Daily Archives: March 31, 2021

March 4 was supposed to be a terrible day. Based on reports of a possible attack, linked to the fact the online cult QAnon had identified March 4 as the day their predictions would come true, nearly 5,000 National Guard troops were ordered to remain in Washington, D.C. Capitol police warned internally of a Q-fueled militia plot, and FBI officials noted it was on alert as well. Congress shut down operations for the day.

And then, nothing. No plot, no protests, no Q. March 4 was a limp, dried-out nothingburger.

Dates have always played a crucial role in the cult of Q the baseless conspiracy theory that there is a global cabal of Satan-worshipping child sex traffickers, and that former President Donald Trump is involved in a righteous plan to bring these evildoers to justice. The groups predictions are often tied to some date on the horizon, when Trumps adversaries will start to be arrested and the global sex trafficking ring will be exposed. The latest date was March 4, but before that it was Jan. 20. And before that it was Dec. 5. And before that, some date in Red October.

For a long time, we didnt have to circle these dates on our own calendars. But after the attack of the Capitol building included some QAnon followers, the groups timeline has caught the attention of law enforcement. Even if the dates arent signalling the fall of a global cabal, perhaps they could help us prevent another deadly attack. Just as a doomsday cult continually reworks its calculations to account for failed end of days predictions, QAnon is always moving the goalposts for when its big day will arrive. Its the cult that cries wolf.

Just take March 4 as an example.

To understand March 4, we have to start with all the other March 4s that came before it. QAnon has long warned a storm is coming, and that at some point the shadowy group of Democratic and celebrity elites said to be pedophiles who eat babies and drink childrens blood would be brought to justice. When exactly this will take place has been a moving target since Qs inception.

Some of the earliest messages from Q, an anonymous person or group of people claiming insider knowledge on which the QAnon conspiracy theory is based, specified precisely when these arrests would begin. A post in October 2017 claimed that Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45 AM 8:30 AM EST on Monday the morning on Oct 30, 2017. When this didnt happen, new dates were disseminated. Gradually, Qs posts became more vague, allowing the followers to project meaning onto cryptic messages to decipher what would happen when. That way, if nothing happened, it was simply because Q followers had misinterpreted the scripture-like missives, not because Q was bogus. The result has been a constantly evolving ephemeris of dates, culminating in a fever pitch of anticipation for Jan. 20, 2021. Most QAnon followers believed that on Inauguration Day, Trump would reveal he had actually won the election, introduce martial law and begin public trials and executions of those in the cabal.

When this prophecy failed, just as all the previous ones had, many QAnon followers were inconsolable. Some even decided to abandon the movement altogether, saying they felt duped. But others simply went back to the drawing board, hoping to find another date on which to hang their hopes. Thats when March 4 started to pick up steam.

Despite the often illogical nature of QAnon predictions, the March 4 date wasnt plucked out of thin air. As a date of significance, it predates QAnon entirely. For much of U.S. history, Inauguration Day was indeed on March 4, until the ratification of the 20th Amendment in 1933 changed it to Jan. 20. A decades-old conspiracy theory held by a group known as the sovereign citizen movement claims that at some point in the 1870s, the United States government was converted to a corporation owned by the city of London, and every president since Ulysses S. Grant has been illegitimate. According to this far-out thinking, U.S. birth certificates and Social Security cards are actually contracts of ownership, with U.S. citizens as property of this vast, foreign-owner corporation. Though the sovereign citizens conspiracy is even more elaborate, the QAnon followers only lifted the bits that served them, and decided that on March 4, the corporation of the United States would be dissolved, and Trump would take office as the 19th legitimate president.

This theory was floated in QAnon circles in early 2021. On Jan. 11, a user in a Q Telegram chat room wrote out the basics of the theory. Trump will NOT be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on January 20 Trump WILL take office as the 19th president of the United States on March 4, the post reads. I really dont know all the details involved in this. Just know the end goal has always been the destruction of that 1871 corporation and the return of America to the people like the democratic republic it always intended to be. On Jan. 15, Canadian Q vlogger Michelle Anne Tittler posted a video in which she reads out the same text, which became popular once Jan. 20 failed to deliver, as Recode reporter Rebecca Heilweil noted. The video had been cross-posted to alt-video sites, and the March 4 idea continued to spread on mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok, as well as on Telegram and QAnon message boards. By January 22, the theory had spread far enough that Reuters ran a fact check debunking the rumour. Tittlers YouTube profile was eventually removed for violating the sites policies, but not before the video promoting March 4 had racked up nearly 1 million views. The cross posts of her video on BitChute and Rumble have currently been viewed 124,000 and 66,000 times, respectively.

As the idea of March 4 was picking up steam in the QAnon community, it also caught on in the news media. Dozens of stories identified March 4 as the groups latest goalpost, citing it as a potential sequel to the insurrection on Jan. 6.

But Jan. 6 and March 4 differed in a number of important ways. Jan. 6 attracted many more than just QAnon supporters. It was a rally promoted by Trump, who invited the thousands of his supporters that came to D.C. that day. Along with QAnon believers, there were also far-right militia groups with backgrounds of instigating violence who were known to be planning to come to the Capitol that day. It was also an undeniably significant date, not significant in the QAnon, cryptic puzzle sense, but in a practical sense: Jan. 6 was the day Congress was certifying the results of an election that millions of Americans wrongly believed was fraudulent, thanks to Trumps lies. Jan. 6 had all of the ingredients necessary for a dark outcome, yet law enforcement was not prepared.

