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you get your podcasts. And we're going to see the next episode of the next episode of the iHeart Women Sports. Oh, welcome back to, well, this is the behind-the-bastard's feed. And this is normally where you get new episodes behind the bastards. But every now and then we try something new, and in the not too distant future, I'm planning
to be launching a new podcast with my friend and fellow giant nerd, Jo Kasebian, also a fellow podcast. Hey, Joe, how are you doing? Hey, buddy, it's good to be here. Yeah, and we are wanting to do a plan to do a podcast on Warhammer 40,000, which is a game
system that some of you are probably aware of, and others of you maybe aren't.
“I think a lot of people know about this now.”
It's reach kind of a point of cultural, critical mass, or I think a significant chunk of
people in the internet are just kind of casually aware it exists in a way that they weren't when we were kids and started playing this. Yeah, 100%, I remember back when I first heard about Warhammer through the books, like nobody really knew what it was other than other people that would fall into that fan zone. But now anybody who doesn't even know it's a miniature, maybe they know it from the like
the total war games or whatever it is, definitely the biggest it's ever been. Yeah, and the podcast, you know, talk later about what exactly the podcast kind of things that the podcast will be covering, but this episode, I specifically wanted to talk about the intersection of Warhammer 40K and like pop culture and pop politics in the United States and elsewhere, because it's what of having a surprisingly large impact on like the way
people communicate on the internet, and the way people talk about Donald Trump in particular, that's really weird. 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 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 I do that, Joe, you've got a book to plug. I do. My debut gunpowder fantasy novel The Highlands Burn comes out May 29th, so you can preorder it now, which is the best time to get it.
So when it arrives, it'll be nice and fresh. Excellent. Well, everyone should do that, and everyone should listen to the episode, which you have no choice but to listen to, because I'm going to start reading it to you and you're already listening to the podcast, right?
So if you're at all in a social media and up to date on the current political hars of our age, you've probably heard President Donald Trump referred to as God Emperor Trump.
Currently that phrase alone returns about 4 million results on Google, and that is a reference
To Warhammer 40,000.
In 40K, as its fans call it, the God Emperor is the founder and 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 10,000 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, right?”
Hey, I've been recently Trump posted a picture of himself as Jesus Christ, so maybe he's starting to buy managers. That's right, that's right. And the Emperor, being a being whose lived tens of thousands of years, is kind of insinuated to maybe have been Jesus or at least somebody who like profited, you know, was influential
in starting the early church. He's been insinuated to have been basically everybody, 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, could 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 shrodinger situation, and this aspect of it is really well embodied by something
very funny that happened on February 11th, 2019 over in Italy. The via regio kind of all, is an event held in via regio, a city in Tuscany, and has been a yearly parade in celebration since 1873. 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 pushed to increase taxes on working class citizens and poor people, processed 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 card of all. And kind of the key feature of this is there's these huge paper-mishave floats, the largest of which weighs like 40 tons, that people may spend the year making, there's massive things.
They're the size of buildings, and then walk through the street, right? And they're drive through the street, I think now. And there's these big drunken parties, and everybody wears masks since a great time, about
half a million people attend each year.
And 2019 was like in the other year, except that the pride of the parade was a 65-foot tall sculpture of Donald Trump as the god emperor of mankind. Yeah, would you show me this picture? I asked if I should. I had never seen this.
It'll be the thumbnail image of this. This one's not going to be a video episode because it's a special one, but I do kind of want people to see it, if you just Google like Trump got emperor float parade float or something
“like that, you'll see pictures, and it really is something that gets massive, right?”
I would love to be into the planning meeting on that one, because you know it took a small to medium sized team to build this monster. Yes. Someone had to pitch that idea to the rest of them and explain exactly what the fuck it was. It was several people's whole year.
