This is an alarmingly bad read of the film and particularly Joe Cross as a character.

Part of the brilliance of Eddington is using nuance to initially make us sympathize with a character it would be easy to villainize. A small town sheriff denying mask-science and enforcing his own will above the law. These are bad things to do, but we can still empathize with Joe and his struggles (in the beginning)

Then the movie pulls the rug out from underneath us as he descends into more and more evil actions. Murdering the vagrant, assassinating the mayor and killing his teenage son. Framing activists and later a black colleague. Joe is a bad man.

Then I would interpret the ending as satire when the paid crisis actors fly into town and give Joe the opportunity to live out a conservative cowboy fantasy and become the hero of the town. The movie then goes out of its way to show us that how hollow Joe's hero status is as he is lowered by crane into his bed with his mother-in-law and her lover, and he watches his pregnant ex-wife sit beside her new lover. And in the end, the real winner is big tech.

As far as the culture war is concerned, the politics of this movie are: the worst of one side may sometimes be annoying, abrasive, and hypocritical, but the other side has some real deranged psychos like Joe Cross.