Do you roll your eyes at pop culture reporting and Tiktok videos about the latest drama with Taylor Swift or the Beckhams? Do you dismiss the deep interest that countless millions have for celebrity gossip as the “opiate of the masses”? Do you prefer reading New Left Review over New Idea?

The gossip industry isn’t just selling ads; it’s selling a worldview to protect the ultra-rich by turning their hoarding of wealth into a spectator sport.

Dismissing pop news as a distraction or irrelevant is a major strategic error — for similar reasons that dismissing health culture is an error.

Like the health content industry, the pop culture and celebrity news content industry has a “celebrity gossip to patriarchy pipeline” that funnels people into the arms of the far-right.

If you ignore these stories, the far-right will weaponise them.

The Right — creators and influencers like Candace Owens and Ashley St Clair — use the drama between Brooklyn Beckham and his parents, or Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, to hook audiences and feed them a steady diet of misogyny and conservatism.

Reporting and commentary on celebrities and popular culture is an integral part of neoliberal capitalism’s mechanism of mass deception. Pop culture flattens our consciousness and integrates us into the status quo. But dismissing it is absolutely the wrong option. The Right, supercharged by technology like Youtube, Twitter and Tiktok, has transformed this industry into a right-wing radicalisation funnel.

Political struggles take place in every sphere of life — economic, family, work, and online celebrity reporting. If we abandon pop culture, we abandon the millions of people who consume it to the predators of the alt-right.

Lie one: The family is safe

When Brooklyn Beckham speaks out about his controlling parents, right-wing commentators frame him as weak. They tell him to “be a man” and submit to the traditional family hierarchy. This reinforces patriarchal norms under the guise of entertainment.

The feud between the Beckhams (ultra-millionaires) and the Peltzes (billionaires) is not just family drama. It is a clash of capital. These figures, the Swifts, the Beckhams, are part of a global plutonomy that controls narratives to protect their brand value and their billionaire status.

It further shows how capitalism commodifies families. The Beckhams saw their children as units of capital accumulation, and Brooklyn Beckham experienced the consequences of that system, relationships as financial transactions for the sake of the “brand”. This voyeurism enables a discussion about how capitalism always turns families into cages of property relations.

Lie two: women are the aggressors

The “multi-billion dollar industry” of gossip shares resources with authoritarian movements. When the media smears Nicola Peltz or Blake Lively, they are protecting powerful men and established hierarchies. Just as workers and unions who challenge sexual harassment in workplaces are often smeared and attacked by employers and defended by influential journalists, so too did the capitalist patriarchy smear Lively and defend Baldoni.

The playbook for how the “gossip industrial complex” functions was a pipeline to the alt-right was Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard trial. An ecosystem of “tea channels“, influencers, and bot networks were mobilised by Depp and his backers to dismantle not just Heard’s credibility, but to undermine and destroy the #MeToo movement. This was the backlash of the misogynstic far-right pretending to be entertainment news.

In Australia, an example that jumps to my mind is the 2010 David Jones sexual harassment case where then-CEO Mark McInnes was defended by the company’s establishment and by many in the media after being accused of sexual harassment by Kristy Fraser-Kirk. McInnes lost the case and was subsequently rewarded by the corporate board-room elite by landing more multi-million dollar executive jobs, including most recently as CEO of Lovisa, where Lovisa investor Chris Prunty said of McInnes’s $2 million cash salary “You cannot overpay for top talent”.

Lie three: Woke is ugly

Another example is the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle “good jeans” ad. This ad became a flashpoint for alt-right recruitment, weaponising aesthetics to recruit. By framing the ad as a return to “traditional beauty” and “real women,” conservative commentators created a false dichotomy between Sweeney’s image and inclusive marketing, which they labelled woke.

While the Beckhams story shows how families are used as capital, the Sweeney story shows how bodies (especially women’s bodies) are used as capital. Women’s bodies have long been used to sell goods and services (most especially as labour in the Global South), but the Sweeney example shows how women’s bodies are capitalised to sell traditional gender ideology to young women and men. When Donald Trump praised Sweeney’s ad while disparaging critics as “woke,” he was treating her body as a form of political capital.

Sweeney has become a one-dimensional symbol for reactionary, right-wing online clout, while the jeans themselves have exploitation literally woven into the fabric.

This tactic of praising “conventional” attractiveness as a political rebellion served as an entry point for far-right radicalisation. Under capitalism, women’s bodies are merely sources of corporate profits and patriarchal conformity. Women and men who were otherwise interested only in celebrity gossip were drawn into deeper ideological pipelines where adherence to rigid gender norms is equated with cultural superiority.

By engaging in pop culture and stories like the Beckhams, like DJ sexual harassment, like Blake Lively, like Sydney Sweeney, you can see practically — in dramatic, real, visceral ways — how corporate power and the ultra-wealthy exercise power to insulate themselves and other members of the billionaire, oligarch class from accountability. The “facade” Brooklyn Beckham describes is actually the maintenance of class power out in the open. If famous, millionaire Blake Lively is smeared like this, how much worse is it for a minimum wage nurse or textile worker?

The problem is production, not consumption

Mainstream media serves state and corporate interests. The gossip pages are no different.

The owners of the gossip platforms (Murdoch press, tech oligarchs) share class interests with the Beckhams and Peltzes. They manufacture consent for gender roles, patriarchy and fellow capitalist oligarchs — the same corporate billionaire interests that attack unions and destroy the environment. They smear Nicola Peltz for the same reason they smear striking workers and lock up Extinction Rebellion protestors: to discipline anyone who steps out of line.

If you refuse to engage with this pop culture, you leave a vacuum that the Right fills with anti-woke, misogynistic, bigoted narratives, with no alternatives for countless young women and men.

I’m not saying that you should have sympathy for the Beckhams, the Heards or Livelys. Rather, the culture war is an entry point for providing a counter-narrative to the far-right.

It is time to stop being polite about the pop culture superstructure. It is time to fight for it. Enter the comments. Expose the PR machinery. Occupy the comment sections, the subreddits, and the group chats. Find the alienated, angry, disaffected women and men, who are being pulled into the far-right vortex, drop a ladder to them and pull them up and out.