In a media landscape increasingly shaped by outrage, algorithms, and corporate consolidation, Network feels less like a 1976 satire and more like a prophecy — especially in the wake of Congress’ billionaire tax cut.
What once seemed like over-the-top fiction—the idea of a news anchor having a televised breakdown, or a corporation treating human emotion as a marketable commodity—now reads like a documentary. The film’s biting critique of media spectacle, profit-driven news, and public manipulation hits harder today than ever before.
With Ned Beatty’s thunderous monologue serving as the sermon of a system where commerce rules all, Network doesn’t just hold up—it warns us, loud and clear, about the world we’re already living in.
“So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.’” — Genesis 6:7
With the rise of Trumpism and faux Christian nationalism, this kind of thinking isn’t just back—it’s juiced up like a gym rat on a pharmaceutical bender. It’s on a full-blown performance-enhancing cocktail of delusion, rage, and Old Testament cosplay.
This is one of the reasons I’m an atheist. Not because I hate community or ritual or even reverence. But because this is what people call divine.
A deity so disappointed in humans that he kills everything else too—animals, birds, insects, even the worms crawling through the dirt—because he has regrets? Sorry, no.
What did the red panda do?
And let’s be honest: this isn’t some obscure passage. This is Noah’s Ark, the Sunday school darling, the bedtime story of choice for millions. People decorate their kids’ rooms with cartoon giraffes climbing aboard their floating zoo of doom.
But it’s not adorable. It’s appalling.
You want moral clarity? Try this: If your god drowns puppies, maybe don’t worship it.
Yet here we are, in 2025, watching a cult of Christian identity politics repackage this exact brand of cruelty as strength.
They’re not content with private belief anymore. They want blasphemy laws. Forced births. Books banned. A Bible in one hand and a voter suppression bill in the other.
Trump didn’t invent this. He just saw the market for it.
He gave white evangelical America what it always wanted: a strongman who hates the same people they do, wrapped in scripture and sprayed orange.
And stories like Noah’s flood are the emotional blueprint for this theology of annihilation.
You don’t fix things. You punish. You cleanse. You wipe it all out and call it holy.
It’s not justice. It’s vengeance with a halo. It’s not faith. It’s fanaticism.
And that quote? It’s not ancient wisdom, but the slogan of every tyrant who ever declared himself righteous.
