BaronVonBort, to globalnews in University of Florida terminating all diversity, equity and inclusion positions

Christians: “! Jesus had a diverse group of friends and loved everyone!”

Also Christians:

moira, to superbowl
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

Today on Superbowl Jesus Part 6: The Ultimatum, we discuss the final three images of the in some detail, riff a bit more on the AI art because how can you not, and wrap up by discussing the overall message and intent of this supposedly conciliatory campaign from the Christian fundamentalist authoritarian right.

https://solarbird.net/blog/2024/02/21/superbowl-jesus-ad-part-6/

This concludes the series. I hope you'll forward it around a bit, and use it to inform others about the nature and intent of this particular sort of propaganda. I've always seen myself as kind of a one-person intelligence service, and, well - forewarned is forearmed.

Thank you to those who encouraged me to write it, and to all of those who read along.

moira, (edited ) to superbowl
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

wednesday, in episode 6: the conclusioning about that horrible Jesus Superbowl ad

moira, to USpolitics
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

Today in the Superbowl Jesus series, we discuss the Racism Triptych, the centrepiece of which is the most overtly racist image on television since at least Bush I's "Willie Horton" ad.

It's so racist that while I'm not Christian, I'm pretty sure mainstream Christianity would consider it actual blasphemy.

It may seem questionable to hang this much on imagery that has clearly been through the AI machine. My response is that these images were carefully chosen as part of a billion-dollar ad campaign, and in all the areas they care about, the symbolism is specific, precise, and clear.

And by the gods I am holding them responsible.

https://solarbird.net/blog/2024/02/20/superbowl-jesus-ad-part-5-the-triptych/

We will conclude with Part 6 on Wednesday.

solarbird, to politics

superbowl jesus ad, part 5: the triptych

Welcome to Part 5 of a series of posts focusing on the fundamentalist propaganda “He Gets Us” Superbowl ad of 2024.

I strongly recommend you read at least the first section of Part 1 before proceeding, if you have not already done so. It defines a variety of critically important terms, outlines the overarching purpose of this entire series of ads – this billion-with-a-B propaganda campaign – and the relevant religious-political beliefs of those who designed it.

If I could summarise Part 1’s first section in a paragraph, believe me – I would. I have tried, without success. That’s why I point people back to it, because to echo Dickens – without that knowledge, little of what follows will have full meaning for you.

The next three images comprise what I think of as the Intentional Racism Triptych.

On our left panel, we have slide seven. It features one of the least obviously AI manipulated or re-drawn images of the entire selection. It shows an idealised, even nostalgically-rendered oil field with a small number of scattered derricks, with no fracking equipment visible. The field itself is semi-arid to arid, with a mix of brush, tumbleweed, and other similar low scrub plants scattered about. In the distance lie tall hills, somewhere between what I’d call mountains and foothills, without snow. Above that, we have a very blue sky with a smattering of clouds.

In the middle distance sits the a car, the driver’s door open. Strangely in this context, it is a car and not a truck, a four-door sedan/saloon car out of the 1980s, evocative of an early-80s SAAB 900 but with internally inconsistent headrests. (I see you there, AI image generator. Hello!)

In the foreground, in the middle of a dirt road which looks very much like a thin-layer-of-sandy-dirt soundstage, our Saviour – the man who has already found Jesus, an older white man who is an oil field worker – washes the feet of our Sinner, a young Asian woman who is dressed mostly like a hippie in flowing patterned silks and bikini top, albeit more of a 90s hippie revival variant than the original. To her side lies a protest sign reading “CLEAN AIR NOW.”

This Saviour was brought to you by Exxon-Mobil, apparently. He’s where he’s supposed to be, doing “Real Man” work, in a “Real Man” place, bringing oil out of the ground for capitalism. The oil field is pristine, and there’s not a hint of pollution…

…which brings us to the sins of our Sinner. She’s dressed inappropriately for the location, and immodestly on top of that. She’s somewhere she shouldn’t be – and being Asian, that’s not limited to “a protestor in an oil field.” And on top of everything else: she’s a liar.

The air is visibly pristine. Her call for “CLEAN AIR NOW” is therefore a lie, a demand for something she already has – and is therefore an excuse to shut down oil production and hurt the “real man” doing the “real work” and the economy.

