How X-Men Red Tackles the Topic of Domestic Terrorism

WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for X-Men Red #6 by Tom Taylor, Carmen Carnero, and Rain Beredo, on sale now!

As the debate over whether or not comic books should have a political agenda or simply political subject matter rages on, X-Men Red continues to wear its politics on it sleeve like an x-adorned sash. Since its first issue, X-Men Red has overtly been about the current political climate with regards to social justice and the treatment of minority groups. When comic fans who rail against this sort of subject material in mainstream books (specifically in Marvel Comics), this book is often a target -- and with good reason.

Writer Tom Taylor has presented the X-Men in an allegorical manner that at one time was a staple of their comics. His work in the story arc “The Hate Machine” harkens back to other classic X-Men stories like “God Loves, Man Kills.” As heavy-handed as a lot of allegory X-Men Red might possess, they to hold an earnest. They want you to see how serious the consequences of fringe groups can be. When someone becomes a true believer in an ideology birthed for hate and fear, the limits of what they are willing to do in order to uphold their rhetoric can lead them down dark paths.

In X-Men Red #6 Cassandra Nova‘s goal of brainwashing people into mutant-hating psychopaths is a thinly veiled allegory for a lot of the issues regarding how social media influences the masses for the worse. And while some won’t agree with Taylor’s politics it’s hard to say the man doesn’t have a point. Now we’re not comparing Mark Zuckerberg to Cassandra Nova (although they both have reptilian qualities) drawing a connection between the social media platform Facebook and the mind controlling powers of Nova seem to have similar effects on people in the real world and in comics.

Of course one of those things is far more terrifying and actually does lead to death. Turning someone into an Atlantis-crushing, brain-washed monster actually has its parallels to the influx of hate speech and biased media blurbs turning the average person into a frothing-at-the-mouth zealot against anything different from themselves.

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Just as it is in the real world, radicalization is the true enemy in X-Men Red. The lack of balance within global politics has divided us so far that even in a the comics community there seem to be too massive groups of people just yelling at each other over a medium built on people fighting crime in spandex (seems kind of trivial when you put it in perspective, doesn’t it?). And while Taylor and artist Carmen Carnero are using the medium to say obviously shine a light on how infighting can lead to abhorrent behavior. Sometimes the behavior in question is turning someone into what is essentially a suicide bomber.

Now, that notion might sound a bit hyperbolic, but when someone detonates himself in a small market place in the Middle East, they were clearly not in their most rational state of mind. People don’t wake up and decide to do something so drastic out of the blue. It takes time and manipulation to turn a person into a zealot. And while in our world this might not be achieved through mind control (at least not in the way Cassandra Nova uses it), hateful rhetoric and the fear-mongering tactics are the tools used to shape a person’s mind into an engine for destruction and knock down rational faculties.

When Jean Grey declared “We’re going to weaponize the truth” in a previous issue of X-Men Red, this was not a call to arms against a certain ideology; it was battle cry for common sense, for finding a middle ground based on empathy, which is something that is often lacking among the general public when it comes to social issues. If Cassandra Nova represents the notional of radicalization, both foreign and domestic, in the Marvel Universe, then Jean Grey is absolutely the social justice warrior to combat her. While that is political allegory that might be a bit too black-and-white for some comic fans, doesn’t detract from the book’s quality or its gusto.

X-Men Red is a combative book, in the best kind of way. But naturally, if a reader rails against the message the characters of the book are trying to present, they’ll probably hate it. This is absolutely an allegorical story (a thinly-veiled one, to be sure) and if it’s seen as an affront to a reader’s own personal way of life, then maybe X-Men comics aren’t their thing, and maybe they never were. At the end of the day, just because someone stands for something doesn’t mean they’re against everything else.