Bonus Episode: Untitled Warhammer 40,000 Podcast

tickets now. They will be in the show notes and I hope to see you there.

But before we get into that, because I think that's the thing that's going to be relevant to everybody, even the people who you know aren't into the game at least can get something out of this stuff, which is why we're putting this up as our teaser episode in the Bastard's Feed. But before we do that, Joe, you've got a book to plug.

Currently that phrase alone returns about four million results on Google, and that is a reference to Warhammer forty thousand in forty k as its fans call it. The God Emperor is the founder in deity of the Imperium, a vast million world empire that includes nearly all human beings. He was once a mighty warrior and a deadbeat dad, but he spent the last ten thousand years or so hooked up to life support. So you can already see. You know, the guy likes gold. He's always covered in gold, and

he's a terrible father. So you can see why Donald Trump gets compared to him from time to time.

But you know, getting beyond that, if you haven't don't know anything about Warhammer and you just heard the phrase God Emperor Trump, you probably didn't think too much about it outside of like, oh, people are being weird about politics again in the United States, right, can you? It couldn't be right. Trump is kind of a singular figure when it comes to global media attention, so it's not all that noteworthy that fans of a game would reference

him in memes. What makes this one unique is that people using the phrase and spreading memes about it are kind of as likely to be mocking the president as praising him. It's a real Schrodinger situation, and this aspect of it is really well embodied by something very funny that happened on February eleventh, twenty nineteen, over in Italy. The Via Reggio Carnival is an event held in via Reggio, a city in Tuscany, and has been a yearly parade

in celebration since eighteen seventy three. It started when a bunch of rich guys decided to make a parade with floats that would help put the city on the map in a cultural sense, and rather than funding the parade themselves, they push to increase taxes on working class citizens and poor people protested by wearing masks and presumably committing petty crimes. Right, So you've got like a classic story here. It really

is a beautiful thing. I love a good carnival, And kind of the key feature of this is there's these huge paper machet floats, the largest of which weighs like forty tons that people make spend the year making. There's are massive things, they're the size of buildings. And then like walk through the street, right, and there are drive through the street I think now, and there's these big drunken parties and everybody wears masks and it's a great time.

About half a million people attend each year. And twenty nineteen was like any other year, except that the pride of the was a sixty five foot tall sculpture of Donald Trump as the God Emperor.

got a massive flaming sword. Everything about him is gold. Often he has glorious long flowing hair, the kind that Trump doesn't. But yeah, in the float this big Sordi had, there's like twitter birds flying around the handle, which Fabrizio put there to make the point that Trump had weaponized

Twitter against his enemies. And written on the blade in Italian was the phrase your taxes and your duties, and the specific way that these were written in Italian was meant to be like bring up a different phrase, which Galley summarized as meaning, here's your fucking tariffs, right, like that's the blade is the tariffs, which is kind of like prescient that he really picked those out as being a weapon in a way, they weren't nearly as much in twenty nineteen as they are now.

get online, they go viral. People are sharing this like crazy, and Fabrizio's meaning sailed right over a lot of people's heads. I'm going to quote now from an article in Time. Many conservative commentators on Twitter appeared to interpret the float as a tribute to Trump. Several tweeted that was a parade for Trump. Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent for right wing Channel one American News wrote, this carnival in Italy looks a lot more fun than the Thanksgiving Day

parade in New York. Just look at this Trump float.

the game at all. But social media and video games have introduced forty K to the masses in a way that, like, you don't have to spend a lot or even any money to at least consume the lore. A lot of people who are fans have never played the game. You know, maybe they play some video games, but a lot of people just like watch hours of YouTube videos, and those YouTube videos are largely regurgitating decades worth of lore that have been like written and stored in websites or put

in wikis. Like that's all. That's the hobby to quite a few people who call themselves fans, and so as a result, when the long simmering US culture war ignited the world of gaming a year or so prior to the start of the Trump campaign, forty K became a

battleground too. The fact that the imperium that the god Emperor ruled was in the text of the game a fascist state, which was you know, largely the subject of satire in thee made it kind of an obvious inspiration for white nationalists looking to hide propaganda in memes.