I know, I know, as I said, they have their own definitions of truth, and don’t care if something’s an objective lie – but that’s only for them. Definitionally, she’s not one of them, so if they can call her a liar, they will.

She might even be a Chinese communist, since – as goes without saying in their community – all environmentalists are lying communists anyway, and Chinese people are always suspect. Making her ambiguously east Asian – one might say “Chinese enough” – just adds the spice of fashionable racism to the recipe.

“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”

Senator Cotton will want to know.

Now, because the most important image of a triptych is always the one in the centre, let’s skip ahead to the right image first: slide nine.

This image shows a quiet evening scene in a suburban neighbourhood built… it’s hard to say, but I’d guess as early as the late 1910s, and the early 1950s. As always, in the nostalgic and “better” past.

We see two houses, separated by a single narrow driveway, both with established greenery and lush lawns. Two mixed-gender couples are arranged in front of the right house, one on the left side of the frame, and one on the right.

The left couple is clearly Muslim. The hijab-wearing woman – our Sinner – is sitting in an old woven-ribbon-style folding lawn chair, her feet being washed, as the man stands attentively behind her.

The right couple’s man is white, intended to be sitting on some sort of gardening chair, but it’s an AI mess and doesn’t work right but that doesn’t matter. He holds a green apple with a bite taken out of it, which in this context has to be symbolic of something, but the obvious meanings don’t make a lot of sense in this context. His eyes are closed, which also seems to me like it has to mean something, but I’m honestly not getting it.

The woman – our Saviour – is just ambiguous enough to be white, or not, depending upon the viewer. The way she’s rendered, she’s got that Kinda Ethnic vibe that they like when they want not to use a white person but don’t want to make it clearly someone not white either. She’s not wearing a head covering of any kind, obviously, but could be a convert from Islam who married a white man. That would make her okay, fit to lead our Sinner out of her sin – which is, of course, being a Muslim and holding Islamic faith.

While religious conversion isn’t intrinsically racist, in this case, it obviously totally is. See everything from “Jews for Jesus” to the “Muslim Ban” that Trump is pledging to reinstate.

Finally, we move to our centre image, slide eight – by far the most overtly racist image of the set. I want to make that very clear, as I will be describing the intended racist message in explicit terms. That description of their message is fucking well not an endorsement of that message.

Read on only if you understand that last paragraph, because this one’s bad.

In this image, the thin veneer that is the top-level message of compassion, equality before god, and reconciliation has been ripped away; this particular slide is propaganda against refugees and asylum seekers from the south.

Our scene shows a bus full of people unloading passengers on a Chicago upper-middle-class white-picket-fence residential street in the very late evening. It’s essentially one of the Republican “migrant buses,” the kind DeSantis and Abbot have been using to send asylum seekers away from services to a blue state without coordination, notice, or compassion, often in the winter. This exportation of people – arguably kidnapping – serves a variety of purposes which have been discussed elsewhere. The driver is Christian – it’s not ambiguous, there’s a cross hanging above him – and unhappy.

In most of these images, the “saviour” and the “sinner” are on similar levels, physically. Often one is sitting and the other is kneeling on the ground, but there’s interaction to it, an acknowledgement of each other. They’re communicating, sometimes quite clearly. It’s part of the top-level intended message of reconciliation.

Not here, though.

I want to stress, this next sentence is how they know this will be read by their own people:

Here you have the angry dirty brown illegal Sinner carrying her anchor baby at full height, looking away, with a mixture of anger and fear, while the white Saviour woman kneels on the ground, looking down, washing the Sinner’s feet. There is no sense of communication between them; our Sinner is ungrateful and unreceptive. Our Savour, the white Christian, is looking down, tense and unhappy, at clean water turning a dark, filthy brown as it washes from the Sinner’s foot back into the basin.

Please understand – the washing water is clear and clean in every other image where it is visible, no matter how dirty the feet are; after all, it represents in part the forgiveness of Jesus, so stays forever whole.

But not here.

That difference means it’s not the dirt on her feet spoiling the water: it’s her, herself, spoiling the water – the water of God’s forgiveness.

One might even say it’s meant to show a kind of poisoning of the water, instead of the blood.

This image is out-and-out racist hate propaganda, pretending – just barely – to be merely one more variation on the theme. Our Sinner’s sin is being here at all and not white, and she is not worthy of redemption.

