Politically Incorrect Villain / Live-Action TV

Politically Incorrect Villains in live-action TV.

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• After being revealed as The Mole, Agent Ward of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. feels the need to make a rather sexist speech to Maria Hill insinuating that she's only kept around for eye candy purposes.
• And Then There Were None (2015):
  • Blore, in this adaptation, did not merely give false evidence against an innocent man that resulted in the man's later death in prison. Instead, Blore arrested a gay man for cottaging (homosexuality being illegal in England at that time) and then beat him to death in the jail cell. Although Blore initially denies the crime with the usual cliched excuses for prisoners who die in custody, the torment of seeing everyone killed one-by-one finally makes him feel remorse and sympathy for the man he murdered.
  • The original novel's depiction of Isaac Morris is antisemitic, with characters uncritically referring to him as a "jewboy" whose Jewish sensibilities allow him to instantly work out how rich someone is. In the series, this is reframed to foreshadow how unpleasant Emily Brent is; when Isaac Morris' name is mentioned, she remarks that you'll find Jews at the bottom of any trouble.
• Angel:
  • Billy could even uncover the latent homicidal-hatred-of-women in other men, like a virus. This power is explained as bringing a primordial part of the male psyche to the surface and putting it in charge of his brain. Which definitely borders on Unfortunate Implications, implying all men secretly hate women (but then this is Joss Whedon).
  • When Angelus appears in Season 4, he uses the word "retarded" practically every other sentence. Also, most of his Hannibal Lectures to the team have misogynistic or racial overtones, although that may just have been him trying to get under their skin.
  • Mostly Played for Laughs, but in "The Girl in Question", the head of the Italian Wolfram & Heart branch has a lot of spite towards gypsies. To be fair, they show spite when trying to assist Angel, who was cursed by gypsies.
• Big Sky: Legarski expresses some standard right-wing complaints of how America went downhill, that political correctness goes too far, verging off into misogyny and racism, claiming he wants to save young people falling to immorality while also being a murderous human trafficker who believes the women he does this to deserve it for them being promiscuous.
• Black Lightning (2018):
  • The ASA chose a city with a large African American population, notorious for racial tension, to do experiments to make people docile; there's no way they would've chosen a white city to do that. The obvious implication is that they don't want black people to fight against injustice subjected upon them.
  • Martin Proctor of the same group makes a point of how he wants to kill Black Lightning's "black ass", and in the Season 1 finale every other line out of his mouth expresses his bigotry for black people, while quoting "Make America Great Again".
• The Boys (2019):
  • Ezekiel and the Believe Expo spread homophobic propaganda that is at least a decade past its expiration date, much to Hughie and Annie's disgust, although Ezekiel turns out to be a case of Armored Closet Gay.
  • Homelander is most certainly racist and ableist; he refers to Arabs as "camel jockeys" and maims/kills a Seven prospect who is blind because he doesn't want a "cripple" on his team. He also willingly associates with Stormfront, only showing discomfort at her peddling the white genocide conspiracy theory to his son. Additionally, Homelander's constant quips that Becca is raising Ryan to be a pussy or "like a girl" strongly indicate he's a misogynist. Plus, he has nothing but contempt for non-Supes (and pretty much everybody who isn't him), believing their only lot in life is to grovel at his feet.
    Homelander: No, no! How many times do I have to tell you? We don't need a fucking Master Race, I'm the master race, that's the point. That's the whole point.
  • Even before her racist attitudes are shown on screen, Stormfront views non-powered humans with Condescending Compassion. When chasing Kimiko and her brother through an apartment building she kills a black family for no reason and calls Kimiko's brother a "yellow bastard" when she kills him. Her behavior dates back to the 30s when she was originally Frederick Vought's wife and his first successful test subject. In the 70s she was known as "Liberty", murdering a young black man she accused of robbery. It seems that Stormfront just mutates her ideas according to her time passing from a literal Nazi in the 30s to alt-right in modern times holding far-right white supremacist ideas and believes in the white genocide conspiracy theory.
  • Blue Hawk is a Straw Character for critics of the Black Lives Matter movement, who speaks almost exclusively in dog whistles like "All Lives Matter," "blacks are predisposed to be aggressive and criminal", and "tough on crime." However, it's implied that his contempt isn't reserved for just black people but non-powered humans in general like Homelander, as he cheerfully reminds A-Train that they were all trained to "dominate totally" when dealing with civilians and shouts "Supe Lives Matter!" when faced with an angry crowd.
  • Downplayed by Captain America expy Soldier Boy who's been around since the early 20th century like Stormfront and barely changed his views since then. He hazed his sidekick to the point of abuse because Misery Builds Character, hit on Mallory with every stereotypically sexist line in the book, and when returning to America after having been a Russian captive for the past 40 years he scoffs at a gay couple walking down the street. However, despite helping the CIA smuggle cocaine into black neighborhoods he's not shown to be racist, as he had high praise for Bill Cosby and the Mujahideen. Also, unlike, say, Homelander or Stormfront, he doesn't actively antagonize anyone who isn't a straight white man.
