If you’ve been following me for the past few years, you know I’m a creature of pop culture who enjoys talking about movies, TV shows, comic books, and Lego. Some of my frequent cultural references have been the movies Idiocracy and Don’t Look Up. Both are fictional, satirical comedies that were, tragically, prescient and inadvertently predicted our current political predicament of a corrupt broligarchy run by the world’s most reckless, perverted morons.
For those who haven’t seen the Oscar-nominated 2021 dystopian comedy, Don’t Look Up imagines an America run by a Republican President (Meryl Streep) who outsources most of her decisions to an alleged “genius” billionaire tech bro, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance). As an apocalyptic comet approaches Earth, the conservative movement ignores the warnings of actual scientists and experts. Instead, they outsource the fate of humanity to Isherwell who wants to exploit the comet fragments for rare minerals. To make matters worse, right-wing media and politicians decide to politicize the comet. They promote conspiracy theories and disinformation to create a divisive culture war telling people to simply not look up at the comet that is about to destroy Earth. A complicit corporate media plays “both sides” with science and facts and decides to keep things light and fun for the sake of ratings.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.
Again, this is the plot of a fictional movie co-written by progressive writer David Sirota, editor-in-chief of The Lever, and meant to be a black, satirical allegory about humanity refusing to acknowledge the cataclysmic climate crisis that threatens to destroy all life. It was written before Covid-19 and released during the pandemic.
Fast forward to 2025 and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, an unelected billionaire, is now acting like the co-president of the United States, talking to the press in the Oval Office and addressing the Cabinet. (In the movie, Isherwell also is given access to national security information and routinely addresses the President and her cabinet.) Musk is also allegedly receiving briefings about potential war plans with China, receiving billions from the government in contracts, and America is edging towards war with Greenland to control its minerals. Meanwhile, measles has become great again because the right wing has politicized vaccines and science. Americans can’t agree on basic facts and despite sharing the same space, we live in different information ecosystems filled with lies, half-truths, and confusion.
For over two decades, Sirota has been warning about the corrupting influence of dark money in politics, the radicalization of the right-wing, the fecklessness of Democratic centrists, and the emergence of a broligarchy that pulls the strings. Like Sarah Kendzior and other writers, he was shunned by the establishment and seen as a fringe activist and naysayer by many Democrats and liberals. Unfortunately, he was right.
In this Chai Talk, Sirota reflects on his movie and how it maps our current reality and what hopes he still has for the majority to wake up and correct the ship before it crashes for good.
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