In contrast, March 4 was almost strictly QAnon-focused, and even among that group, there was little consensus. Thats the norm for dates in the QAnon almanac. When someone identifies a date of interest, it snowballs into dozens more followers promoting the idea, which then sparks debate and deliberation among the community. Followers share evidence for and against a particular date, noting that Q who hasnt posted since December, the longest period of silence since the entity began posting in 2017 rarely specifies exact dates anymore.

But even when there is widespread consensus among Q followers on a given date, such as Jan. 20, QAnon rarely makes a call to action more extreme than pop some popcorn. Much of the Q philosophy is that the work is done through research on your computer, and when big events take place, all Q followers have to do is sit back and enjoy the show. The message is on this date, turn your TV on, not on this date, we take to the streets. This is such a well-hewn tenet of the QAnon cult that other alt-right groups often criticize QAnon for promoting complacency rather than the kind of violent uprising those groups prefer.

QAnon is built in part on this fantasy that you can change the world in a really grand, revolutionary way just by sitting at your computer and sharing memes, said Travis View, co-host of the podcast QAnon Anonymous, which has been tracking the movement for years. Jan. 6 was unique because it was an event specifically promoted by Trump. You really need those big advertising powers from those influencers in order to motivate QAnon followers to do something in the physical world.

Either way, as soon as the media began publicizing the March 4 date, that coverage threw a lot of cold water on the notion. Just as quickly as the idea emerged, it was being backpedaled. As early as Feb. 9, Jordan Sather, a QAnon influencer, posted on Telegram that he had the feeling the March 4 date was planned disinformation designed to dupe people into spreading probably nonsense theories that make the whole movement look dumb. Very quickly, the prevailing theory among QAnon was that March 4 was either a psychological operation or a false flag. Q supporters began rejecting the idea and mocking media coverage of the date.

March 4 is the medias baby, MelQ, a QAnon influencer on Telegram with over 80,000 subscribers, wrote on March 2. Nothing will happen.

Law enforcement in and around D.C. could very well have had reliable intelligence suggesting a more organized event on March 4, which may have been squelched by the increased security. We cant know for sure. I reached out to U.S. Capitol Police officials for comment, but they only directed me to their previous statement, which does not cite QAnon or any other group by name.

QAnon, by and large, is not a violent movement, and popular holidays among Anons are not going to be the best place to look for predicting violent events, according to security experts I spoke to.

There are organized, white supremacist and far-right militant groups that commit violence on a recurring basis, and thats the biggest element thats lost in the way law enforcement looks at these issues. They tend to look at them as standalone events, said former FBI agent Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Theyre not looking for violence these same individuals committed in the weeks, months and years previous to the attack on the Capitol that would be significant evidence demonstrating their intent.

Instead, German said law enforcement should focus on individuals and groups with a known track record of violence, and rely on intelligence rather than random dates tossed around on Q forums for predicting and preventing violence. Thats not to say we should brush QAnon off as harmless: after all, there are QAnon supporters who have been involved in violent plots, including a man arrested in Wisconsin last week for threatening to commit a mass casualty event. And even beyond these outlier offenders, the QAnon movement, including its ever-evolving calendar of predicted catastrophes, comes with its own very real risks in undermining trust in our democratic institutions in a very real, insidious and growing way.

We need to worry about Q not because its about to overthrow the government, said Mia Bloom, a professor of communication at Georgia State University and an expert on QAnon and extremism. We need to worry about Q because the long-term effect is corrosive to democratic values.

The cult who cried wolf is not one whose cries should be written off for good.

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QAnon Has Become The Cult That Cries Wolf - FiveThirtyEight

The past year has been a tough one for the movie business. But despite the widespread closure of theaters and delays in releases,an impressive bunch of films related to the arts have come out.

From dueling documentaries on the infamous Knoedler forgery scandal to biopics on artists M.C. Escher DavidWojnarowicz, here are 19 new art movies and where to stream them.

Undoubtably one of the biggest art scandals of the 21st century, the Knoedler forgery ring saw the eminent U.S. gallery sell some $80 million in forged mid-century masterpieces. Those involved said they did so unknowingly, despite an unverifiable provenances, wildly anachronistic materials, and, most damningly, a misspelled signature. Daria Price covers it all in this documentary. (Bonus: The film features expert commentary from Artnet Newss senior market editor Eileen Kinsella.)

Knoedler forgery scandal, take two. This documentary interviews Ann Freedman, the gallerys president, and a central figure in the forgery ring. She presents herself as the scams biggest victimbut was she actually its mastermind?

Chris McKim draws on the audio journals of the late artistDavid Wojnarowiczplus commentary from the likes of Fran Lebowitz, art dealer Gracie Mansion, and art critic Carlo McCormickto paint a full picture of the queer painter, photographer, writer, and activist, who died in 1992 of AIDS. The obscene title comes from a graffiti message that Wojnarowicz found scrawled on the street and appropriated for his art.

Artist Matthew Taylor directs a love letter toMarcel Duchamp, who changed the course of art history not once, but twice. First with his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,which ignited controversyat the 1913 Armory Show in New Yorkeven as it ushered the Modernist movement into the mainstream, and then withThe Fountain, his urinal readymade that became a legendary Dada masterpiece.

