17 September 2026 - 6:00pm
The midterms are fast approaching, and it’s not looking good for Republicans. To divert attention, they’ve increasingly sought a scapegoat in foreign-sounding menaces such as “Third-Worldism” and “Islamo-Communism”.
Perhaps nowhere else is this newfound obsession better represented — visually, dramatically and, above all, sloppily — than in the Daily Wire’s latest film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, released yesterday. Its only real merit is in showing how the Right increasingly resorts to ever more déclassé forms of entertainment to appeal to its dwindling base.
The movie, produced by the conservative media company’s head honcho Ben Shapiro and starring the cancelled Jonathan Majors as a Delta Force veteran, makes clear its intentions from the get-go. One of the first scenes shows a Syrian man interviewing for the position of janitor at a college. “I will do any work. America is the best,” says the man, who is actually a terrorist plotting a takeover of the college in order to establish a caliphate. The woman interviewing him, a stereotypically progressive school administrator, replies: “America is not what it’s cracked up to be.” As soon as the interview ends, the Syrian man walks out and slashes an American flag hanging on a pole on the quad.
It’s a scene that recalls the mass outcry over taqiyya, an Islamic concept concerning the concealment of one’s faith under particular circumstances. For certain sections of the Right, however, the term is sometimes invoked to suggest that Muslims in the West are habitually concealing their true views in order to deceive non-Muslims and ultimately undermine Western society. The idea has been promoted, in part, by Donald Trump ally Laura Loomer, who has claimed that “it’s easier for a jihadist to murder someone in the name of Islam if you use Taqiyya to brainwash non-Muslims into thinking you are not a threat.”
Later on in the film, there is a scene featuring blue-haired protesters chanting that “Zionism is a supremacist modality” at a pro-Palestine encampment. That much is certainly plausible: I’ve witnessed this rhetoric on my own campus at Columbia. What is far less believable, though, is that the encampment leader, an excitable and keffiyeh-clad girl, is in direct communication with the terrorist leader. As she explains to her crew of protesters, “we got the attention of an elite group of real freedom fighters,” apparently not realising the “freedom fighters” in question are terrorists.
The terrorists take over campus, shoot dozens or even hundreds of people dead, and take others hostage. “I seek forgiveness from Allah the almighty,” the captives are forced to chant in unison. It’s not until Majors’s character teams up with two students to save the hostages and kill the terrorists that they finally escape. The final scene shows them triumphant, with the two college boys reuniting with their romantic interests (who had ended up in the hands of the terrorists).
Run Hide Fight: Infidels is in equal parts poorly executed, reactionary, and delusional in linking college kids protesting Israel, whatever one makes of the campus pro-Palestine movement, to an actual terrorist takeover of a campus. It joins a growing genre of anti-Muslim, action-thriller, Right-coded films such as the June-released Citizen Vigilante, which turn contemporary Right-wing grievances into cartoonish action fantasies.
These films are less political persuasion than political wish fulfilment, creating a world in which the worst and most unrealistic caricatures of “the other side” are made real. It is red meat rendered as slop — and, somehow, the fare keeps getting worse. Then again, a Right consumed by fighting “Islamo-Communism” was perhaps always going to get the entertainment it deserves.
