In the new Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Trailer
Jones says,
I don’t believe in magic. But a few times in my life, I’ve seen things, things I can’t explain. And I’ve come to believe that it’s not so much what you believe. It’s how hard you believe it.”
Indiana Jones opines that it doesn’t matter how hateful, violent, or evidence-manufactured one’s beliefs are. It doesn’t matter how much suffering, death, or destruction of freedom is inflicted by adherents. It only matters, “how hard you believe it.”
In the context of today, the Walt Disney company has chosen with this trailer to promote the fact-free fanaticism endemic to violent extremism in the US today: Big Lie election denialism, anti-semitic hate, incel misogyny, transphobic bathroom “protection,” racist Great Replacement Theories, history-erasing Critical Race Theory book and course banning, and myriad QAnon conspiracism. Bigoted advocates of all these crackpot ideas can take heart: as long as they believe strongly enough, Indiana Jones is saying, they’re on firm moral ground.
Indiana Jones has been chock-a-block with bigotry in the first four movies (see for example this analysis of racism and misogyny in the series from Matt Berger on Screen Rant), so the bar was already set low. Yet this trailer defies even the flimsy premises of the film series itself. Now, Jones seems to endorse both Nazi fanaticism despite Indiana confronting Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark (film one), and Stalinist zealotry despite its role as the villainous ideology Indiana faced in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (film four).
Objections can be sent via email to Disney’s movie public relations department, and to Disney’s Corporate Social Responsibility Team. Please also get involved with anti-hate groups (links are provided to groups countering various forms of hatred in the paragraph above) working to counter bigotry and promote media education, media social responsibility, and human rights.