Chapter 1: What is the teaser for the new Warhammer 40,000 podcast?
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions.
Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but you know. Tired and sick. Tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it.
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.
Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the Enhanced Games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.
Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on. A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.
Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud.
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Chapter 2: How has Warhammer 40,000 gained cultural significance?
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 ā 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.
All they need is a tiny bit. There's always enough wiggle room. It's like a mouse smashing itself under a door. There's nothing you can do.
Right. Right. Especially since like it's part of its wiggle room and part of it's like, well, what do like angry young men who aren't great at like being socialized do? Well, they spend way too much time playing games. I say as an angry young man who wasn't well socialized when he was young. I see myself in these comments, Robert. Yeah, playing a lot of Warhammer, right.
And hey, I'm well socialized now and I still love Warhammer. That's fine. Goddamn right.
Which is always wild to me because Warhammer is inherently a social game. It is, it is. Even with all the video games or whatever, if that's how you want to consume it, great. But the second you cross that line and start buying minis, you have to go into a room and start talking to people.
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Chapter 3: What is the connection between Warhammer 40K and contemporary politics?
Who would have thought that Donald Trump was Hillary Clinton's gene seed father?
Yes, it is implied. The meme, because again, this is his son who is the evil he's fighting. So yes, this kind of is implying that Hillary Clinton was created by Donald Trump. And she's absolutely towering over him, too. Yeah, she's towering. She looks way cooler. She just killed an angel. It's pretty sweet. So the meme broke.
The God Emperor meme broke mainstream awareness in 2016 when New York Times reporter Jonathan Weissman wrote about the hate mail and threats 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 an image of the gates of Auschwitz, the famous words Arbeit Macht Frei, replaced without irony with Machen Amerika Great. So, again, this guy and this journalist, like Wiseman doesn't recognize that this guy is making a Warhammer reference or at least he doesn't write about it. Yeah. It's just like, what the fuck is this? The username of the guy messaging him.
And again, like, why would he have? Right. Like, if you don't like you wouldn't assume Trump God Emperor is someone referencing a video game. You just in this context, you just assume it's a crazy fascist. Right.
Right.
Yeah, but about two months after that column came out, a writer with the Huffington Post, Nico Pitney, wrote an article about the growing Trump God Emperor meme phenomenon. Quote, among Trump's active online supporters using the nickname is now commonplace.
The post announcing Trump's participation in the Q&A heralded our God Emperor and a search of the phrase returned over 200 posts in the day after Trump's appearance. 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 40,000. We know he can't literally be one, wrote member New Jersey 908, but the phrase whips people into a frenzy, saying that we literally want a dictator.
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Chapter 4: How do memes like 'God Emperor Trump' reflect fan culture?
And this all does end badly for the emperor, Like, his sons, who were his main generals that he had created in a lab, too, eventually a bunch of them betray them, and he's badly wounded, and he 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, kind of...
in 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 like people always like to say like oh it's you know and nobody's good in the world of warhammer 4k which is true yes um but specifically the imperium is horrible Yeah.
Absolutely horrible. And in the books about this genocide, there's moments where your favorite characters are wiping out a species, and the last members of the species will be like, we just wanted to be left alone. They're not subtle. The writers are not super subtle about them being the baddies.
Say what you will about Warhammer 40K, but subtle is not one of them.
Subtle is not something you can apply to this game. However, some people fail to see the broader message in the lore and just hone in on the things that appeal to them. And there's a great 4chan post I found from, I think, July 21st, 2015, where someone posts a picture and it's yet another one of those like...
photoshop things where you've got like donald trump in the place of a space marine year is now 40 000 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 And again, like in the game, things aren't good in the 41st 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.
And anywhere the space marines came from is by design terrible. Right.
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