Jennifer Trainer, who spent decades as the head of public relations at MASS MoCAin North Adams, Massachusetts (and is married to Joseph C. Thompson, its former director), directs a film celebrating the institution and the way it revitalized a rural town after local factories shut down. Meryl Streep offers some star power as the documentarys narrator.

Artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, known for her monumental wooden sculptures, shaped from towering cedar trunks, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the studio machinations that make her large-scale public artworks possible.

Novelist and filmmaker Veronica Gonzalez Pea spent two years interviewing the painterPat Steirin this intimate portrait of the groundbreaking feminist artist and her beloved waterfall paintings, made by dripping, splashing, and pouring paint.

For this documentary, director Dennis Scholl gained access to the personal life of Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Stillin the form of 34 hours of audio recordings of the artist, as well as interviews with his daughters, Diane Still Knox and Sandra Still Campbell.

Carlos Almarazwas a Los Angeles artist and Chicano art activist who died of AIDS in 1989. His widow, artist Elsa Flores Almaraz, along with actor Richard J. Montoya, co-direct this Netflix documentary about his life and legacy, including his struggles to come to terms with his identity as a Chicano and his bisexuality. Watch to find out why David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, Jack Nicholson, and Cheech Marin have all been fans ofAlmarazs work.

This HBO documentary is largely narrated by artist and curator David Driskell, who died last year. The film explains the influence of his seminal 1976 group show Two Centuries of Black American Art, and features prominent Black artists working today, includingTheaster Gates,Kehinde Wiley,andJordan Casteel,

After decades of supporting institutions behind the scenesincluding more than a decade heading the board at the Museum of Modern ArtNew York City art philanthropist Agnes Gund gets her moment in the sun with this documentary directed by her daughter Catherine Gund.

Illustrator Matt Furie never could have predicted the afterlife of Pepe the Frog, a character from his comic book seriesBoys Club. This documentary from Arthur Jones unravels the mystery of how the slacker frog morphed first into an internet mascot and a symbol of hate for the alt-rightand how Furie attempted to reclaim his most famous creation.

Martha Cooper, who in the 1970s became the first female staff photographer at the New York Post, has made a name for herself as the foremost documenter of graffiti art in New York City. Now, her unlikely career is itself the subject of a documentary film, directed by Selina Miles.

Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree found a pair of unlikely documentary subjects in Barbora Kysilkova, a Czech painter, and Karl-Bertil Nordland, a thief that stole two of her paintings. The movie tracks their unlikely relationship as Kysilkova attempts to paint a portrait of the heavily tattooed criminal who committed the robbery because, she says, they were beautiful.

You might not know the name Gustav Stickley, but the late designer was a key figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement, which rebelled against industrialization. Director Herb Stratford provides a full picture of Stickleys life and career, and whats behind his lasting significance.

The mind-bending work of M.C. Escher, known for his optical illusions, was an exploration of both art and mathematics. Director Robin Lutz explores the evolution of the Dutch printmakers increasingly intricate work, animating his illustrations to stunning effect, with voiceovers from actor Stephen Fry.

This documentary from Aurlia Rouvier and Seamus Haley explores the various theories as to the identity of anonymous British street artist Banksy and praises his high-profile stunts, likeLove Is in the Bin, the shredding of aBalloon Girl print after it sold at auction. Its likely to be enjoyed most by diehard Banksy fans (one talking head apparently claims that Banksy is the Picasso of the 21st century).

In this indie film, directed by Michael Walker, three art school grads are determined to navigate the New York art world, even if they that means resorting to blackmail, betraying their friends, andperhaps worst of allpainting their own mothers in the nude. (Full disclosure: a group of real-life art-world professionals were called in as extras in the penultimate scene at a gallery opening, so keep an eye out for the writer.)

Director Halina Dyrschk continues the important work of restoring the legacy of pioneering Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, who began experimenting with abstraction five years before it was invented by Wassily Kandinsky. The film recounts Klints life and career, her descent into obscurity, and ultimate rediscovery, including theblockbuster 2019 exhibitionof her work at the Guggenheim Museum New York.

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19 Art Movies Available to Stream Now, From an Appreciation of Banksy to Dueling Documentaries on the Knoedler Scandal - artnet News

Whats Next? PAW asked two writers with different views to consider the future of our major political parties. Read Julian E. Zelizers take on the Democrats here.

There is an American elite, and if youre reading this magazine, you are very likely part of it. In terms of educational attainment, social status, income, and net worth, most Princeton alumni are at the most privileged end of the spectrum.

Elites seem to have benefited massively from the policies accepted or championed for decades by both major parties establishments. On paper, we have flourished under globalism and you-do-you social liberalism. International trade and relaxed borders havent put us out of jobs; our salaries havent been stagnating for 50 years; and with the luxuries of wealth and practical cunning, our peers have embraced the liberties of the sexual revolution without bearing many of its most visible costs: Most of us still get and stay married and rear children in stable homes.

Thats on paper. At a deeper level, our material privileges havent made us or our kids all that happy. The constant demand to strive and produce to win in a meritocracy undermines joy. No wonder mental-health care is now the main function of our universitys health services. Still, we arent dying the deaths of despair highlighted by Princeton professors Anne Case *88 and Angus Deaton: suicides, drug overdoses, and liver disease. Many of our compatriots are. We seem to have mastered the art of overlooking these forgotten Americans.

Ryan T. Anderson 04 is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which describes itself as Washingtons premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.

