Opinion: MAGA is Coming for Your Superheroes

If you’ve hung around in comic book spaces over the last few months, you might have seen a lot of superheroes fighting ICE. In fact, Cyclops blasting an ICE agent as drawn by Jake Castorena, supervising director of X-Men ’97, is my current Facebook cover image. I’ve also seen Wolverine, Venom, Optimus Prime, Batman, and a dozen others. The people who write and draw our superheroes seem to mostly agree that ICE would be on the villain side of the equation.

Naturally, MAGA hates this. That’s not surprising. After all, you can draw a direct line from GamerGate to Trump’s presidency. The modern reactionary fascist movement has always been connected to geek fandoms. Once the various white supremacist networks went mostly online in the 2000s, the male-dominated, insular world many young men inhabited in cyberspace was a prime recruiting ground.

This puzzles a lot of geeks who aren’t right-wing. How could you possibly read or watch X-Men and not internalize the connections to the civil rights movement? Optimus Prime’s most famous quote is “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings,” so why would anyone assume he wouldn’t be opposed to masked men shooting people in the streets? I’m a dedicated Whovian, and the number of people I have seen be perfectly at ease with bigoted beliefs in the name of The Doctor is baffling and heartbreaking.

It’s tempting to think that MAGA just doesn’t understand comics, and that if we gently explain it to them, they will realize they are wrong. In my experience, this is almost never true. Instead, we have to deal with two fundamentally different points of view, neither of which involves stupidity.

The first is what I mentioned earlier: geek space colonization. White supremacists and edgelords from the darker reaches of the internet leave their chan boards to try and take over a fan page on social media. At first, they use offensive jokes about gas chambers or racist conspiracy theories to test the waters. If they get banned, they move on to another page.

If they don’t? If the page mods tolerate them in the name of traffic or a misplaced belief that this helps free speech? Then the briganding starts. They flood the space with increasingly worse content framed in the geek page’s subject until the space is so toxic all minorities leave. Now, they have a page with big numbers they can pretend is just a fan page, but which is now effectively a Nazi psyop outpost. Ian Danskins described this process in his Alt-Right Playbook.

The second isn’t as stormtroopery, but is just as insidious. Ironically, I came to understand it through studying Disney adults. Disney adults are people who have made visiting Disney theme parks a very specific kind of shibboleth. Because Disney vacations aren’t cheap, having proof of a regular relationship with the Mouse’s strongholds is indicative of wealth, stability, and the freedom to spend time and resources on frivolity. It’s Mecca for people for whom conspicuous consumption is a sacrament.

This means that Disney adults lean conservative, wealthy, and Christian. That may seem wildly at odds with most Disney content’s focus on liberal values of equality, tolerance, and respect for people different than you, but that’s because Disney adults aren’t engaging with Disney as art, but as iconography.

It’s not important that Tianna struggles against racism, that Rapunzel decouples from a predatory parental figure, or that Elsa wrestles with her country’s treatment of indigenous people. What matters is acquiring the symbols, recognizing them, and displaying them back to the rest of the tribe. The message is irrelevant compared to proving that you have been blessed by the presence of a Disney princess, a kind of weird capitalist simony in theme park form.

On a similar note, the people clogging up your fan spaces trying to convince you the X-Men would be hardcore anti-immigration supporters know only that superheroes are good guys. The characters themselves are ignored to focus on the powerful image of a spandex-wearing saint using violence. That image is what they care about, and they will twist any superhero they can until that hero is wearing a vicarious red hat no matter how ridiculous that would be within the character’s mythology.

These are, after all, people who are completely comfortable re-writing the Bible to be a pro-gun, anti-abortion, homophobic, and nativist text because saying you’re a Christian is more helpful socially than actually living by scripture. If they can do that, making the Punisher a pro-cop racist is a snap.

Icons have their own power divorced of their original meaning. It’s why versions of the swastika that have positive connotations predating the Nazis still make people uneasy (though, sadly, not as uneasy as they used to be). We’ve seen the Punisher’s skull logo become the de facto symbol of a certain type of conservative, and they will take every other symbol they can. Change symbols of hope and liberalism into MAGA shorthand, especially the mainstream ones, and eventually the new meaning is all that’s left.

This article appears in Private: Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2026.