When “Neon Gods” was released as the first single from Ad Astra on February 22, 2022, its most immediate political reference was the United States. Donald Trump had refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. The lie of a stolen election had created an alternate reality powerful enough to help drive the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Two days after the single came out, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A song about propaganda, fabricated threats, and political submission suddenly carried another meaning that had not been part of its original conception.
But “Neon Gods” was never meant to be a song about one politician, one country, or one moment. It is about a mechanism. Fear becomes hatred. Hatred needs an enemy. Repetition replaces evidence. Political loyalty turns into faith. And eventually, people submit to leaders and ideologies they helped elevate in the first place.
More than four years later, the song feels less like a snapshot of its time and more like a warning that was not taken seriously enough.
The gods we create
The title naturally echoes Paul Simon’s “The Sound of Silence” and its image of people bowing to the “neon god” they created themselves. In “Neon Gods,” the singular becomes plural. Our media landscape no longer has one center of authority. It has political leaders, platforms, influencers, media channels, ideologies, and closed information spaces competing for devotion.
The neon light is bright and impossible to ignore, but it is artificial. It creates a surface rather than clarity.
That is what the gods in this song represent. They are not gods in a religious sense. They are manufactured authorities that demand something resembling religious obedience:
At the altar of indifference
To the Neon Gods you pray
A propaganda echo chamber
This death cult you obey
The crucial shift happens when a political claim is no longer judged by whether it can be supported. It is judged by who said it. If the right leader makes the claim, it must be true. If reality contradicts the leader, reality becomes the enemy.
This is no longer ordinary political support. It is the surrender of one’s own judgment.
Fear, enemies, and alternate realities
“Planting the seeds of hate” describes hatred as something cultivated. It rarely appears out of nowhere. It begins with real uncertainty: fear of economic decline, social change, loss of status, or loss of control over one’s life.
Propaganda does not examine those fears in search of solutions. It exploits them. Complex problems are reduced to a list of convenient enemies: migrants, minorities, queer people, the media, scientists, political opponents, or some hidden conspiracy supposedly controlling everything from behind the scenes.
The enemy can change. The method remains the same.
The next step is not necessarily to make everyone believe one specific lie. Creating enough doubt can be sufficient. When every event is surrounded by five contradictory explanations, truth itself begins to look inaccessible. People stop asking which claim is supported by evidence. They ask which source belongs to their side.
That is how an echo chamber protects itself. Journalists who contradict it are called corrupt. Courts are declared illegitimate. Scientists are dismissed as agents of the system. Former allies become traitors. Every attempted correction is absorbed into the conspiracy and presented as further proof of it.
The line “With us or against us” removes all space between loyalty and hostility. Disagreement becomes betrayal. Politics stops being a difficult negotiation between competing interests and becomes a struggle between absolute good and absolute evil.
Since the song was written, the technology behind such alternate realities has advanced rapidly. Generative AI can produce convincing images, voices, videos, and endless variations of the same false narrative. Automated accounts can create the impression of mass support. Different groups can be shown different versions of reality, each tailored to their own fears.
AI has no ideology of its own. But it has made manipulation faster, cheaper, and more personal.
The myth of a glorious past
The song becomes most explicit in these lines:
Evoke the golden glories
Of a distant mythic past
White supremacy’s always lurking
To be emboldened again
Authoritarian movements often promise national rebirth. To make that promise work, they invent a past that was pure, orderly, homogeneous, and great until someone took it away.
“Make America Great Again” is one obvious example, but the mechanism is not uniquely American. Similar stories appear across Europe and elsewhere. The nation was supposedly united until migrants arrived, minorities demanded equal rights, social values changed, or liberal democracy weakened a more “natural” order.
The past must remain vague because precision would expose the lie. Great when, exactly? And great for whom? For racial minorities? For women? For queer people? For those with the wrong religion, ancestry, or political beliefs?
This does not mean that every criticism of migration policy, integration, or rapid social change is racist or fascist. Treating every disagreement that way would be both inaccurate and politically useless. The line is crossed when belonging is defined by ethnicity or ancestry, when equal rights become conditional, and when some people are treated as permanent outsiders in the country they call home.