Photo courtesy Ethics and Public Policy Center

The future belongs to whichever party does for them what the establishments of both parties have done for us: prioritize their needs and interests. That means building an economy that works for everyone. It means rebuilding the cultural and moral order that gives more people the central blessing of a stable, two-parent family. It means prioritizing policies that serve the non-elite.

Many Beltway pundits spent January and February analyzing the internecine battle within the GOP as between QAnon forces (embodied in Marjorie Taylor Green) and establishment forces (embodied in Liz Cheney). This isnt where the real debate is. After all, everyone smart on the right knows that just as William F. Buckley had to run the Birchers out of the conservative movement two generations ago, so too today the Republican Party will have no future if it provides safe haven to the alt-right, QAnon, racism, anti-Semitism, or xenophobia.

The real intra-GOP struggle to watch is the one between what we might call the Mitt Romney of 2012 and the Mitt Romney of 2021: It is about whether Republicans will advance a policy agenda that promotes the flourishing and core values of the forgotten Americans (which would also, incidentally, prevent them from being coopted by conspiracy theorists and bigots). Pundits will analyze day-to-day political weather; PAW readers should consider the underlying climate changes.

Fast forward to today, and Romney introduces the most generous federal child-assistance program to ever come from a Republican. No longer does he refer to himself as a severe conservative. Meanwhile, the Marco Rubio who focused on freedom when he ran for president in 2016 gave an address in late 2019 titled Common Good Capitalism and the Dignity of Work, backed by policy initiatives such as expanding the child tax credit and paid family leave. These arent Chamber of Commerce priorities.

If the Republican Party of the past two generations was marked by the fusionism that came out of Buckleys National Review, the question now is what a 21st-century fusion looks like. The old fusionism combined the religious right with anti-communists and libertarian economists, with an eye to protecting the American way of life from its enemies at home (including, in this view, Big Government) and abroad (the USSR).

But the American family and American worker werent saved. And the GOP fell into the rut of assuming particular policy applications were its lodestar principles. Today, a new fusionism is forming that evaluates social, economic, and foreign policies by asking how effectively they defend core American values like life, marriage, work, and religion.

After all, the way of life that the Founders sought to protect was a blend of the Declaration of Independence and the Bible. Where people are made in the image and likeness of God, subjects of inalienable dignity. Where people are created male and female, to unite in marriage and raise children together in a family. Where people assemble in a variety of houses of worship to give thanks to the Creator so central to the Declaration. And where they spend their labors in service of others and in keeping with their obligations to God to support their families.

The real intra-GOP struggle to watch is the one between what we might call the Mitt Romney of 2012 and the Mitt Romney of 2021: It is about whether Republicans will advance a policy agenda that promotes the flourishing and core values of the forgotten Americans.

Now this way of life isnt just for Americans its based on human nature. Most people want to form families, worship God, and find dignified work. A political movement dedicated to this vision would be broadly attractive.

On social issues, Americans dont want to be judged by their race, sex, class, or religion. A smart GOP would reject identity politics, critical race theory, and gender ideology. A commitment to human dignity and equality would demand not only protection of the unborn, but also rejection of racial identity politics (both left-wing and right-wing) and assaults on religious liberty. As the left has set its face against faith traditions that uphold historically normative understandings of marriage and family, Republicans must step up to defend these basic values.

On economic issues, Americans dont want to maximize GDP, property rights, or economic freedoms at all costs. They want to find decent jobs, support their families, meet their needs, especially on health care, and not worry that theyre one pink slip away from eviction. Rights and liberties matter. But as fellow alum George Will *68 once wrote, the most important four words in politics are: up to a point. The GOP is the party of economic freedom, up to the point where it ceases to serve human flourishing. All liberties have limits. So do markets, for all the blessings theyve brought.

This doesnt mean that conservatives should embrace the lefts class-warfare rhetoric or aggressive taxation, redistribution, and regulatory expansion. The goal is to craft policies that serve the flourishing of human beings and their communities. Not government-run institutions replacing the authority of families, religious communities, business, and other institutions of civil society, but policies that, to quote the theologian Richard John Neuhaus and sociologist Peter Berger, empower people and the free institutions that mediate between individuals and the state. Its already happening, as Romney, Rubio, and Mike Lee, for example, have all introduced the pro-family federal policies mentioned.

When it comes to jobs, we need policies reflecting the fact that a job is more than a paycheck. It provides meaning and community, purpose and direction. And along with religion and other elements of civil society, it contributes to what Harvards Robert Putnam calls social capital. Government transfer payments, including a universal basic income, wont do much to stop the decimation of the economies of small towns or the breakdown in marriage and family.

Republicans must also creatively apply timeless principles to Big Tech, woke capitalism, and cancel culture. A GOP of the future will learn from the GOP of the past that Big Government can threaten human freedom and flourishing, but it will also understand that Big Business can too especially when oligarchic global corporations attack basic American values. We need a culture, not just a legal system, that fosters the free exchange of ideas.

A smart GOP would reject identity politics, critical race theory, and gender ideology. A commitment to human dignity and equality would demand not only protection of the unborn, but also rejection of racial identity politics (both left-wing and right-wing) and assaults on religious liberty.

We also need a foreign policy no longer focused exclusively on free trade and democracy-building, but concerned with the rise of China, the creation of a class of global citizens with no particular loyalty to their homelands, and the impact of immigration and trade on American workers.