Even the gay man in image twelve is treated better than this, and believe me, I still have things to say about that image.

I don’t know if I have any Christian followers reading this, but… this is… serious business blasphemy, right? Top level scream-it-to-the-heavens blasphemy against the core message of Jesus. Isn’t it?

You might want to consider yelling about that.

Next. Slide.

[link]

moira, to superbowl
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

Part four of the Superbowl Jesus series kind of turned on me, becoming a meta-analysis of why they'd lie so transparently about the AI images used in the Superbowl "He Gets Us" propaganda piece.

The lie is so obviously a lie. Why do it?

It ended up being a deep dive into how the the fundamentalist authoritarian movement behind these ads defines "truth." Spoiler: it's not how most of the people I know define truth. But it should seem familiar to you, once you see it.

https://solarbird.net/blog/2024/02/19/superbowl-jesus-ad-part-4-a-lie-so-blatant-it-must-be-true/

solarbird, to politics

superbowl jesus ad, part 4: a lie so blatant it must be true

Welcome to the fourth post of a series analysing the imagery from the billion-dollar “He Gets Us” propaganda campaign to recruit people into fundamentalist evangelism, focusing specifically on the ad run during the 2024 Superbowl.

I strongly urge you to read the first section of Part 1 before continuing, if you have not already done so. That first section explains the overall theological structure of the ad. Without understanding that structure, the terms “Sinner” and “Saviour” as used in this series will not make sense, but I don’t want to have to paste that explanation back in to each of these posts.

Caught up? Nice.

One of the more curious parts of this event has been the maker’s disclaimer stating that they absolutely did not use AI, that they hired a photographer – they even named someone – and that these images are photographs.

I suggest you revisit Part 3 of this series if you still give that any credence.

Personally, I’m willing to accept that a photographer played some role. I’m convinced that the images actually used were at very least heavily reworked with AI tools, if not re-created from whole cloth using the photographs as training material, but I admit that it’s possible that in some way a photographer was involved. Maybe in the rough drafts.

But why lie about it?

AI art is, obviously, huge right now. A lot of tech is super into it; several months ago, it would’ve got them a lot of attention if they’d made interesting images and said upfront that’s how they did it. Maybe they decided to hide it because the mood on AI has shifted so much. I don’t know.

But that’s not the important part. The important part – the important question – remains…

…why lie about it?

Particularly given how obvious it is that it’s a lie?

Even though they absolutely couldn’t get images that weren’t obviously at very least heavily AI altered, if not entirely AI rendered, they decided to lie about it. Why?

The answer is very simple: they can’t not lie. They actively can’t. They can’t avoid it.

I mean, sure, they could’ve told the truth here, but the more they feel that being honest about it would hurt them in some way – even just making them look bad – the less likely that becomes.

I wish it were because of PR. I really do. But it’s not. It’s because they have adopted a very different definition of truth.

For most of us, truth is weighed against observable, measurable reality – at least, where that’s possible. The truth of science, or more generally, the truth of empiricism.

Empiricism is the idea that you can observe the world, measure it, test against it, and accept that what happens reveals things about the world (and the universe). It means you can use those tests – that data – to make decisions about your life. To improve it, even. It’s core of the scientific method, amongst other things.

Babies are, in many ways, empiricists.

But that’s not how the fundamentalist evangelical movement defines truth.

Their truth is defined by God Said. If observable reality differs, then it’s reality that’s wrong, and it’s wrong because God Said.

Yes, really. That’s the key. Right there. God Said, so It Is. It’s that simple.

This is an example of a group using inherited wisdom as its metric of truth. It’s pretty common, historically, and before empiricism took off, it was absolutely the standard in Western thought. It’s core to both western conservatism and their flavour of authoritarianism, and built upon the idea that we are all living lesser, degenerate forms of an ideal way of living that we must constantly strive to recover. In their case it’s extremely literal, in that it’s the Fall of Man in the greater sense from the Garden of Eden, and the absolute, perfect, and utterly unchanging Word of God as represented in the Bible.

And believe me, they harp a lot on that perfect and unchanging part.

In practice, is any of this actually preserved across generations? Oh hell no. It’s basically two to three generations back, as modified to suit nostalgia, simplified re-renderings of memories from childhood and parental stories, and – of course – to serve white Christian cishet male dominance over others.

