5 Targets That Fans Wrongly Slam for Taking ‘Both Sides’

5 Civil War

Last year’s Civil War marketed itself with a bunch of A.I. photos of destruction across America, and also with hints at the lore behind the movie’s conflict, none of which gave anyone a correct impression of what the movie was going to be. Then when audiences did watch this movie, about a bunch of journalists, they got very angry. Among other reasons, they got angry because during this crucial election year, the movie never tied its factions to actual existing political parties to explain which was to blame. 

It’s a bit of an odd reaction, for a few reasons. For starters, the movie features speeches from the evil president against whom half the country has risen up, and this president is fascist. 

The movie is quite open about this. They don’t have anyone recite his backstory and announce that he rose to fame as part of the Republican Party, but if you want to place him somewhere on the political spectrum, they chose one spot, and it’s far at one end. 

While the movie hoped to attract viewers from all sides, as any wide-release film would be wise to, you really shouldn’t accuse it of arguing for neutrality. That’s because it goes to great lengths to show the perspectives of people staying neutral in this conflict, and the takeaway at the end says that’s the wrong way to be. 

Civil War could have been a movie about how a journalist’s noble goal is to document events without bias, but it instead ends by saying this sort of dispassion makes you inhuman. It’s the strongest critique of neutrality since that episode of Futurama where someone from the planet of the Neutrals says, “If I don’t survive, tell my wife, ‘Hello.’” 

4 Bioshock Infinite

The 2013 game BioShock Infinite received tons of praise when it came out. Not only did everyone enjoy the gameplay, in which you ride rails through the sky and jump on people, but they also felt moved by its depiction of 1910s racism. The game’s world, full of religious nationalism and racist propaganda, felt positively novel in 2013. 

Today, every online conversation about the game will call it overrated. Virtually every conversation complains about one thing: After you fight this city of segregation and lynching, the common people rise up, and the game has you fight against them, too. The character you play as drops a memorable line comparing the city leader and the resistance leader, saying, “When it comes down to it, the only difference between Comstock and Fitzroy is how you spell the name.”

But the game here isn’t saying racism and antiracism are both bad. This resistance here aren’t just fighting for their rights but have used guns to literally seize the means of production. They’re now slaughtering the innocent, which is a fairly honest depiction of how such revolutions go down, if history is any guide. You might say the game is declaring that the Gilded Age and the Reign of Terror were both bad, but surely the second claim there is an understatement rather than something to get mad over. 

Aside from that, you should be wary of taking quotes from singular characters and treating them as a story’s thesis statement. When that character, Booker, says that line, he has just learned he died in an alternate timeline while fighting under Fitzroy, who is now exploiting his death for her cause. So, he isn’t feeling very kindly toward her.

Not that you need to pardon the line because you feel sorry for Booker. Quite the opposite. Booker should not be anyone’s guide in this antiracist story, as his own backstory involves multiple counts of light genocide. He’s improved since, but then the game ends (big spoiler ahead) by revealing that the evil Comstock is really one more alternate-timeline version of Booker. He might have said, “The only difference between Comstock… is how you spell the name” to equate the two sides, but that's not why the story included the line. The story included it as foreshadowing. It foreshadowed that Comstock was really the same person as a second character with a different name.

Further undermining Booker's role as a reliable arbiter of all this, the game ends with him deciding that something in him is so irredeemably evil that he must kill himself in all possible universes to stop himself from becoming that racist despot. We guess this isn’t so much a case of both sides being bad as infinite sides being bad. 

3 South Park

South Park has a reputation among people who caught a couple episodes a few decades ago and have retained a vague impression of what the show does. Apparently, it sticks to a formula where it will describe both sides of an issue and then always take the middle ground.

The truth is, many episodes do show the writers’ perspective as the sane middle ground between two sides that are both wrong. And the truth is, the correct view always is the sane middle ground between two sides that are both wrong — if the two sides are humorous caricatures on either side of your own view, caricatures that you create for the express purpose of explaining why your view is right. 

That is not the same as picking a compromise between the two mainstream perspectives, or between what Democrats and Republicans say. Go through the many lessons South Park has put forward over the years, and while you’ll find they don’t collectively fit into any one party’s platform, the idea behind each is often to state some bold position, not to compromise between anything. The clearest of these may be the episode where they argue against censorship in absolute terms, saying, “Either it’s all okay, or none of it is.” 

