How Did Hollywood Writers Predict All This?
There have been many striking parallels between current events and fictional TV shows. Incredibly, these shows were written and filmed before the events they mirror.
Here are three examples.
1) The Boys
In S5E6 of the superhero satire show The Boys, Homelander, the main antagonist, unveiled a golden statue of himself, an expression of his large and growing God-complex. The same week that episode aired, a golden statue of Trump1 was unveiled at Trump National Doral Miami. The Trump ceremony even included a pastor “blessing” the statue, which held similarities to Homelander’s relationship with a super-powered televangelist named Oh-Father, a presumed servant of God who is more interested in serving Homelander.
That was just one of many parallels between the show and real life, which led showrunner Eric Kripke to remark that he is “really tired and weary of the world reflecting the show before we get a chance to do it.”
The episodes were written before the 2024 election. Filming ran from November 2024 to July 2025.
2) Daredevil: Born Again
In Daredevil: Born Again, a convicted felon, Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, becomes mayor of New York City. He creates a special task force, selecting the most corrupt cops he can find. The task force ignores civil liberties as it terrorizes the city. Residents of places like Chicago, LA, Portland, and Minneapolis will find some task force scenes eerily familiar. Fisk also creates a secret prison, akin to how the Trump administration planned to create prisons in warehouses without an announcement or community input.2
One of the most striking similarities has to do with Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, an anti-hero who seeks vigilante justice against the mobsters responsible for the death of his wife and children.
Some members of Fisk’s task force begin using Punisher’s symbol, imagining him to be their model. The use of the symbol by officers was already well documented when these episodes were written, likely inspiring the writers. After the episodes aired, media reports surfaced about this phenomenon rising to the highest level. The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, had been handing out challenge coins that used the Punisher symbol.
In S1E9, Castle confronts the officers using his symbol. Patel should consider what he tells the fictional officers: “You think you know my loss? How I see the world? ... You’re a bunch of clowns, you know that?”
Notably, the hero of the show is Daredevil, Matt Murdock, not Castle. The morality of vigilantism is a major theme of the show, and Murdock, a lawyer with a Catholic upbringing, struggles with how to respond when the system fails. On this journey, we see Murdock make poor choices and deal with the consequences. Castle shows us what Daredevil could become if he chooses the wrong path. The show doesn’t present Castle as the hero to emulate. And the dirty cops who admire Punisher just don’t get it. They’re part of the system creating the injustice that both Daredevil and Punisher are fighting.
Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again was written and filmed entirely before Trump won in 2024. Season 2 was filmed February-July 2025.
3) Andor
When Season 2 of the Star Wars series Andor was released in the Spring of last year, there were many undeniable parallels between currents events and a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The Empire seeks to expand its hold on power by creating a problem that is then blamed on peaceful protestors. This is similar to the method I’ve written about before in this newsletter: “1) federal agents create chaos, 2) protests over the chaos ensue, 3) Trump uses the protests as an excuse to grab more power.”
Rather than provide a check on Emperor Palpatine, the Senate goes along with the power grab. In one of the most memorable scenes of the series, Mon Mothma delivers a powerful speech to the Senate. It begins,
“I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”
The speech was widely shared because of its relevance to current events. It currently has over a million views on Disney’s YouTube channel alone. Season 2 was written in 2022-2023 and filming started in 2022, before Trump’s second term.
Why is this happening?
Why have certain TV show writers been such prescient explainers of our current political moment? I can only speculate. It may be that good writing and good observation go hand-in-hand. These writers could have a rare talent for seeing things in our culture that most of us miss. Or, maybe, in the words of Charlie Cox, the actor who plays Daredevil, it’s “purely coincidental”?
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Bridging the Divide
Also, be sure to check out Emily Matthews’ article on her experience working for AVC, “Bridging the Divide: How My Journey Led Me to the American Values Coalition,” published this month at The Vital Center.
She writes,
We use our digital presence to speak out on abuses of power from the federal government, while also speaking up for the vulnerable. With so much misinformation in the digital ecosystem, we aim to be a voice of truth. Through providing resources, skills, and building a community, we hope to counter the extremism and the misinformation we are witnessing in our families and neighborhoods. All these efforts are important to us because as Christians, we believe it’s both wise and biblically sound to “clean up our own house” before we cast judgement on others. How can we be a light to the world if our own affairs are off balance? How can we have a leg to stand on morally if we’re enabling corruption in our own communities?
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Some More Good Reads
WaPo: “Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career”
The documents, together with Saltzburg’s explanation of them, raised remarkable questions: Had a reclusive guru been secretly trying to steer Gabbard’s actions as a public official? And could that shed light on the improbable arc traced by one of the most unconventional shape-shifters in modern American politics?
Gabbard’s career trajectory has taken her from socially conservative Democrat to progressive darling, Bernie Sanders ally and presidential hopeful, and then to Fox News contributor, MAGA Republican and, eventually, Trump’s top intelligence official, a role that granted her access to some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
Cato: “The Freedom to Give Helps Protect Everyone’s Liberty”
When Donald Trump publicly vowed one year ago to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, a step lacking in any colorable legal basis, he sent a shock wave through America’s nonprofit and philanthropic community. It was part of a multi-fronted onslaught that included investigations, loose talk of confiscating endowments, and even a move to purge ideologically unwelcome nonprofits from the public service loan forgiveness program. In 2021, vice-president-to-be J.D. Vance, then running for an Ohio Senate seat, said that while the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and Harvard “pretend to be charities” and get corresponding tax treatment, they are “fundamentally cancers on American society.”
There is a contrasting story to be told, though, about how the freedom to give without asking government permission or approval has given America a $600 billion philanthropic sector with unique accomplishments in advancing science, health, education, religion, and culture, among other endeavors – no other country comes anywhere close to matching it.
The Bulwark: “Oops, We Invited Nazis to Our Christian Nationalist Conference”
Last weekend, roughly 1,500 Christian nationalists from across the country met in Ogden, Utah, for “The War for Normal”—a gathering featuring some of far-right Christianity’s most online thinkers and posters.
…
Fatefully, the event also included a booth for Antelope Hill Publishing—an extremist publishing house that has made its name putting out racist books, as well as translating and reprinting old ones. To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here, Antelope Hill got its start translating the memoir of an unrepentant commander in the Nazi SS. Their current online store is offering not one but two “Third Reich Bundles”—a collection of books written by prominent Nazis for between $126.89 and $180.49.
Antelope Hill didn’t exactly clean up for the big conference. The press tweeted out a picture of its booth, showing stacks of both the SS memoir, Burning Souls, and other pro-Nazi books like The Essential Speeches of Adolf Hitler.
The statue is actually bronze and covered in gold leaf.
These plans have recently been scaled back due to community pushback and legal challenges.
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I try so hard to take you seriously, but I just can’t. Soon you’ll be including your pronouns in your bio.