The guy behind it is artist Fabrizio Gali, who created as a critique of Trump's presidency. Some of this is obvious if you like really look at the details of the statue. They're like four blue Twitter birds flying around the sword handle. The emperor, like this is based off of like a drawing in several drawings of the emperor, which is he's guys wearing huge, a huge golden suit of power armor with like Eagles wings
on it. And 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 sword he 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 bring up a different phrase, which Gali summarized as meaning, "Here's your fucking tariffs," right? That's the blade is the tariffs, which is kind of like, "Precient," that he really kicked
those out as being a weapon in a way they weren't nearly as much in 2020, during that day and as they are now. And it still kind of works as a bit of imperial propaganda on 40K. This is a hundred percent something that the Emperor would have said to, like, a planet in revolt.
Like, "Here's your fucking tariffs," with a literal sword. Yeah. Fabrizio said of this, quote, "It's a joke, but in fact, he's trying to destroy nations with the economy instead of nuclear missiles."
This is one of the strongest actions, let's say, that powerful people like Trump can
use. So we'll go back to Fabrizio in a bit, but what's relevant to my point here is, the point
I was making earlier, is that as soon as pictures of this float get online, t...
They're 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 it was a parade for Trump. Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent for right-wing channel What 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."
Oh, incredible, everybody knows it can't be a Trump float because it wasn't sponsored
by Coinbase. Right. Right. No one was selling crypto. It was 2019.
It couldn't have been affiliated with Trump. Yeah, exactly. Nobody could have rugged Paul the parade. Oh, man. I do, you know, if the emperor was a real character, he's got to be alive, he should be
alive then, because he's like 30,000, 40,000 years old when the game starts, which means theoretically, the emperor could have bought in F.T.s, right, that's true. His madness could be entirely driven by all of his apes getting stolen. It might be, he set him down the path. The thing that really drove him to combat chaos of someone tried to explain the concept
of a slurpe juice to him. No, I got a rules humanity. You people can't govern yourselves. The fuck? 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 like 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 wickies. Like 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, 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, you know, largely the subject of satire in the lore, made it kind of
“an obvious inspiration for white nationalist 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, 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 propaganda is to people. The all they need is the tiny, but 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 in part of its 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, isn't angry young man who wasn't well-socialized, but he was, you know, 70 myself in these comments? Yeah, playing a lot of warhammer, right? And hey, I'm well-socialized now, and I still love warhammer. That's fine.
Goddamn, right?
But which is always wild too, because warhammer is inherently a social game.
It isn't.
“Even with all the video games, 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. Yeah, at some point, you're going to have to be around other people when you really want to do it. So God Emperor Trump meme started spreading on 4chan back in 2015, right around the same
time Trump announced his campaign. And December 25, 2015, a YouTuber named Talit, uploaded a video that collected a bunch of early memes entitled it "Donald Trump Imperor of Man Kind." Talit 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 had 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 is very confusing. This is a real beautiful find. I think that's Hillary in there.
Yeah, that's Hillary. Oh, yeah, that's Hillary. That's Hillary. And then there's a, there's not, 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 to make sure 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 reported Jonathan Weisman 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 shift-ness, shift-less, hook-nosed Jew.
I was served an image of the gays of Auschwitz, the famous words "Arbite mocked fry," replaced it without irony, with mocking America great. So again, this guy and this journalist, like, Weisman doesn't recognize that this guy is
making a warhammer reference.
That's good, right? That's good, right?
“That's just like, 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 got emperor is someone referencing a video game. You just, in this context, you just assume it's a crazy fascist, right? Right.
Yeah. Uh, but about two months after that column came out, a writer with the Huffington Post, Niko 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 foreign members say God Emperor is simply a tongue-and-cheek attempt to dial 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
Doon and a tabletop game called Warhammer 40,000. We know he can't literally be one, wrote member New Jersey 908, but the phrase which people into a frenzy saying that we literally want to dictate her. Oh, okay. Okay.