• The fifth season of Breaking Bad introduces a group of neo-Nazis who end up playing a very large role in the events of the season. However, their beliefs border on being an Informed Attribute. Apart from having a few swastika tattoos, they never do or say anything particularly racist, and their designation as Nazis seems to just be a shorthand way of saying "these guys are bad news." The only exception is Kenny's bizarre hatred of bike helmets and their mocking of Jesse crying during his confession video.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Superpowered, psychotic misogynist priest Caleb is a proud and vocal misogynist. Every time Buffy fails to defeat him he loudly chalks it up to her being female.
  • There's Warren, too. Being a misogynist in a Whedon work is a bad career move. The number of times he uses the word "bitch" would make a good drinking game.
  • Angelus and his constant jibes at the wheelchair-bound Spike. He's got a million of 'em, ladies and gentlemen.
• Community:
  • This is Pierce Hawthorne's defining character trait.
    Shirley: You have literally introduced me to strangers as "the black woman".
    Troy: He used to think I was Shirley's nephew. He doesn't anymore. Now, he thinks we're cousins.
    Pierce: You're not?
    Abed: He still thinks I'm a terrorist.
    Pierce: If you're not, I apologize. If you are, I'm a hero. I'm willing to take those odds.
    Annie: You said I have a "crafty Jew brain"!
    Pierce: Nobody knows how to take a compliment anymore!
  • His father, Cornelius Hawthorne, is even worse to the point of being able to find some bigoted reason to hate basically anyone.
  • The false Messiah in "Studies of Modern Movement" mentions that he wrote a song about race mixing entitled "Don't You Do It!"
  • Richie and Carl claim that the point of being gay is to get a job just by being gay and then "do it as well as the normals" (their words).
• Cathedral of the Sea: The chief inquisitor Nicolas burns Jews to death because he blames them for crucifying Christ.
• Criminal Minds:
  • The episode "Limelight" features Jeremy Andrus, a serial killer who is severely misogynistic, to the point that he refers to women using the words "it" and "bleeder".
  • The episode "The Tribe" also features Jackson "The Grandfather" Cally", a cult leader who wishes to show the world what "savage animals" the Apache tribe "really" are.
• Davy Crockett (1954): The second episode, Davy Crockett Goes to Congress, features this heavily. In order of appearance:
  • The episode starts with Davy and Russell trying to become homesteaders in western Tennessee, only to find that they've moved into the territory of Bigfoot Mason, who's well on his way to becoming the local Small-Town Tyrant by running local Indian families off of land he then ads to his own. Davy accepts the position of local magistrate at the urging of one of the more compassionate community members... and makes it his first job to bring Bigfoot to justice.
  • After Bigfoot and his posse are arrested, Amos Thorpe, a lawyer friendly to them, defends them in court and then tries to run for office as the new district's congressman... with his campaign funded by the money Bigfoot made from the Indian land grabs. He barely appears in the story itself, but the prospect of being represented by him is what disgusts Davy enough to run against him, and end up in Congress.
  • Finally, the entire United States Congress becomes this at the end of the episode when they pass the Indian Removal Act ensuring the forced relocation of thousands of Indians to beyond the Mississippi. This prompts Crockett to resign his position in disgust, though not before giving his fellow legislators an incendiary "The Reason You Suck" Speech on his way out.^note While the details are fudged for narrative purposes, the Act itself is Truth in Television, as is Crockett's opposition to it, and, sadly, his inability to prevent it.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Master, particularly his Jacobi and Simm-incarnations.
    The Master (Jacobi): Killed by an insect... a girl! How... inappropriate.^note The "girl" in question is a humanoid insect.
    The Master (Simm): [to Martha^note Black woman and Jack^note Queer immortal] Oh look, it's the girly and the freak! Though I'm not sure which is which...
    • Regenerating into an over-the-top Edwardian lady also pushes him into Straw Hypocrite territory.
    • When the Simm Master returns in "The Doctor Falls", he's still sexist, and seems rather put out by the idea he's going to become a woman... which doesn't stop him flirting with her.
  • The Toymaker, in his first appearance in "The Celestial Toymaker", wears the garb of a Chinese Mandarin, despite having the appearance of a Caucasian man. In his return nearly 60 years later in "The Giggle", he's unapologetically racist, sexist, and at the very least anti-trans. Whether or not he genuinely possesses these views or is merely playing the role as part of the 'Game of the 21st Century', however, is more ambiguous.
  • Lady Cassandra from "The End of The World" and "New Earth" is one of the most racist and elitist characters in the show. She considers herself the "last human" and looks down on everybody else as mongrels, despite the fact that just like Rose points out, she has mutilated herself through plastic surgery so many times that she hardly resembles a human being even physically anymore. Since Cassandra later recognizes Rose as a "pure-blooded" human like her, Cassandra herself might be a parody and deconstruction of the usual white supremacist villain, perhaps, considering that she and Rose represent past and future British values Cassandra might represent the old protestant conservatives, going so far as to snatch Rose's body in order to live on as a "pure" human. Since Rose fits her racial eugenics, she is forced to carry on Cassandra's personality because their "purity" somehow makes them superior to everybody else. In a bit of a subversion, Cassandra does value loyalty a lot and has a fondness for the people that prove themselves to her.
  • "Human Nature" features an already fairly unlikeable snobby public schoolboy who then snidely comments to Martha, who's working undercover as a maid, "with hands that colour, how can you tell when anything's clean?" This was more to cement his unsympathetic nature rather than his evil nature, as a few scenes later he dies at the hands of some aliens in such a way that the audience is not meant to feel sorry for him.
