New Online Computer Game Exploits Right-Wing Paranoia

By David Corn, Mother Jones. Posted October 29, 2009.

It's January 2011. The GOP is about to assume control of both houses of Congress -- having been voted in by a public deeply suspicious of Democrats after President Barack Obama conducted clandestine talks with President Felipe Calderon of Mexico and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada.

But two days before the new conservative majority is to be sworn in, Obama announces that this Congress will not be seated, that the United States (a creation of "racists and warmongers") will be replaced by a North American Union, that the U.S. Constitution will be dissolved and that private ownership of firearms will be outlawed (as part of a United Nations treaty banning firearms globally). In response, millions rise up, and the Revolution begins.

A Glenn Beck movie project? Perhaps. But it's also the premise for a new online computer game hosted by a Web site called United States of Earth.

In the game's scenario, 20 million armed American "patriots" begin seizing local and federal government offices. These are the same people whose earlier Tea Party protests had been ignored and dismissed by the mainstream media. Now, they post bounties for government employees. There's fighting in every state.

Meanwhile, Lou Dobbs has been disappeared, and Glenn Beck has been found dead of an "aspirin overdose." Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly have been rounded up and Fox News forcibly shut down.

The U.S. military refuses to come to Obama's rescue. His loyalist forces of 40,000 end up controlling merely three counties in Virginia, while an allied force is in charge of three counties near Washington, D.C. The Federal Reserve also controls two of its own counties, as does the Cong (the remnants of the Democratic Congress). A collection of pro-Obama black nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists have a hold on two counties. What can you do as a player? You can join the patriots trying to capture Obama and defeat the Cong.

The Web site notes that this rudimentary World of Warcraft-type multiplayer game -- titled "2011 Obama's Coup Fails" -- is merely "an action-packed, satire-filled" entertainment. But it does say, "If current events keep transpiring as they are, then 2011 Obama's Coup may in fact become a dark chapter in American history."

This game, though, is no right-wing plot to foment anti-Obama paranoia. Its organizers -- who are not identified on the site -- are a small group of Ron Paul-loving libertarians living in Brooklyn, N.Y., according to Michael Russotto, one of this band. He insists the game's designers and editors are not advancing any partisan agenda and that this anti-Obama scenario is one stunt they've devised to bring people into their larger "United States of Earth" project, in which players build their own empires and try to "dominate other members' regimes across real-world maps."

See more stories tagged with: rush limbaugh, glenn beck, barack obama, tea parties, united states of earth, the obama coup

David Corn is the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones and the co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush. He writes a blog at davidcorn.com.

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