We're just wondering that. You can get back then. Yeah. It was nice you're back then when they had to pretend it was a bit. And I do have the quote, it could be Doon.
Warhammer is kind of, like, a lot of Warhammer was originally ripping off Doon, and
“the Emperor characters based heavily on Leo Trades, right?”
Like, there's that's certainly like Warhammer is essentially all of the sci-fi that was big in the 1980s and before getting put into a blender and merge together, right? So we mix with Thatcherite UK as we'll talk about, yes. So like the journalist there is correct, like, yeah, I mean, they could have been, but in this case, they definitely weren't.
They were talking about the Emperor from 40K. Now, a big part of the appeal of the God Emperor character for these people is that he was explicitly in the lore of the game, Jenna Sidal, the way the backstory goes, you know, Warhammer 40,000 is set in the 41st millennium, like 39 or so thousand years into the future. And in the lore of the game and like the, the year 30,000 or so, about 10,000 years before
the current day of the setting, the Emperor, while he was still alive in 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 went crazy and fucked everything up. So Earth was just like this warring mess of techno barbarians and shit, and the Emperor takes over a 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 and in a human world that wouldn't”
bend the need of him, right? They just do thousands of genocide out in the galaxy. They take over like a million words and this all does in 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 betrayed 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 none of this works for the Emperor and that again, kind of, 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.
And people always like to say like, oh, it's, you know, and nobody's good in the world of
Warhammer Force. Okay. Which is true. Yes. But specifically, the Imperium is horrible.
Yeah. Absolutely horrible. And in the books about this genocide, there's like moments where your favorite characters are wiping out of species and like the last members of the species will be like, we just wanted to be left alone.
Yeah. These are, they're not subtle, like the writers are not super subtle about them being
The bad.
Yes. Say, say what you will about Warhammer 40K, but subtle is not one of those. Settle is not something you could apply to this game. However, some people fail to see the broader message in the lore and just hone in on the things that appealed to them.
And there's a great four-chand post.
“I found from this, I think July 21st, 2015, where someone posted 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 the good, 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. It's not in fact good.
And anywhere the space marine's came from is by design. Terrible. Right. Yeah. They're abducted child soldiers who are like genetically enhanced so they can go crack down
on rebellions against the state. They're not like, it's not like it's a fun game. There's a lot of like the lore is interesting and the models are cool, but you're not supposed to think, boy, I wish I lived in that world. That would be silly.
Imagine if RFK Junior got the keys to the space marine program. Absolutely not. He's already got a strategic stockpile of trend and, like, butter ready to go. Yeah.
“Yeah, that's the first step towards having space marine, so you should just let RFK cook”
up, like, whatever kind of, like, mammal penis-based potion he can to invent the extra organs that make you a super soldier.
Fuck, he's America's first meal apothecary.
That's right. That's right. He's the beginning of the Techno Barbarian tribe. So the very first edition of Warhammer 40,000, which was called Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader.
It was a tabletop war game published first in 1987. Before '87, its manufacturer, games workshop, published a wide array of board games and miniatures, most of which were focused around fantasy war gaming and roleplay. Tabletop war games have a long history. The ancient Greeks were talking thousands of years ago, had a game called Patea, where
players would simulate failanks 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 didn't have it. Nice, did they need it? Yeah, we got a dice.
We know the Romans had D20, so, I mean, theoretically. It's true. That's true. But yeah, and there was, like, it was for military training, it was to help people who
“were going to be like officers, I think, sometimes figuring, like, learn the ropes and what”
not and learn to think strategically, the Romans being Romans plagiarized the Greeks and made their own war games, which were similar, but often much more complicated. The earliest form of chess, which is a tabletop war game, was created in India, and like the 600s, I think. And I think that the 1600s is when you start to get like modern chess.
And by the 1800s, and early 1900s, people had started selling and marketing war games with little lead soldiers, often simulating the polionic combat, or like American Civil War combat. But this is when you start to get war games, that at least you could recognize that a glance as the same kind of thing as Warhammer. We've got two dudes, and they're pushing little models of soldiers around a table, right?