  • While the villain of "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" is already pretty unlikable (he killed an entire crew of hibernating aliens just to steal the dinosaurs they were transporting), he reaches new levels of cruelty when he threatens the Doctor into handing over Nefertiti. She leaves with him voluntarily, and he gleefully talks about how he wants to "break" her.
  • In "Thin Ice", the very first thing that the villainous Lord Sutcliffe does is to start racially abusing black companion Bill the instant that he sees her. The Doctor punches him.
  • Krasko from "Rosa" is a racist time traveller from the far future who is trying to prevent the American Civil Rights Movement from happening by preventing Rosa Parks' famous bus ride.
  • In "The Star Beast", once The Meep reveals their true colours, they refer to Rose Noble (a transgender girl) as Donna's "weird child", much to Donna's fury.
• Doom Patrol (2019): The Bureau of Normalcy are a covert government organization obsessed with imprisoning and destroying individuals they view as abnormal. This would be enough to put them at odds with our heroes, but it's also implied that they targeted Larry Trainor and Danny the Street specifically due to them respectively being gay and non-binary.
• The Farscape episode "Coup by Clam" features a security guard named Mekken who is extremely coarse and misogynistic (and it isn't just him — all the females of his native planet are badly oppressed). When Scorpius accompanies him on his tour of Moya to make sure he doesn't try anything underhanded, the guard uses the opportunity to loudly voice his relief that Moya is "controlled" by a male Pilot, among other things. And when he discovers that the mechanic he's guarding is actually a woman, he attempts to kill both her and Chiana — right before Scorpius breaks his neck.
• The Villain of the Week in the Firefly episode "Heart of Gold", Rance Burgess, is misogynistic to such an extent that he apparently forces a traitorous prostitute to, well... suck him off in front of his lynch mob, in order to prove his superiority over women.
• The Flash (1990): The episode "Ghost in the Machine" has the titular Ghost use the term "colored" once when he realizes that his old archfoe, the Nightshade, is an African-American man.
• In the For the People episode "Rahowa", Jay is forced to defend a white supremacist accused of shooting a politician. His closing argument, though expressing that there is plenty of reasonable doubt that said neo-Nazi was actually responsible, doesn't mince words about him still being a terrible person.
• Fresh Meat: Ralph, who's homophobic, sexist, and compares the struggles of being rich to being black.
• Game of Thrones:
  • King Joffrey Baratheon is a He-Man Woman Hater, showing basically no respect for any of the women around him (which, to be fair, is not much more respect than he shows anyone else) and stating in "Dark Wings, Dark Words" that intelligent women do as they're told. Also, when speaking about his late uncle Renly, a not-so-closeted homosexual, he says he considered "making his perversion punishable by death". Of course, this is more to the viewers than the other characters, since it's Medieval European Fantasy, and this view was the norm in actual Medieval Europe, with homosexuality usually being punishable by death — it would be more surprising if it wasn't. "The Lion and the Rose" has his re-enactment of the War of the Five Kings with dwarf entertainers. In addition to insulting several of his guests, his in-laws and his uncle at the same time, the quiet reaction from most of the crowd while Joffrey giggles like a madman speaks volumes for how offensive they find the performance.
  • Played with in regard to his grandfather, Lord Tywin Lannister.
    • He refers to the Northerners as "unwashed", but would treat women and savages with fairness according to their competence.
    • Tywin expresses similar disdain of homosexuals to Joffrey, albeit not nearly as hatefully. He views homosexuals as basically being mentally ill, showing what might border on Condescending Compassion. Tywin also acknowledges and admires homosexuals who show competence and ability, such as when he had Ser Loras Tyrell (the lover of the above mentioned Renly) assisting him in the vanguard for the Battle of Blackwater and says that Ser Loras is a gifted knight who would make an excellent addition to the highly respected Kingsguard for his grandson due to his abilities, regardless of how Tywin personally feels about Loras being gay.
    • Similarly to Joffrey, he expresses a disdain for women but when Cersei assumes he doesn't let her 'contribute' because she's a woman, he does make the (quite correct) point that he distrusts his daughter because she's a Smug Snake, not because she's a woman. He names The Un-Favourite Tyrion as Hand of the King in his stead after Joffrey kills Ned Stark because he wants Tyrion to do damage control, something he rightly assumes Cersei isn't capable of doing. However, despite Tywin's opinion of her intelligence, it becomes clear that he sees Cersei as a brood mare to be married off to make connections and babies precisely because she's a woman. As for Tyrion, though he's willing to put Tyrion to work and doesn't deny his skills, he still hates Tyrion because he's a dwarf (as well as the fact that he blames Tyrion for killing his wife, Joanna, in childbirth) and thus 'not a presentable Lannister', refusing to name Tyrion as his heir so long as Jaime, the Golden Boy of the family, may potentially take up that role. Though Jaime's vows to the Kingsguard disqualify him from serving that role, Tywin is convinced he can talk/bribe/extort Jaime into quitting somehow, coming awfully close in Season 4.
  • In the History and Lore feature on the Dance of Dragons, Viserys is shown to be misogynistic against Rhaenyra's faction.
  • King Euron Greyjoy is strongly implied to be an ableist, given his disrespectful attitude towards Jamie, Tyrion, and his nephew Theon in particular. He's also rather misogynistic, believing that women should work as servants and laborers for an army instead of fighting on the front lines or holding a position of power.
• Glee:
  • Resident Straight Gay Smug Snake Sebastian Smythe cements his descent to full-on villain by insulting Camp Gay Kurt Hummel's fashion choices with a sexist slur, and offering to have his father, an Amoral Attorney, throw Spicy Latina Santana Lopez "in prison with the rest of her relatives"... or deliver them a piñata.
  • Sue is also extremely politically incorrect, with her constant fat jokes towards Finn and Mercedes, essentially forcing her cheerleaders to follow dangerous starvation diets, transphobic comments towards Unique, and her habit of giving everyone (usually insulting) nicknames based on their race, age, disability, sexual orientation, and body type. The one thing she's surprisingly sensitive about is mental disability, as she becomes fiercely protective of a girl with Down's Syndrome who tries out for cheerleading squad, and it's eventually revealed that she has a sister with Down's as well, whom she loves very much.
• Downplayed with Arc Villain Dr. Han in The Good Doctor. He's an arrogant Dr. Jerk who torments the medical residents studying under him with his impossible standards, and reassigns the Idiot Savant protagonist Shaun against his will because he believes Shaun's Hollywood Autism makes him a liability before firing him when he has a meltdown trying to confront him over it. While he had valid points about the nature of Shaun's profession requiring effective communication, he has a highly prejudiced attitude towards his condition and outright dismisses the idea that Shaun can overcome his shortcomings while lying to Shaun's face that he'll eventually trust Shaun with more responsibilities if Shaun continues to perform well in his new role.
  Han: No matter how hard he works, no matter how hard you try and help him, his limitations are not going to change. He's going to continue to inflict them on our patients all in the name of diversity and inclusion.
• Manipulative, abusive, and snobbish Evil Matriarch Veronica Harrington in The Haves and the Have Nots is intensely homophobic (the principal reason why she abuses her son Jeffrey) and also racist (she won't even accept Jeffrey dating a white woman and insists that he date a "big, black woman").
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • "Hate Crimes" has Bayliss and Pembleton attempt to track down two skinheads who had murdered a young man for being gay. Though the skinheads evade justice, Bayliss and Pembleton get a consolation prize when they rough up and humiliate their boss.
  • The Big Bad of the first Crossover with Law & Order is Colonel Alexander Rausch, a white supremacist and domestic terrorist.
• In Season 2 of The Hour, crime kingpin Rafael Cilenti briefly abandons his Faux Affably Evil facade to randomly tell Bel that "In the end, all women are showgirls and whores."
• iCarly: Wade Collins in "iRocked The Vote".
  Wade: I hate children, I hate teenagers, I hate animals, AND I HATE AMERICA!
• In From the Cold:
  • Los Jinetes, the Spanish terrorists who serve as the antagonists in the present, are violent racists against all immigration to Spain behind several deadly attacks while they plot even more.
  • After learning that Anya was genuinely falling for Faina, Svetlana scolds Anya for behaving like a sissy.
• Mac, Dee, and Frank from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia are Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist examples.
  • Mac is an Armoured Closet Gay and religious fundamentalist who thinks Blackface can be done tastefully.
  • Dee has created some pretty racist characters, one of them being a ghetto Latina and another being a buck-toothed Asian lady who talks funny.
  • During the discussion between Mac and Dennis over whether or not blackface can be done inoffensively, Frank says you gotta make the lips funny when doing blackface and shows pretty offensive examples of blackface to prove his point... which obviously fails to prove his point.
  • The first episode is called "The Gang Gets Racist" and follows the gang (including Charlie and Dennis & except for Frank) as they try to prove they're not racist. They fail spectacularly.
  • Additionally, Dennis is a horrible classist, referring to people who live in the Great Plains or the desert as "trash".
• JAG: Played straight, subverted, played with, deconstructed, and otherwise discussed in many episodes of the series.
  • The Right-Wing Militia Fanatic is a recurring trope in early seasons. However, befitting the show's conservative views, they're treated with a good deal more nuance than in most fiction. Some, like the antagonists from "Brig Break", are explicitly Aryan Nations and villainized accordingly; others, like Colonel O'Hara from "We the People", are portrayed this way by their political enemies but in reality are honorable people with legitimate grievances who happen to hold strongly right-wing views. Finally, it's shown repeatedly that even the bad people in these groups aren't necessarily bigots driven by prejudice so much as common criminals looking for a payout (the aforementioned Aryans, for example, are trying to steal high-tech weapons from a Navy base, but their inside man betrays them as soon as the theft is carried out, planning to sell them to the Iraqis instead for a much higher payday).
  • In general, identity politics in the U.S. military is a frequent cause for JAG investigations, with the service's multi-racial nature, the increasing integration of women into combat roles, and the question of gays serving in the military offering plenty of opportunities for friction. Sometimes, the investigation leads to this kind of villain, who really is a straightforward bigot. At other times, the issue is honest misunderstanding or personality clashes. Sometimes, media or political figures try to make it appear that prejudice is at stake in order to whip up a controversy that the facts may not justify.
  • Middle Eastern characters, finally, are a common source of such villains, especially the sexist kind, and especially as the show's setting transitioned into The War on Terror. Even when there are no terrorists or agents of hostile governments at work, the patriarchal tendencies of Middle Eastern societies remain on full display, with U.S. servicewomen often bearing the brunt of them (leading to the expected resentment when people who treat them like second-class citizens nevertheless expect them to risk their lives in defense of their country).
• Parodied in a Key & Peele sketch, where a duo of black men (played by Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key) caught in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse are offended to find the zombies are so racist they're terrified of them.
  Key: These are some racist motherfucking zombies.
• Law & Order: Organized Crime: Manfredi Sinatra, who is first seen referring to Black Lives Matter protesters as "mentally deficient" and "thugs". He also doesn't approve of his son having married a Black woman and had children with her (although they later divorced). Still, Manfredi insists he loves his grandchildren despite this (cognitive dissonance, presumably).
• Given the focus of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on "sexually based offenses", it's depressingly common for perps to have sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or racist justifications for their crimes.
  • The guy from the episode "Execution" speaks in a similar manner as the Criminal Minds example above, actually calling his first victim "the thing" once or twice.
  • The episode "Fallacy" is full of people who are unrepentant jerkasses to the transgender Sympathetic Murderer (albeit even the detectives themselves veer into Noble Bigot with a Badge territory).
  • The episode "Hate" centers around a non-Muslim man who rapes Muslim women and men and then sets them on fire, then after being arrested kills another Muslim man while in jail. He has a Freudian Excuse, but absolutely nobody in-universe gives a shit.
  • It's also not uncommon for Jerkass defense attorneys or uncooperative witnesses to engage in this, frequently referring to female detectives or ADAs as "honey", "sweetheart", or the more directly hostile "bitch". Fin and Amaro have also been subject to racially derogatory comments (a perp derisively addresses Amaro as "amigo", and another makes a crack about affirmative action when they both confront him).
  • Given that the case in "Raw" centers around an extremist white supremacist group, it's not entirely surprising that pretty much all the bad guys (and anyone associated with them) is this. Although one of the most vocal examples turns out to be an undercover FBI agent taking on this persona intentionally as part of the operation. After the reveal, she makes a point to apologize to Munch (Jewish) and Fin (African-American) for her comments. Brian Ackerman takes the cake though, even going so far to call Olivia "the prerequisite tuna feminist" and "Hillary", and expressing to Cragen his shock that "they" still let white men have positions of power "unless, of course, you're a homosexual".
• Legend: Ludwig Hauptman, a wealthy German (and to Ernest's chagrin, his European publisher) on a tour of the Wild West. It's not just the fact that he's hunting a buffalo herd precious to the local Arapahos, he also approvingly quotes General Sherman's statement that killing the buffalo will destroy the way of life of the Great Plains tribes, showing that he's fully aware of what he's doing. He isn't much better in dealing with other European ethnicities, greeting Professor Bartok as "a Gypsy to carry our guns," to which Bartok replies that if he were a German, he'd be very careful about handing loaded guns to a Hungarian.^note Hungary was stripped of its constitution and sovereign status after the failed revolution of 1848 and placed under the absolute authority of the (ethnically German) Hapsburg monarchy. By the time of the TV show, Hungarian sovereignty had been partially restored, but the resentment was a lot slower to fade.
• While the original Leverage series focuses almost entirely on white-collar criminals and organized crime figures, Leverage: Redemption branches out into this kind of villain a couple of times, though still usually with a profiteering angle of some sort.
  • The villains of "The Great Train Job" are a hate group trying to run a (gay and biracial) couple of farmers off their land. They turn out to be tied to an investor who wants the land for his own purposes but is a pretty big racist in his own right. While the episode is happy to make the bigots look ridiculous, the initial assault on one of the farmers is not in any way Played for Laughs — the writers make the point that such people can be total clowns and still very much worth worrying about.
    Harry: I can help you. These guys aren't smart.
    Elliot: No. They are not smart and they are not tough. They are entitled. And they are stupid. And that is what makes them dangerous.
  • "The Belly of the Beast Job" revolves around a couple of employees attempting (with a little help from the heroes) to bring down a music producer who's been sexually assaulting his employees and bribing or bullying them into silence.
• He's only a Jerkass rather than an outright villain, but one of the many ways that Sawyer's jerkiness is established early in Lost is that almost every time he opens his mouth, he says something dismissive about a woman or something anti-Arab about Sayid. In fact, he basically insults everyone for whatever they are. It's subverted slightly in that he's doing it on purpose in order to be hated by others as much as he hates himself.
• Very common in MacGyver (1985), given the show's liberal bent and fondness for tackling real-world issues. Someone expressing bigoted views is, in fact, a fairly common sign that they're a villain, and a full list of those to whom that applies would be far too long. There are a couple that stand out even by the series' standards, however:
  • "The Challenge", widely viewed as the darkest episode of the series, features a white supremacist villain who tries to frame a local inner-city youth center as a nexus for drugs and gangs (the very thing the club exists to draw inner city teens away from), and when the gambit fails, kidnaps and lynches the youth center's leader out of sheer spite. Not by accident, the villain is an utterly ordinary shop owner from Los Angeles rather than being from Germany, South Africa, the American South or any other region stereotypically associated with white supremacy, nor does he seem affiliated with any of the more infamous groups like the Nazi Party or Ku Klux Klan (though he and his goons do briefly put on white hoods to hide their identities during the kidnapping). The episode wanted to make the point that this kind of mentality, and the violence associated with it, really can pop up everywhere.
