USA’s anti-capitalist product of the very corporate Universal Studios Mr. Robot has in the past been almost embarrassingly unashamed of its Marxist, anarchistic, and borderline anti-American style. However, it previously had the miniscule advantage of taking place before the liberal apocalypse of November 2016. Not anymore. The third season premiere lets loose its latest anger against both capitalism and the Trump administration.
The October 11 episode follows Elliot (Rami Malek) waking up after surviving a shooting to a city suffering from blackouts caused by the chaos of the second season finale. As he tries to make sense of what has happened, he soon comes to a conclusion about the result of his revolution, which includes - you guessed it - the usual insulting of capitalism.
The only added wrinkle includes new and obvious slams against the “dark future” brought by Donald Trump in this visual montage.
Elliot: Darlene's right. I can't trust them. This was too easy. But at least I stopped them for now. I can go home knowing that. But was she right about me? Am I sticking my head in the sand? Did my revolution just bury our minds, instead of freeing them? Encrypting Evil Corp's data was meant to empower us. Instead, it left us powerless, scaring us into even more submission. I am not going to get rid of the invisible hand. Turned it into a fist that punched us in the dick. And like a botnet, the fear I created is spreading so fast, it's practically airborne. It's swallowed us whole, digested us, and now we're stuck in its asshole, waiting to be dumped out. And while we're here, they're having their way with us. They packaged a fight into product. Turned our dissent into intellectual property. Televising our revolution with commercial breaks. They backdoored into our minds and robbed our truth, refurbished the facts, then marked up the price. This is what they do. It's what they're good at. This is their greatest trick. Lobotomizing us into their virtual reality horror show. And this all started because I tried to hide from society. Remember? Fuck society. Yeah, well, I fucked society, all right. I reset it to zero, and if I don't do anything about it, it will continue to grow in this malignant way.
And that's what I'm afraid of the most. This dark future that I set into motion. Who knows what could come from this? What if instead of fighting back, we caved, gave away our privacy for security, exchanged dignity for safety, and traded revolution for repression? What if we choose weakness over strength? They'll even have us build our own prison. This is what they wanted all along. For us to buy in on our worst selves. And I just made it easier for them. I didn't start a revolution. I just made us docile enough for their slaughtering. And I can stand here and blame Evil Corp and every other conglomerate out there for taking advantage of us, blame the FBI, NSA, CIA, for letting them get away with this, blame all the world's leaders for aiding and abetting them, blame Adam Smith for inventing modern-day capitalism in the first fucking place. Blame money for dividing us, blame us for letting it. But none of that's true. The truth is... I'm the one to blame.
Ironically, this could have been seen as a somewhat interesting parallel to our society. The ones who tend to profit off the division of politics and chaos are, in fact, those who like to stay on top. We’ve seen that through the George Soros-funded Black Live Matter movements or the Democratic Party’s acceptance of the violent Antifa group or the sudden popularity of pussy hats. The political elite and the media create an “us vs. them” narrative that profits them with money or re-election at the expense of average citizens. There is something worth discussion there.
But then we couldn’t talk about Donald Trump! In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, show creator Sam Esmail remarked on including the clips despite the political climate saying, “For me, the election of Trump is not political. It’s not a Republican-Democrat or conservative-liberal thing. It’s a guy who’s unintelligent and unprincipled and unfit to run a super power. We see now how dangerous that is, not just for the country, but for the world. It’s pretty apolitical for us to bring Trump into the fold, and — like you — I find it incredibly amusing.”
Got that? It’s not a political thing. Trump is just objectively bad. That’s why it’s okay to focus on him as the dark future of the county. It’s not like millions of people voted for him in a fair election or anything. Except they did, and he is still our president. The only thing “amusing” about this sentiment is how blind most on the left, including Mr. Robot seem to be to that fact.
In fact, the show also doesn’t even seem to have the brain power to realize that being the one of dozens of shows that take a cheap shot at Donald Trump plays right into what “they” in the elite want. Many people in Hollywood, Congress, foreign power, and CEO positions already don’t like the president and make that fact known constantly. Is the edgy, rebellious program therefore telling us to agree with the top one percent then? I’d like someone to pose that question to the creators.
Even in its third season, Mr. Robot is just yet another liberal propaganda piece that masquerades itself as something deeper by thinking that insulting Trump and capitalism is still original. Society can fall, and that is probably the only thing we can count on surviving.
