Duck Superman
Politix
Politix
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
The new Superman is a critical hit and box-office smash—despite conspicuous Republican efforts to discourage people from seeing it. It’s the GOP vs. truth, justice, and the American way!
In this episode, Matt and Brian explore all the reasons the modern right might have been put off by this movie, and Superman’s longer-running themes:
* To what extent are right-wing critics really just evincing old, philosophical conservative misgivings about liberal empathy and compassion?
* Are today’s Republicans really upset to learn that Superman is pro-immigrant (as he has been for almost 90 years, or is that just a red herring?
* Or is it really just that this particular adaptation is an unsubtle send up of several recent, high-profile, right-wing corruption scandals (though not, unfortunately, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal)?
Then, behind the paywall, in a recent interview, Hunter Biden of all people challenged Democrats to appeal to people’s better natures, rather than appeasing their prejudices—just like a certain superhero…
The younger Biden’s broader judgment aside, his comments raise pretty profound questions for the party as it wrestles with how to broaden its appeal in the Trump era. Should Democrats be Superman to Trump’s Lex Luthor? How far will uncut virtue get them? And who’s the best avatar for Democrats to broadcast empathy across the board: Another old white guy with cultural roots in white working class America? Or a next-generation Obama-like figure who leans on respectability politics to appeal to cultural conservatives?
All that, plus the full Politix archive are available to paid subscribers—just upgrade your subscription and pipe full episodes directly to your favorite podcast app via your own private feed.
Further reading:
* Brian on why Republicans are right to dislike the new Superman (because it rightly depicts their political values in an unflattering light).
* Matt argues Democrats should just throw Joe Biden under the bus.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The one who ought to speak up would be for Merrick Garland to be like, I regret the way I handled |
| 0:04.4 | myself. And now the file should come out. The day before the election, Batman comes to see Superman. |
| 0:09.8 | He says, do you have anything we can use against Luther? And Superman, you know, kind of garlanding it, |
| 0:15.5 | says, is that what we do now, dig into people's personal background so they can't run for political |
| 0:20.2 | office? |
| 0:26.2 | And Batman says, we're talking about Luther. And Superman says, yes. And that's why you have to put some faith in the American people to do the right thing. |
| 0:34.7 | Hey, everyone, you're listening to a free preview of the politics podcast. |
| 0:38.6 | This week we'll talk about the new Superman movie, the revealing right-wing backlash to the new Superman movie, and look at what it has to do with the recent history of right-wing scandal, including possibly the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. |
| 0:56.3 | We'll get into all of it, including the question of whether Democrats should be more like Superman or less like Superman. If you want to hear the |
| 1:01.5 | whole conversation, you can upgrade your subscription to paid at politics.fm. |
| 1:09.6 | Hey, everyone. Welcome to the politics podcast. I'm Brian Boiler. |
| 1:12.7 | I'm Matthew Glacius. |
| 1:14.2 | So a very quick background. I wrote an article last week about the right-wing backlash |
| 1:19.2 | to the new Superman movie. And then yesterday, Matt suggested that we should do an episode |
| 1:24.3 | about it, which I agreed to because I'm a sporting kind of fellow |
| 1:28.6 | and I don't like to be irritable. |
| 1:31.4 | Anyway, but it puts me in a little bit of a bind because the whole premise of the piece |
| 1:36.7 | is that I'm like not an encyclopedic comic book. |
| 1:39.8 | Well, this is, you know, so I read Brian's piece. |
| 1:42.8 | I was like, this is a good piece. |
| 1:44.4 | But he's also, he's like bending over backwards. |
| 1:46.6 | I'm not like one of those comic book nerds, you know? |
... |
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