In the New York Times' critics' list of the best films of the year, there's this little riff from A.O. Scott:
Last spring, with #OscarsSoWhite in the rearview mirror and Donald J. Trump’s victory on the as-yet-unglimpsed horizon, I reviewed Jeremy Saulnier’s "Green Room." It struck me at the time as a smart, brutal, slightly contrived thriller about members of a rock band battling a gang of white-supremacist punks in the Northwest. In retrospect, though, it seems possible that this scrappy little indie (which just missed making the list below) was something more than a bit of nasty fun. Maybe it was a harbinger, an unheeded political signal amid the pop-cultural noise, a pre-emptive allegory of battles to come.
Am I reading too much into it now, or was I not paying close enough attention then?
Emphasis mine. I can't imagine I was the only critic to mention this at the time, but I noted what seemed like a relatively clear parallel in my review:
Green Room comes along at an interesting cultural moment, given the rise of the so-called "alt right"—the meme-proficient cohort of white supremacists that has flocked to Donald Trump—and the increase in rural heroin consumption.
So it seems to me the answer is relatively obvious: YOU WERE NOT PAYING CLOSE ENOUGH ATTENTION THEN.
Then again, maybe it isn't so obvious. Maybe it was just because liberals were deep in their own civil war, but one of the great frustrations felt by conservative opponents of Trump in the primaries was that very few people really seemed to care that much about the barrage of anti-Semitic nonsense coming from Trump-backing goons until he was the Republican nominee. Only then did much of the mainstream press seem to realize that the alt right was, you know, kind of gross. And then! Then we were treated to ridiculous pieces asking "why ... the Jewish right looked away?" when it came to the alt right. As if conservatives, particularly conservative Jews, hadn't been fighting against the alt right for months and months, to no avail. As if their Twitter mentions hadn't been turned to racist trash during most of the primary.
Bleh. Whatever. You're all paying attention now, I bet.