Like, that's kind of when that comes into being.
Games Workshop had been founded in 1975 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 Warhammer, which is now called Warhammer Fantasy, came out in 1983. In 1986, Games Workshop published an issue of their company magazine, White Dwarf, that featured an orc model carrying a banner with the face of Margaret Fathcher, and the prime minister of the UK painted on it, and the piece was labeled Maggie's death banner.
And there's a, oh, there's just a joke, it's fucking great. Yeah. First off, pretty good paint job, like this, it's a credible, incredibly painted orc. And that's just straight up Margaret Fathcher's face on a banner with like a severed hand on the top.
It's great. That's good. And like the orcs understanding of technology is pretty much Margaret Fathcher's understanding of how economics work. Right.
Yes. Yes. Yes. If you privatize it, it goes faster. Yeah.
That's right. And a 2023 article for the gamer Ben Sledge writes, "She later appeared she being Fathcher in the evil within a campaign for warhammer fantasy roleplay. The name of the campaign itself is a reference to one of Fathcher's speeches, where she
infamously said, "We have always to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult
to fight and more dangerous to liberty." She was, of course, talking about the striking miners who are feared for their livelihoods in the face of countless mine closures under her regime. The Empress Margarita, also spelled Magrita, is a clear satirical representation of Fathcher,
Ascending to power in 1979, the same year as the British Prime Minister.
Oh, that's so cool. It gets better.
“In MacRacker leads an army of orcs against Arca Zargoels dwarfs, who themselves are suffering”
miners. If those names aren't recognizable to you, Ian McGregor was responsible for shutting down countless mines under Fathcher's orders, and Arthur Skargel was the leader of the National Union of Mine Workers during the strikes in 1984 and 1985, who later founded the Socialist Labor Party.
So, that's not subtle. With the unionized the dwarfs. Yeah. Yes, all dwarfs are unionized. As are, the sponsors for this podcast, unless they're not, I have really no way of knowing.
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite on humor me with Robert Smigle 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 Headwriters Streeter Sidel helped an Occupella band with their "Between Songs Banner."
Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Wasn't a humor me with Robert Smigle and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's us to Jonas Brothers and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news? The news. We created our own podcast.
Oh. Hey, Jonas. We invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it.
For the first people to do podcast.
Pretty. Yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts around. But this one's extra special.
“So how do we, how do we actually come up with a name, hey, Jonas?”
Guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Oh, we are thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers.
Well, this is how you guys remember it going down. Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast. People could call in and say, hey, Jonas.
And then I broke down on my little notepad, hey, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title. Oh, the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to hey, Jonas, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcast. Just listen, we don't care where you hear it. 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's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having troubles stopping the muscle growth. Listen to superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen Kingdom on Earth. He felt destined for greatness. So, when a swaggering Armenian businessman had a pulse Jacob into an extraordinary world,
he doesn't look back. For ouries and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey. Broad-Michal McFee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracy's I've ever come across.
When Jacob met Levant, this went to a billion dollar fraud.
But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive? The largest tax investigation in American history.
“You need to tell me what you know is somebody coming after me.”
Jacob told Levant, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 40k. As Sledge notes in his article, after 1987, the people making Warhammer 40,000, I think in part because 40k really started to take off, and they were like, "Oh, this could actually
be big. We probably shouldn't make so many jokes about partisan politics that might stop people from wanting to buy the game." Maybe we should put Margaret Thatcher's face up in there? Yeah, probably she had Maggie's face under his many banners.
So they got a little more subtle with things. The politics didn't disappear entirely.
You could always tell it was like punks making it in that period of time.
