For several years now, the Daily Wire has attempted to take on the Left’s monopolistic hold on Hollywood with films that are so subversive, so controversial, that critics won’t even touch them, like What Is a Woman and Am I Racist. The first Run, Hide, Fight was not politically incorrect enough to bring much rage their way, though they did call it pro-gun, as I recall (it was not). But Infidels is a whole different thing. It dives into a movement that has captured much of the Left and especially Hollywood.
To the Left, it is verboten or even blasphemous to target their protected, marginalized groups: people of color, LGBTQIA, etc. The more marginalized you are, the more status and power you have provided — and this is important — you are also ideologically compliant.
You get no protection if you voted for Trump, like Nikki Minaj, who was booed at the Grammys. They pretend it’s brave to shout “Free Palestine,” when in fact, nothing gives you more social cred. Phoebe Bridgers shouting “Free Palestine” is not hard. Pink standing up for Israel is hard on the American Left in 2026.
When you have protection, you become Teflon. No one is allowed to criticize you. If you don’t have protection (“cis normies”), you are to be fully dehumanized, bullied, attacked, and even killed, if your name is Charlie Kirk.
It’s ironic that the Palestinians cheered the deaths of 3,000 Americans after 9/11, and today’s Left cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This is where righteousness meets radicalization. But it’s left a vacuum in the arts because the list of what Hollywood can and can’t say just gets longer. They are political and make everything they do political. They do not want anyone else to have a voice. Dissent is strictly forbidden.
Run, Hide, Fight infidels dives right into the belly of the beast and doesn’t just ruthlessly mock the “Free Palestine” folks, but states the kind of hard truths they avoid, like how Radical Islam views gay people, for instance. Or how it views or treats women. These are as verboten on the Left as they are in Radical Islam, which is kind of funny that it arrived here.
So you see gay people thrown off roofs and woke women’s throats slit. This is where the rubber meets the road and the ultimate fate for “Queers for Palestine” should they ever try to go live in Palestine. But reality doesn’t matter. What matters is that Palestine is now the most marginalized and thus, the most elevated and protected, as the wheel of oppression keeps spinning.
Infidels reminds me of the flipside of One Battle After Another. If you wanted to teach American culture in 2026 to your class, you’d show three movies: One Battle After Another, Eddington, and Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels. That would be all you needed to see.
It’s a full meal of a movie if you like a lot of action, with a little romance and bromance thrown in. It is subversive by default simply because it is, like Citizen Vigilante, a film Hollywood could never and would never make. That’s what a counterculture does. It offers a counter to the dominant culture, especially when that culture becomes stale and hesitant.
Of course, some tried to say that One Battle lampooned “both sides,” but it didn’t. It followed the rules of Woketopia by casting only white men as the villains (actual Nazis) and all people of color as “good.” The young woman must save herself, and Leonardo DiCaprio is allowed absolution by being a “good ally.” His character mirrors nearly every dude bro who writes for Film Twitter. That’s why they loved the movie: it’s about them.
Eddington arrives a little more in the middle, even if it, too, must ultimately declare that the Left might be silly but the Right is evil. That’s one step out of the Left’s bubble, and toward a more balanced view of American society, and for that we should be grateful. Infidels are all the way on the other side, even though it isn’t as the Left would believe. It isn’t “White people good” and “people of color bad.” For the most part, it’s cast in a diverse, intersectional way, as the first one was.
So they can’t really call Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels “racist,” so they’ve glommed onto “Islamophobic.” And that just means they depict Radical Islam as it exists today. Not in the minds of the Left, of course. Never have they been more vulnerable to being radicalized than they are right now. They have no guardrails because you’re not allowed to criticize Islam on the Left because they are not white, just as you’re not allowed to criticize Islam in Islam because it’s blasphemy punishable by death.
Not all Muslims follow these strident rules, of course, but the terrorists most definitely do, and these are the villains in Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels, not Muslims. But to the Left, of course, it doesn’t matter, which is why it’s a bit of a free-for-all right now to capture hearts and minds in America for a wide array of what we would have considered our enemies: Communist China, Radical Islam.
Infidels dare to portray Jihadists as they are in real life, without the protections afforded by the Left, who must always depict the villains in most movies as white men. All you have to do is listen to any podcast about the rise of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda to see that we are “infidels” and Jews are “Zionists.”
It is often too on the nose and at times absurd in its depiction of the terrorists but it’s not as far off as the film critics would have you believe, if you have any working knowledge of the kinds of people who would bust into the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and shoot everyone inside.
Is Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels “Islamophobic?” I don’t even know what means anymore. As with every other word the Left uses to demonize people who don’t follow their fundamentalist views, I have no idea what they’re saying. Did they humanize the terrorists? No. Did they show them in cliched ways? I suppose, just as they show the Woke in cliche ways, just as One Battle After Another shows white people and ICE agents in a cliched way. This film isn’t saying “all Muslims.” It’s very specifically saying “Islamic terrorists.” And they do exist in real life, even if Hollywood is too afraid to put them in movies anymore.
Here are a few examples of what that looks like:
- Moscow Concert Hall Attack (Russia, March 22, 2024): Gunmen affiliated with ISIS-K attacked the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, killing at least 144 people and injuring over 550 others. [1]
- Palma Occupation and Massacres (Mozambique, March–April 2021): Fighters linked to the Islamic State seized the coastal town of Palma, executing a multi-day assault that left nearly 1,200 people dead and displaced tens of thousands during a prolonged occupation. [1]
- Dagestan Attacks (Russia, June 23, 2024): Coordinated militant attacks targeting Orthodox churches, synagogues, and a police post in Derbent and Makhachkala (Dagestan) resulted in around 20 deaths and numerous injuries. [1]
- Brussels Shooting (Belgium, October 16, 2023): A radicalized Tunisian national claiming allegiance to ISIS opened fire on a group of Swedish football supporters in central Brussels, killing two Swedish nationals before being tracked down and killed by police.
So it isn’t like these guys aren’t out there killing people. It’s just that Hollywood will never make movies with brown people as the villains. At least not that I’m aware of, not lately. I asked Google AI if Hollywood has made any films with Middle East Islamists as the villains as this was the answer:
Mainstream Hollywood has largely moved away from featuring Islamist extremists as villains in major studio films over the last five years, pivoting instead toward other geopolitical adversaries, sci-fi threats, or domestic antagonists.
Major studios have increasingly avoided the trope due to cultural sensitivities, criticisms of orientalism, and industry shifts toward more diverse or non-specific villain archetypes. While low-budget or independent political thrillers (such as conservative-backed or direct-to-video productions like Run Hide Fight: Infidels) occasionally touch on these themes, major blockbuster Hollywood releases from studios like Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, or Sony have avoided centering plots around Islamic terrorism during this period. Instead, recent action and thriller films have focused on cyberattacks, cartel violence, domestic extremism, or traditional geopolitical rivals.
Domestic extremism is code for “white supremacists” or Trump supporters. It doesn’t refer to Luigi Mangione, Thomas Matthew Crooks or Tyler Robinson. At least not yet. So this is yet another reason Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels is subversive. Hollywood would never make it.
It gets a rave from Film Threat’s Ethan Padgett, who writes:
The stunt work, pyrotechnics, practical effects, and marksmanship are beautifully done. Action scenes never feel redundant, and the brutality from our disgusting antagonists is appropriately shocking without going into exploitation territory. Producer Ben Shapiro is smart in tackling this material. Our heroes are men of action and believe in law and order, which is refreshing. The film is character-driven, and political commentary is integrated into the storyline through humor. From a thematic perspective, it directly addresses ideological differences between Gen-Z men and women alongside suicidal empathetic tendencies of the Leftist movement. To note, the left-leaning characters are not one dimensional and have a brief arc. The suicidal empathy angle is taken in a direction that will make you both laugh and jaw-drop in the grim direction it goes.
Run Hide Fight: Infidels is released during a key time in our history. It is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, yet we live in a world where Western civilization is fighting against the unholy alliance of Socialists and Islamists. After all, America has been fighting these radicals since the days of President Thomas Jefferson. Our nation must listen to those who know what it’s done to other countries, whether it is Brigitte Gabriel and her experience in Lebanon, or Tommy Robinson calling out the cowardice of the British government. Thankfully, there are resources that expose the evil of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Spiked and The Free Press. It doesn’t help that we have politicians with ties to this organization. I genuinely hope that Rankin’s film encourages Christians, Jews, and those of other religious groups to fight against institutions affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Overall, this is one of the better films to come from The Daily Wire. It is up there with Matt Walsh’s documentaries, What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist?. Run Hide Fight: Infidels is an exhilarating blockbuster that will bring out the fighting American spirit this fall!
Christian Toto called it a throwback action romp.