Don’t believe me? In the 90s, they didn’t really care about trans people. I’d see more hate-forward people try to tease those in authority forward on it and they’d be “That sounds very, uh, medical. Is it homosexual? Then whatever, we care about stopping the homosexuals.” Before the late 1960s, they didn’t even care all that much about abortion or birth control, because caring about those things was Papist, and they were way more concerned about race mixing.

However, they’ve decided hating trans people is eternal, so now, for them, it is. It’s always been true and therefore it’s always perfect and unchanging and God Said.

This next part’s really important to understanding what’s happening around us. I’m begging you, understand this. I’ve been trying to get people to understand it for twenty years.

If truth is measured against inherited wisdom, then the truth of a statement depends upon conformity to that inherited wisdom.

That stays true even if that inherited wisdom is in the form of a Perfect and Unchanging Word Of God that changes a lot every generation and a half. How much something supports your worldview – again, God’s Word – becomes the only measure of truth, regardless of anything reality might have to say about it.

This literally is how you get most flat earthers. This is how. Right here. This. They’ve decided that’s what God Said, so God Said, and that makes it real. I have seen this happen, someone already deep in that community going over the edge to flat-eartherism, because someone proved to him that the Bible says the earth is flat, and so, he said, “You’re right. The BIble does say the earth is flat. So it is.”

This definition of “truth” – this definition that has zero direct reliance upon observable reality – is also how they can so guilelessly set up lie factories to manufacture new types blood libel against their enemies.

It’s how they could say for decades that “homosexuals” were violent vicious evil mentally-ill psychopathic paedophiles who want to rape your children, give them AIDS, and turn them gay because it’s the only way we can reproduce. It’s how they can say the same sorts of things – often exactly the same things – about trans people now, along with all the other insanity they make up.

They are aware, of course, that whose who “haven’t found Jesus” have different definitions of truth. Their leadership in particular has always been highly aware of this.

The way they’ve gone about handling that hasn’t changed much in decades. First, get a couple of fundamentalist or socially-allied “sciencey” people to either cherry-pick or just straight-up fabricate data (the “make shit up” method) and publish papers that look like science, that look real to people who don’t know how their whole system works. Paul Cameron was a particularly famous foot soldier in this part of the war; look him up, if you want. He was a professional liar generating blood libel to get people killed.

Then set up some “sciencey” or “policy-ish” sounding sockpuppet groups, and have them generate a bunch of bullshit that sounds like research or analysis. The important part is that whatever they do has to be towards the goal of ‘proving’ the desired result, as opposed to studying the actual data and seeing where that leads them.

Footnote each other back and forth for a while, then generate some another layer of new sockpuppet organisations, referencing the first two. Then the first layer can start referencing the third, and your bullshit generator is up and running.

Eventually, you get enough noise that the credulous media starts hearing and parroting it and treating your bad-faith horseshit as legitimate, both-sidings it against reality for the horse race and the views.

That’s what they did against against lesbians and gay men people for decades. That’s what they’re doing to trans people now, with the absolute intent of going back to doing it against LGB people if they manage, in the end, to “ditch the T.”

If there was one thing in the world I wish I could do with this knowledge, it’s get it into the heads of journalists and in that way convince them to stop playing along. To stop meeting bad faith with good, to stop parroting bullshit because it’s “both sides.” Just fucking stop. I don’t care that they can lie to you with sincerity, they can lie with sincerity because they’ve decided God Said This Shit We Made Up, and because of that, actual reality doesn’t matter.

It’s not even that they don’t know. They know their methods are bullshit. They know their data is bad. And they don’t care, because their own data doesn’t matter, not even to them. The lie serves God – in that they’ve decided it serves their goals that they’ve ascribed to God – and that makes it true.

Even though it’s in every way a lie, a knowing lie, made in the most complete possible bad faith, that’s what they’ve decided.

So when it comes to lying about something as obvious as this AI art bullshit…

…they can no longer even tell they’re lying.

It’s better for them and their movement, they’ve apparently decided, for then to declare that this isn’t AI art. That it’s photography, as nonsensical as that is. So despite all the obvious bullshit of that statement – despite everything your own lying eyes tell you – that’s what they’ve decided is true.

