Citizen Vigilante, and Elon Musk’s obsession with it, explained

A violent anti-migrant propaganda movie titled Citizen Vigilante was a smash hit on Apple and Amazon over the weekend, and the online right is celebrating. The film, directed by a man frequently described as the world’s worst director and starring disgraced actor Armie Hammer, blew up after Elon Musk began promoting it on X. It currently has a 94 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it has officially acquired distribution.

“Citizen Vigilante has now SURPASSED the ‘Michael’ movie,” posted online provocateur Libs of TikTok joyfully on Friday. (It’s not clear what metric she is using when comparing the two.) Conservative media personality Patrick Bet-David described the film as tapping into “the rage millions of people feel when their own government won’t protect them or their kids.” Turning Point USA contributor Jack Posobiec mused darkly that while “Sinners is a movie about killing white people and has the all-time record for Oscar nominations of any film in history,” the righteous Citizen Vigilante “was banned.” (Citizen Vigilante was denied a rating in Germany, effectively barring it from wide release there.)

Conservatives are excited about Citizen Vigilante because they see it as a corrective to mainstream liberal pop culture. They think its success shows that people are hungry for the story they’re telling about the world. But it’s not clear if Citizen Vigilante’s success proves that there has always been a large and dormant audience hungry for racist propaganda, or if it’s mostly proof of how effectively Elon Musk has used the platform he bought to mainstream xenophobic hatred.

Citizen Vigilante centers on Hammer’s character Sanders, an American landlord living in an unnamed European nation. Over the course of the film, Sanders acts out bloody vengeance on the migrants who have overrun the country and now rob, rape, and stab the natives with impunity. And not that a tragic backstory or lost love would make his rage okay, but the movie doesn’t even bother with that; Sanders’s rampage is simply motivated by the belief that he is facing an “unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists and the blindsided woke left.” In the world of Citizen Vigilante, violence is the honest white man’s only option.

Is any of this stuff true? No. Studies demonstrate no link between immigration and crime rates in either the US or Europe. But there’s one place it’s totally exploding, and that is the mind of Elon Musk. The South African-born trillionaire has been on a crusade against “woke” politics for years, and lately has been pivoting harder into racist “great replacement theory” fear-mongering. On his X account, Musk regularly reposts false claims that migrants of color plan to kill white people, and that “white solidarity” is the only rational response.

Now, Musk is directing people to Citizen Vigilante. Over the weekend, he posted the full film to X, where it was available for 48 hours. Since then, he’s been boosting memes and positive reactions to the film all over his X account. “This is what people want to see,” Musk wrote on Sunday.

“The audience wants real films again — bold and with impact and about reality,” crowed director Uwe Boll in an interview with Newsweek. “The times of SUPERGIRL and all that c*** are over.”

The bizarre Supergirl namecheck feels like it comes out of nowhere, but Boll is invoking a longstanding sense of right-wing resentment toward mainstream pop culture, which conservatives hold to be too left-wing for comfort. The online right has been treating Supergirl as a symbol of Hollywood’s illegitimate “wokeness” in action, with the same outrage that powered the review-bombing of Captain Marvel in 2019 and a vicious hate campaign on the all-female Ghostbusters in 2016. The belief here is that the right is both deprived of and owed movies where tall white dudes kick ass, beautiful women serve as eye candy, and the American flag waves in the background.

That the movie stars Armie Hammer, a man accused of sexual violence, only adds to the meta revenge fantasy it embodies. Meanwhile, the de facto German banning becomes a titillating suggestion that this movie speaks a truth so powerful that the establishment is trying to keep it from the waiting public.

For the same reason, conservatives love rallying around independent films that are too far right for Hollywood studios to distribute. We saw a similar narrative in 2023, when the “protect the children” film Sound of Freedom, which flirted with Q-Anon conspiracy, outearned an Indiana Jones movie on opening weekend. Musk even offered Sound of Freedom what now looks like a rehearsal for his Citizen Vigilante opening strategy, suggesting they put it on X to stream for free.

When a movie like Sound of Freedom or Citizen Vigilante is successful, it feeds into another, deeper conservative theory of the world: that not only are conservatives owed those films, but in fact, everyone secretly wants them, and they’re lying to themselves when they say otherwise. That’s the context within which Musk declared Citizen Vigilante “what people want to see,” and it’s why conservatives are so excited by its financial success.

But it’s not actually clear that the success of Citizen Vigilante after Musk’s PR blitz proves anything except that when the man who owns X posts there, his ideas spread far. After all, why else did Musk pay $44 billion to acquire what was then Twitter in 2022, if not to put his thumb on the scale of cultural conversation? He wanted to be cool and found he didn’t have the skills for it. So he bought Twitter, a platform he thought was cool, and remade it into X, a place he could socially dominate.

Now, Musk still isn’t cool, and X isn’t either. But it retains a large and influential enough user base that Musk’s opinion carries a weight it would not otherwise have. A recent study shows that X’s algorithm drives users measurably to the right. After Musk posted in support of anti-migrant riots in Northern Ireland, researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate concluded that his continued reposting of anti-migrant narratives was “instrumental” to an “explosion in calls for violence” surrounding the Belfast riots.

If Citizen Vigilante found an unexpected audience, it’s there because Musk built it, post by post.