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Paul Thomas Anderson’s new blockbuster One Battle After Another isn’t just another arty prestige picture — it’s Hollywood’s latest exercise in recasting criminality as moral virtue while sneering at law and order. The film has opened wide and already carved out headlines, but what matters more than box office numbers is the message it sends to millions of impressionable viewers.
From the opening reels Anderson dramatizes jailbreaks and the freeing of detained migrants, framing those acts as courageous resistance rather than lawbreaking with real victims. The plot openly traffics in romanticized revolutionary violence, turning attacks on institutions into sympathetic set pieces and treating immigration detention as something to be heroically sabotaged.
This isn’t harmless art — it arrives against a backdrop of real-world violence targeted at federal immigration facilities and agents, where lives and public safety have been put at risk. When Hollywood normalizes assaults on immigration enforcement, it doesn’t stay in the multiplex; it filters into the headlines and into the heads of people already primed to believe the state’s agents are villains.
The A-list gloss on this message makes it more dangerous: big names and big budgets lend legitimacy to vigilante impulses, and studios that bankroll these narratives show who their loyalties lie. Audiences deserve to know that the emotional polish and awards chatter are being used to sell moral confusion — to make attacking law enforcement look fashionable while ignoring the rule-of-law consequences for everyday Americans.
Conservative commentators and ordinary citizens aren’t opposed to art that challenges power, but we will not applaud films that glamorize violence against officers and officials charged with keeping our communities safe. We should demand accountability from studios and promoters: stop packaging anarchism as courage, stop softening the image of political violence, and stop pretending that destruction of public institutions is a path to justice rather than chaos.
If Hollywood insists on producing summer-long sermons that sympathize with those who attack detention centers and government agents, then patriotic Americans must respond in kind — by speaking out, voting with our wallets, and defending the institutions that protect our neighborhoods. The culture is a front line, and when filmmakers trade in agitprop dressed as high art, they make a deliberate choice about which side they stand on.