The question for the GOP, then, is whether this new fusionism achieves policy prominence in the party. Watch to see whether the GOP speaks not just about fair procedures and rights and liberties (essential as these are), but also about the way of life they would promote. Doing so would force it to put its money where its mouth is, championing policies to make this way of life possible. Because it belongs to no single race, or class, or religious tradition, this way of life and related political agenda would enable the GOP to be multiethnic and interfaith. Any viable Republican Party must seek out working-class voters from all ethnic and religious backgrounds and represent their interests.

As the privileged keep doubling down on neoliberal economics and identity and gender politics, the Democrats will undoubtedly become even more the party of the elites. So the Republicans must become a working-class party, championing the values and policies that make for the real happiness were all after. Some Princeton elites might want to join the cause.

More:

What's Next? The Republicans | Princeton Alumni Weekly - Princeton Alumni Weekly

In February, the video game publisher Victura announced it would launch what it described as a realistic video-game portrayal of the Second Battle for Fallujah. Based on dozens of interviews with troops who fought in the 2004 battle, Six Days in Fallujah was billed as more of a documentary than an action experience. We track several units through the process and you get to know what it was like from day to day. Peter Tamte, Victuras CEO, told The Wall Street Journal. He explained that the game would avoid the politics of the Iraq war and the perspectives of civilians who experienced brutality at the hands of U.S. forces, since that was a divisive subject. Instead, the game would engender empathy for the U.S. Marines who fought in the battle.

This promotional campaign encountered immediate opposition. Veterans of the battle argued that a documentary story about a controversial battle in a controversial war could hardly be stripped of its politics while remaining true to its subject. War is inherently political, the Fallujah veteran John Phipps explained to The Gamer. So to say youre going to make an apolitical video game about war is nonsense. Show me a war that wasnt started because of politics. You cant. War is politics. Its just a different form of politics.

The controversy about Six Days in Fallujah is really a larger story about video games, militarism in the media, and the expanding boundaries of politics. Video games are not only a contested cultural space in America, but also a contested political space in which governments and corporations, journalists and activists, and players of every stripe, are competing to tell stories and shape perceptions about the world. This multi-billion dollar industry plays an increasingly important role in shaping the world-view of its participants and the politics of their societies. It is far past time that the policy community writ large treat this industry with a rigor equal to its influence.

A game about the Iraq War might not seem like it poses big questions about the politics of war, but as a hugely popular form of mass media, video games can influence peoples emotional states, thought patterns, and perceptions. Every year, military-themed first person shooters (FPS), which simulate combat from the point of view of a combatant, generate billions of dollars of revenue. The most popular franchises, like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter-Strike and Halo, have sold hundreds of millions of copies and feature varying degrees of realism, inspiration from real-world events, and science-fiction elements. Unlike print, radio, television, or movies, video games are an interactive format that allows them to affect people differently than more traditional forms of broadcast media. Ian Bogost, a professor of media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has argued that the interactive nature of video games makes them an inherently persuasive mediuma system of procedural rhetoric that encourages players to create abstract mental models for how systems work and to form judgments about those systems through the act of playing. The design of a games models and systems of interactions are intentional choices by the designers, and they set the terms for how a person encounters the game. One video game designer called this effort to induce a certain type of player reaction emotion engineering in the design process.

Research has demonstrated that some game design choices improve the way people focus and increase feelings of well-being. Other design choices can trigger addictive behavior. While research is ongoing, experimental studies have shown that some military FPS games can cause players to become measurably more militarist in outlook. In a realistic military FPS game, the presence or absence of rules of engagement, for example, will dramatically change how the player approaches a mission. When the military itself consults on the design of such a game, this leads to a number of uncomfortable questions about why those choices were made. Consider Full Spectrum Warrior, a 2004 game that began development as a training simulator for U.S. Army soldiers. The company behind it, Pandemic, modified the game into a commercial release that so the Army could send the game downrange for soldiers to play while deployed. Set in a fictionalized version of Iraq, the game features an empty, crumbling urban landscape coded to be obviously Middle Eastern, filled only with Arab men to shoot. The strongest incentive not to engage in combat isnt to safeguard civilians, but to avoid personal injury to your squad mates. Despite its marketing as realistic and messaging that it was developed with input from the Pentagon, the game-world it creates removes the complexity of urban insurgency and substitutes simplified moral dilemmas that portray the military in unambiguously good termsan enjoyable setting for a game, but hardly reflective of the reality of the war in Iraq.

Examples from traditional media help elaborate why this is a concern. Emotionally resonant media about real issues have changed publics perception. Researchers have found, for example, that ostensibly realistic films like Argo (depicting the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis) or Zero Dark Thirty (chronicling the search for Osama bin Laden) altered public opinion about those events. There is also evidence that such media can result in real world behavioral change in agents of the state. In his 2008 book, Torture Team: Rumsfelds Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, Philippe Sands interviewed a former lawyer stationed at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who claimed that the television show 24 inspired interrogators to go further than they otherwise might. The journalist Jane Mayer interviewed an Army interrogator in Iraq, who said that after people watched 24, they would walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things theyve just seen.

This is perhaps one reason why the Pentagon has collaborated with Hollywood since the early 20th century to create sympathetic portrayals on television and in film through the Entertainment Officean arrangement often called the military-entertainment complex. For television shows like 24 and films like American Sniper, the office will not only analyze the scripts for accuracy, it will also alter scripts to improve the portrayal of the military on screen. The Entertainment Office is in enough demand to be selective in what it will advise, reportedly turning down 95% of the scripts or story treatments it receives. Were not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way, Captain Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera in 2014. This selectivity creates a powerful incentive for writers, producers, and directors to cede narrative ground to the Pentagon in order to secure access to their expertise, equipment, and approval.

