"Bluey" creator Joe Brumm wrote a line that had no business being in a kids' cartoon because of its poignancy, and it seemed like something you'd find written in a more adult show. Brumm had learned a lesson that many other creators either have yet to learn or refuse to, and that's that once you create something and release it to the world, it's no longer under your control, no matter how badly you want it to be.
The father character in the show, Bandit, relayed that to his youngest daughter, Bingo, during the episode Stickbird, where Brumm, through Bandit, said, “When you put something beautiful into the world, it’s no longer yours, really.”
And that's absolutely true. Even though I'm just a humble column writer, everything I release is often subject to interpretations and conclusions that I didn't expect people to reach based on what I wrote. The article has my name on it, but your brain doesn't, and that means you're going to perceive things differently thanks to your own life experiences, ideological positioning, and preferences.
While this is very true on an individual level, it's also true on a societal level. I mentioned "ideological positioning" affecting how you perceive or consume any kind of information, and that includes art.
Case in point, Lilly Wachowski is angry that the Right is "misinterpreting" his meaning behind his film The Matrix, which he claims is a trans allegory and said it always had been. I don't believe him, but that's beside the point. He goes on to say that the Right is practicing "fascism" by taking art and appropriating it for their own uses and messaging.
Trans Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski on the right-wing "fascist" appropriation of the concept of red-pilling for conservative propaganda." pic.twitter.com/mOHchUHoz4
— Libby Emmons (@libbyemmons) December 3, 2025
Rich, coming from a guy appropriating women's styles, clothing, and claiming to be of the female sex, but I digress.
He is right, though. Not about the "fascist" part, but about how the Right is appropriating his work for their own uses. In fact, the Right does it all the time and is very good at it. Much better than the Left is.
And you can see it happening all the time. The White House just did it with Sabrina Carpenter's song "Juno," much to her dismay, and her reaction only allowed the White House to clap back and solidify the song as a pro-ICE tune.
🚨White House responds to Sabrina Carpenter:
— alexis⸆⸉ (@EternalXshine) December 2, 2025
“Here’s a Short n’ Sweet message for Sabrina: We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?” pic.twitter.com/rU6LZ9kMzI
Remember the This Is Fine meme, with the dog sipping coffee as the room burns around him? That was created by a comic artist named KC Green in 2013. In 2016, the GOP used it to describe the DNC's chaos around the Clinton campaign. This pissed Green off to no end, calling the post "stupid." Funny enough, the GOP made Green's meme so popular that he started monetizing it with merch and a plushie, but hates that it achieved escape velocity thanks to the Right.
Then there's Pepe the Frog, a meme that arrived on the internet in 2005 and quickly went viral thanks to its being used by almost every facet of the Right, from the groypers to the standard Republican keyboard warrior. It achieved peak saturation when Trump himself posted a Pepe character of himself. This didn't sit well at all with Matt Furie, Pepe's creator, who said, "It sucks, but I can't control it more than anyone can control frogs on the internet." Furie did attempt to reign it in by suing InfoWars over "hate merch," and the ADL put it on even listed it as a hate symbol. Furie even "killed" Pepe in 2017, but it was of no use. Pepe belonged to everyone else. It was even used in Hong Kong by pro-democracy marchers.
The thing is, the Left doesn't have a very good track record of doing the same. There are likely several reasons for this, including the fact that they see anything with a right-leaning origin as disgusting and not worthy of giving any attention to, even if beneficial, but it's mainly because the Left doesn't get the same thing out of art that the Right does.
The Left tends to see art as an expression of aspiration, whereas the Right sees art as a descriptor of truth.
Let's go back to The Matrix for an example. The Wachowskis created it as a proposed ideal of breaking free from imposed illusions and embracing your truth, even as the world around you tells you it's a lie. Personal liberation is the ultimate good, and embracing that will ultimately bring forward a better world, possibly even a Utopia. That's exactly what the Left gets out of that movie.
However, the Right interpreted the film differently. They see it as a message that the world is being fed a false reality, and the ugly truth can be seen if you just wake up and truly look around. It's an encouragement to fight the lie and embrace the truth, no matter how hard it is to do so.
Both are correct because you can interpret art as you see fit, but on a societal level, the Right has more of an advantage in their idea catching on because even aspirational art has to be rooted in an element of real-world truth. This is where the Right lives. When the aspirational aspect of art falls flat or is too niche to resonate with a broader population, the underlying truth is still there, and the Right can use that to effectively make the art presented more popular through its definition of it.
THE truth will always resonate louder than YOUR truth, and that's why the Left is bad at holding onto their own art once it's released into the world. It's not just gone from their control, its aspects will always itself kneeling before reality.
