Hey, cool, we just got our first look at the next X-Men movie! A clip emerged online of a deranged politician railing against mutants living among us, frothing that they’re not God’s creations. Sounds like we’re going to get an adaptation of the classic storyline God Loves, Man Kills, probably with some mutant-hunting sentinels thrown in along the way!
Uh, wait. Oh no. This is our reality. Crap.
Florida Republican Webster Barnaby has just made a truly insane speech during a debate on criminalizing trans people using bathrooms that really must be seen to be believed:
“I’m looking at society today and it’s like I’m watching an X-Men movie. When you watch the X-Men movies from Marvel Comics, it’s like we have mutants living among us on planet Earth. And some people don’t like it, but that’s a fact. We have people that live among us today on planet Earth that are happy to display themselves as if they were mutants from another planet,”
Whoa! Settle down there, Stryker! It was at around this point that we began to have serious doubts as to whether Barnaby had actually ever watched any of the X-Men movies where mutants are, y’know, the good guys. He went to crank up the rhetoric even further:
“The Lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who parade before us… That’s right, I called you demons and imps, who come and parade before us pretending you are part of this world.”
Totally normal stuff for a politician to say during a debate! Critical misunderstanding of the entire X-Men franchise aside, it’s genuinely scary to see an elected official openly referring to trans people as “demons and imps” during a debate, which sounds more like something out of a mass shooter’s manifesto than anything that belongs in a debate about bathrooms (of all things).
It’s worth pointing out that Barnaby quickly realized he might have said the quiet part loud, and tried to walk back his ludicrous rant by saying:
“I would like to apologize to the trans community for referring to you as demons.”
It should be noted that he clearly does still think trans people are demons, he just doesn’t think he should have said it.
Back in the 2000s Grant Morrison’s New X-Men comic saw rebellious mutants sporting a Che Guevara-style t-shirt that read “Magneto Was Right”. Well, maybe he was.