Accurate. And growing misogyny is a threat to democracy, not “just” a threat to women.

💯

Hope is hard in the face of fascism, but it’s how we win in the long term. Giving into nihilism just makes it easier for them to keep control.

Support each other, make art, teach the truth, and keep fighting.

More and more honest education is necessary, not forcing people to be “good.” This is a terrible idea that ends in atrocity, no matter who is deciding what is “good” and “bad.”

The anti-sex and anti-artistic freedom impulses are also part of the same problem. Neo-Victorian “leftism” is a problem.

Frustrating, but there is no path to freedom through totalitarianism. It’s not possible to end bad ideologies with censorship. Disdain for other people does not result in successful organizing. And so on.

Fascism is terrible and must be stopped, but adopting its methods is not the way forward.

“People are too dumb to think for themselves and so must only be exposed to propaganda to control their beliefs” is not an ideology I support, no matter what are the “correct” ideas to be taught. It is worrying how common this antidemocratic ideal is promoted by the supposed Left, in art & politics.

Art can have negative effects, without question. It still isn’t education, & judging it for its pedagogical quality leads to didactic work of little aesthetic value. It’s the Victorian children’s literature standard. Bad art & bad education.

Also, censorship does not lead to understanding nuance…

See also: the bullshit of “premature antifascism,” the fake polisci theory created in the 1950s to argue that the Left was wrong about fighting fascism pre-1939/Dec. 1941. So this claim maintains the Left is still wrong even though they were right about the evil of fascists.

This is depressing, though not as surprising as I wish it were. Accurate education that engages with the history of fascism in the United States is intentionally suppressed by many school boards, and textbook writers. Same reason the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederacy is still taught.

Again, this is an issue of educational policy, not a failure of art to serve in a pedagogical role it doesn’t have. Teaching media literacy is urgent, not trying to control the range of artistic engagements - serious or popular - with any given topic. More censorship is not the cure for censorship.

This is a side effect of poor education, intentionally created by authoritarians who benefit from an uninformed electorate. Art is not sufficient history education, nor should it be. When it is forced into the role, it does a bad job. This isn’t the fault of art, rather of propaganda in education.

There is a long and glorious history of exactly this type of resistant humor preserved in a handful of surviving documents, many of them play scripts. Black humor is a survival mechanism, and even bleak humor helps keep alive the hope for a better future needed to keep fighting day after day.

Are responding to both carrot and stick, with threats of worse treatment on one hand and payout in the other.

There are no better set of conditions to incentivize lying. The feds know it, just like lawyers do. Provoking the lie to use as “proof” against chosen victims is the whole entire point.

It’s almost like offering bribes results in people performing whatever action results in the payout, and not a deep commitment to truth and accuracy.

Next it will turn out that torture functions the same, only the lies are to stop pain instead of gain value.

Or that jailhouse informants…

Thank you for this. I’m glad my comments contributed to the important and complex issues the OP raises.

Audiences interact with and interpret work, how ideology functions in non-didactic art, and the social functions of humor.

So ultimately you aren’t wrong in your analysis, but I disagree with your expectations and interpretations of the works discussed, and of resistant art more broadly.