The early years of 40k art and lore contained many references and illusions to aspects of punk culture. So today, in the game, space marines are these gigantic, much taller than people, like monk-like heroic warrior monks, right? And they're all superhuman, the result of all of this genetic tinkering, and they're
incapable of fear in these, these kind of idealized, like the absolute ideal of a stereotypical
Warrior, right?
That's everything a space marines, that's not what they were at first.
“The first space marines were basically like mercenaries and like drafty cops of this brutal”
impure that were there to 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 and 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.
Minors ship their ores and slavers play their lutes some 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? Space marine cops flying through space so they can play candy crush and do nothing at
a different location. Right?
“That's not the only way space marines were depicted, but they were often depicted as that.”
As like cops and bullies, they were nearly always thugs, they weren't like they looked
cool, but like their personalities were not cool, right? They weren't meant to be. Yeah. Went from being like a warrior knight to starting off as like solid from Long Island. That's right.
Yeah. Strong, solid vibes in these guys. So again, even though after this point, there's no more whole campaign settings created a mock like Union Busting and the like. The designers behind 40K were always pretty direct about the fact that the Imperium are not
the good guys and the Emperor is not a great leader. In fact, here's how the first ever Warhammer 40,000 rule book opened. For more than 100 centuries, the Emperor has sat 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 riding invisibly with power from the dark age of technology. He is the carrying lord of the Imperium to whom 1,000 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. Much more explicit now it's kind of couched in the pseudo religious terms that the entire
Imperium exists says, but that it was definitely very much. You couldn't hide from like, no, this is an empire that runs on blood and death. Yeah, yeah. And there's still that bit that intro goes on to include some of the texts that they have at the start of every game book now.
And they always do make the point that like, this is a bad, this is the worst possible
regime, right? Yeah.
“They've been very consistent about that, but I love that bit at the start, right?”
Would you win it out with their like, the Imperium runs on the blood and flesh of human beings? It's a cannibalistic nightmare regime. Yep. Nothing changes.
Nothing changes. Variations of that passage have been included in basically every book of rules and lore 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 is 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, no most of like, 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 at over the years. The lot of people have made that aesthetic a real part of their lives. And this is, 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 of you 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, you're, you're seeing this now, but this is essentially a, I mean,
it's a, a waps like stamp with some papers underneath it, that's adhering into the armor. Oh, I've seen some, but I haven't seen this. Yeah, these are in, in the game, these like, waps papers adhered to like armor by these like waps seals, it's called an oath of moment, right, or purity seals, too. Like there's two different kinds of things that both sort of, you know, involved
there being like papers attached to it. But like, these are things like an oath of moment is like before battle, Marie space marines like right down, like what their goal is for this fighter, like make a vow that like this, you know, the enemy won't pass this point or something.
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 that space marines had look, have more like a medieval night vibe. And that's a big part of like the 40k 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 and 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 purity, like seals that you can put on your gear, right?”
I've seen like detachment's named after like space marine stuff as well. Yeah, yeah, like it's it's it's fucking wild. And there's even like if you look down there, there's another example of one on a guy's armor, with a bunch of like Warhammer patches on his body. Yeah, yeah, it's nothing but Warhammer stuff going from the Warhammer stand-in case.
More space marine's got a material guard one from the death watch of Krieg. Yep, or the death court. Yeah, sorry. Well, in that picture that you're looking at, Joe, came from a two-year-old post in the Warhammer 40K subreddit that read "Greetings from Ukraine."
Yeah, this has become really popular here because many of the military or Warhammer fans, so many of the volunteers who helped the military try and find merchandise or patches of this type for them as a nice gift, right? It's, and I'm not, by the way, like we're talking about this in the context of people taking Warhammer the right way, the wrong way, and have any issue with this, like you're fighting
“a fucking desperate war for your survival, do whatever you want to hear your armor, you know?”
Yeah, it makes you feel better, it's weird, it was strange to see, like this actually making its way to a real war because so many that people fighting that war are fans of the game. Like, that's just a moment for the hobby, and you can, to, for a comparison to how much this is jumped into mainstream, like, consciousness, when I was in the military, we had stupidly,
we call them morale patches. We had super little morale patches too, I never saw a 40k one.
