The Right Wing Super Bowl Commercial That Aged Very Badly

Five years ago, the popular clothing brand Grunt Style produced an iconic 30 second commercial depicting a heroic police officer facing off against an enraged mob of Antifa protesters. The commercial was so incendiary and controversial, Grunt Style ultimately declined to air it at the big game. Leftist commentators at the time were quick to condemn the visual story as fascist propaganda, and these accusations weren’t completely without merit. A larger than life superman standing in opposition against a horde of barbarians is indeed the cornerstone of fascism. Fascism is inherently reactionary, and is opposition to an idea, rather than an idea in of itself. And that’s why the right-wing idealization of military and police as depicted in this commercial ended up failing, and backfiring in a spectacular fashion.

You can see the commercial on the Grunt Style channel below:

The first takeaway from this clip, like in any commercial, is that this is a sales pitch. By purchasing one of Grunt Style’s tactical shirts, you’re not simply buying a product, you’re buying a lifestyle. You’re buying Grunt Style, which might be the most on-the-nose brand name ever. And that’s arguably true for almost every American brand in existence, you’re not just buying a shirt, gun, coffee machine, or burger, you’re buying into and somewhat directly participating in the advancement of an ideology.

However, as astonishing as this might sound, ideological movements centered on consumerism tend to be intellectually and morally bankrupt and have nothing of substance behind them, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with the Grunt Style commercial. Let’s analyze.

While the soundtrack for America the Beautiful plays, the main character, let’s call him Judge Dredd, is watching a group of Antifa protesters brandishing anti-police signs and setting fire to an American flag. This causes him to reflect on several key moments of his life, all pertaining to the American flag. The images are shown going backward in time. He takes an oath as a new policeman in front of the flag. As a soldier in a foreign desert country he watches his comrade’s flag-draped coffin being loaded onto a plane. As a teenage football player he looks up at the flag flying overhead.As a young boy he watches firefighters raising the flag in the ruins of the WTC. Back in the present, the mob attacks and Judge Dredd readies his baton. It’s clobbering time. The commercial ends with Grunt Style’s catch phrase, this we’ll defend.

And that’s actually the root of the problem. This we’ll defend. But defend what? The mood is quite dystopian. If we take the message literally, he’s defending the flag. But a flag isn’t a thing to be defended, it’s a symbol of something. A flag represents a particular nation of people. In this case, the flag represents the very people Judge Dredd is fighting. That’s of course the unfortunate but necessary irony of police work, especially in periods of civil unrest. The commercial gets around this by depicting the police as heroic “real” Americans, and others the protesters as bad. There’s more than one problem with this.

The most prominent and serious problem has to do with the commercial’s deliberately morbid framing the flag. The earliest flashback, the young boy watches a flag being raised over the WTC, the smoldering, toxic tomb of more than 3,000 people. Later, he’s a fervently patriotic young man gazing at the flag over the school football stadium. There can be no doubt here that he’s already decided to serve his country when he’s old enough. In the final flashback, he’s paying respect to casualties of war, in fact, the same war that he was watching on TV as a boy. After retiring from the Army he becomes a policeman, as usual, in front of the flag. The montage of flashbacks and the riot Judge Dredd is at in the present all tie together into one montage. In 2001, the American people were united against a supposed existential entity. The majority embraced the idea of war, and the few dissidents were bullied into silence. That war became the longest in all of American history, with grown up children signing up for the same combat zones their fathers had served in. In the end, the war was lost, and as is typical of lost wars, it came back home. By 2016, the American economy was in shambles, society in chaos, and armored vehicles that once roamed the streets of Baghdad were now patrolling burning American cities.

And that’s the problem. A flag represents a nation, and a nation is supposed to be living people, not a cemetery. Judge Dredd is defending something that’s already dead. The enraged mob don’t see him as a protector, but as an enemy. And they’re actually not wrong. A person who uses force against the living to protect something that’s already dead isn’t a protector at all.

Oddly, this reminded me a bit of a character in a 1971 Soviet film, Officers. This film, as the title suggests, is about the lives of two young Red Army officers who meet for the first time somewhere in the frontier territory of Central Asia, going on to serve throughout the 20th Century. One of them started his career already married, and naively brings his young wife to his first duty assignment at a dangerous frontier outpost, and they go on to have a son and a grandson. The son and his wife both die as heroes in WWII, leaving behind a baby to be raised by the grandparents. He too continues family tradition by joining the military. The moral of Officers is that a military, yes, even the big scary Red Army, doesn’t exist to advance an agenda. It’s not supposed to “fight for democracy” or communism or anything else except life. Wars are a disastrous tragedy, but what matters most is that life is able to continue afterward. WWII’s disastrous human toll is represented on a personal evel by one whole generation of the family being wiped out, but life still carries on through the grandson.