So that’s what they rationalise, and that’s what they say.

If that sounds like everything you know and hate about MAGA, and everything you know about how Donald Trump works

…congratulations. You have connected the dots.

Now.

Where we were, before this got so long?

Ah, yes. Slide seven. Tomorrow.

[link]

moira, (edited ) to superbowl
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

In Part 3 of my deep-dive into the "He Gets Me" Superbowl Jesus ad, I address questions raised by readers, then get into image six: the alcoholic.

They're selling "reconciliation," but as explained in Part I, they don't actually believe in that. So I'm taking apart what their images say and mean to their own people.

Fair warning, today I am partially thwarted by the incredibly, and I really do mean incredibly in the vintage sense of "their denials are not credible," bad use of AI tools. There is genuine wow here, and maybe that's appropriate given that it's the weekend.

https://solarbird.net/blog/2024/02/17/superbowl-jesus-ad-part-3-some-notes-and-more-images/

Part 4 - where I get into that aspect of this visual nightmare - will be out Monday.

moira, to superbowl
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

A sneak preview from Part 3 of the "Superbowl Jesus" ad analysis series:

solarbird, to politics

superbowl jesus ad, part 2: there’s so much more to unpack

This is the second in a series of posts analysing the imagery from the billion-dollar “He Gets Us” propaganda campaign to recruit people into fundamentalist evangelism.

I strongly urge you to read the first section of Part 1 before continuing, if you have not already done so. That first section explains the overall theological structure of the ad. Without understanding that structure, the terms “Sinner” and “Saviour” as used in this series will not make sense, but I don’t want to have to paste that explanation back in to each of these posts.

Back? Great.

We left off part one three images into this collection, so here, we start with image number four. If you want to see the images as we go, you can find them on youtube. I won’t be (re)linking, since most of the people with it are horrible, but it’s not hard to find. We’re going through them in the order they appear in the video.

I have learned since Part I of this series that there is a credited photographer for these images, and that the surreal nature of them is intentional. I am reasonably willing to consider that some parts of these are photographs, but I also have a very difficult time believing they are not heavily manipulated using AI tools given the various very clear tells. But that’s speculation on my part, and in the end, not really important; I only mention it because if the AI commentary in Part I.

Image four is … wow. What the hell am I even looking at here? What kind of dreamscape nonsense are they presenting us this time? Seriously, it’s taken me a few goes just to try to start on this one.

First, you have what amounts to a day-for-night sky, which, of course, never works. Then in the background you have Discount Vasquez Rocks with extra greenery and none of the light matching anything else in the image. In front of that on the left, you have an early-1960s pickup truck that looks like something from Tremors (1990); in centre we have a strange land of discontinuity and a partially-derendered metal guardrail where distance means nothing; and on the right, we have some soundstage alien trees that remind me of Lost in Space and a smouldering campfire pit and two remarkably, and I do mean remarkably, large oil lanterns of a kind I saw featured in a Technology Connections youtube video, except those were normal sized.

Moving forward you have another discontinuity and a transition to what looks like a matted-in and fairly sloppily-dressed soundstage. On the left, we see what looks like some strangely vivid purple meadow sage, which isn’t even a North American plant but also does look kind of like something I’ve seen but don’t know by name. I’m honestly wondering if they wanted purple sage because of the Zane Gray novel.

On the right you have some sort of vegetative mass reminiscent of… honestly the only thing that comes to mind is the creeping terror from The Creeping Terror (1964). Matte vegetation like that does exist, but I’ve never seen it look like this myself.

(one billion dollar propaganda campaign. a billion dollars. they put this on during the super bowl.)

Forward centre we have our Sinner and our Saviour. The Sinner is an older Native/First Nations man of indeterminate tribe who is sitting on a long piece of desert driftwood, his foot being washed in a metal washtub by our Saviour, an older white man, who carries vague cowboy iconography including… I honestly don’t know what that’s supposed to be. It’s placed and shaped a little like a holster and sits vaguely like leather but it’s also reminiscent of a bandana hanging out from his coat.

All of the foreground pieces are set on a television-grade thin-sand-on-a-soundstage “ground” and I am so psychically damaged by this cowboys-and-indians-but-fundamentalist mashup of stereotypes that it’s genuinely hard to piece together. If they didn’t lean so much into anti-Mormon hate I could take that approach to it, but the thing is, they really do historically hate what they call “the cult,” so I have a hard time thinking that’s a factor here.

