https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3akydj/conspiracy-theorists-think-alex-garlands-civil-war-is-actually-programming-americans-for-civil-war

The trailer for Civil War, a new film about the crack up of America from Alex Garland and A24, dropped like a bomb on the internet. The film is coming out next year in April, it’ll tell the story of a war journalist, played by Kirsten Dunst, traveling with her family across the U.S. as the country goes to war with itself. Right wing grifters online have already decided that the film is “predictive programming”—an example of shadowy deep state elites using their control of the media to prepare the population for an actual civil war.

Predictive programming is a long-running conspiracy theory that claims powerful Hollywood elites are using the media to program the populace. The idea is that, at the behest of the Illuminati or somesuch, Hollywood makes films like Civil War to normalize the idea of conflict between the states. Philosopher Alan Watts coined the term and it’s been used ever since to explain away the eerie similarities people find between art and the real world.