Talent was a very small time creator. We're talking about a thousand subscribers, but this particular video broke half a million views, and part of it, like the imagery in the video, is there's a famous piece of art from the lore of the game. That's the emperor fighting his son who betrayed him, over the body of one of

his other sons that was murdered by the betrayers. It's a very famous drawing and they just included that, but they hadn't swapped out the Emperor with Donald Trump very crudely, and I believe Hillary Clinton was playing the role of Horace, his evil son. I'll do a screen share so you can see this, Joe.

that he received online from Trump supporters. Quote from that article, the anti Semitic hate, much of it from self identified Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn't stopped since Trump God Emperor sent me the Nazi iconography of the shiftless hook nosed jew I was served in an image of the geists of Auschwitz. The famous words are bite, mocked, fry replaced without irony with maccin America.

Some forum members say God Emperor is simply a tongue in cheek attempt to rile up Trump opponents who fear he would be a strong man as president. The term is attributed variously to God Emperor, characters in the science fiction series Dune and a tabletop game called Warhammer forty thousand. We know he can't literally be one, wrote member in New Jersey nine oh eight, but the phrase whip people into a frenzy saying that we literally want a dictator.

the game genocidal. The way the backstory goes, you know, Warmer forty thousand is set in the forty first millennium, like like thirty nine or zero thousand years into the future, but in the lore of the game, and like the year thirty thousand or so, about ten thousand years before the current day of the setting. The Emperor, while he was still alive and healthy, launched a great crusade after

unifying Earth. You know, there had been a big space empire before, but it all crashed after the Ai, you know, went crazy and fucked everything up. So Earth was just like this warring mess of techno barbarians and shit. And the Emperor takes over. He unifies Earth, and he makes a bunch of gene modified super soldiers called space Marines, and he sends them out into the galaxy to commit mass genocide against all of the different alien species that

he considered a threat in any human world. That wouldn't bend the need to him, right, They just do thousands of genocides out in the galaxy. They take over like a million worlds, and this all does end badly for the Emperor, like his sons, who were his main generals that he had created in a lab to eventually a bunch of them betray them and he's badly wounded and has to be on like this life support system forever and ever, which leads to the nightmare future that the

game itself is set in. But the fact that like none of this works for the Emperor, and that again kinda in the lore, you're not supposed to be like, ah, the Emperor, what a good guy who was doing a good thing. You're supposed to be like, oh, he's just like wiping people out for no reason, Like he was just a real real dick. Yeah.

now forty thousand. Trump turned out to be the God Emperor and initiated the imperium of man killing Xenos all day, every day in his honor. Life is good. Get like in the game, things aren't good in the forty first millennium. The Emperor's stuck in a life support chair and everyone worships him even though he was a major atheist, and everything's falling apart all the time. Life is not in fact good.

a long history. The ancient Greeks were talking thousands of years ago, had a game called Patea where players would simulate FEALANX combat using game pieces and some sort of rules system. I don't think we actually have the rules, but I don't actually know that much about it. But they did have a dice.

similar but often much more complicated. The earliest form of chess, which is a tabletop wargame, was created in India, and like the six hundreds, I think, and I think that the sixteen hundreds is when you start to get like modern chess. And by the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, people had started selling and marketing wargames with little lead soldiers, often simulating Napoleonic combat or like American Civil War combat.

But this is when you start to get wargames that at least you could recognize at a glance as the same kind of thing as Warhammer, where you've got two dudes and they're pushing little models of soldiers around a table, right like that, that's kind of when that comes into being. Games Workshop had been founded in nineteen seventy five by three friends who loved these first stirrings of nerd culture and wanted to make and sell games of their own.

