The below video takes a good long while to meander around to the point, and meanders around a good bit when it gets there, but the point is fairly simple: modern progressives in the entertainment industry are pushing stories of “magic” because progressive ideology is basically indistinguishable from magic. Both systems reject cause and effect and assume that the universe will bend to your will simply because you want it to. This is part of why many on the left are opposed to logic, reason, the scientific method.
I’m not opposed to magic in fiction. But I am uncomfortable with fiction that *pushes* magic as some sort of viable world view. Hell, even in the fictional worlds where magic users are the “heroes,” they seem to inevitably be dirtbags:
1) Star Wars universe: the space wizards think *nothing* of using magic to telepathically change peoples minds, to cheat them, to outright steal from them.
2) X-Men universe: in X-Men 2, Professor X freezes a whole mall full of regular people in order to chat with some of his students. Beyond the outrage on these peoples rights to go about their day without being frakked with, who knows what damage this does to them on the neurological level. At least “Logan” pointed out that this sort of thing was, indeed, A Very Bad Thing.
3) The Harry Potter universe: the wizards are *forever* screwing with the minds, senses and memories of regular people. People suffer and die in large numbers and the magic users don’t give a damn.
And magic in fiction is generally *lazy.* Magic works without rules, or at least whatever rules it might have are arcane and mutable. The best stories are those where not only the characters but the *author* are constrained by a strict set of rules (i.e. natural laws). The author and the characters then have to *think* their way to a solution. This might be a solution that the reader can look at and go “why didn’t I think of that” as opposed to “where the hell did that come from?”
And as bad as magic can be in fiction, when it’s applied in the real world it’s simply disastrous, whether it’s psychic surgeons, astrologers or wokies railing against phantom fascists as if they were demons or dementors, with solutions as divorced from reality as a Stalinistic Five Year Plan.