I mean, this is back in the early 2000s, I've been killed at 20 seconds. Yeah, never saw anything, never. So within a decade, it's just like, no, there's detachment same death care, spacebringer, there's morale patches, like, it's, it's, it's having a moment, that's for sure. It's having a moment, and it's going to get weirder joke, 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. We're different company show off new weapons,
“both firearms that are linked, 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 little couple of decades, but it's really escalated over the last 10 or 15 years, have been small, portable, semi-automatic, and automatic grenade launchers. In many cases, ones that can fire, like, smart grenades, right? We have to leave 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 what's weapons
have, like, weapons development has leapt forward over the course of the last, like, 20 something years in this regard. You have a lot more options there than 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 spacebringer carries is called a boulder, and is 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 shoot towards its target and blow up. And, you know, their huge guns meant for future terrifying post-human war. And periodically, would you see one of these new automatic grenade launchers, people in line would be like, oh, that looks like a boulder, we're finally making real boulders, right, because that's kind of what they look like. And this
here at shot show, Barrett, which is a company that makes very fucking big guns brought a semi-automatic grenade launcher painted in ultra marines blue with a fucking, uh, an oath of moment attached to the barrel. Oh, wow. Hey, everyone, Robert here, the maker of that 30 millimeter grenade launcher was actually Mars Inc, not Barrett. I made the mistake because both Mars and Barrett are making
basically identical 30 millimeter grenade launchers and competing to get a contract from the
US military for this program called the SSRS system, and both had models of the SSRS on display at shot show, but it was Mars Inc that painted theirs up to look like a boulder and put a purity seal on it. Thank you. I have to wonder what games workshop feels about this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's just straight up 40k. That's just the boulder. Yeah. Ultra marines blue and everything on there. Like it's fucking wild. Yeah.
Whether or not you think that's cool, depends on your attitude towards the ar...
Again, you can think about that however you want, but it represents a kind of awkward
problem for games workshop. The fact that stuff like this is happening is evidence of the insane degree of cultural penetration that Warhammer has achieved, but having real weapons made
“in the image of your video game or of your of your game weapons can be problematic, too, right?”
Yeah. You don't want to be connected to someone being actually murdered by your product. Right. Right. Like that, that can be a problem. And speaking of things that are problematic, the sponsors of the show. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite on humor me with Robert Smygo and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Oden Kirk to David Letterman help make
you funnier this week. My guess SNL's Mikey Day and head writer streeter side L helped an occapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Wasn't a humor me with Robert Smygo and friends on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's us to Jonas Brothers and guess what, we have some
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We invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to first people to do podcast.
Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts. But this one's extra special. So how do we,
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on a call about what we should call it. And oh, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. Well, this is how you guys remember going down. Yes, I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast. We could call in and say, hey, Jonas, and then I rubbed down on my little note pad, hey, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title. Oh, I got it. But thanks for remembering
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Jacob told Levant, you're ruining my life. Listen to kingdom of fraud on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So as I kind of brought up before we went to break, the wide popularity of Warhammer has increasingly forced problematic confrontations, both between sort of how much people like it, and how many many things they want to stick Warhammer on, and what the company,
games workshop, they want Warhammer's.com, and between like groups of 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 very mocked themed guard arm. Here's something if I'm remembering correctly. But he was like wearing Nazi shit, and he'd entered the tournament under the name Austrian painter, like real fucking subtle,
my dude. And people weren't thrilled about this. I'm going to quote from an article in Polygon. GT Televera tournament organizers gave comment to tabletop Wargaming site Spikybit 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 organizers said that the player said he would not leave unless they involve the police. As displaying Nazi imagery is not illegal in Spain,
the organizers hesitated, less the spring legal trouble upon their club. And I don't know enough
About the situation to know, like where these guys really just backed into a ...