The first edition of Warkhammer, which is now called Warhammer Fantasy, came out in nineteen eighty three. In nineteen eighty six, Games Workshop published an issue of their company magazine, White Dwarf, that featured an Orc model carrying a banner with the face of Margaret Thatcher then the Prime Minister of the UK painted on it and the piece was labeled Maggie's Death Banner. And there's a show with PHO. It's fucking great. Yeah,

first off, pretty good paint job like this. It's a credible, credibly painted Orc and that's just straight up Margaret Thatcher's face on a banner with like a severed hand on the top.

fight and more dangerous to liberty. She was, of course, talking about the striking miners who feared for their livelihood and lavelhoods in the face of countless mind closures under her regime. The Impress Margaretha also spelled Magreeta, is a clear satirical representation of Thatcher ascending to power in nineteen seventy nine, the same year as the British Prime Minister.

way of knowing. And we're back. So I think that has established politics and political satire was kind of embedded in the foundations of Warhammer from the beginning, right, Yeah, but it was also more a thing in fantasy than forty K. As Sledge notes in his article after nineteen eighty seven, the people making Warhammer forty thousand, I think in part because forty k really started to take off and they were like, oh, this could actually be big.

We probably shouldn't like make so many jokes about partisan politics that might stop people from wanting to buy the game.

and they're you know, they're all superhuman. They're the result of all of this genetic tinkering, and you know, they're incapable of fear, and they're these these kind of like idealized like the absolute ideal of like a stereotypical like warrior, right, Like that that's everything a space marine is. That's not what they were at first. The first space marines were basically like mercenaries and like drafty cops of like this brutal imperial that were there like crack down on dissent

and stuff. There's a great from an early White Dwarf magazine. There's a piece of art that I'm showing Joe. Now that's like an early it's a drawing up. There's like a punk who's been spray painting marines out on a wall, and he's got his hands against the wall, and there's two space marines standing behind him. You know, they're not taller than him, because they weren't initially superhuman. They were just guys in armor. One of them's got what looks

like a stun baton in his hands. And then there's text underneath it that says, when the eye of Terror blinks, ships fly between Lost Worlds and the rest of the galaxy. Miners ship their oars, and slavers play their loathsome trade where chance permits, the forces of the Imperium make their mark, bringing to the Lost Worlds the brutal order of the Imperium, if only for a few days. So there's space cops, right.

immobile on the golden throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass, writhing invisibly with power from the dark age of technology. He is the carrion Lord of the Imperium, to whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, and for whom blood is drunk and flesh eaten. Human blood and human flesh, the stuff of which the Imperium is made.

nothing changes. Variations of that passage have been included in basically every book of rules and lare published by Games Workshop in the years since. Unfortunately, they didn't do that in a vacuum, and over the long years of the game has existed, they also expanded the lore behind the Space Marines and turned them into what they are today. And because the Space Marines are what sold the best

and what looked the coolest. Most of like the especially the kids who were just getting into the hobby, got into the Space Marines were who they marketed and focused more and more of the game around. And there's a lot of different alien races and stuff in it, and obviously those had to become more monstrous to match, right, because that makes the space Marines look cooler and more heroic.

And all of this led to a situation where a lot of players didn't realize really that the Imperium aren't the good guys and that Purge, the heretic and other Imperial catchphrases shouldn't be seen as admirable. But again, space Marines look really, really cool, and Warhammer players and writers have created so much fiction and fan out over the years that a lot of people have made that aesthetic a real part of their lives, and this has happened

in some pretty extreme cases. Probably the most extreme example of this would be the fact that if you watch enough videos put out by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, or just a ton of combat footage from the War in Ukraine where you can see a lot of Ukrainian soldiers, you'll inevitably run across dudes with decorations in their armor or gear that look like this, And Joe, you're seeing this now, but this is essentially a I mean it's it's a wax like stamp with some papers underneath it

that's adhering it to the arm.

Like there's two different kinds of things that both sort of you know involve there being like papers attached to it, but like these are things like the oath of moment is like before battle, Marie space Rins like write down like what their goal is for this fight, or like make a vow that like this, you know, the enemy won't pass this point or something, and then they'll like

adhere that to their armor to like hold them to it. Right, And you know this was like they started putting these on the armor of the models, these like little bitty like you could see these like scraps of paper adhered by like wax seals. Because they made the power armor. The Space Marines had look have more of like a medieval night vibe, and that's a big part of like the forty k aesthetic is you have like a lot of these medieval like weapons and armor, but it's also

like futuristic. That's a big part of like the appeal of the aesthetic of the setting, and it appealed to people so much, and there's so many fans of Warhammer in Ukraine that, like one a lot of young Ukrainian men started going into battle, they started putting purity seals on their armor, like to the extent that like now people make and sell period like seals that you can put on your gear.