The second officer in the buddy team is completely institutionalized in the army, and for whatever reason does not ever marry or have children of his own. He’s clearly quite lonely at times, but he’s not Rambo in First Blood. He loves his friends and finds happiness in helping them, swooping in to save the day multiple times throughout the story. Nobody in Officers can be described as acting out of anything but very personal and human reasons, certainly not vague loyalty to a flag.

Grunt Style’s Judge Dredd isn’t like either of them. He doesn’t have a family to reflect on; the flag is in every shown moment of his life, but there’s no wife, girlfriend, or children in any of them. And there’s apparently no adopted family to relate to either. And he certainly doesn’t empathize with the people on the other side of the picket line. He only has anger and devotion to the faded symbol that’s ruled his life since early childhood.

In 2016, Grunt Style and their customers associated themselves with Judge Dredd and view the protestors as a villainous, evil enemy. Quite literally, power structure and its hired enforcers were good, and the people who opposed it were evil. But is that true now? Maybe for some, but certainly not all. The 2016 conservative Republicans who made military and police service their entire personality are now ostracized and branded as extremists. Conservative groups like the III Percenters are, one by one, branded as “far right” extremist groups. Barrack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, has now been installed back in the White House. Then Biden, quite calmly, expressed the willingness to use F-15s and nuclear weapons(!) against anyone who moved against the government. Imagine if Putin said something like that.

Since 2016, those conservatives have gone on to split into two groups. The first group is comprised of the people who don’t actually have any values and just want to be on the stronger side, so changed their viewpoints to more closely match with the new power structure. Conservatives not willing to do that are gradually, rapidly, finding themselves in the shoes of American communists in the Cold War. An ostracized, hated minority with no rights.

Yet, even members of the latter group still often cling to the Grunt Style fantasy. Do they still not yet realize that Judge Dredd is not their friend? They have become the protestors in the video, and Judge Dredd is ready to beat them, and kill them if necessary. Understand that there are no longer any friends in the military or law enforcement. They have been subjected to so many loyalty tests, anyone with even a shred of integrity has long since left or been forced out.

I remember in 2018 or 2019 sitting in on a briefing when an officer from our unit’s judge judicial advocate (JAG) announced the new transgender policy. I remember how many people in the audience were angry and lashed out at him personally. Of course this was unfair, the new policy wasn’t his idea, he was just the messenger. But anyway, what happened then? Those people either learned to keep quiet, or they got out. I remember in Iraq there were incidents of young ladies being surprised to find men using their shower and toilet facilities, and this was allowed. Again, same thing. Either learn to keep your feelings to yourself, or get out. Allowing transgender service members didn’t improve so-called “mission readiness” in the normal sense, but it was the perfect loyalty test, serving the same purpose as the tests Gideon used to weed out his recruits. The witch hunt against “white nationalists” was another big loyalty test. Anyone who found this stupid or straight up unconstitutional had to either keep quiet or get out.

The biggest and most effective loyalty test was of course the plandemic. Injecting poison into yourself is a more effective loyalty test than being ordered to execute a family member. You might, for example, not like that family member so have no trouble pulling the trigger. There is no deeper act of unconditional obedience than inflicting potential harm on yourself. To be clear, I’m not saying every single person who took the vaccine was harmed. I’m simply saying that the risk was high enough to suffice as a loyalty test. It’s literally like loading one cartridge into a revolver, spinning the wheel, and pointing it at your own head. A person who follows such a command is willing to do anything.

In 2023, the only people left in the American armed forces are people who consented to taking the vaccine, not just once, but repeatedly, and accepted absurd gender ideology. If, or I should say when, the order comes down to start herding “enemies” into camps, do you think our military and police will hesitate? No, of course not. “I’m just following orders.” Or “you have nothing to fear if you just comply.” Or my personal favorite, “if you don’t like it, move to Russia.”

#slavaukraini is the #metoo of 2023, and it’s just as dogmatic as the plandemic. Pledging loyalty to Ukraine is politically useful, and taken to a greater extreme than pledging loyalty to Israel. It’s absurd for an official in one country to pledge loyalty to a different country, and that’s what makes it so effective as a loyalty test.

The best loyalty tests are absurd and defy all logic and reason. Only the most mindless drone is able to pass such a test, now all of our major institutions are full of those people, with virtually everyone else weeded out.

I pity right wingers and conservatives, but it’s hard for me to say anything except “I told you so.”

When he returned to Rome after crushing the great Hebrew revolt in 71 A.D., Titus reportedly refused to accept a wreath of victory because there is “no merit in vanquishing people forsaken by their own God.”

I share this quote for two reasons. The first reason is because this is the most unfathomably based thing any human being has ever said. The second and more pertinent reason is because that’s essentially what has happened in the USA. Ancient Hebrews trusted in their God to bring them victory, but he sided with the Romans and crushed them in the most humiliating fashion possible. American conservatives have long worshipped the military and police, somehow obliviously unaware that this is akin to worshipping a hammer. A military is simply a tool incapable of reason or morality. And now, someone else has picked up the tool and is using it to smash conservatives to bits.

Ian Kummer

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