Discerning the movie “Independence Day,” 28 years later

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 05, 2025

Pope Leo XIV’s prayer intention for the month of July is “that we might again learn how to discern, to know how to choose paths of life and reject everything that leads us away from Christ and the Gospel.”

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I thought about that intention after seeing on the 4th of July, for the first time in nearly thirty years, the movie Independence Day. My wife and I have fond memories of seeing the film when it first came out. The summer of 1996 was a great time to be alive. Something about Independence Day—Will Smith and crew zapping those aliens and saving America—seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the time.

Our reactions in 2025 were different. Wrote my missus on Facebook:

I just watched “Independence Day” and I don’t think it aged very well. Definitely questioning my taste in movies. I thought it was so great at the time. Also, it’s hard to watch knowing that 9/11 is right around the corner. Eerily similar optics.

I read her post, and Pope Leo on discernment, at about the same time. And it got me thinking.

About 15 years ago The Public Discourse ran a fascinating article by Matthew J. Franck, “Same-Sex Marriage and Public Opinion: Spirals, Frames, and the Seinfeld Effect.” Its point was that 1990s movies and tv shows were subtly softening us up for the revolution that was coming. (Remember “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”?)

I thought I saw some of that when we watched Independence Day. Again, I loved the movie at the time. In fact, I remember Charles Krauthammer on Fox News declaring the film a win for conservatives back then, because it extolled old-fashioned values.

But watching it again all these years later, I don’t agree. I don’t just mean because of the love interest being a stripper, the cohabitation, divorce, etc. I get why ‘90s conservatives saw past that to the virtues the film was extolling.

I mean, as my wife said, the foreshadowing of 9/11. But also the foreshadowing of the War on Terror. The film seemed almost like it was prepping us mentally for it, in a way similar to how Seinfeld, Will and Grace, Ellen, etc., were prepping us for same-sex marriage. Independence Day even seemed to be prepping us for swiping out patriotism with globalism.

On the surface, of course, it’s a very pro-American movie. But under the surface, it’s a patriotism of a very neocon type. An American-led global alliance against the alien “locusts.” And a war whose victory means, in the fictional President’s words, that the 4th of July “will no longer be an American holiday.” He meant because the victory on that day will belong to the whole world. But the absence of the word “just” in that sentence, as in “the 4th of July will no longer be JUST an American holiday” is telling. It feels like on the surface they have us cheering for some pro-American butt-kicking, while under the surface the writers are setting us up for the dissolving of such things into a new gooey globalism. Which was exactly the project being pursued by our elites at the time—and ever since.

Sounds crazy, I know. But didn’t we just experience a similar coincidence—and one more compressed in time—with the plot of the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun: Maverick in 2022 and Operation Midnight Hammer, the real-life attack on Iran, just a few weeks ago? Cruise’s character must destroy a uranium enrichment facility buried deep underground in a rogue country, by having his jet target the facility’s entrance. Midnight Hammer likewise had to target Iranian nuclear facilities hidden in a mountain, with precision strikes aimed at the ventilation shafts. In both the fictional and the real scenarios, the attacks were understood to have stopped a nuclear weapons program that was about to become operational.

Was Independence Day softening us up for the War on Terror, the way other pop culture in the ‘90s softened us up for same-sex marriage? Was Top Gun: Maverick softening us up for Operation Midnight Hammer?

Again, I know it sounds crazy. But are pop culture psy-ops by our national security apparatus really that unfathomable? If the-powers-that-be did seed 1990s pop culture with the antecedents of the coming LGBT revolution, as The Public Discourse alleged in 2010, why would they not do it to us on other issues as well?

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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