or the wrong way. I don't have any issue with this. Like you're fighting a fucking desperate war for your survival. Do whatever you want to your your armor. You know that makes you feel better. It's just it's weird. It's it was strange to see like this actually making its way to a real war because so many of the people fighting that war are fans of the game. Like, that's just a strange moment for the hobby. And you can for a comparison to how much this has jumped

into mainstream like consciousness. When I was in the military, we had stupid like we call them morale patches. We had super little morale patches too. I never saw forty k one and I mean this is back in the early two times got up until the twenty Yeah, never saw anything never and so within a decade it's just like no, there's detachments themed after space marine groups. There's moral patches like it's having a moment, that's for sure.

It's having a moment, and it's gonna get weirder, Joe, because I got another thing to show you, Oh boy. Every year, the firearms industry gathers in Las Vegas, Nevada for the Shot Show. It is the gun industry trade show where different companies show off new weapons, both firearms that are thing meant for civilian use and for police

and for the military. And one big trend, as I'm sure you know, Joe, in military arms design over the last couple of decades, but it's really escalated over the last ten or fifteen years, have been small portable semi automatic and automatic grenade launchers in many cases, ones that can fire like smart grenades. Right, we have a degree of control and like when it detonates, how far it

has to go? Right, Like that's a big it's like a major area in which weapons have like weapons development has leapt forward over the course of the last like twenty something years in this regard, you have a lot more options there then you used to for grenade launchers of that type. And periodically, you know, as some of these different products that are like because the main weapon that a space marine carries is called a bolterer, and it's this big, cool looking rifle that's actually not like

a rifle at all. It fires basically like a rocket munition that one charge shoots the munition out the barrel and then a secondary charge actually ignites the rocket and then the rocket will like shoot towards its target and blow up.

fans themselves. And about four years ago, Spain's largest Warhammer tournament let a guy play while wearing Nazi paraphernalia, and I believe his army was kind of like Nazi themed too, Like it was like a Wehrmacht themed guard army or something if I'm remembering correct, But he was like wearing Nazi shit, and he'd entered the tournament under the name Austrian painter, Like really fucking subtle, my dude, And people weren't thrilled about this. I'm going to quote from an

article in Polygon. Gt Telavera tournament organizers gave comment to tabletop wargaming site spiky Bit, stating that the club repudiates the Nazi mentality in all its aspects. Nazi ideas have no place in our group because they are contrary to everything we stand for. The organizer said that the player said he would not leave us unless they involve the police, As displaying Nazi imagery is not illegal in Spain. The organizers hesitated let this bring legal trouble upon their club.

is not. And in this announcement there's a couple of interesting lines. First off, they're pointing out that, like, look, the imperium of Man is a cautionary table. Like so

many aspects of Warmer forty thousand, it is satirical. They go through the definition of what satire is right, Like, that's literally in this little article that they put up, and then they note that said certain real world hate groups, in adherence to historical ideologies better left in the past, sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment and co op them for their own agendas. We've said it before, but a reminder about what we believe in.

We believe in and support a community united by shared values of mutual kindness and respect. Our fantasy settings are grim and dark, but that is not a reflection of who we are or how we feel the real world should be. We will never accept nor condone any form of prejudice, hatred, or abuse in our company or in

the Warhammer hobby. And then they basically they straight out say, if you come to a games workshop of nter store and where symbols of a hate group, we'll ask you to leave if we don't want your money.

not saying they shouldn't have. We may dig into some of that, you know, later as the podcast goes on, but like, they haven't handled this perfectly, but that's a pretty good message, right that, like we don't want your money, we don't want you in the hobby. And it's good that they did say something eventually, right, you know, this is a publicly traded corporation. They're not they're not a

culture warrior and they're not an activist. Yeah, but like, I'm glad that something got fucking said, and they've That's not the only thing they've done in the last couple of years. There's been some more subtle and some less subtle moves. You know, one thing that happened recently, So for years, a lot of fans have asked for, like as the get because as Warhammer's got more popular, more women have played, and they've added in more female models

for different like sides and stuff. There's more female guardsmen than there used to be, more female elder and you know, they've they've at least and the Sisters of Battle, which is an all female line, has gotten like a refresh line and a lot more attention. You know, they've done this a few ways. But a lot of people want there to be female space marines and this is kind of a you know, still a topic of a lot

of debate within the actual lore itself. The Emperor like they can only be male because of how the Emperor designed their gene seed and stuff. And the real reason for this, obviously is that like nobody thought about it in nineteen eighty seven, that like they would want there to be like the female models for space. They were thinking about that kind of stuff.