But never mind the idea that both sides are worthy of mockery. All sides are worthy of mockery. The real flaw with bothsidesism is when someone falsely says both sides are the same, and South Park is associated with that, too. One famous episode featured an election between a literal giant douche and a turd sandwich, and 20 years on, people blame “Douche and Turd” for turning an entire generation off voting. 

The episode did not, in fact, invent the idea that neither presidential candidate in a general election seems like a good choice. This has always been a common opinion, not just among people who see the two parties as two opposite extremes but among everyone who’s far to one side of both candidates, which makes them both seem so alike. The episode addressed this common opinion, and it ended with the lesson that because it’s such a perennial opinion, it’s not a unique situation, so you must figure out which candidate you prefer anyway and vote for them. 

A decade later, South Park brought back their douche and turd concept, labeling their Trump candidate for 2016 a giant douche and Hillary Clinton a turd sandwich. At the same time, they said electing Trump would lead to apocalyptic destruction, and they went on to have him nuke Canada. You can dislike two things and decide which one you dislike less. If a few more thousand people did that, we’d be in a much better place right now. 

2 Jon Stewart

When Stewart returned to The Daily Show in 2024, some viewers were angry that he spent many episodes mocking Joe Biden, including telling him to drop out of the race for being so old and mentally gone. People said it was as though Jon was equating Biden to Trump, though Trump remained a serious threat that needed to be fought with every resource we had. 

This criticism against Jon has died down a bit now. Somewhat, that’s because The Daily Show has since had to shift fully to criticizing the Trump administration, due to the small fact that Trump became president. Also, Stewart’s calls for Biden to drop out were vindicated, first by Biden agreeing to do so and then by internal revelations saying he really should have done so earlier. But the criticism points to a wider, misunderstood truth about how commentary works.

When a liberal commentator, who is free to talk about anything they want, reserves a disproportionate number of attacks for liberal targets, it’s not because they think these are as bad as the other side, and it’s not because they think they’re worse. It’s because it’s their side. It’s the same reason you probably spend a lot more time concerned with the temperature of your bedroom than you do the temperature of Venus. It’s closer to you, you believe you have more power to change it and you may even feel somewhat responsible for its current state, no matter how much of the blame really belongs to your spouse. 

The liberal media also had more reason to cover Biden’s declining function than they did Trump’s. They thought Biden’s decline hurt his chance of winning, while Trump’s decline didn’t hurt his (and if Trump’s did, many such commentators were okay with that). They also thought Biden’s decline would hurt his ability to govern, while they thought Trump couldn’t govern well with or without dementia. Sometimes, during his takedowns of Biden, Jon would break away to say, “And, of course, Trump is much worse. That part should go without saying.”

Oh, and when we said the show has now shifted fully to criticizing the Trump administration, that’s not quite true. It will also criticize Democrats, for failing to defend against the Trump administration. That is not, like some people think, someone twisting for the sake of criticizing both sides. It’s someone holding their own side to a higher standard because they think so poorly of the other. 

Granted, this isn’t nearly as effective an electoral strategy as constantly lying and saying your own side is perfect, but if you really do want to improve your side, rather than just to win, it’s the only way to go. 

1 Ryan

When it comes to wishy-washy people who insist on looking at both sides, the absolute worst example of this would have to be Ryan. We are referring here to Ryan from The Office, sometimes known as Ryan the temp, and how he once dedicated a toast to the troops but then amended it to say he was toasting troops on both sides.

People today post the above GIF to mock anyone guilty of equating both sides. But you need to remember that the joke here was not that Ryan refused to take a stand, to the point that he committed the ultimate betrayal and sided equally with the enemy during war. The joke was that he was speaking about respecting all people and saying every soldier is living out the same values by fighting for their country, even when only one of the two countries is correct. The joke here was that that may all be true, but it’s douchey to stand up at a party and show off how enlightened you are.

In time, everything is forgotten. You've seen the meme where Pam holds up two sheets of paper and says, “They’re the same picture”:

Today, we use that to mock people who can’t tell the difference between two things that are really different. But that wasn’t what was going on in the episode. The two things Pam was holding up really were the same picture. 

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