In many ways, video games are just another branch of the military-entertainment complex, since developers will collaborate with the Pentagon to ensure a degree of realism. The developers of the 2014 title Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, which is set in the near future, not only consulted with soldiers and futurists to generate realistic combat scenarios and rules of engagement, they also recruited a Pentagon scenario planner to the design team. The Pentagon scenario planner helped the game developers think through a realistic set of threats for a futuristic war scenario, which prompted them to select private military contractors as the most plausible enemy over their first choice, Chinas Peoples Liberation Army. In doing so, the Pentagon influenced the design of the game to shape how players will envision future real-world threats. Considering the game sold more than 21 million copies, this represented an enormous audience for the Pentagon to influence. (It is notable that one of the games directors was later hired by the Atlantic Council think tank to advise the military on future warfare scenarios, cycling the same threat model from the Pentagon to video games, to think tanks, and back to the Pentagon.)

The U.S. military also appears to have been involved in the production of Six Days in Fallujah, which raises questions about how it is intended to shape perceptions of the Iraq war. In the mid-2000s, Tamte led a different video game developer named Destineer, which partnered with the Japanese publisher Konami to release a version of Six Days. Back then, Tamte claimed the game had no stance on the politics of the war in Iraq, as he repeated this year. At the time, Destineer ran a thriving side business making training simulations for the Pentagon and the intelligence community. The U.S. Marine Corps was an official consultant for the companys first game, Close Combat: First to Fight. And In-Q-Tel, the CIAs venture investment arm, partnered with the company in 2005. The suggestion that a company with such deep ties to the government could make a game without politics sparked an outcry, and Konami deemed the game too controversial. They canceled its publication in 2009. No one is canceling Six Days in Fallujah anymore. Tamtes current company, Victura, is also a publisher, so he is moving forward with a new developer contracted to update the games code and gameplay. The game is slated for release later this year.

Today, the global video game industry is one of the worlds largest culture industries. According to market research firm IDC, the global video game market topped $179 billion in revenue in 2020, making it larger than the global film industry ($100 billion) and North American professional sports (around $75 billion) combined. Video games cultural impact skews young: According to the Entertainment Software Association, 70% of people under the age of 18 regularly play video games. Younger players also tend to be male: According to a Pew survey, almost twice as many young men regularly play games as young women. That doesnt mean all players are young; 64% of players are between 18 and 54 years oldprime voting age.

The Pentagon certainly views gamers as a high-value target for outreach and has spent 20 years using video games for recruitment. The most famous of these efforts, Americas Army, was a free-to-play military FPS game launched in 2002 to persuade young players to enlist. Its portrayal of army service was neutral and de-politicized and avoided portraying the hardships of basic training or graphic bloodshed during combat sequences. It instead focused on exacting detail in weaponry, uniforms, and mission design.

While Americas Army did not result in a recruitment boom, by the 2010s, as the number of new enlisted flagged, the U.S. military revisited video games as a way to boost its numbers. In 2018, the Pentagon created a new service track of professional video game players to compete in the growing field of esportsprofessional, competitive video game play. These new service tracks are part of the recruiting commands in the Air Force, Navy, and Army, a recognition of the power of the growing power of esports to generate interest among younger people. I would argue that in looking at these generations, we have to begin thinking about how they approach this question of where they will apply their talent, Dr. E. Casey Wardynski, an Army recruiting official, told journalists about the program. We have to confront this question of, will we wait until theyre 17, or will be start talking to them at age 12, 13, 14, 15, when they form the set of things they are thinking about doing with their life?

The growth of online streaming has only expanded the audience for video games and has had a powerful effect on culture. Popular online streamers, using services such as Twitch, livestream feeds of the games they play alongside their commentary. They interact with viewers via chat functions and build loyal followings. The streamer popularly known as PewDiePie (real name Felix Kjellberg) is the highest-earning creator on YouTube, pulling in roughly $8 million per month mainly by broadcasting himself playing video games to the more than 100 million subscribers to his channel. He briefly had a lucrative partnership with Disney that the entertainment giant ended after a series of his videos featured anti-Semitic imagery and slurs. While Kjellbergs beliefs are all but impossible to pin down, he has used racist and anti-Semitic slurs on his livestreams and for a time was a cult-hero on the right. The gunman who attacked a New Zealand mosque in 2019 urged those watching a livestream of the attack to subscribe to Pewdiepies channel before opening fire. Kjellberg has disavowed the far-right and has spoken about his struggles to balance the tongue-in-cheek style of video game livestreams with the real-world political fallout such talk can have. Kjellbergs successand the controversy around himspeaks to the centrality of video games and video game culture in online life.

The policy implications of video games

Video games are not neutral spaces stripped of politics in which people engage in neutral play together. They are vibrant, contested, growing, lucrative, politicized spaces, where actors of all sizes and ideologies compete to influence the minds of their audiences. Video games are where politics happen. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a leader in using games to reach voters. She recognizes, just as the Pentagon does, that games are an important site for political speech, especially when live-streamed. This past October, she hosted a get-out-the-vote event on the video game streaming service Twitch that attracted more than 430,000 live spectators to her channel, the third-largest audience the site had ever attracted to a single stream.

