A violent anti-migrant propaganda film titled Citizen Watcher was a huge hit on Apple and Amazon over the weekend, and the online right is celebrating. The film, directed by a man often described as the world’s worst director and starring disgraced actor Armie Hammer, blew up after Elon Musk began promoting it on X. It currently has a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has officially acquired distribution.
“Citizen Vigilante has now OVER the movie ‘Michael,’” online provocateur Libs of TikTok gleefully posted on Friday. (It’s not clear which metric you’re using when comparing the two.) Conservative media personality Patrick Bet-David described the film as tapping into “the anger that millions of people feel when their own government fails to protect them or their children.” Turning Point USA contributor Jack Posobiec grimly reflected that while “sinners “It is a movie about killing white people and it has the all-time record for Oscar nominations of any movie in history,” said the righteous man. Citizen Watcher “was banned.” (Citizen Watcher It was denied a rating in Germany, which effectively prevented its widespread circulation there.)
Conservatives are excited about this. Citizen Watcher because they see it as a corrective to dominant liberal pop culture. They believe their success shows that people are hungry for the story they tell about the world. But it is not clear whether Citizen WatcherThe success demonstrates that there has always been a large, inactive audience hungry for racist propaganda, or whether it is primarily proof of how effectively Elon Musk has used the platform he purchased to spread xenophobic hate.
Citizen Watcher centers on Hammer’s character, Sanders, an American landlord living in an unnamed European nation. Throughout the film, Sanders enacts bloody revenge against the immigrants who have invaded the country and now rob, rape, and stab the natives with impunity. And it’s not that a tragic story or a lost love eases his anger, but the film doesn’t even bother with that; Sanders’ uproar is simply motivated by the belief that he faces a “hostile takeover by Islamist extremists and the shocked left.” in the world of Citizen WatcherViolence is the honest white man’s only option.
Is any of this true? No. Studies show that there is no link between immigration and crime rates in either the United States or Europe. But there is one place where it is completely exploding: Elon Musk’s mind. The South African-born billionaire has been on a crusade against “woke” politics for years, and lately has been veering more strongly toward the racist scaremongering of the “great replacement theory.” On his X account, Musk periodically reposts false claims that immigrants of color are planning to kill white people and that “white solidarity” is the only rational response.
Now, Musk is directing people to Citizen Watcher. Over the weekend, he posted the full movie on X, where it was available for 48 hours. Since then, he’s been pushing memes and positive reactions to the film all over his X account. “This is what people want to see,” Musk wrote on Sunday.
“Audiences again want real, bold, shocking, reality-based films,” boasted director Uwe Boll in an interview with Newsweek. “The days of SUPERGIRL and all that shit are over.”
I miss him supergirl Namecheck seems to come out of nowhere, but Boll is invoking a long-standing right-wing resentment toward mainstream pop culture, which conservatives consider too left-wing for comfort. The online right has been trying supergirl as a symbol of Hollywood’s illegitimate “awakening” in action, with the same indignation that fueled the bombardment of criticism from Captain Marvel in 2019 and a cruel hate campaign against the female community Ghostbusters in 2016. The belief here is that the right is deprived and owed films in which tall white guys kick ass, beautiful women serve as eye candy, and the American flag flies in the background.
The fact that the film stars Armie Hammer, a man accused of sexual violence, only adds to the revenge meta-fantasy it embodies. Meanwhile, the de facto German ban becomes an exciting suggestion that this film tells a truth so powerful that the establishment is trying to hide it from the waiting public.
For the same reason, conservatives love to support independent films that are too right-wing for Hollywood studios to distribute. We saw a similar narrative in 2023, when the film “protects children” sound of freedomthat flirted with the Q-Anon conspiracy, earned more than an Indiana Jones movie on opening weekend. Musk even offered sound of freedom what now seems like a rehearsal of his Citizen Watcher opening strategy, suggesting they put it on X to stream for free.
When a movie like sound of freedom either Citizen Watcher If successful, it fuels another, deeper conservative theory of the world: that not only are conservatives owed those movies, but in fact everyone secretly wants them and is lying to themselves when they say otherwise. That is the context in which Musk declared Citizen Watcher “what people want to see,” and that’s why conservatives are so excited about its financial success.
But in reality it is not clear that the success of Citizen Watcher after Musk’s PR blitz prove anything except that when the owner of X posts there, his ideas spread widely. After all, why else would Musk pay $44 billion to acquire what was then Twitter in 2022, if not to put his thumb on the scale of cultural conversation? He wanted to be great and discovered he didn’t have the skills for it. So he bought Twitter, a platform he thought was cool, and turned it into X, a place he could dominate socially.
Now, Musk still isn’t cool, and neither is X. But it retains a user base large and influential enough that Musk’s opinion carries weight it otherwise wouldn’t have. A recent study shows that X’s algorithm pushes users considerably to the right. After Musk posted in support of the anti-immigrant riots in Northern Ireland, researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate concluded that his continued posting of anti-immigrant narratives was “pivotal” to an “explosion of calls for violence” around the Belfast riots.
Yeah Citizen Watcher found an unexpected audience, it’s there because Musk built it, post by post.