If You Want ‘Star Wars’ To Discuss About Politics, You are A Disney Grownup
If you were on the internet on Monday, you probably saw something related to Star Wars Day. As happens every year on this day, social media sites were inundated with trivia, tributes, and the ever-cringeworthy salutation “May the Fourth be with you” (get it?????) to celebrate the blockbuster franchise bestowed upon the world by George Lucas in 1977.
Despite the steep drop in quality under Disney’s auspices and the bitter online fan clashes over the Mouse’s handling of the property, Star Wars remains a highly popular, and highly lucrative, intellectual property. (Full disclosure: since subjecting myself to the cinematic torture session that was an 8:30 showing of The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, I have gone cold turkey on any and all Star Wars media. No, I have not seen The Mandalorian.)
This mawkish and frankly cringe “holiday” (totally butchering the real meaning of that word) has been adopted not only by online nerds and Facebook moms, but by our leaders and government entities — you know, the people who you’d think would maintain a sense of decorum and not make cheap appeals to your love of Baby Yoda for some likes on X.
In fact, it has escalated to the point of self-parody. Just take a look at this AI slop posted by Rep Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., that’s guaranteed to give you nightmares of small, green Mike Johnsons hiding under your bed:
Seemingly on a mission to make Star Wars appear as fake and gay as possible, Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill — second perhaps only to Stephen King in wasting his accumulated public goodwill on cheap political statements — made multiple Star Wars-themed videos to promote … the Obama Presidential Center. Never mind that the eyesore masquerading as a presidential center looks like the kind of place Luke, Leia, Han Solo, and the Rebels would bust out of after stealing the plans of another Imperial superweapon.
President Donald Trump also joined in, with the White House posting AI-generated images of the president in the Star Wars universe.
“Happy May the 4th to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting so hard to to bring Sith Lords, Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, & well known MS-13 Gang Members, back into our Galaxy. You’re not the Rebellion—you’re the Empire. May the 4th be with you,” said one post of a muscular Trump, flanked by bald eagles, clutching a lightsaber.
“In a galaxy that demands strength – America stands ready. This is the way. May the 4th be with you,” said another, this time with Trump clad in Mandalorian armor and accompanied by the most diabolical thing ever concocted by a marketing department: Baby Yoda.
Even government entities that exist to supposedly educate the American people got in on the “festivities.” Perhaps concerned that no one would care about the amazing wonders of our very real universe without a relevant pop culture reference, the X account for the Hubble Space Telescope compared stellar jets, a truly beautiful cosmic phenomenon, to lightsabers.
The National Mall NPS posted an admittedly very cool picture of the Washington Monument and … compared Washington’s struggle for our independence to the conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire from the movies …
As a now-famous Chinese railway employee once said, “It’s all so tiresome.”
The fight for our country’s independence is epic enough to stand on its own merit. from the sweeping battles to tense political debates to the often arduous experiences of ordinary Americans, there’s enough dramatic heft and pathos to fill hundreds of movies, TV shows, and books (and it has).
It’s a sad commentary on American society that we have to refer to modern pop culture phenomena to get the American people the least bit interested in real American history, and only two months before our 250th no less. By equating the Revolution with a popular science fiction series, we diminish the real achievements of real men in our own past and cheapen the sacrifices they made to pass down this inheritance to us.
Most might see light-hearted fun, a way to engage with young people who increasingly have the attention span of certain insect species, or a way to own the infamously pop-culture-obsessed leftists. But when confronted with the sheer volume of asinine Star Wars Day content (and that’s what it is, content) from very important and powerful people — people who have the power to affect your daily life in dramatic ways — one can only conclude that something’s not quite right here.
Everything seems to be viewed or related through some pop culture reference or franchise. Fandoms now dominate the cultural landscape. Whether it’s Star Wars, Harry Potter, video games, or anime, fandoms increasingly act as substitutes for identity. In the political realm, we saw this most pointedly with transgenderism. The mentally ill didn’t just identify as transgender; that deluded idea became their entire personality, bleeding into every facet of their lives. For all intents and purposes, they did not exist as a human being outside of their identification as a transgender person.
In the pop culture arena, that phenomenon is exemplified by the “Disney adults,” grown people who go to the Disney parks multiple times a year and spend thousands of dollars to feed their obsession. This isn’t merely a hobby or even an addiction. It’s a fundamentally different way of viewing the world. Fiction and fantasy become more real and more important than the real world.
Increasingly, Americans are unable to engage with reality on its own terms because they’ve never had to. People have been raised and educated in a world in which you can relate to it solely through references to fictional material. You don’t have to know about the geopolitics of the Ukraine War. You just have to know that Putin is Voldemort and Zelensky is Harry Potter.
This pop culture shorthand tells you everything you need to know about the moral stakes of the conflict, according to the entertainment-media complex that pushes this way of engaging with the world, for both power and profit. Never mind that actual history and actual politics are messy affairs and can rarely be so neatly separated into black and white moral categories. And certainly don’t get the crazy idea that actual history or real-world events might be more engaging and enriching than fantasizing about laser swords and starships.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Star Wars. I used to be obsessed, and I still would be if Disney made good movies. And there’s nothing wrong with liking Star Wars for what it is: good entertainment that sometimes has noble and uplifting themes.
But the fandomization of pop culture has begun to leak into real life and in so doing has made it less real. The negative effects the American people have suffered due to the oversaturation of mass consumption pop culture can’t be understated. Whereas references to the Bible, Greco-Roman history, and classic literature used to be commonplace in normal, everyday American political discourse, they’ll get blank stares today. We’ve lost an immense amount of cultural and historical continuity with our ancestors because we only understand references to modern media.
The thing about mass consumption pop culture is that it bleeds into everything. Baby Yoda is everywhere and can be put on anything to make a dollar or make a statement. As we’ve seen with this year’s May 4, Baby Yoda even bleeds into politics. Politicians follow the cultural pulse of the country. They use youth slang, go on TikTok, and use AI to make all manner of outlandish pictures. So when the populace begins to live in fantasyland, it isn’t long before politicians follow suit. And when our leaders begin to see things through the lens of unreality — an unending stream of memes, AI slopaganda, and pop culture allusions — things become very dangerous indeed.
Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at JP and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel