Are Zombie Shows Metaphors for the Camp of the Saints?
11/23/2016
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Zombies have of course been big in 21st Century pop culture. One surmise is that they serve as a metaphor for discomfort about mass immigration and the threat of it accelerating, as in Germany in 2015.

This was most explicitly brought out in the 2013 movie starring Brad Pitt, based on the novel by Mel Brooks’ son Max Brooks, World War Z.

A global epidemic of zombieism destroys most nations. The most intelligent country, Israel, survives longer than most by building a big, beautiful wall to keep out the zombie hordes, but …

All during the election campaign, we were inundated by tweets from professional campaign consultants laughing at the lack of sophistication and spending of Trump’s campaign staff. For example, Josh Marshall wrote in August:

The Secret Behind Trump’s Comically Bad Digital Campaign?

ByJOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 22, 2016, 3:47 PM EDT

Since the election, however, Trump’s most trusted adviser, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Kushner’s analytic expert Brad Parscale of low-cost San Antonio, have been a little less secretive about how they got so much more bang for their buck than did, say, poor Mitt Romney. A Forbes article about Kushner mentions:
Television and online advertising? Small and smaller. Twitter and Facebook would fuel the campaign, as key tools for not only spreading Trump’s message but also targeting potential supporters, scraping massive amounts of constituent data and sensing shifts in sentiment in real time.

“We weren’t afraid to make changes. We weren’t afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn’t working, we would kill it quickly,” Kushner says. “It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked.”

This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration.

I don’t have cable TV so I’ve never seen The Walking Dead. Is it a metaphor for immigration?

[Comment at Unz.com]

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