD just try. Mamdani is a fcking terrorist, and stupid to boot. Mamdani Says He May Still Order Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Arrest in NYC - The New York Times share.google/FG9DIYnNZbyqxy…

11:15 PM · Jul 18, 2026 · 892 Views

15 Replies · 13 Reposts · 40 Likes

David Marcus@BlueBoxDave

This is a cowardly dodge. Either he can or he can’t. He can’t. As usual it’s all just big talk.

Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd

🚨 Mayor Mamdani Says He is Considering Arresting Bibi Netanyahu If He Visits NYC “I believe that PM Netanyahu belongs in the Hague. He's a war criminal … There is an active conversation with our legal department in seeing what the prospects are we have here in our

5:18 PM · Jul 18, 2026 · 14.8K Views

44 Replies · 41 Reposts · 309 Likes

Ian Miller@ianmSC

As always, Zohran Mamdani believes that being mayor of a city makes him an enforcer of a delusional, imaginary version of “international law” that supersedes the country he actually lives in. Just atrocious, dangerously idiotic nonsense.

Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd

🚨 Mayor Mamdani Says He is Considering Arresting Bibi Netanyahu If He Visits NYC “I believe that PM Netanyahu belongs in the Hague. He's a war criminal … There is an active conversation with our legal department in seeing what the prospects are we have here in our

4:38 PM · Jul 18, 2026 · 173K Views

150 Replies · 257 Reposts · 1.71K Likes

My feed is filled with images of the grinning, brilliant and perpetually sharp-on-his- feet Mamdani derided as an evil violent terrorist. And stupid at that! “What a moron,” spew sudden experts in international law, much as the online right became Classics scholars overnight in the build-up to the release of the Odyssey.

No, actually wily Mamdani is smart as a fucking fox. At the end of the day he won’t have Netanyahu arrested. He’ll probably say, “I looked into the legality and unfortunately I don’t have the authority. Unlike some people I don’t want to abuse my authority and believe in the rule of law. But those who have the authority need to arrest him. Netanyahu belongs in the Hague.” Almost no one will see it as backing down. And as the “controversy” continues to roil the rage-bots of social media he’ll get out the message “Netanyahu belongs in the Hague” over and over again. A shift in the Overton window. And he couldn’t do it without the perpetually enraged online right.