Misérables in the Multiverse of Missed Points
What happens when conservatives try to claim Star Wars, X-Men, and Les Mis while ignoring that they’re all about punching fascists.
TL;DR
Star Wars is a leftist anti-war allegory where the U.S. is the bad guy, the Viet Cong are the heroes, and the boot you’re licking doesn’t even exist in the canon you think it does. The Force isn’t with you. It’s actively filing a restraining order.
If you’re siding with the people building Sentinels, you are the bad guy. If you think the X-Men are a metaphor for your feelings about vaccine mandates, you’ve failed a reading comprehension test more basic than the GED Nightcrawler probably got via correspondence.
If you find yourself inspired by Les Mis but also rant about "lazy poor people" or "backing the blue," you are experiencing narrative vertigo. You’re belting out revolution songs while clutching pearls over Starbucks baristas unionizing.
Let’s talk about Star Wars—not the toy commercial or the billion-dollar nostalgia factory it has since become, but the original films. Specifically, A New Hope, which George Lucas wrote in the 1970s as an allegory for the Vietnam War. No, really.
"It was really about the Vietnam War, and that was the period where Nixon was trying to run for a [second] term, which got me to thinking historically about how democracies get turned into dictatorships." — George Lucas, 2005 interview with The Chicago Tribune
Lucas also said the Rebels were directly inspired by the Viet Cong: guerrilla fighters resisting a technologically superior imperial force. And guess who the Empire was? That’s right: America.
So, to recap: Star Wars is a story about scrappy insurgents (the Rebellion) fighting a colonial superpower (the Empire), which was explicitly modeled after the United States during the Vietnam War and the Nazi regime.
But that hasn’t stopped a certain crowd—the Let’s-Go-Brandon galaxy brain brigade—from repeatedly siding with the literal space fascists.
Dark Side Dunning-Kruger
Conservatives have spent decades trying to claim Star Wars for themselves, despite its core message being a flashing neon anti-authoritarian billboard. They look at the Empire—space Nazis in black capes with a Death Star—and see order, power, and discipline. In their heads, the Rebels are the whiny woke mob, and the Emperor is just enforcing galactic border security.
Consider Trump even compared himself to a Jedi (though with a red light saber). Or the endless stream of chuds on Twitter defending the Empire as "a necessary stabilizing force." There’s even an entire subreddit—r/EmpireDidNothingWrong—where self-styled realists roleplay as bootlicking Imperial bureaucrats. You know, for fun.
Spoiler: if you’re identifying with the guys who blew up a planet to silence a senator, you missed the point. Badly. That’s not nuance. That’s fanfic fascism.
Pop Culture Always Hates Fascists
Lucas didn’t just draw on Vietnam. He pulled imagery directly from Nazi Germany: stormtroopers, Imperial officers in SS-style uniforms, and authoritarian architecture straight from Albert Speer’s blueprint nightmares. Even the name "Empire" isn’t subtle. This wasn’t a grey area. This was a big, loud, cinematic middle finger to fascism.
Which is why it’s hilarious watching right-wing figures use Star Wars memes while trying to own the libs. You’re quoting the rebellion while voting for the Empire. You cosplay Jedi while cheering on space Palpatines. You watch the Death Star explode and root for the insurance adjusters.
If right-wingers siding with the Empire in Star Wars is a case of tragic irony, their love for the X-Men is straight-up cognitive dissonance with spandex. After cheering for a ragtag rebellion of space communists, they somehow look at a group of persecuted minorities with superpowers fighting government oppression and think, "Ah yes, this validates my belief in traditional family values and strong border policy."
Let’s get this out of the way:
Mutants = Marginalized people.
The X-Men = Civil rights activists.
Magneto = A Holocaust survivor radicalized by systemic oppression.
The government = Always one step away from launching Sentinels to ethnically cleanse anyone different.
Stan Lee didn’t exactly hide this. In his 1968 "Stan’s Soapbox" editorial, he wrote:
"Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today."
And Jack Kirby was open about how he and Lee modeled the X-Men as stand-ins for groups facing persecution, particularly African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. Later interpretations expanded this to include the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, and basically anyone who’s been told they’re dangerous simply for existing.
But somehow, right-wing fans look at Wolverine—an anti-authority loner who openly resents the government—and think he’d vote Republican. Or they see Magneto, a Jewish man who survived Auschwitz, and go, "Why’s this guy so angry?"
Spoiler: if you identify more with Senator Kelly than Storm, congratulations. You’re not the hero in this story.
Weaponized Ignorance
The real irony is that the X-Men have always been progressive. The 1980s gave us God Loves, Man Kills—a storyline where a televangelist whips his followers into a mutant-hating frenzy. Sound familiar? That book could’ve dropped in 2025 and felt ripped from Fox News.
There’s literally a mutant registry storyline. There are literal internment camps. Every time you see a mutant "cure" subplot, it’s not subtle. It’s about how society pathologizes people for existing outside a narrow definition of normal.
Even the mutant school—Xavier’s Institute—is a progressive dream: a queer-affirming, racially diverse, trauma-informed safe space for gifted kids who’ve been rejected by society. It’s basically the opposite of PragerU.
After watching conservatives miss the point of Star Wars and then completely wipe out on the mutant metaphor in X-Men, it should come as no surprise that they also romanticize Les Misérables … especially Don Taco … while ignoring the fact that it is literally about poor people rising up and throwing bricks at their government. It’s a musical about class warfare, state violence, poverty, and systemic injustice—and somehow it’s ended up on the playlists and posters of people who would have 100% sided with Javert.
Let’s be clear:
Jean Valjean is a criminal because he stole bread to feed a starving child.
Javert is a cop who believes laws are absolute and mercy is weakness.
The students at the barricade are working-class revolutionaries, radicalized by inequality and driven by hope.
The villains are the ones in power.
It is not subtle. There are literal anthems about revolution, solidarity, and dying for liberty. “Do You Hear the People Sing?” is not a call for tax cuts. It’s a call to overthrow the existing social order. If that doesn’t scream anti-establishment, I don’t know what does.
And yet, there are conservatives who sing along proudly at events, blissfully unaware that they are the metaphorical palace guards in this story. You’re not the rebels at the barricade. You’re the landlord in Act I.
From Misérables to Misinterpretation
Victor Hugo wasn’t just writing a sad story about French orphans. He was writing a 1,400-page indictment of a society that punishes the poor, criminalizes kindness, and clings to legalism at the expense of humanity. If he were alive today, he’d be called a bleeding-heart socialist and probably get banned from school libraries in Florida.
Even Hollywood’s adaptations haven’t sanded off the edges much. The 2012 film had middle-class audiences openly weeping while completely missing that the story isn’t about personal redemption in the abstract—it’s about political liberation through solidarity and sacrifice.