The futuristic sci-fi game Warhammer 40,000 depicts a battle between authoritarians and their opponents in a dystopian future. Historian Christian Ruth, in the conservative website The Bulwark, describes Warhammer 40,000 as "bombastic and intentionally, deeply satirical." But according to Ruth, MAGA Republicans are taking the game's biting satire of fascism and twisting it into a pro-Donald Trump meme.
"40k's deep ambiguity makes it a compelling setting for gaming — but it also offers the online right a perfect set of tools for prosecuting its own irony-poisoned meme crusade," Ruth explains in The Bulwark. "What exactly do they want to express when they depict Trump as the God-Emperor of Mankind? If you have to ask, they might joke, the Inquisition could show up on your doorstep."
Warhammer 40,000 debuted long before the MAGA movement. Released in 1987 — the year Trump's "The Art of the Deal" came out — by the British company Games Workshop, Warhammer 40,000 (which many gamers and sci-fi fans call "Warhammer 40K") was a sequel to the battle game Warhammer. When Warhammer 40,000 came out, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the UK, the Soviet Union still existed, and Madonna was burning up the Billboard charts.
But Warhammer 40,000 is still popular after 39 years, and according to Ruth, MAGA Republicans are well aware of it.
"Many of 40K's foundational themes deliberately evoked the political and socioeconomic tumult of the 1980s and the late Cold War as (Prime Minister) Margaret Thatcher restructured the British economy along neoliberal lines," Ruth notes. "Some of the earliest editions of both the original Warhammer and 40K made their contemporaneous satire explicit. One of the mightiest and bloodthirstiest and most human-hating Orks in the 40K universe is called Mag Uruk Thraka, for goodness' sake. In 40K, whole worlds are destroyed by a casual 'Exterminatus' order that cauterizes threats to the Imperium with nuclear fire. The real-world English industrial town Birmingham, degraded by Thatcher's policies in our timeline, became the name for a dark, backwards industrial planet in 40k's distant future; it receives so few visitors that 'its inhabitants have become linguistically and culturally isolated.'"
Ruth continues, "The punk rock and the counterculture movements of the 1970s and 1980s were a major influence on the art of Warhammer and have remained a constant undercurrent for its unique hyper-gothic medieval futurism. All of which is to say, Warhammer has always been political."
MAGA Republicans, according to Ruth, are twisting Warhammer imagery when they rail against "wokehammer."
"One right-wing Warhammer YouTuber, 'Arch Warhammer,' has notably made joint videos with far-right fitness guru 'the Golden One' Marcus Follin in which the two lament the decline of western culture in their respective media spheres," Ruth observes. "Elements of far-right politics in both the United States and the United Kingdom have surged in Warhammer communities. Some fans feel that their hobby has come under unwelcome external scrutiny and even attack, and seek to preserve it against alleged cultural interlopers by upholding what they see as the old ways."