White supremacy and ethnonationalism do not always present themselves openly. They often hide behind cleaner terms, coded language, and carefully constructed deniability. The presentation becomes more modern. The hierarchy of human worth underneath it remains the same.
Old images, modern propaganda
The lyric video, produced by Black Sheep Media with screenplay, artwork, and editing by Igor Polyansky, adds another layer to the song (video at the end of this post). It draws on historical movie posters and the visual world associated with Fritz Lang: monumental faces, tiny human figures, machines, eyes, commanding hands, controlled crowds, and invisible networks of power.
These images are not used as nostalgic decoration. Their form already speaks the language of propaganda.
Early movie posters had to create an immediate emotional effect through oversized faces, sharp diagonals, dramatic contrast, limited colors, and powerful symbols. Today, thumbnails, memes, short videos, and political social media graphics often serve a similar purpose. They simplify, intensify, and overwhelm before the viewer has time to reflect.
Metropolis provides the clearest parallel. Human beings build the machine and then become subject to its rhythm. Workers lose their individuality and move as a mass. The machine becomes a modern Moloch demanding sacrifice. This reflects the central idea behind “Neon Gods”: we create systems and symbols, give them power, and then bow before them.
The Dr. Mabuse films add the idea of invisible control. Power operates through networks, shifting identities, manipulation, and the inability to tell what is real or who is responsible. Spione connects surveillance with control over information. M shows how fear can take hold of an entire city and turn suspicion into mob judgment, even when the original danger is real.
The imagery belongs to another century. The political psychology does not.
From warning to political power
The lie about the 2020 US election did not remain an online conspiracy. The official House investigation concluded that Trump knowingly spread false claims in an effort to overturn the result, and that those claims helped provoke violence on January 6.
Donald Trump is now president again. The movement that transformed an electoral defeat into a conspiracy narrative has returned to government power. The 2026 V-Dem Democracy Report describes a severe decline in liberal democracy in the United States, including attacks on institutional checks, media, and dissenting voices. The report is an academic assessment, not an uncontested official verdict. But its warning should not be dismissed simply because it is uncomfortable.
In Europe, far-right movements have also gained visibility, votes, and influence. German authorities reported another substantial rise in the number of people assigned to the right-wing extremist spectrum in 2025. The national details differ, but the recurring patterns are recognizable: manufactured threats, contempt for pluralism, the normalization of dehumanizing language, and the promise to restore a mythical social order.
When an alternate reality becomes the basis of government policy, propaganda is no longer only shaping debate. It is shaping institutions, rights, and lives.
Why my position is humanist and antifascist
My position is clear: I oppose fascism in every form, and I support democratic resistance to it. I do so because I am a humanist.
Fascism is not merely an opinion I happen to dislike. It elevates nation, race, obedience, and power above the individual human being. It divides people into categories of greater and lesser worth. It needs enemies, suppresses dissent, and treats pluralism as weakness. Wherever it gains power, freedom and dignity become privileges granted by those at the top.
Humanism begins with the opposite principle: every person has equal dignity. That dignity does not depend on nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, social status, or political usefulness. No leader, nation, party, platform, or ideology stands above it.
For me, opposition to fascism follows directly from that belief. It is not a fashionable label, a party affiliation, or an excuse to stop thinking critically. Not every action or statement made in the name of antifascism is automatically right. Violence, dehumanization, and contempt for democratic rights do not become acceptable because someone claims a noble purpose. Every movement and every method remains open to criticism.
But that necessary distinction must never become an excuse for passivity. The misuse of the word “antifascism” does not invalidate the principle behind it. Democratic antifascism is not the mirror image of fascism. Refusing racial hierarchy, political submission, and the destruction of equal rights is a basic human responsibility.
Indifference is not neutrality when people are being stripped of their dignity. Silence does not remain empty. It creates room for those who are willing to fill it with hatred.
No new gods
The final words of the song are deliberately simple:
We’re all humans
No Neon Gods
The answer to one cult of personality cannot be another. The answer to a closed ideology cannot be a competing form of submission. We do not need new idols, new absolute truths, or new excuses to divide human beings into those who belong and those who do not.
We need a standard that survives political fear, tribal loyalty, and the seduction of power.
For me, that standard is the equal dignity of every human being.
No one stands above it.
No Neon Gods.