Gotham City’s Bane Is Every DSA Candidate’s Final Form

Happy Friday, folks. Let’s talk about the most accidentally prophetic screenplay in Hollywood history, shall we?

Somehow, someway, Christopher Nolan got his hands on a time machine, took one look at America’s political future, and built an entire trilogy to warn us about it. I rewatched “The Dark Knight Rises” last weekend and dang-near slid off my couch during Bane’s Blackgate Prison speech.

To set the scene: the bombs have gone off. The police are buried alive under Gotham, sealed in like a city-sized panic room without an exit hatch. Every prisoner in Blackgate has just been handed a rifle and a grudge. The football players have sunk into the earth, America’s favorite sport swallowed whole. Bane climbs onto the wreckage of the city he just hollowed out, and he starts preaching:

We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you… the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please. Start by … freeing the oppressed! Step forward those who would serve. For an army will be raised. The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests, and cast out into the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened. Spoils will be enjoyed. Blood will be shed.

I mean, come on. Put a claw mask over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker, Michigan U.S. Senate nominee Abdul(etc) El-Sayed, Colorado congressional nominee Melat Kiros, and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, and you genuinely cannot tell the difference.

Bane isn’t a comic book villain. He’s every DSA candidate’s final form, minus the gym membership.

The monster who hijacked and crashed a CIA plane with no survivors, stormed the stock exchange, and held a city hostage with a nuclear bomb spends his big speech insisting that capitalism has failed us, that oppressors have oppressed for generations, and that he alone can hand control back to the people, while the crowd claws over each other and the city burns. As the stadium disintegrates, Bane lays out his class-based populist playbook: seize the institutions, redistribute by force, and claim moral legitimacy while preparing total annihilation.

I don’t know how he did it, but Nolan clearly cracked open the Democratic Psychos of America platform mid-time-travel and decided it made a better villain origin story than a legitimate governing philosophy.

The echoes are enough to make you sick.

The DSA calls it putting “people before profit” (never mind that it polls abysmally with the poor, working-class voters they claim to speak for). Bane sneers at the “myths of opportunity.” Both regurgitate the same lie: that the American Dream and free markets were built to keep people down.

The DSA calls it “taxing the rich” (or eating the rich, if they’re feeling ravenous). Bane calls it ripping richies from their decadent nests and enjoying the spoils. How inspiring.

The DSA relishes the idea of ending mass incarceration. Bane’s opening act as a monstrous dictator was storming Blackgate and declaring the prisoners the true oppressed, then convening kangaroo courts where being a capitalist, a cop, or a creator is itself the crime. Bane-style justice looks a lot like sending the good guys out onto thin ice to die.

They dress it up in the flowery language of “returning power to ordinary people,” delivered through a mask or with a smarmy Joker smile. But what the Bane Bolsheviks actually want, and fully intend to bring to fruition, is a communist society: classless, stateless, moneyless, and full of fear, chaos, and pain.

Once you gulp down the black pill and accept that the existing order is irredeemably corrupt and must be replaced by the proletariat, the road forks toward exactly one destination: strongmen, emergency powers, and “purification,” dressed up however the decade demands.

You can clearly see in the film how hope gets weaponized. You can also just read a history book and see the same thing (but kids don’t do that nowadays). The French Revolution, the Bolshevik uprising, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution all followed the same pattern. They sell like sex and then kill like an STD.

Luckily, every previous socialist uprising of this intensity has eventually been throttled by people smarter and sturdier than the tyrants selling them, whether that was the Soviet Union collapsing under its own weight, the Khmer Rouge finally meeting its match, or the long, grinding resistance that kept Western democracies from going the same way. In the movie, Batman beats Bane, and Gotham chooses to save itself instead of accepting annihilation. But it’s a constant choice, one we make over and over, because full-blown tyranny is always just one bad election away.

Doing the harder thing, working, following the law, building instead of burning, choosing gratitude over grievance — those things have never been the easy sell; it’s not supposed to be. We’re at one of those pivotal moments again: let the stadium collapse under us, or stand up to the Banes of our own era and choose to be great again.

For now, we can find peace in knowing Bane was jacked, built like a tank on roids. Our homegrown revolutionary wannabes, by contrast, are weighing in at 135 pounds of pure nonbinary fluff, more likely to pull a hamstring storming aluminum barricades than an empire.

If we play our cards right, the business-minded, Christian Bale-esque builders, the Batmans of the world, won’t even need to break a sweat.

Turns out Nolan never needed a time machine. He just needed C-SPAN, a couple of DSA press releases, and some old tweets to cast the perfect villain.