I can’t think of a time in my life when the idea of a Muslim terrorist was not the most acceptable societal enemy. As someone who came of age in the wake of 9/11 and the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, I have come to accept hating Muslims as the status quo. On a personal level, it functions sort of like advertising: so ubiquitous that I rarely pay much attention. There just aren’t many situations in my daily life where I’m thinking about how a stranger might perceive my boring existence as threatening. I’m normal. But sometimes I am snapped out of the monotony of Islamophobia and remember the limitless imagination of those who can watch one of the many recent videos of someone in Gaza, carrying around the body parts of a loved one in a plastic bag, and think They deserve this.
One of those moments was earlier this summer, when I encountered the trailer for the Daily Wire’s latest foray into filmmaking, Run Hide Fight: Infidels. In this campus action movie, ISIS (‘memba them?) invades a liberal arts campus because administrators are far too distracted by leftist they/thems and gay kids forming anti-Israel encampments to realize that in mere hours, a caliphate will be established on campus by a Syrian janitor. The film stars Jonathan Majors, who just a few years ago was destined to be the next big thing before he was found guilty of assaulting his ex-girlfriend.
Majors plays a former Delta Force operative on a book tour who says things like, “There are three ways Islam will conquer the West: through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our nation’s freedoms against us.” The messaging was so vintage and early 2000s—was it meant to be a throwback, or was there new stuff being introduced to the oeuvre? I thought the feeling across the board was that ISIS lowkey fell off. I had no idea anyone was still thinking about them as a real threat, especially when everyone—from Twitch streamers to beloved children’s entertainers—is Hamas these days. I was excited to learn what was going on with the state of modern Islamophobia.
The Daily Wire released the film on its own streaming platform, which has been hemorrhaging subscribers over the last few years. To understand the experience of watching this film, you must familiarize yourself with the imaginary reality the Daily Wire occupies. It is one where on the day of the film’s release, the media company's co-founder Ben Shapiro sent an email to subscribers of the Daily Wire asking the question, “When was the last time a major studio made a movie where jihadi Islamists were the bad guys? Take your time…” It is not a question worth answering, but Shapiro does anyway: “It doesn’t exist because the people who make our movies are ready, willing, and able to make a villain out of a pastor, out of a cop, or even out of a guy who owns a lawnmower. But radical jihadists? They’re complicated. Nuanced. Best not to touch it. Don’t want to hurt their feelings.”
I need to know where people are too scared to hurt Muslims' feelings. Please, show me. Ben Shapiro clearly has never seen Sex and the City 2. In 2022, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism released a report stating that out of 8,885 character roles with speaking roles or names across 200 scripted series from 2018 and 2019, 1.1 percent of them were Muslim. When a Muslim character did show up, a third of them perpetrated violence.
The thesis of Run Hide Fight: Infidels is this: If you show an ounce of humanity toward a brown person, you probably will get killed and you’ll deserve it because you are weak. We are told this in the film’s opening sequence, which begins seven years before the present day, with Captain Clay Saunders (Majors) on a Delta Force mission in my homeland of Mogadishu, Somalia. (YAY!) He and his partner are about to detain a big-shot terrorist they need to bring back alive to America. They aren’t “allowed” to kill him because of international law or whatever. While on the mission, Saunders’s partner is too distracted by the terrorist's young son, who is also in the home, to realize he is about to get killed. See what happens if you let your guard down?
We are then transported to the fictional Laughton University in Virginia, where Saunders is about to speak on his book tour. On this small campus, everything the right-wing mind can conjure about a liberal arts college is happening at once. Laughton University would give Chris Rufo an aneurysm. A puzzlingly small pro-Palestine encampment, with no more than 20 or so participants (led by a blue-haired pansexual girl and bitchy gay guy), has taken over a portion of the quad. They don’t know it yet, but they’re in cahoots with the ISIS leader whom they’ve been texting for support. He really holds it down for them, at one point leaving some cash in a locker for them to order pizza.
The leader of the ISIS cell is Ibrahim, who we later find out … is the son of the captured terrorist from the film’s first scene! And he just got a job on campus as a janitor, despite having no experience or references. Ibrahim pulls at the administrator’s heartstrings by bringing up the war in Syria, and she hires him on the spot. Of course, she is later killed because of her empathy, and because she speaks ill of America to him during the interview. This all happens while we follow an uncompelling and frankly ugly group of centrist-to-Republican students who are mildly anti-encampment but pro-Clay Saunders. These are the kids who end up saving the day.
