Saw a copy of Not That Kind of Good Guy by John Ringo at a used bookstore the other day. Obviously AI-generated cover, peak-internet-rightist-brainworms John Ringo writing a teenage superhero brutally murdering what a Republican imagines when he thinks of globalist elite Epstein types. As the prose superhero guy - heard of it, any thoughts?
(When I first saw it in the wild, my first thought was that it probably serves as an obvious rebuttal to a certain type of comic fan who says cape stuff is inherently leftist, but I figured you'd have more substantial thoughts if you'd heard of it.)
Haven't heard of it, but I have heard of John Ringo, and from what I've heard of some of his other writing I find myself wondering what his actual practical objection to the Epstein types even possibly could be. Was he miffed that he didn't get an invite?
Jokes aside, I do think you're likely correct that it's meant as that kind of rebuttal to the "everything I like is secretly leftist" crowd, but I also think it's emblematic of a fact about our current moment, which is that everybody interested in reading or writing these things is currently getting frogboiled by horseshoe theory into the same basic conclusions about the world and the appropriate response to it. At this point, is the idea that there's some leering, murderous club of elites playing real-life monopoly with our lives and livelyhoods a "left-coded" or "right coded" idea? Vs. something that's basically just taken as a given prior to any further discussion? Is there any escaping the drumbeat of the idea of political division at the highest level is basically Kayfabe- that all of these people, regardless of their ostensible principles or affiliations, are meeting behind closed doors and laughing about what rubes we are? Personally I'm finding that It's getting harder to get away from offline.
I'm not speaking to the truth of these ideas (although it's almost certainly more than zero) but I am speaking to what I've observed in the zeitgeist. The world is very transparently run by monsters and really always has been, and whether you approach that fact from a left-leaning or right-leaning starting point doesn't affect the shape of the resultant stories all that much. The entire premise of The New Ultimate Universe (and to a lesser extent he Absolute Universe) is that there's a secret Neoliberal Illuminati group co-ordinating to continuously ensure the end of history and the smooth functioning of extractive, exploitative systems of power. In the particulars of how this is framed, and particularly in the parts written by Deniz Camp, these are fairly leftist comics- but with this premise, did they have to be? Was that a given? Obviously not. And, from the other direction, I was disillusioned with the politics of The Dark Knight Returns for quite a while, but in recent years I've warmed back up to it, because even if I don't agree with the objectivist libertarian overtones of the thing, the way in which the comic is visibly writhing against the political monstrosity of things As They Are, the naked evil on display in the halls of power, is immensely relatable to me. The underlying evil of something often isn't hard to spot, even if your personal politics are going to determine the language you use to articulate it (and, for right-wingers and many left wingers, the specific ethnicity you determine to be most directly at fault.)
As the belts tighten, the masks come off, and the people in power stop bothering even to grasp around for an ideological fig leaf to justify their behavior, both audience demand and creator interest are inevitably drawn in the direction of the truest, basest, and most noble impulse at the heart of the superhero genre- that is, the desire to find the people who made the world the way it is, and then make them choke on their own blood.
