One of the Fall’s biggest movies premiers is First Man, a biographical/action movie about Neil Armstrong.  It screened last week at the Venice film festival to rave reviews and Oscar talk.  A movie about one of our biggest 20th century heroes complete with jets, rockets, and spaceflight?  Cool, eh?  Not so fast, bucko, we have to go through the Patriot Test.  Uh, oh, the movie left out the actual planting of the US flag on the moon.  Trigger The Outrage Machine.  Now, for context, only a couple of hundred people have seen this movie so far; it doesn’t release until October 12, but right wing screamers from Breitbart to Twitter to even Marco Rubio have whipped up The Outrage Machine and turned the movie into a political hot potato over leaving out a flag planting scene.  Again, NONE of the people screaming on social media have actually seen the movie, and apparently not even the trailer, since our beloved totem was even featured in that.  Have a look:

Those who have actually seen the movie say the flag is all over it, and even shown in the moon scenes.  Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong in the film, said that the the story depicts “human achievement” more than simply American, which, in fact, is the way Armstrong himself saw it.  They chose to focus on Armstrong’s story, not only American culture.  And to some, that is the unforgivable sin.

So where is the outrage coming from?  It’s coming from radical partisans (who haven’t seen the movie) using bullshit to whip up anger of the base using the excuse that Armstrong’s biography wasn’t All-American-Flag-Wavingly-Jingoistic enough.  Oh, and that Gosling is a goddam Canadian daring to play an American hero.  That all adds up to blasphemy against Jingo, the All Seeing God of all things nationalistic.

The whole controversy is manufactured from whole cloth to only piss off the base.  What does the base do?  They get pissed off, of course, and light up social media with fake outrage over nothing.  And that’s how it works.