If you read George Orwell’s classic political satire Animal Farm in seventh grade, you probably remember the basic contours of the plot: fed up with human rule, a group of well-intentioned barnyard animals set up their own egalitarian society, with disastrous results. Published in 1945, Animal Farm has a timeless (and, certainly, contemporarily relevant) message: it’s about how the impulse to retain power will always come at the expense of our basic morality.
That message, however, seems to have been lost on most MAGA influencers assigned the book in middle school (if they even read it at all). After their failure to cancel Barbie or the Wicked movies, conservatives have moved onto a new film adaptation of Animal Farm. (The animated film, which is directed by Lord of the Rings star Andy Serkis, opens May 1).
The problem, however, is that they’ve failed to reach a consensus on what the actual message of Animal Farm is.
The right-wing outrage cycle over a movie featuring Seth Rogen making fart jokes appears to have been sparked by influencers like Emily Saves America and Riley Gaines, who recently posted the trailer for the film. In an April 28 X post, Gaines tweeted that the film was “incredibly well done. They do a perfect job of reminding viewers that Marxism always has and always will fail.” She hashtagged her tweet #AnimalFarmPartner, leading people to assume the post had been the result of a paid partnership between herself and Angel Studios, the Utah-based entertainment company distributing the film, which was also behind the faith-based blockbusters Sound of Freedom and The King of Kings.
Many on both the left and the right found Gaines’s tweet bizarre, in part because while Animal Farm is certainly a critique of Stalinism, it’s also very clearly not a full-throated endorsement of capitalist ideals. The human owner of the farm is a capitalist and after he is overthrown, the power-hungry pigs mimic his behaviors, adopting human clothes and profiting off the labor of the other farm animals. The book is ultimately less of a condemnation of specific systems of governance and more a critique of mankind’s lust for power and blind adherence to ideology.
In the latest adaptation, Serkis also tweaked the plot by adding a greedy human character (voiced by Glenn Close) who wants to buy the farm, characterizing the film in USA Today as “about authoritarianism and power corrupting and our response to that”—a message that, in theory at least, would certainly resonate with 2026 audiences.
It clearly did not, however, resonate with many of Gaines’s ideological bedfellows, who pounced on her for being a Marxist shill. “Promoting communism is the new gay for pay,” right wing podcaster Tim Pool tweeted. Earlier this month, he posted that he had turned down an offer from Angel Studios to promote the film due to it being “pro communism and anti-capitalism.” The influencer Peachy Keenan also excoriated the film, calling it “retarded socialist propaganda.”
The inability to reach a consensus on the actual message of the new Animal Farm movie may very well be a reflection of its artistic merits, or lack thereof. (Indeed, the film currently has a 23 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes). But it’s also just generally a reflection of how little media literacy exists in our current information landscape—an issue that, in fairness, is far from specific to the right. Unless the moral messaging of a work of fiction is clearly and consistently telegraphed throughout, there seems to be a complete inability to accept ambiguity or contradiction, or to acknowledge that multiple ideas can be good or bad at the same time.
Though middle schoolers might be able to immediately grasp the takeaways from Animal Farm, it says something that high-profile political commentators can’t. In fairness, Orwell himself, who has been claimed by both the right and the left during his lifetime and beyond, probably would have appreciated the confusion his novel has wrought—even if he may not have appreciated Seth Rogen’s fart jokes.
