What we wear, what we watch, what we scroll through while waiting in line—these are not distractions. They are signals. Pop culture is not apolitical. It’s not neutral. It is the most pervasive delivery system for power, ideology, and aspiration we have. And it has always been political.
From Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance channeling Black Panther aesthetics (but without questioning the economic order) to the erasure of Palestine from Hollywood scripts, pop culture teaches us who gets to be seen, who gets to speak, and who gets to be remembered. It mirrors the politics of the moment—and more dangerously, it shapes them.
Pop culture is curriculum.
It teaches us how to desire. What to fear. Who to mourn. Who to blame.
And when we do not interrogate it, we are being taught passively, unconsciously, and constantly.
Culture Wars Are Real
The right understands this. That’s why they spend billions on media, film, music, memes. They aren’t afraid of a protest sign—they’re afraid of a love song that becomes an anthem. A TikTok that becomes a movement. A TV show that dares to name the empire.
They fear cultural awakening because they know: if you control the narrative, you control the future.
And yet many on the left still see pop culture as fluff—as less serious than policy, protest, or philosophy. But if we’re not fighting for the cultural space, we’re losing the most influential battlefield of all.
Pop culture creates myths. And we live by our myths.
The American Dream Was an Ad Campaign
Look at the 1950s: white picket fences, Coke bottles, kitchen-bound housewives, and G.I. Joes. These were not neutral aesthetics. They were state-sponsored symbols of capitalist supremacy—used to demonize socialism, justify segregation, and sell war in a pretty dress.
Television wasn’t just entertainment—it was propaganda.
And yet, that same medium gave us The Twilight Zone, The Wire, Pose—each a rupture in the dominant script. Each offering a vision of possibility that felt closer to truth than the headlines ever could.
Art Is Where We Imagine Otherwise
In moments of deep crisis, we don’t turn to the stock market—we turn to story. To rhythm. To visuals. To feeling. This is why artists are first to be silenced under fascist regimes. Why students and filmmakers are jailed. Why censors panic at a poem.
Because art bypasses the logical mind. It touches something older.
Pop culture is where we rehearse the future. It is the soft soil where the seeds of revolution are planted. It can reinforce the status quo—or shatter it.
Who Tells the Story, and Who Gets Erased?
We must ask: whose culture is allowed to be popular?
Palestinian culture? Black radical tradition? Indigenous wisdom?
Or is popularity still coded as whiteness, wealth, and violence with a soundtrack?
When pop culture includes us only as caricatures or casualties, we are reminded that politics isn’t only in the courtroom or the battlefield—it’s in the writers’ room.
And if we are not building our own narratives, we will be trapped inside theirs.
Cultural Work Is Political Work
To study pop culture is not to glamorize celebrity—it is to expose the machine behind the face.
It is to trace how the system recycles our pain for profit.
How it hijacks our slang, our movements, our music.
How it censors us with algorithms and shadowbans.
How it erases truth with a punchline.
But also—how we fight back.
Through satire. Through storytelling. Through refusal.
Pop culture is the terrain. And if we understand its tools—images, repetition, symbols, spectacle—we can begin to reshape the myth.
We’re Not Just Observers—We’re Architects
What you repost matters.
What you amplify, boycott, write, remix—it all matters.
We don’t just consume culture. We produce it. We inherit it. We shape it.
The revolution will not be televised.
But it might go viral.
And at Everything is Political, we’re here to break the myth of neutrality. To pull back the curtain. To say: culture is where power lives—and where liberation begins.