Not gonna lie, this one’s pretty opaque in the specifics just because it is such a visual clusterfuck. I can’t tell if they tried too hard or not hard enough and had to rush it and just ran with the inchoate melange we see here.

Regardless, the intended surface-level read is “reconciliation” with “through Christ” on the side. That’s the same for all of these. That’s the sales pitch.

But the deeper read – I think the key here is that in their culture, God gave the White man this country and a manifest destiny to “settle” it – and Christianise it. It was a holy mission; you can even see it referenced as such in secular cowboy films of the mid-20th Century such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

In that context, the Native man’s sin is a combination of not being white, not being in the Bible and not yielding to the Manifest Destiny of Christian America. The white man is good in terms of being surface-level gracious to his inferior, and also for being a vaguely cowboyish rural white man with an old truck which has a rapidly dying battery because he left the lights on, I guess.

Because the white cowboy is always the good guy, right?

I’d guess this is also pushing back a little on land-back and treaty-rights movements. But the iconography is so vague and unfocused I can’t point to anything and say, “See? This means that” so I won’t.

(one billion dollars. for the love of the gods. a billion dollars.)

Next slide, please.

This one is much simpler and at first glance doesn’t need much analysis, but bear with me – it does.

A 1960s modernist building with long-brick walls and no windows fills the left and centre background. It has two metal doors which do have windows, and an armoured and very obvious security camera not really pointed at anything in particular. There’s a small anti-abortion protest on the right, beyond which we can see a somewhat shabby motor hotel with a cleverly branded rooftop sign reading MOTEL, in case you weren’t sure. Beyond that are palm trees, implying California, though it could as easily be Arizona or… sure, even Florida, the colours on MOTEL could be right for Florida.

But given who they hate and the small size of the crowd, I’m leaning towards California.

In front of the clinic on a badly-decayed concrete sidewalk there is a bench, on which sits our Sinner, a young white woman not visibly pregnant but she’s wearing baggy clothes so there’s room for ambiguity. Her jumper is thick and has extra long sleeves, and we’ll get back to that. She has a tattoo on her right leg, and we’ll very definitely get back to that. Her left foot is being washed by our Saviour, one of the anti-abortion protestors who, like everyone else in her group, is both white and overdressed for the weather.

This one in at first glance seems less bad than most, if you ignore the underlying meaning of the ad’s framework. But the combination of MOTEL, “bad part of town” (via the trifecta of decaying infrastructure, generic family planning clinic in an old building, and security camera), and most importantly the tattoo give it away.

Our young woman is placed in the role of the Sinner here because she’s been sex trafficked. The tattoo is an ownership indicator. MOTEL is indicative of where she’s forced to work. She might be seeking an abortion, she might just be seeking birth control, and both of those are sins too, but the big red flag here is putting her in the role of Sinner for being trafficked for sex.

Being a woman, she’s always at blame for anything related to sex, up to and including being kidnapped for forced prostitution and raped, so naturally, having been trafficked for sex makes her the sinner in this perverse little diorama.

By proximity and habit, they’re also implying collusion between the “family planning clinic” and the sex traffickers. This has been a trope through their modern history, since at least the early 1990s and almost certainly before. They also have a history of asserting for internal consumption that “family planning” agencies aid child molesters and other rapists.

I don’t know that the extra-long sleeves imply she’s hiding needle tracks in her arms, but they might.

If she had Jesus in her heart, whispers the theme, she wouldn’t be here. That’s both the general miasma of their belief system and the specific context; accept their version of Jesus and she can get out.

You’ll excuse me if I throw up in my mouth a little bit at these self-righteous motherfuckers, particularly since if she’s there for an abortion, they will absolutely demand that she carry her rapist’s child to term if she wants them to help. After all, it is go, and sin no more.

Not sinning any more includes delivering that rapist’s baby.

Otherwise, she’s on her own.

Next. Slide.

[link]

moira, to superbowl
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

I decided I wanted to do a frame-by-frame analysis of the Super Bowl "He Gets Us" ad, getting into the iconography and meaning of this recruitment attempt tailored to attract moderate to liberal non-Christians and cultural Christians into the fundamentalist evangelical belief system.

