X-Men: Gold emphasizes assaulting and torturing a right-wing woman

Matt J. Battaglia at The Federalist provides some more insight into just how bad X-Men: Gold Straw really is with its leftist politics, and galling rightist metaphors. The stealth messages by Ardian Syaf were just the tip of the iceberg:

...X-Men Gold’s first issue begins with a tone-setting talking head page, as “The Fact Channel” shows an interview with Lydia Nance, the “Heritage Initiative Director.”

She’s pointedly anti-mutant and a new character created for the series. The Heritage Initiative chyron was snuck in there, and if it weren’t for the second issue calling attention to the name, it could very well have been innocuous.

In issue two the X-Men confront the “New Brotherhood of Evil Mutants” after they bomb the United Nations. Punching ensues, then the X-Men sit down with Captain America to talk about their new adversaries, which is when the “Heritage” name shifts from maybe a coincidence to a pointed reference to the actual Heritage Foundation, a mainstream conservative think tank in Washington DC.

So writer Marc Guggenheim has just put in some stealth messages of his own, I see. It gets worse:

It’s later revealed that Lydia Nance and the Heritage Initiative planned and funded the terrorist attacks to get the public to hate mutants so they can start deporting them. The X-Men discover her scheme, break into her home, assault her, and vow to bring her to justice. What justice?

Public exposure. Not exposure of specific deeds, but of her lack of virtue. This is key: Kitty doesn’t threaten the “Heritage Initiative” chief with publicly revealing her instigation of kidnapping, terrorism, etc. — she threatens to reveal she’s a bigot! In Guggenheim’s new take on the X-Men, actual criminal acts are less damning than wrongthink.

This would almost be funny if it weren't for how horrific it's already shaping up to be. So when an artist with revolting beliefs slips them into the background of the artwork, that's bad. But when the writer does nearly the same thing in his script, that's okay. No wonder this, by sharp contrast to the Syaf case, hasn't made many headlines in the MSM, if at all.

To make matters worse, the story basically validates breaking and entering, assault, trespassing and even potentially torturing a woman (update: as seen in the panel I posted above, found through Scans Daily, it looks like Rachel Summers is asphyxiating her), in one of the most revolting storylines to litter comicdom since DC's Identity Crisis featured similar elements in 2004. It's bad enough they're blatantly making a conservative outfit into conspiracy villains, yet at the same time, it's self-defeating how the X-Men don't seem interested in exposing the woman for the crime she's accused of. Blackmail? That only makes the X-Men look as bad as she's unfortunately portrayed as.

Comics have always had political angles, but never have mainstream books been so over-the-top preachy and vehement in vilifying the creators’ political enemies. Now every creator is also on Twitter, constantly spewing their opinions about everything so a large number of readers can discover these artists don’t like them.

That should serve as an important reminder to any liberal apologists that conservatives are fully aware there's been politics in comics since the Golden Age, but until recently, few have ever been as openly hostile to conservative electorates as they are now.

Truth Revolt notes at the end of their followup commentaries:

...that’s to be expected when the comic series plays loose with identity politics and makes Iron Man a teenage black girl, Miss America a queer Latina, and Ms. Marvel a Muslim. It’s no wonder Marvel comics sales continue to drop. But that’s of no consequence to the powers that be that have promised, “Our new heroes are not going anywhere!”

They're clearly determined to go down with the sinking ship. Why, the idea they go by, that a conservative outfit orchestrated terrorist attacks to frame mutants not only stinks of 9-11 Trutherism, it's also similar to the time when Marvel featured a story in the Marvel Knights Captain America, where it turned out terrorists were working for the government. This latest monstrosity proves they're still firmly stuck on conspiracy insanity.