Marvel’s Hulk, Mark Ruffalo, thinks capitalism will kill us until we elect millionaires ‘like us’
Mark Ruffalo has come out as a Bernie Sanders supporter and thinks that instead of electing evil billionaire capitalists like Trump, what we really need are leaders ‘like us,’ and by that he means millionaires like Mark Ruffalo.
The late Andrew Breitbart once said that the breakdown of the studio system was what really turned Hollywood to the left. Los Angeles has always been a “queer” city in a straight country but when the film moguls ran things, when the old white dudes were in charge, they kept the craziness of the talent in check. They forced them to act according to a bottom line instead of constantly shifting faddish ideologies. But with that system long dead and gone the inmates are now running the insane asylum, and every election cycle we all have to suffer through their attempts at political relevance.
And Mark Ruffalo has shockingly come out in favor of the candidate furthest left in America, Bernie Sanders. I say ‘shocking’ with all the sincerity of Captain Renault when he found out there was gambling going on in Casablanca. I think most people assumed Ruffalo was a Bernie Bro. This is sort of like Hamas tweeting out that they’ve got a problem with this whole Israel thing.
But it’s more than just an anticlimactic candidate endorsement this time. No, Ruffalo is calling for an outright American Revolution which should be sending ‘woke’ celebrities like Colin Kaepernick into triggered fits. After all, his Instagram is entirely dedicated to proving that the American founding was all about slavery. But PC snowflakes aside maybe Ruffalo is right. Maybe we do need radical earth-shattering change.
But is Bernie really that radical a change? Ruffalo thinks that what really makes this almost 80-year-old man such a hot ticket is that Bernie is just like us. Trump of course isn’t like us, he’s nothing like the common man. Sure, he eats at McDonalds and can’t stay off social media but aside from that he’s basically the Marie Antoinette of his generation telling the homeless that they can always stay at a Trump hotel if it gets too cold on the streets.
The retort to my sarcasm is “Ah, but Trump is a billionaire!” You’ve got me there. Being a billionaire does put one out of the category of ‘us.’ Most of us don’t actually know any billionaires, but come to think of it I don’t know any millionaires either. If the argument for your favored political candidate is how similar he is to us then it matters greatly what you mean by ‘us.’ If by ‘us’ Ruffalo means people like himself, well yes Bernie is like ‘us.’ Because Ruffalo and Bernie are both multi-millionaires.
If we squint very hard maybe those of us who are toiling away in the smoky proletariat basement of the Titanic can see the difference between Bernie, Ruffalo, and Trump. But really the harder I look, the more all three just look like a self-referential ‘us’ making the rest of us look a lot more like a ‘them’ by comparison. When your first person plural excludes more people than it includes you aren’t building a revolutionary coalition, you’re just reinflating your sterilized bubble.
Bernie isn’t exactly a commoner. This is the man who told the New York Times: “I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” As Forbes pointed out this sounds downright Trumpian. In the end, it’s all a bit too reminiscent of Orwell’s satirical Animal Farm. All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Ruffalo and Bernie share an equality denied to the rest of us.
By John Lee Reed, an American Conservative who specializes in cultural and political commentary
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
