“My mom always said there were no monsters—no real ones—but there are.”

“Yes, there are, aren’t there?”

The first two Alien movies are marvels of modern science fiction. Both films’ plots are deceptively simple: aliens show up and wreak havoc on innocent people. However, in Current Year it has become obvious that these films are more than mindless diversions: their horror lies in their primal metaphor. They are cautionary tales about outsiders—feminists, globalists, and progressives in general—infiltrating and, if left unchecked, eventually decimating America.

Alien takes place on a starship named the Nostromo, which is an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s novel of the same name. Considering the novel is about a colony overthrown by revolutionary natives, we shall see that the name is apt. Aliens takes place in Hadley’s Hope, a small colony on a distant planet. Both settings are meant to evoke American domesticity. The Nostromo is an immense ship sailing through cold, inhospitable space. This starship is the only place that supports human life and culture. It is humanity’s home. Likewise, Aliens opens in a small colony on an untamed, unexplored planet. The colony, like the ship, is an oasis of civilization in a dangerous and otherwise unfriendly world.

Both settings, the ship and the colony, exist on the frontiers of human possibility. Both are small places of order amidst chaotic and hostile wastelands. Both invoke the archetypal Castle, or fortress of order and safety, sheltering the families within. They are places of “embattled, spiritual power,” ever on the watch.

The name “Nostromo” is Italian for “boatswain,” or the officer in charge of a ship’s crew. This word comes from the Italian “nostro uomo,” which literally means “our man.” In other words, the ship is named after a man with responsibility over others: the head of a household.

It’s no coincidence that the Nostromo is named after an Italian: it is America. Like America, the Nostromo begins with a diverse coalition of characters. We observe working-class engineers, pilots, and others involved in shipping freight and earning a living. These are people of various races and ethnic backgrounds, but all appear to be negotiating and working together towards a shared goal of prosperity.

Similarly, the colony in Aliens is made up of pioneers and researchers who will probably not live to see the fruits of their own terraforming labors. Like the American pioneers, these are not communities of the privileged, or of idle elites. They are working-class families forced by circumstance to labor together; people making it on the frontier.

Like pre-1960s Americans, both are groups of people who have no desire or need for outsider ideologies. In fact, ideological motivation amongst these characters would feel patently absurd. They are families contentedly busy building their own worlds.

However, everything explodes when these families make contact with the ultimate outsiders: the aliens. These outsiders have no discernable language or morality. The humans’ intentions appear clear and understandable: live and work in peace, form families, build a better future for rest of the human race. The aliens’ motives are unknown, and in some ways non-existent. They do not create, they merely destroy (i.e. deconstruct). The aliens are a danger to all that is living—even their spilt blood melts the floor.

The aliens are spiritual stand-ins for both the outsiders and the outsider ideologies that invaded America, complete with their accompanying nihilism and terror attendant upon their insane and destructive goals. The aliens are depicted as the antithesis of humanity. Obviously this is true of their insectoid appearance, but the difference is more than merely racial. It is the aliens’ Bugman social structure, coupled with their destructive nature, that also has everything in common with progressive ideals.

The cultural revolution of the Free Love era, with its quashing of Christian sexual mores and traditional families, is the core of this anti-American ideology. It is the same progressivism that has disrupted every part of our modern world, and the aliens symbolize it effectively. In fact, based on their actions throughout the story, if the aliens do have a goal it is simply (to quote Black Lives Matter) to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family.”

At the beginning of Alien, the ship’s crew responds to a distress call. While investigating, a white male crewmate is attacked by a creature that wraps around his mouth and face—mask-like, silencing his speech and immobilizing him. Once the man’s powers of self-expression and communication are silenced, the alien makes use of his abundant biological resources to incubate its young.

This alien, like progressivism, counts on the Nostromo’s capacity for compassion to trick its crew into bringing it aboard. The ship’s airlock is the American border; the crewmate’s body is America’s social, intellectual, and moral infrastructure. Like radical feminism or transgenderism in a free speech-affirming-America, this alien only survives by virtue of the ship’s perfectly engineered climate. And like the progressive “march through the institutions,” it can only incubate within an already healthy and full-grown body (never creating anything new of its own).

When the alien is done nourishing and strengthening itself inside of the crewmate, we are treated to the film’s most infamous scene. The demon, no longer needing its host body, bursts forth, murdering the white male and waging war on his makeshift family for merely existing.

We see the similar slow-motion implosion taking place in all major institutions across the West. Having taken advantage of our Constitutional rights, the education system, and technological innovation brought about by the generational stability of nuclear family units, progressivism labels America itself—its “host,”—the enemy.

Ripley, avatar of protective womanhood, initially refuses to even allow the infected crewmate to enter her ship. Like so many American grandmothers and great-grandmothers who abhorred abortion and rejected globalism, she senses the danger and precariousness of her home’s situation. But the erosion of morality always begins this way: the righteous desire for order is bypassed through trickery and an appeal to empathy. And so a different crewmember opens the airlock and lets the parasite-infested human back onto the ship, despite going against all decontamination (biological vetting) and safety protocols.

Ripley is the only one to stand firm in the name of following the Law, while her captain and others appeal to hysterical emotion. It is her courage and tenacity that keeps her alive as she watches the alien dispatch her shipmates and eventually destroy the ship. In the end, Ripley only survives by exiting the Nostromo—which she correctly sees as a lost cause—in an escape pod.

The sequel, Aliens, continues the story of American families attacked by outsiders from the beyond. It begins with our heroine, Ripley, learning that her only child, a daughter, has died while she was away, trapped in hypersleep for half a century. Ripley’s world disintegrates. She then discovers a surrogate daughter in Newt, a young girl whose entire family was killed by aliens on the colony of Hadley’s Hope. Both female characters long to return to the familial roles they once inhabited.

The ensuing war of this mother and daughter becomes a war for the survival of their newly-formed family unit. In the world of Aliens, the family is the most sacred of coalitions. Ripley’s family stands in stark contrast to alien society, which is seemingly devoid of families. Aliens only exist as part of the the perfect progressive utopia: individuals, living in pods, with no discernible familial bonds.

And while they seem to have no familial relationships, we do learn that aliens are part of a matriarchy. They are ruled by a queen. This queen is a mother to countless fatherless children, all of which appear bereft of any human emotion or human concerns for things like beauty, justice, or mercy. This matriarchal society, the dream of the Longhouse, is the antithesis of American culture and values. The thought of our world being turned into theirs is truly obscene.

These films illustrate once again how some of the most popular science fiction is a seeming rejection of the widely-accepted narrative that American culture has slowly but surely “progressed” towards a modern technological utopia. Instead, they are a somber depiction of disordered reality. They tap into our fears of how outsiders have and will use our structures and values against us, until their goals are met.

As long as death cults continue to press for the destruction of American families, these films will continue to spawn sequels and spin-offs. This is because, like all horror, they reflect our anxieties over abandoning traditional morality. The lesson in both films is clear: when you’re eking out a life in an environment that’s actively seeking to destroy you, be extremely wary of who or what you let in that airlock.

Giordano J. Lahaderne is the author of The Mambo Wizard: Breakfast is Served! available now from amazon.com/dp/B09WRG9V12/

Follow him on Twitter @giordano_lives