I never wanted to know what it would have looked like if Luke joined the Dark Side in Return of the Jedi, but now we have our answer.
He’s got no flag right now. Taking the weekend off break from imperialism, I guess.
It's unfortunately not all that surprising, when considering how commonly US people have full-throated ignorance of imperialism and support it blindly, and then you combine that with somebody who has a big platform and gets validated for doing it. Not defending him at all, mind you, but when I think about the state of US political education, like even some of the more aware celebrities seem to linger in a hazy state where they sort of know something is screwy, but haven't quite cottoned onto what imperialism is yet and what that means beyond vague notions like corruption. Bo Burnham is the one time I can recall seeing a major US celebrity tackle it head on with the kind of language we might use here and he even did it in comedy song form, but he also seems to be an oddity of a celebrity in terms of consciously fighting against celebrity going to his head almost as a form of protest against the nature of it.
Frankly, at this point I always assume that a given American mainstream public figure holds abhorrent views. Sometimes I get pleasantly surprised, but not as often as I'd like.