  • "The Ten Percent Solution" is another extreme example: the villains are escaped Nazi war criminals who've linked up with Aryan Nation movements in the United States, with the long-term goal of taking over five U.S. states and leading them into secession from their homeland. While this is a much pulpier example, the plot is in fact based on a real-life idea embraced by some of the nation's white supremacist movements at the time the episode was made.^note It never got past the theoretical stages, largely because the plan hinged on enough neo-Nazis moving to the same couple of states to become a real electoral force... and none of them wanted to be the ones that had to move.
• M*A*S*H:
  • Frank Burns is usually a borderline case, showing far more dislike of Koreans than necessary, often even extending to South Koreans. He stops short of resorting to racial slurs, however, something that a few even more unsavory types do, and one of his more well-known Pet the Dog moments involves helping Hawkeye expose an unintentional U.S. Army attack on a South Korean village that the brass refuses to take responsibility for. He is incredibly homophobic, however, in one episode trying to get a gay soldier court-martialed for no reason other than that, even though the only evidence is a statement the guy had made (and which Burns had overheard). Even Major Houlihan (often Burns' partner in any scheme involving military regulations) can't support him this time. Hawkeye and Trapper have to lure Burns into exposing dirt on himself that they can use to blackmail him with (they fool him into admitting that he had bought the answers to his medical school final) and "convince" him to leave the guy alone (a common counter to Burns' schemes; he tends to give up when he discovers he'll get in even worse trouble than a potential victim).
  • Calling Charles Winchester a "villain" is kind of a stretch, but he shows blatant bigotry in one episode when his sister writes to inform him that she's engaged; he objects to her fiancé solely due to the fact that he's Italian. He ultimately offers a sincere apology for his objection, though. Interestingly, for all his snobbery, Winchester is pointedly not ableist, to the point of aggressively dressing down a sergeant who mocks a soldier for stuttering. It's revealed that Charles' sister has a similar speech impediment.
• Ángel Mercader from Machos is tremendously sexist (he believes that it is humiliating that a man is unemployed and his wife is the one who works, and if a woman expresses professional ambitions, she believes that she is trying to usurp the place of a man) and also very homophobic, especially with Ariel, his gay son.
• These are not Mission: Impossible's most common villains; those are Dirty Communists (in the earlier seasons) and The Mafia (in the later ones). However, a great many other antagonists appear throughout the series, some of whom fall into this category. Former Nazis attempting to revive their ideology in the modern world appear several times, as do African white settler regimes practicing apartheid.
• This is one of the ways that Peaky Blinders makes us root for the Shelby crime family — they're not good people, but at least they're better than their enemies. Namely:
  • Inspector Campbell, a villain in the first two series, holds some anti-Catholic bigotries and has a deep-seated misogyny that comes increasingly to light as the series goes on.
  • The second series has a London mob war between the Shelbys (who are of partly Romani descent), the Sabini Organization (an Italian gang), and the Kosher Nostra under Alfie Solomons. The Shelbys are the only ones not to make racist comments against the other gangs, and Sabini — the villain — is consistently the worst.
  • One of the third series' villains, Leon Romanov (yes, one of those Romanovs), an exiled Russian archduke, makes anti-semitic comments in Russian about Alfie, who understands and is not amused. Alfie has a pretty low opinion of the Russian aristocracy, but it seems justified.
    "You people hunted my mum through the snow with dogs."
  • The other big villain of the third season, Father Hughes, isn't presented as especially racist or sexist. No, the writers find other ways to make him despicable.
  • Averted with the fourth season's villain, Luca Changretta, who is portrayed as something of a Worthy Opponent with a pretty legitimate grievance against the Shelbys. Indeed, he's the target of a rather bigoted tirade by Alfie, who repeatedly calls him "a fuckin' wop". In the finale, he does make a few misogynistic comments at Polly's expense, though his frustration with her is pretty understandable.
  • Put front-and-centre in the fifth series, whose villain is the Historical Domain Character Oswald Moseley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Naturally, he's a deeply racist man, with a pretty low opinion of women, too, and he gives a big New Era Speech in one episode about needing to liberate Britain from Jewish influence. His Violent Glaswegian dragon, Jimmy McCavern — on top of providing muscle for Mosley, which is pretty damning on its own — makes a number of anti-Irish and anti-ziganist remarks, and even introduces himself with a song about anti-Irish violence. Ironically, Jimmy is played by Irish actor Brian Gleeson (son of Brendan and brother of Domhnall).
• Peacemaker (2022):
  • Anti-Villain Protagonist Christoper Smith/Peacemaker has very backwards views on women and makes a homophobic joke about Vigilante's gay dad at one point. He has a Freudian Excuse for it, as he was raised by a white supremacist who trained him to kill minorities. If anything, it's surprising he didn't turn out worse.