Games can tell us a lot about how the world works. Johan Huizinga theorized in Homo Ludens that play is essential to culture and the formation of society. The concept of play, he argues, is foundational to how humans form their beliefs about rule-based systems, which are the foundation of modern civilization. Video games began as a new way to play with computers but have evolved into rich texts filled with politics and arguments for how the world should work.

The cultural dominance of video games lends them political salience. Studying how video game communities form and discuss issues can offer unexpected insight into how audiences are built and come to share common beliefs, including malignant ones. As an example, consider how video games presaged the rise of the alt-right in American politics. In 2005, the far-right provocateur Steve Bannon started a business to pay Chinese players to farm assets in the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft to sell to other players at a profit. The business itself flopped, but Bannon learned from the experience that video game players can be mobilized outside the game. These guys, these rootless white males, he told the journalist Joshua Green, referring to his perceived customers, had monster power.

When he took over the online news outlet Brietbart, Bannon realized he could use video games to power the online alt-right that ultimately helped Donald Trump win the White House. In 2014, Bannon led Breitbart to take an active role in publicizing and encouraging Gamergate, an explosion of organized, violent, and misogynist harassment carried out by some video game players angry at the rise of feminist perspectives in games. Mobilizing gamers to fight for conservative values in the culture war turned out to be wildly popular. Bannon turned the rhetorical strategies and organizing tools of Gamergate into powerful weapons for the Trump campaign, and with them, he mobilized a small army of very angry, very online young men into effective political operatives.

Gamergate had a transformative effect on the nature of online discourse. One of its most enthusiastic proponents, Mike Cernovich, moved on from Gamergate to write fake news stories attacking Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election and later hosted a show for Alex Jones conspiracy show Info Wars. The pattern of coordinated abuse, harassment, and threats perfected by GamerGate has come to define much of the Trump-supporting internet. Charlie Warzel, a technology journalist at the New York Times observed last year that Gamergates DNA is everywhere on the internet.

Obviously not all video game players are misogynist harassers, just as not all games are funded by the Pentagon to present tailored narratives about a controversial war. But all video games do present a worldview to the player, whether it is explicit or not, and understanding that world view can help us understand what the players themselves believe. As an inescapable part of public discourse and an enormous media market we ignore at our peril, video games are not just video games: They are the site of political contention, of negotiation over social boundaries, and of free speech itself.

Joshua Foust is a PhD student studying strategic communication at the University of Colorado Boulders College of Media, Communication, and Information. His website is joshuafoust.com.

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Video games are the new contested space for public policy - Brookings Institution

In 1984, the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a set of galleries to Philip Johnson, who had served asthe institutions founding architecture department head during the 30s. He staged some of the museums most memorable architecture shows, among them 1932s influential International Style show, which helped pinpoint a mode of modernist design that was cropping up around Europe. He also transformed the institution that housed such pioneering exhibitions, designing its famed sculpture garden in 1953. He even gifted MoMA several masterpieces, including Jasper Johnss Flag (195455). His genius helped define the Museum in its formative years, William S. Paley, chair of MoMAs board, said upon the gallerys dedication.

For more than 30 years, a sign bearing Johnsons name has been visible on a wall on the museums second floor. All that changed, however, earlier this month, when the Black Reconstruction Collective, a group of 10 architects, temporarily covered it. They were participating in the museums current Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition, and they were responding to recent protests over Johnsons name at the museum. For the run of Reconstructions, the Philip Johnson Galleriess sign will be hidden beneath a denim textile bearing out the groups manifesto, which reads, in part, We take up the question of what architecture can benot a tool for imperialism and subjugation, not a means for aggrandizing the self, but a vehicle for liberation and joy.

Protests over Johnsons name have been brewing since November, when a group of Black architects and artists signed a letter demanding that MoMA remove it from its walls. The letter, circulated by the Johnson Study Group, claimed that Johnson relied on his MoMA connections as a pretense to collaborate with the German Nazi party and that he effectively segregated the architectural collection at MoMA by not hiring Black curators and by not acquiring work by Black architects. While it is unclear when MoMA acquired its first work by a Black architect, scholar and Reconstructions curator Mabel O. Wilson has argued that the museum was maintaining the logics of racism during its early decades by focusing on white European and American designers, even when their work related to affordable housing for Black communities.

For some, Johnson can be can be considered an architect whose output, while variable in quality, helped define a sensibility, with his Glass House ranking as one of the most celebrated modernist structures in the U.S. For others, his legacy cant be separated from his explicitly fascist and anti-Semitic views. Protests over Johnsons politics are not newhis fascist leanings are well-documented, most recently in a 2018 biography by Mark Lamster, and even during his lifetime, various individuals, both within MoMA and outside it, attempted to bring attention to them.

But with the Johnson Study Group letter, new questions are arising: How can MoMA effectively right Johnsons wrongs? What would a MoMA without recognition of Johnson look like? Those who oppose the removal of Johnsons name counter with another question: Should MoMA have to contend with the political views of a figure who has been dead for almost two decades?

V. Mitch McEwen, an architect included in Reconstructions, said that she signed the Johnson Study Groups letter partly in an effort to address concerns that the architecture department at MoMA was vested in fascism and white supremacy, she told ARTnews. As far as we could tell, no one had investigated that beside concerns about anti-Semitism. To be exhibiting work in a gallery with the name of a white supremacist doesnt sit well with me.

According to McEwen, she and others met with MoMA director Glenn Lowry in January to discuss how the museum could begin to reconcile with Johnsons history. His response, McEwen told Hyperallergic, was that MoMA didnt create the problem.