It got long. REALLY long. Long enough that I'm dividing it into several posts. Here's part one:

https://solarbird.net/blog/2024/02/15/superbowl-jesus-ad-part-1-lets-frame-by-frame-it/

And if you get tired of the frame-by-frame and can't deal with it, there's a TLDR at the end.

eta: the easiest way to follow this series would be to follow my blog, which is fully federated as @solarbird

cc: @floatybirb by request

SirTapTap, to random
@SirTapTap@mastodon.social avatar

I've seen the ads all over Reddit and they're so fucking weird

They're just like "hi there. were not racist btw :)))"

like...ok...thanks...

jeffowski, to random
@jeffowski@mastodon.world avatar

https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/pop-culture/he-gets-us-super-bowl-ads-hobby-lobby-connection-explained/536-077eab4c-88a9-431c-ad6d-c53528aaefbc
Yes, there is a connection between ‘He Gets Us’ Super Bowl ads and Hobby Lobby
Mart Green, a Hobby Lobby executive, is on the board of the nonprofit responsible for the "He Gets Us" ads.

davidmschell, to random

So I finally saw the foot washing commercial and I have some thoughts.

The He Gets Us commercial is exactly what a lot of us white American Christians want our faith to be - and not in a good way.

  • It gives us a Jesus that is exactly who many of us are hoping for, who doesn't worry about structural problems, but engages in a way that is ✨nice✨, but doesn't actually result in any kind of broader social change or require anything of us.

As gross as foot-washing might seem, in this context, it feels like an almost-empty gesture, the equivalent of "be warmed and filled" (James 2:14-17) while doing nothing to change the circumstances that are harming them, except it's worse because many of those who put out the ad are on the side of making those circumstances worse.

  • It makes white American Christians the main character. We and people who are us and look like us and don't look like us but are on our side get to be the heroes, acting like Jesus.

  • It flips no scripts, challenges nothing many white American Christians already believe.
    And of course it makes the fundamentalists angry, because they've so thoroughly lost the plot that even an almost-empty (given the context) gesture like washing the feet of your ideological enemies - right after and right before working and fighting against things that would help people who are different from them in the slightest - seems like a betrayal of the True Christian Faith™.

paul, to superbowl
@paul@oldfriends.live avatar

They washed feet 2000 years ago because feet were nasty and it showed humility.

The 2024 equivalent would be swampass after running a 5 mile marathon.

Are they willing to be that humble?

kurtsh, to superbowl
@kurtsh@mastodon.social avatar

Reminder that all those "Jesus/He Gets Us" ads are hypocritically funded by the 'Signatry''.

The Signatry also funds tens of millions of dollars of hateful anti-LGBT & anti-abortion lobbying & legislation.

The truth behind the ‘He Gets Us’ ads for Jesus airing during the Super Bowl - CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/us/he-gets-us-super-bowl-commercials-cec/index.html

bedast, to superbowl
@bedast@squirrelmob.com avatar

When you see a #HeGetsUs ad, remember that it’s a campaign by #TheServantFoundation, primary funder of #AllianceDefendingFreedom, designated a #HateGroup by the #SPLC. They are well known for being anti-LGBTQ+ and have been funding anti-abortion efforts.

This is a campaign of hate.

#SuperbOwl

Rentlar, to atheism in Jesus Super Bowl Ads: Hobby Lobby Family Leads He Gets Us Campaign

Using money to feed and shelter the poor, displaced and sick like Jesus would… nah

… YEAH BABEEEE!

Spellinbee, to snoocalypse in Reddit Activity Plummeted After The Protests

They were just religious ads, that would say things like Jesus loved his neighbors . The biggest complaint I saw about them was at some point, that was literally the only ad you would see on reddit.

btaf45, to atheism in Oh, you're tired of my anti-religion posts?

If Jesus doesn't speak to you he doesn't listen to you either. It's no harder to do the first thing than the latter thing.

katharinaviken, to superbowl

In 2020, @charles and I made People You May Know on Apple TV, essentially exposing Cambridge Analytica had worked with ultra-conservative churches in the US. And wouldn’t you know it, two years later the company we found exploiting vulnerable people turn up at with a $20M Christian ad. I break down what they’re up to on @moviemakingmama on TikTok.

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