But Variety’s Todd Gilchrist speaks for probably most who cover film, writes a review dripping with sneering elitism that almost recalls Maude Lebowski reviewing the porn flick in The Big Lebowski:
Rather than making a satirical point about liberal overreach, the movie argues that all this empathy for other people — including for the Indigenous tribes whose land was seized on behalf of the school, or Palestinians trying to hold onto theirs — is a purely oppressive force. Further, it’s in direct opposition to the uncomplicated, common-sense decisions made by men like Saunders who have faced America’s real enemies.
Unsurprisingly, Rankin’s depiction of Muslims is deeply Islamophobic, although Sue Obeidi, senior vice president for the Muslim Public Affairs Council Hollywood Bureau, has rightly called the film “more ridiculous than it is offensive.” The whole movie is like that — not smart enough to actually explore the viewpoints or value systems of either Muslims or liberals, much less where they come from. Instead, the filmmaker becomes a megaphone for his producer, right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whose debate style tends to involve steamrolling his opponent with strawman arguments and acting surprised when they become exasperated.
It’s just odd that Hollywood has no ability nor any desire to talk about any of this, isn’t it? That’s probably because they are now an industry ruled by fear.
White Saviors and the New Woke Order
One of America’s best untold stories of the past ten years happened at Evergreen College in 2017. A band of students rose up to protest a professor who refused to leave campus on a “day of absence,” when all white people were expected to leave. The troublemaker was Bret Weinstein, and the students formed a real-life pitchfork mob and held the administrators hostage as they chased Weinstein into hiding.
The funny thing was, Evergreen is among the most liberal of all colleges in America, and they were claiming racism. That was only the beginning. That was the opening act. In 2020, we would feel the full force of an entire generation becoming Evergreen. Hollywood mostly pandered and buckled under the pressure, as much of American society did.
It would make the best movie, but it’s yet another Hollywood won’t dare tell. Most of them, I would bet, don’t even know about it. They have gained status inside utopia by throwing their fellow Americans under the bus. Accuse lest ye be accused. As long as you’re pointing the finger at others and calling them racists no one will come for you.
I first realized I was afflicted with white saviorism when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was accused of being “racist.” Because I stood up for the film, I was swarmed on Twitter and called a “racist,” which I would be called many times after that, even now. All of the years I’d advocated for black artists on this site were washed away as the Eye of Sauron fell upon me. I didn’t know the rules, and even if I did, I would not have followed them.
I remember the director Ava DuVernay writing me a direct message about something I wrote on the site (I didn’t actually write it, it was one of the pieces Ryan Adams proofed and spruced up but I didn’t realize what he’d written would be offenisve, but it was to DuVernay). We patched it up and reworded it but it struck me at that moment that I felt resentful over it before realizing I’d been speaking for the black community for years without realizing that wasn’t my place. It was a wake-up call to white saviorism.
When I tried to explain to social media users coming at me when they called me a racist for defending Three Billboards that I’d been so supportive in my advocacy, one of the answers that came back was, “You want a cookie?” Yeah, I guess I did want a cookie, or at least some credit for how hard I tried to shake the tree. That’s when I had to start questioning what I wanted out of it all, who I was really serving, and whether any of it was helping.
But after that, I changed the way the way I wrote about groups not my own because what was I doing anyway? I was trying to help perhaps but I was also making myself look good by making others look bad. When you are a white savior uplifting minority groups it becomes ultimately self-serving because it does not get them real power. It is temporary power that can be ripped away at a moment’s notice.
That is what disturbed me so much about last year. I believed Ryan Coogler had earned his success, and yet, in the end, his more successful movie lost to a less successful movie that reflected white saviorism. White liberals have to always be seen as the virtuous, as the good guys. They’ll throw their fellow white people under the bus to posture their moral superiority.
After last year, I realize that what this still mostly white industry wants is the same thing they’ve always wanted. Just make them look good.
A poll was conducted in 2018 that found that white liberals dumbed down their speech when talking to black and brown audiences, whereas conservatives did not.
And that, more than anything, explains why film critics on the Left see Infidels as “Islamophobic” and most on the Right do not.
Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels is a violent shoot ’em up thriller that is only subversive because of its choice of villain. There was no chance the white saviors of the Left would pass up a chance to project moral superiority. Is it good? It isn’t bad. A little too violent for my taste but it reminds me of the movies Hollywood used to make before they were captured by fundamentalism. Bring on the counter culture.
You can watch the film here.
