Klansmen attending a Nazi victory parade in Roswell, NM in the alt 1961 of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Machine Games/Bethesda)
Video games carry a certain stigma to them, a stubborn perception of being juvenile bullshit for morons with limited social skills, a stigma that has been around as long as video games themselves. The stigma has been on the wane lately as those of us in the millennial generation feel like we can be more open about it, having grown up alongside the medium. It’s undeniably less embarrassing for us 30-somethings in 2022 to talk about the latest Halo or Assassin’s Creed game than it was for a 30-something Gen Xer in 1995 to forget to hide his Super Nintendo before a date came over.
And why not? It was pretty dumb for most of the 80s and 90s when you think about it. Who really looks nostalgically back on the original Mortal Kombat games? They fucking sucked. The only reason anyone ever played them was because they were more violent and gruesome than anything else on the market. One no less notoriously violent title from that era that has aged slightly better is Doom, a 1993 bloodbath of a game depicting a demonic alien invasion of a future colony on Mars.
Doom was created by the same team that a year earlier had published Wolfenstein 3D, which was widely credited as the first commercially successful first-person shooter (the camera perspective inside the player character’s head). Wolfenstein 3D itself was a sequel to 1981’s Castle Wolfenstein, a simplistic 2D simulation of an unnamed American World War II commando who sneaks out of captivity in the titular castle, killing little pixel Nazi soldiers along the way.
In Wolfenstein 3D however, the soldier is given a name: BJ Blazkowicz, which stuck through the increasingly wacky sequels, which got increasingly into advanced technologies and supernatural Nazi occult elements: The Spear of Destiny in 1992, Return to Castle Wolfenstein in 2001, and Wolfenstein in 2009. They were fun to play, sure, but you weren’t really getting anything out of it. There wasn’t any commentary about the historical context in which these stories were told. Blazkowicz never rescued French villagers caught in the crossfire between American and German troops in Normandy or liberated POWs from a Stalag camp, let alone Jews from a concentration camp. He stole a magical amulet from an SS officer and used it summon bolts of lightning and fiery explosions to destroy Nazi soldiers in the 2009 Wolfenstein game.
It wasn’t until 2014 when a new production team, realizing they were out of new ideas, decided to just ditch whatever little pretenses of historical authenticity remained in the series and took the story to an alternate 1960s in which the Nazis won the war in Wolfenstein: The New Order. It was over-the-top violent, viciously satirical, but also managed to find space for commentary about the Holocaust as Blazkowicz rampaged through Europe. It was extremely well-executed in every respect. The 2017 sequel Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, was even better – and more harrowing – as Blazkowicz and his team of partisans fight to liberate the United States from the Third Reich.
Maybe it’s unfair to say Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros never “grew up.” Unlike Wolfenstein as a series they didn’t have any real-world historical basis. But still for a series that started in the early 1980s to deliver an emotional gut punch like the scene above is impressive. This one stuck with me for a while. If you’re not going to watch it (you should), here’s the gist: Blazkowicz, on the run from the Nazis after escaping capture in New Mexico, stops at his childhood home in Texas, with his history with his racist, abusive father, Rip Blazkowicz shown in flashbacks. BJ, having been stuck in Europe for two decades, had no idea what happened to his parents, but Rip is there to confront him with a shotgun, detailing how much happier his life is now that the Nazis are in charge. “I own a two thousand acre ranch up by Forney Lake now,” says Rip, adding that he’d sold out his Jewish wife (who he married only for business connections) to the Nazis. “This is white man’s world now. White man’s gotta keep it Christian,” Rip says before trying, and failing to kill BJ.
Then BJ gets captured and beheaded by the Nazis but his fellow freedom fighters recover his head and surgically attach it to the body of a genetically engineered super soldier. The reanimated BJ then disguises himself as an actor and sneaks on board a Nazi flying saucer bound for a Nazi colony on Venus. There he meets a demented, elderly Hitler who pisses on the carpet during the audition for a propaganda film about the capture and execution of “Terror Billy” BJ Blazkowicz.
It still works. All too well actually. The game hits you so hard over the head with the sci-fi ridiculousness you forget that it’s hitting you less hard with the real world allegories, from the American Ku Klux Klan marching proudly in public alongside German occupiers to an in-game newspaper declaring “Reich Media Most Honest In History!” among many, many, other moments inspired by the real world in 2017 at the dawn of the Trump Administration and the concurrent resurgence of white nationalism he brought with him. But it’s Rip who sticks out the most.
He’s the logical endpoint of the “Well I wish he’d put down the Twitter thingy, but I love what he’s done for the stock market – My portfolio’s never been better!” kind of Trump voter. White, upper class Red Stater who got his, fuck the rest of you. Maybe deep down inside he knows it’s wrong, but it’s done so right by him that it’s not wrong anymore. But he’s doing just fine now.