Lamster, the Johnson biographer, said that, because of Johnsons outsized influence at the museum, it would be nearly impossible for MoMA to scrub him from its history. To cancel Philip Johnson is to cancel MoMA, Lamster said. That does not mean that the moment isnt ripe for reflection, Lamster continued. There is no canceling Philip Johnson. Hes already deadthats as canceled as you can get. The question is how you understand his legacy. If canceling means we dont grapple with that history, thats a big mistake. If canceling means removing his name, thats a different story.

A MoMA spokesperson did not respond to a list of fact-checking queries about Johnsons time at the museum and the institutions response to the signatories of the Johnson Study Group letter. In a prior statement made when the Black Reconstruction Collective covered Johnsons name, a spokesperson said that the Museum currently has underway a rigorous research initiative to explore in full the allegations against Johnson and gather all available information. This work is ongoing.

Johnson began working in MoMAs architecture department in 1930, when the museum, founded a year earlier, was still in its infancy. His first stint at the museum ended in 1934, and there were extended periods where he was not formally employed by the museum. During the late 1930s, in a period while he was disconnected from the department, Johnson began to push anti-Semitic and fascist political views in a series of essays. In one written for the fascist journal the Examiner, he claimed that the U.S. was committing race suicide and advocated for a restoration of national values. In another, written for Social Practice, for which he served as a European correspondent, he addressed the Jewish question in France, writing, Lack of leadership and direction in the State has let the one group get control who always gain power in a nations time of weaknessthe Jews.

During the late 30s, Johnson spent extended periods in Germany, where he found himself carried away by Adolf Hitlers politics, as he once wrote, and he started consorting with Nazi leaders. Prior to this, Johnson had briefly been involved with the U.S.s Young Nationalist movement, which Lamster characterized in his 2018 Johnson biography as an alt-right avant la lettre, with pro-Nazi German-American Bundists, Klansmen, and members of the Black Legion, an Ohio-based secret society that took the Klan as its model, among its supporters. As the Young Nationalist campaign began to fizzle out, and as the spotlight turned to his collaborator, Alan Blackburn, Johnson departed the movement. Meanwhile, the Nazi party continued to rise in Europe.

As the war raged abroad the FBI investigated Johnsons activities in 1940 on the suspicion that he was acting as a Nazi spy. The architect admitted to the Bureau that he attended Nazi party rallies in New York, including the most infamous one in 1939 at Madison Square Garden. (He later denied this.) Although it found evidence that Johnson could be linked to members of the Nazi party, the FBI never charged him with espionage. After the war, in 1947, Johnson rejoined the architecture department at MoMA. For the rest of his career, he was still intimately connected to the museum, even when he was not formally on staff.

Johnsons activities during the 1930s would continue to haunt him throughout his career, and he was later forced to address them during the 90s, after the BBC produced a documentary that focused largely on his foregone fascist politics. Johnson, who at one point called himself a philo-Semite, defended himself, citing his friendships with Jewish architects like Louis Kahn and Frank Gehry, as well as with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, as proof that he had changed. He told the TV host Charlie Rose, If youd indulged every one of your whims that you had when you were a kid, you wouldnt be here with a job either. It was the stupidest thing I ever did, and I can never forgive myself and I never can atone for it. Theres nothing I can do.

Johnson died in 2003, but for some, institutions with connections to him should redress his legacy. Two have already responded to Johnsons unsavory history. In 2020, amid Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, the Glass Housea boxy glassed-in structure in Connecticut that ranks as one of Johnsons most famous buildingsupdated its website with a statement referencing Johnsons own history and a need to confront the difficult histories of places where art, architecture, and racial justice intersectas part of our dedicated effort to tell the full American story. And in November, after the Johnson Study Groups letter, the Harvard Graduate School of Design renamed a structure Johnson designed while he was a graduate student there in recognition of the entrenched, paradigmatic racism and white supremacy of architecture, its dean, Sarah M. Whiting, wrote. (That structure was informally called the Philip Johnson Thesis House, and will now be referred to as 9 Ash Street.)

Over the past several months, multiple essays have taken Johnsons legacy to taskwith people on both sides. In an essay called Why We Should Cancel Philip Johnson, Aaron Betsky, director of Virginia Techs architecture school, wrote, Philip Johnson wasnt just a racist and fascist: He was a cultured, rich cad who made us forget our own failings as a country and as a profession. Others have pushed back against that logic. In a Guardian op-ed, Michael Henry Adams, an architecture historian with connections to Johnsons family, wrote, None of us only amounts to our worst mistake. Today, we all need what Philip Johnson died imagining hed found: the opportunity to evolvea chance to become better people.

Xaviera Simmons, an artist who signed the Johnson Study Group letter, said her intention was not to cancel Johnson, but rather to force MoMA to contend with its history. While some may consider removing Johnsons name a symbolic gesture, its resonance could be far-reaching. You can be subtractive in some ways and additive in others, Simmons said in an interview.

MoMA has to absorb the knowledge that has already been provided and work in concert with the Johnson letter signatories, she continued. Theyve already done the labor. The museum doesnt have to do the labor, actually, and the museum should step back. Youve got to make way for the new, and you have to make way for Black thinkers, Jewish thinkers, queer thinkers, and all the other thinkers.

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MoMAs Philip Johnson Problem: How to Address the Architects Legacy? - ARTnews