and never had a lot of options, should that probably, I mean, I guess they could have
“and should have done more, but I don't really know much about that. What I do know is that this”
cause is a lot of people to get pissed off online. And it blows up enough that games workshop has to publish an announcement on November 19th, 2021. The Imperium is driven by hate. Warhammer 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 Warhammer 40,000. It is satirical. They go through the definition of what satiris, right? Like literally in this little article
that they put up. And then they note that said, certain real-world hate groups in adherence to of 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 are 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 say, they straight out say, if you come to a game's workshop of interstore and wear symbols of a hate group, we'll ask you to leave if we don't want your money. Some things don't need to be set allowed until they do. It's an implication. And to be fair, in most places in Europe, this would have been against law. Spain, however, is a
different for different reasons. Yeah. Yeah, it's that CS divide. You know, sometimes it applies a little further than it ought to. And I want to note too to be fair. I don't want it to seem like
“because as you noted, like this isn't a thing you have to say until you do, there's some valid”
critiques that there were other things that cropped up for a few years prior to this, that games workshop should have made a statement earlier. I'm certainly 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, and 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 a culture warrior and they're not an activist. But like, I'm glad that something got fucking said. And 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 guards when they're used to be, more female L-DAR. And, you know, they've at least trended the sisters of battle, which is an all female line has gotten like a refreshed 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, you know, a 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 1987, that, like, they would want there to be, like, the female models for space marines. They were thinking
about that kind of stuff. And it would hardly be the first bit of lore that was retconned,
like, like, the tapestry of Warhammer lore is a series of retconnings. Yeah. And that said, I also do kind of one thing that I appreciate is in some of the more recent lore when they've gone back to, like, like, feature, have books that feature the emperor and talk about the creation of the space marines. One way they've kind of retconned 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,”
the, your sons, that were the leaders of these legions, women. Like, they should have all been girls. Like, the, their leaders in the space, because we would have 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 meant because the emperor's just kind of had misogynists, like, they're trying to let up destroying him, right? The fact that he, yeah, it kind of does,
like, it sort of works. But one thing him's workshop did do recently is that introduced the emperor's bodyguard, are these other group of fucking future super soldiers, the custodes, who, or the custodes, whatever, it fucking fake Latin pronunciation you want to use. And they've been adding, like, female scopes, like, female heads and stuff, you can only really tell with the faces, but a chunk of people online lost their goddamn minds. I'll tell you that right now. The most
wow, I'm so surprised by this. Crazy over this shit. And it's, it's very funny, because you'll see them posting stuff like, you know, if, if you just want to play the hobby, play the hobby, but don't come into my culture and try to, like, change it because, like, you want to, you want to, you want to be blue-haired, you know, girls in your, in my fucking game. And my culture. Yeah, a lot of these
Guys being like, oh, this is going to destroy the hobby.
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 orcs and shit are worth more than fishing to the British economy. And it's an island. I can play, uh, these weird space monsters, like, tyrannids or orcs, and uh, but, you know, when you, when you add women to the mix, really ruining the immersion, what's the most unbelievable, I can't believe it. Fucking fucking insane man. Yeah, it's,
“it's very silly. And, you know, at the, at its core, this is a culture war centered over very important”
problem for creatives, though, which is that like, when you're creating fictional fascist organizations, whether they're impossibly advanced sci-fi empires or, like, a cult of deranged post-apocalyptic bikers, there's a risk that you're going to make that some of the fans of your work will be fans of those fictional fascists. And not in a, I just think they look cool away, but in a, I have some opinions about, you know, this racial group way, right? And real fascists, as we know,
it has been 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 a send-in 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.com. The time of intellectuals, philosophers, and have
old and worn cultures over, we have entered the era of fantasy, video games, and virtual life. Yeah, right on the nose there, 2019, but bang, hit the target. Oh, hey, I, I hate when you read something from now several years ago. Yeah, that's just everything now. That is, that is just everything. Yeah, that's just everything. Well, Joe, I did that's all I've got here, you know, how are you feeling? I feel, I'm feeling good Robert, and I hate to say it.