  • Peacemaker's aforementioned father Auggie Smith is the white supremacist supervillain White Dragon and leads what is heavily implied to be an offshoot of the KKK. He can't go a minute without saying some sort of racial or homophobic slur, and he's goes out of his way to bully and belittle people of color when he for some reason isn't able to flat-out kill them.
• The Pinkertons: In the episode "Old Pap", General Sterling Price wants to create a new Confederacy in which "the property rights of white men", and only white men, are respected. He feels that he has the right to order any stray black person around — and punish them horrifically if they disobey.
• Powerpuff: Jojo is introduced as the new antagonist while he's ranting to his secretary about his political opponent, whom he's convinced is virtue signalling to the voters because of her gender.
• The Purge (2018):
  • David Ryker, Jane's boss, is extremely sexist. On Purge night, he hosts a party where the guests can molest women through their clothing, specifically because he isn't allowed to do it the rest of the year. If the women go along with it, they get to live.
  • Joe is later shown to be one. He insinuates Jane, who is black, only get her job because of the business she worked for wanting to fill diversity quotas, and implies that Penelope isn't a real American because she's Latina, asking what country her family is from.
• Queen Sugar: The Landrys are racists who never stop trying to make a buck off the suffering of black people. Especially Frances, who is against interracial relationships and calls Charley a "mulatta" who's trying to be white and needs to be "put in her place".
• The Rookie (2018): Doug Stanton is an abusive, racist cop with no qualms arresting minorities for minor actions (along with him hassling them for nothing at all). This obviously rubs West the wrong way, determining that he's got to go, and Doug is set up as being the antagonist of Season 3.
• Samurai Gourmet: The yakitori chef made some fine yakitori, but as soon as he shows his reaction to Americans waltzing into his place, bye-bye sympathy.
• The School Nurse Files: The evil spirits in the school's basement make the students and the teachers homophobic, and also make the teachers make fun of Mr. Hong's disability.
• The Shield:
  • Shane Vendrell is a Dirty Cop and a massive racist to boot. He frequently drops racial slurs, takes a condescending at best attitude to minorities, and is outraged at the very idea that a minority member could be added to the Strike Team.
  • Vic Mackey, to a lesser extent. He's not as openly racist as Shane, but he makes several xenophobic quips regarding the Armenian gangsters he frequently runs afoul of, makes racist quips about Aceveda, and once mockingly imitates a blaccent to mess with a black CI.
  • One-shot villain Mike Holden is virulently misogynistic and spends a good chunk of his screentime listing exactly why he hates women, using these to justify his abuse of his wife.
• Shining Time Station has Hobart Hume III from "Schemer's Special Club". Mr. Hume is the owner of the Nickelaire Club, founded by his grandfather, Hobart Hume I. Mr. Hume is both sexist and racist, refusing to let Stacy in the Nickelaire Club because she's a girl and insulting Billy's Native American image by calling him an Indian. Schemer defeats him by making him eat some very sticky toffee, and he was kicked both out of the station and off the show for good.
• SOKO Potsdam: David Grünbaum is a native-born German of unspecified Middle Eastern ancestry (the actor's family is originally from Egypt) and gets some guff from a white suspect in one episode who thinks he isn't a "real" German.
• Some of the recurring antagonists in Sons of Anarchy qualify as this: the Nordics (the local meth-dealing skinhead gang), the League of American Nationalists (a more organized white supremacist movement that tries to move into Charming and drive the Sons out), and the Aryan Brotherhood (a real-life prison gang). Nonetheless downplayed, as the Sons have their own racial hangups — they don't allow black members, for example. The difference is that outside of their ranks, they don't really care about race, being happy to supply black and Chinese gangs in nearby cities with weapons, or form a partnership with a Mexican pimp, which their white supremacist enemies can't tolerate. (The League, in fact, breaks apart when The Dragon of the organization discovers that his boss formed a similar alliance with a Mexican biker gang against the Sons; the entire reason he's in the League is to fight against that sort of thing.)
• The quick way to tell who's bad in Space: Above and Beyond is their attitude toward the Tanks.
• The Sopranos: The Italian-American Mafia is shown to have very socially conservative beliefs and traditions. The idea of a woman captain is nigh unthinkable to them, they consider black people as thugs for hire (frequently making up cover stories for crimes by saying some variant of "two black guys did it"), finding out one of their own is queer is grounds for their immediate execution (even performing oral sex on a woman is considered evidence of homosexual behaviour), and they're allowed to have as many mistresses as they please, but their own wives must be loyal to them one-hundred percent. Tony is a little better than the rest in this regard (for example, he's able to forgive an underling for being gay, because he's a big earner, and only agrees to a whacking due to peer pressure) but only comparatively (he once had a panic attack from seeing the black man logo for Uncle Ben's rice, and is enraged when his wife admits to an emotional affair with an underling, while at the same time he's having sex with a new woman every other week).
• This is common source of villains in Spooks. Examples include domestic far-right terrorists with homophobic, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant beliefs; shady spymasters and politicians (both British and American) who holds similar beliefs and use the threat of Islamic terrorism to scare the public or their peers into supporting them; and the aforementioned Islamic terrorists, who claim to be fighting oppression but are really cultural chauvinists who dislike the West for the same reason they do any other culture that isn't theirs.
