But at its core, beyond mere representation, Black Panther contains a fundamentally reactionary understanding of black liberation that blatantly advocates bourgeois respectability over revolution, sterilizes the history of real-life anti-colonial struggles in Africa and elsewhere, and allows white folks such as myself to feel extremely comfortable watching it — which, given Marvel’s sole purpose, is almost certainly the bottom line.

The Last Jedi offers up a vapid and apolitical thesis that echoes the non-ideology of Clintonite, Third Way-obsessed technocrats — that there’s no longer such thing as “good” or “evil,” traditions and histories can be discarded, and the primary commitment of a “rebel” is to non-material notions such as love and friendship over any semblance of political conviction.

Here’s a quick primer on the ever-growing dumpster fire: Lindsay Shepherd, a 22-year-old teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, showed a video of notorious transphobe and alt-right sympathizer Jordan Peterson to a class of first-year communications students. At least one student complained that it was inappropriate to display such content without sufficient context.

The basic ability for people to get from one place to another has been totally gutted in recent decades. We’re now almost entirely reliant on the neoliberalized “solutions” of privatized cars and airplanes, marked by rabid union-busting in the workplaces, the emitting of massive amounts of greenhouse gases and considerable financial costs to people who have no other reasonable option available to get around.

This is the near-dystopian endpoint of the neoliberal city: gargantuan corporations forcing cash-strapped cities to publicly bid against each other with tax breaks, subsidies and crass public relations campaigns. In the excellently titled “Amazon’s New Headquarters Should Be In Hell,” author Hamilton Nolan argued: “This is what the extortion of public resources looks like.”

Levant and his crew of propagandists exist because the Canadian media establishment allowed them to. Journalists and industry associations should have denounced the outlet and its correspondents as hateful and dangerous and refused to defend it when it encountered problems while attempting to gain press credentials. They could have taken a stand on behalf of oppressed peoples.

Much of the media coverage of the situation has frequently regurgitated blatant colonial biases. These range from allotting a disproportionate percentage of word counts to the arguments of the developer and his lawyer, deploying the language of capitalist conceptions of property ownership, and refusing Indigenous defenders the ability to self-define.

The Rolling Stone cover story was particularly unique in demonstrating how corporate media works to maintain and strengthen liberal hegemony by building a compelling personal narrative, using fascists as foil characters, and inadvertently disclosing profoundly racist and capitalist biases in both author Stephen Rodrick and main source, Trudeau himself.