Yeah, because I love talking about Warhammer. I love talking about Warhammer, and I love talking about being talking about Warhammer. And I love the weird ship that comes out of it, especially
hearing stuff like this, because I don't want people to be the first introduction of Warhammer,
like, oh, wow, it's populated by fascists. Yeah. I go to a local Warhammer club where I live, I'm not going to do dox it, but it is full of incredibly lovely people, and hopefully one of the most diverse rooms I've ever been in in the Netherlands. Yeah. Yeah, it's good that you, maybe we could close at talking about stuff like this, because it's conservative, a weirdo as I was as a kid. I really do think playing Warhammer was one of the healthier things
for me in terms of connecting me to other people who believed different things, like even within the context of, like, a fucking gaming group at a hobby store in the early 2000s. Like, I remember after the invasion of Iraq, like, a few weeks or months after, like, my friends and I, like,
“somebody brought in, like, a printout of, like, a missile strike on, I think it was a BMP on,”
like, an Iraqi troop transport. You could see frame by frame, this thing blowing up, like,
people inside it, and we're fucking shitty kids in Texas being like, whoa, like, look, I've never
seen anything like that. And one of the guys we game 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 and had, like, his 40s or 50s, who would yell at children over the rules of the video or of a tabletop game? Hell 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 should need to have more respect. And as, like, a fucking 12-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. Meanwhile, he's, he's dressed head to toe, an Imperial Guard cosplay, like, you shouldn't do that. Absolutely. Hey, man, death isn't funny, and covered in skulls, head to toe.
All right, Joe, you want to plug your book before we roll out here? Yeah. So I'm the host of the history podcast lines that by Donkeys. So if you like military history, check us out. And my first gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn comes out May 29th, and you can digitally pre-order it now. So check that out. Reviews are coming in. They're very positive, and I'm really excited to, for it to release. Excellent. I'm very excited to read it
Excited for our listeners to read it.
about Warhammer. When's it coming out? Neither of us know. Where? Hell yeah. There's going to be
“a little bit of a delay, like we're currently dealing with, you know, there's a lot of logistical”
issues, including like just bringing you on and signing contracts because you're in a different country and stuff. We'll figure it out. 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've both kind of teased this online and social media a couple times and I felt like bad about not putting
something out. People had noticed. People had noticed. So we'll be getting you, you know, we'll have more coming out soon. The show will be usually 40 minutes to an hour long episodes.
We'll be covering, you know, the history in the lore in game will be covering like 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 and 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 and sci-fi fiction and how that's led us to like games workshop
“building an empire. Yes. Yeah. And yeah, like what do you most excited to talk about?”
I'm incredibly excited to talk about the and explain how the imperial guard works the people and and now and how they dive by the tens of millions. Yeah. Well, that's all for today folks. We'll be back later. I mean at some point with the show. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media. From more from cool zone media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
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“Listen, humor me with Robert Smigle and Friends on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts,”
or wherever you get your podcast. Hey guys, it's us at 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 our 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 iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen, we don't care where you hear it. I'm Michelle McFey. And I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on. Unmorm impoligamous and an Armenian businessman.
Multi-million dollar house for our eastern Lamborghini's private jets a billion dollar fraud.
But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of fraud on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Winning on clay is an art. The rallies are relentless. And at the French open, only the toughest survive.
I know. I competed there for decades. Joining Renee Stubbs on the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast for no nonsense break downs of the biggest matches. The toughest players. And the moment said to find rolling girls. Gentian Winner. She's an outsider to win the French ring. And he likes clay. Listen, Lerner Rebarkina is arguably the best player in the world right now.
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