• Stargate SG-1: The most common prejudice crosses over with Fantastic Racism: the Goa'uld are an alien race that have enslaved an entire galaxy of humans and several other beings by posing as their gods, and treat their slaves like property to the point of possessing their bodies and wearing them like clothes. A couple of more familiar prejudices show up throughout the series, though:
  • Sexism. System Lord Baal, the long-running Starscream in the show, is perhaps one of the show's more appealing villains in that his approach is somewhat more subtle and frank than the usual Always Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Stupid rhetoric of the series various Big Bads. This is balanced out by him being a blatant misogynist, making several sexist comments (usually directed at Colonel Carter) throughout the show's run. He finally gets his comeuppance in "The Quest, Part 2" when Carter gets fed up and punches him in the face. It's also shown by Kitano, foreshadowing the reveal that he's a Goa'uld. When Sam is called upon to demonstrate the effectiveness of Tau'ri weaponry, Kitano makes no attempt to hide his disbelief that "the female" could be any good with a gun. Then there's Moloch, a Goa'uld lord who decrees that all female Jaffa born in his domain must be sacrificed, believing that only males make good warriors.
  • In "The Other Side", the team makes first contact with a people who are instantly suspicious of Teal'c. They initially assume it's because he's a Jaffa (the footsoldiers of the Goa'uld), which is a reaction they've encountered often enough and that even Teal'c finds understandable. It's only halfway through the episode that O'Neill finally realizes they're dealing with racial supremacists, and that Teal'c skin color (which has never at any previous point been an issue) rather than his Jaffa markings are what they find objectionable.
• Stargirl (2020): Eclipso deliberately invokes this as he attempts to prey on Beth's fears and insecurities about being the cause of her parents' divorce, not fitting in and feelings of inadequacy. He claims that she's both the wrong gender and race to have Dr. Mid-Nite's mantle, and makes thinly veiled racist remarks about Black people being criminals.
• Gul Dukat in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a virulent speciesist and more than a little sexist, openly lusting over the women around him. He tries to conceal it early on, claiming to view Bajorans with paternalism and concern, but eventually embraces his hatred for them in "Waltz" after Sisko forces him to admit that he's a vicious monster rather than the Anti-Hero he claims to be. In "Far Beyond the Stars", when Sisko has a vision of himself and other DS9 characters as people in 1960s New York City, Dukat is a racist cop who harasses and beats him.
• S.W.A.T. (2017): If you're not white, Christian, and heterosexual, you're fair game to the Imperial Dukes.
• Inverted in That Mitchell and Webb Look with Captain Todger, the racist, sexist, homophobic superhero who has been in prison for statutory rape, and General Drayfox, the evil but incredibly PC and sensitive supervillain.
  General Drayfox: Let him kneel before me! Unless of course he's an Orthodox Jew and has an issue with kneeling for religious reasons, in which case I'd be happy for him to pay his obeisance in whatever way he finds culturally appropriate. Mwwahahahaha!
• The second season of Timeless has Nicholas Keynes, a World War I-era Rittenhouse member who maintains his time's attitude about women after ending up in 2018 and taking over as the head of Rittenhouse. One of his plans is to end women's suffrage before it takes off, thus keeping women in the kitchen. In fact, this act results in his loyal Number Two Emma helping the protagonists in preventing the ploy just this one time, as she doesn't want women's equality to be rolled back. Earlier, in Season 1, it's revealed that David Rittenhouse, the founder of the Ancient Conspiracy, was even worse in that respect, seeing women as little more than sex objects and breeders and black people as slaves. Fortunately, most Rittenhouse members aren't as backward.
• The Twilight Zone (2019): In "Try Try", Mark says that men dominate, it's what they do, when justifying his attempted rape of Claudia.
• Watchmen (2019): Pretty much everyone in the Seventh Kavalry, considering that they're out-and-proud white supremacists.
  • Fred T. casually hurls racial epithets at a Black police officer (to his face) and attempts to burn down a Jewish store and jokes about it. As it turns out, his racism was part of the reason for that very police officer's decision to become Hooded Justice.
  • Judd Crawford was a member, perhaps even a leader, of the Seventh Kavalry/Cyclops. Senator Keene later claims that Judd was in the Kavalry not because he was a racist at heart, but to "keep the peace" in Tulsa; Looking Glass doesn't buy that particular line of nonsense. However, the Klan robe seen in Judd's closet is revealed to have belonged to his grandfather, which he defends as his "legacy".
  • Zig-zagged in regards to Senator Joe Keene. He's in command of the Seventh Kavalry, but he is quick to mock the "idiots" and "racist Okies" under him and states that he is using the Kavalry for a loftier goal. But during his confrontation with Agent Blake, he admits that his main motivation for becoming a Physical God is to tip the scales back in the white man's favor.
    Keene: It is extremely difficult to be a white man in America right now. So I'm thinking... I might try being a blue one.
• In The Wire, any time a gangster refers to Omar using an anti-gay slur instead of his name, take a shot.
• Wiseguy: Mel Profitt has a tendency to hurl ethnic slurs at Vinnie when he's upset with him. There's also the Pilgrims of Promise from the second season, a white supremacist group that moves into Vinnie's old neighborhood.
• Young Dracula: Count Dracula's views on women are about what you would expect from someone born and raised in the 15th Century. Most vampires seem to share his positions.

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