It’s hard to figure out what the Daily Wire thinks ISIS, a very well-documented group, actually stands for. At one point, Ibrahim is talking to another operative across campus over a video call after Captain Saunders gets away—Majors is only in maybe a cumulative 20 minutes of this film, hardly a comeback—and he mentions a prophecy that says Saunders will return. What prophecy? Was ISIS doing prophecies?
The film is inconsistent even with its own logic. As ISIS herds students and faculty into a building, they separate the men and women; the women are to be cleansed before donning full niqabs and becoming ISIS brides. But there's also a female ISIS operative whose hijab is kind of loose, and she wears a boiler suit while sniping students from a tower.
As if ISIS weren't a big enough problem on their own, they also team up with a German neo-Nazi who works undercover at the campus book store. At one point, he forces the student captives to recite the testimony of faith. So is the Nazi Muslim, too? Can you be a Nazi and see the light of Islam? I could spend hours fact-checking every dogmatic principle of this film, but none of this matters at all when thinking about the ultimate goal. The point is to make Muslims completely incoherent and muddled. The average person doesn’t need to know the difference between ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Hamas—as long as you are scared of the brown horde, nothing else matters.
In the years since the War on Terror began, Muslims in the West have assimilated pretty well, to the point where one of us can even be the mayor of New York City. With that established reality, the Daily Wire is given no choice but to push hard on the message that Muslims are doing a long con as sleeper agents, ready to establish a caliphate at a Virginia college, of all places. Writer and director Kyle Rankin really wants to push how humorless and strict Muslims are, leading to some of the funniest moments in the film. Ibrahim's coworker at the school asks him what the Muslim day of rest is, because Christians have Sundays and Jews have Saturday. “We never rest," Ibrahim says with menacing passion. "Every day we work for Allah.” His oblivious coworker smiles and replies, “Good on ya!”
The portrayal of the terrorist as single-mindedly driven to kill is so exaggerated that it borders on parody, and it’s hard to see how this film can move the needle toward a renewed fear. There’s no compelling human element, only the disturbing level of comfort Rankin has with on-screen violence. Innocent students and faculty are constantly being shot en masse, and the carnage is unrelenting. The queer leaders of the encampment are kicked off a building and have their throats slashed. A non-binary student, whom ISIS cannot sort as being a man or a woman, is lynched and hangs from a flagpole. None of the violence toward the students is depicted as tragic; it’s supposed to be what they deserve.
Despite its efforts to capture the current moment of liberalism on campus, the film is very dated, even by the standards of Islamophobia. For decades, we have been hearing the same messages about Islamic terror being the biggest threat to the West: the virgins promised to men, how us women are so oppressed, how we are fine dying because of the promises of the afterlife. Terrorism as a concept has been synonymous with the actions of Muslims and Arabs since long before I was born. The Palestinian academic Edward Said explained it best in a 1984 interview with Studs Terkel, calling the term "a word without history because the terrorist just does it for the sheer delight in killing." Said saw the word as effectively meaningless, used only to strip an enemy of an identity and cause, saying, “We cannot distinguish between an enemy with a reason to kill, with a reason to fight, with a reason to exist. He’s just a terrorist.”
In the 42 years since that conversation, hatred of Muslims and Arabs has become more lucrative than any bigot could have ever dreamed. Endless wars, invasions, and mass surveillance aside, hating Muslims is a very reliable way to make a career as a pundit or win elections. Laura Loomer is able to fund whatever she’s done to her face. Shapiro’s promise that this film will do something new and urgent, by depicting Muslims as a threat, is perhaps the funniest thing he’s ever said.
Clips of Run Hide Fight: Infidels have already spread across the internet in the way overtly bad movies often do. It’s hard to imagine someone being galvanized by something so heavy-handed and stupid. But just days after the film’s release, a Vermont man was convicted of attempted murder for shooting three Palestinian students on their Thanksgiving holiday in 2023. While writing this, I was reminded of how Alexandre Bissonnette visited Shapiro’s Twitter account 93 times in the month before he entered a Quebec City mosque, killing six worshippers and injuring 19 right after evening prayers. I don’t know what to do about the reality where I am not considered worthy of living. Sometimes, all there is to do is laugh.
