Robert Evans

No, I got to rule humanity.

You people can't govern yourselves.

You can't be fucking trusted.

Yeah.

So Warhammer 40,000 and the God Emperor character have existed since the 1980s.

For most of the time that the game has existed, it's been a fairly obscure pastime.

It requires a lot of money in order to actually play the game.

And it used to require a lot of money just to buy all of the books and guides that would teach you anything about the game at all.

But social media...

and video games have introduced 40K 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 the hobby to quite a few people who call themselves fans.

And so as a result, when the long-simmering U.S.

culture war ignited the world of gaming a year or so prior to the start of the Trump campaign, 40K 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 largely the subject of satire in the lore –

made it kind of an obvious inspiration for white nationalists looking to hide propaganda in memes, right?

The fact that like people who were playing 40K were usually playing one of the factions affiliated with this evil fascist space empire, even though the game was satirizing the evil fascist space empire part of it all, meant that there was like some room, wiggle room for folks to get in and try to like propagandize to people.

Right.