Maybe some might say the character is a hateful leftist caricature of a proud conservative Texan, that those Americans wouldn’t submit willingly to a fascist foreign occupier, much less sell out their Jewish wife and then half-Jew son to be murdered at their hands. That it’s a horrible insult to portray a Christian “patriot” as being quite alright with the Final Solution.
Yeah but no. We’re pretty comfortable with saying they are exactly who we think they are.
The upscale liberals who control the media and Democrat party believe Jan 6th was another Pearl Harbor or 9/11
And the rest of America, including many Democrats, think they are nuts
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 6, 2022
You might’ve been wondering what the hell was with 1,000+ words of video game talk or why the headline is “The Road is Open Again II: The New Colossus.” This one’s been a long time coming. Last year we examined the ongoing rise of not very subtle anti-semitism in the institutional Republican Party, as in politicians, candidates, and campaigns (“The Road is Open Again” refers to the opening theme from the HBO alt-history series The Plot Against America).
It’s what’s happened since then that really makes a revisit necessary as the situation has only gotten worse, particularly in the last few weeks. Not that it was good beforehand, earlier this year, as evidenced by the above blatant dog whistle tweet by Marco Rubio, the ban on Holocaust books like Maus and the Diary of Anne Frank by MAGA school district boards, a Jewish couple in Tennessee being denied the right to adopt a baby because of religious objections by a state-funded charity, a Kentucky county GOP’s Facebook post complaining about a “Jewish junta” in the government, a Republican Oklahoma state Senate candidate’s warnings of “an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists” pushing the COVID-19 vaccine, MAGA media darling Lara Logan calling evolution a “Jewish hoax,” the Michigan GOP refusing to pull the plug on a state House candidate who called feminism “a Jewish program to degrade and subjugate white men,” and that’s just what’s in National Zero’s archive this year. Who knows what else we may’ve missed?
And would any more of it be necessary to underscore the barely latent hostility bordering on malice MAGA Republicans hold toward Jews? This is even ignoring all the Soros and Rothschild code words they toss around, code words they’ve been using less and less lately.
Kanye West is a deeply sick man who can’t be helped. He’s not going to submit to treatment. He’s going to do something stupid and get himself killed at some point. Or kill himself. Awful as it is to say, it’s hard to see how else this ongoing breakdown is going to end for him. This is to say his “going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” insanity doesn’t mean much in a conversation about anti-semitism in and of it itself. He’s just out of his fucking mind and there’s no point in getting into what his motivations are in saying that sort of shit. It is however necessary to look at what he set off: first by emboldening common trash anti-semites as you see above, and then taking it even further by bringing hardcore Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes to dinner with fat former President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Not that Trump really needed the help given the shit he’s said over the years. The above Truth Social post from him came just days after Kanye’s “death con 3” batshittery. “US Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel – Before it is too late!” is undeniably more menacing what he’s said before. Some might want to excuse it as him really meaning to say “American Jews should vote for Trump and other Republicans because Israel could be left defenseless against Iranian or Syrian aggression if they don’t! The clock’s ticking!” or whatever, ignoring the question of well why didn’t he just fucking write that instead if that’s what he really meant.
It’s hard to look at that and not think Trump really means “I’m ready to cut my Jewish supporters loose and declare open season on the Tribe,” or worse. What else should we see when Donald is too afraid of his base to denounce Nick Fuentes after the now-infamous dinner?
And then there’s Republicans themselves. Sure they bashed Fuentes and Kanye for hating Jews, but for the most part didn’t want to go after Trump himself. They have nothing to gain and a lot to lose in doing so. The simple math says a plurality of Republican voters and more importantly their Rip Blazkowicz-type donors want Trump back in the White House on January 20th, 2025.
Even simpler math: An April 2022 Politico/Morning Consult survey found 12% of Trump 2020 voters said being “accused of anti-semitism” was “not a problem”, 28% said it’s a “minor problem” in deciding whether or not to vote for a candidate. That more than half of Republican respondents say it’s not a big deal if a candidate is openly anti-semitic is kind of frightening.
Maybe even more frightening is how MAGA influencer Steven Crowder on his Thursday show said there’s “a conversation to be had about secular humanists with Jewish last names in Hollywood exploiting people” like we’re supposed to think that’s a “conversation” that’ll be held in a spirit of good faith and respectful dialogue. Now how does anyone, anyone whatsoever, not look at that and say he’s just being anti-semitic and he’s using his platform to mainstream hostility toward Jews. This asshole has nearly 6 million subscribers on YouTube, 3 million followers on Facebook. He’s not “kekek1488” posting Nazi memes on Gab. He’s feeling the vibe and refining it to “a conversation.”
The vibe is not good. Last year we wrote the ground had “been laid out for an outright explosion of anti-semitism on the right.” If it’s not an explosion yet then it might as well be a one-alarm fire that’s flared up quite a bit over the last few weeks. The road is wide open and it sure as hell feels like the majority of Republican voters are goose-stepping happily on it.