the creation of the space Marines. One way they've kind of retcon things is because there's a conversation between the Emperor and one of his top advisors who's like, I thought, you should have made all the primarks, you know, your sons that were the leaders of these legions women, Like they should have all been girls, like they're leaders in the space because we would have had less problems. They wouldn't have all wound up going to fucking war with you.

They would have been less annoying. And I kind of do like the idea that all space Marines are men because the Emperor is just kind of a misogynist, like, and it led up destroying him, right the fact that he yeah, it kind of does like it sort of works. But one thing MS Workship did do recently is they introduced the Emperor's body guard or these other group of fucking future super soldiers, the custodes who or the castode is whatever it fucking fake Latin pronunciation you want to use.

And they've been adding like female sculpts, like female heads and stuff you don't really tell with the faces. But a chunk of people online lost their goddamn minds. I'll tell you that right now. The most I'm so surprised by this crazy over this shit.

woke gets in, it ruins everything. Fucking Warhammer has never been worth more money, Like Games Workshop is one of the most valuable corporations in the entire United Kingdom. Fucking little plastic models of space marines and or and shit are worth more than fishing to the British economy. And it's an island.

have some opinions about you know, this racial group way right, and real fascists, as we noticed, spent decades getting really good at using stuff like that as a bridge to start propagandizing to young people. Whether we like it or not, fictional worlds are battlegrounds and the broader culture war against

ascendant fascist sentiment worldwide. Fabrizio Galley, the creator of that God Emperor Trump float that we started this episode discussing, said something similar in an interview that I read on heavy dot com. The time of intellectuals, philosophers, and of old and worn culture is over. We have entered the era of fantasy video games and virtual life. Yeah, right on the nose there, twenty nineteen. But bang hit the target.

and I, like, somebody brought in like a print out of like a missile strike on I think it was a BMP on like an Iraqi troop train. You could see frame by frame this thing blowing up like people inside it, and we're fucking shitty tech kids in Texas being like, whoa Like, look, I'd never seen anything like that. And one of the guys we gamed with was like

a veteran who'd been like a tanker. I think he had fought in Desert Storm and was not like I had always assumed it was a pretty conservative guy and was not like the most like was a man in his like his forties or fifties who would yell at children over the rules of a video or of a tabletop game. Oh yeah, like that kind of dude. But also when he saw what we were doing and he realized what it was a picture of, he was like,

don't do that, Like there were people in there. You don't laugh at something like that, you know, like it's not cool. It's not something to like go like whoa over, Like it's not a game, like like it's the most terrifying thing you can possibly imagine, and you need to have more respect and as like a fucking twelve year old little piece of shit like that actually like hit and impacted me, and I was like, oh yeah, I was kind of if, like, fucking this guy is calling

me out for being a dick. I might have been being a dick.

There will be a podcast and it'll be a weekly show. It'll come out at some point this year. We just don't know exactly when yet. But we wanted to tease the idea for all of you and show you kind of what we've got coming down the pipe because we both kind of tease this online and social media a couple times, and I felt like bad about not putting something.

real world reporting on different controversies around the game. You have a great pitch for that, based on another one of these like weird political culture war things that hits like a convention where people are like playing gaming and doing like painting contests and how the community deals with it.

So we'll be talking about like both real life, how this this hobby is influencing and has been influenced by the shit going on in the world, and we're going to talk about just the nerdy shit that we love. Like I'm looking forward to putting together a painfully detailed history of like the concept of a space marine in sci fi fiction and how that's led us to like games workshop building an empire. Yes, yeah, and yeah, Like what are you most excited to talk about.