Propaganda Review: Angry Goy - The Game!

Are you ready for the single most offensive video game ever made? Long answer short: no, you probably aren't. 

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo___X

Video games, by their very nature, have courted controversy from the very beginning. It wasn't long after the medium became entrenched in the pop cultural psyche before the powers that were started citing them as moral ills - lest we forget, the National Safety Council itself went after the arcade game Death Race and 60 Minutes was winging together "scare pieces" about the psychological impact of violent games all the way back in 1976. Since then, each passing generation has had its boundary pushing interactive watersheds, each drawing intense public scrutiny from concerned parents groups and worrywort politicians alike. In the 1980s you had Native American rape simulators and arcade shoot 'em ups where you blew away people in sexual torture devices, and in the 1990s you had kung fu games where you could knock each others' heads off, shitty Sega CD games about stealth vampires eating Dana Plato a whole host of three-dimensional FPSes widely reported as being the root causes of many a school shooting. The bottom fell out with the release of Grand Theft Auto III shortly after 9/11, with seemingly a new game to be "gravely alarmed" about coming down the pipes every three months or so: Postal, BMX XXX, The Guy Game (which, technically, is considered an illegal piece of C.P.), so on and so forth. With the advent of the Internet and indie gaming, however, the locus has shifted away from condemning video games that are just textually violent (indeed, Hatred, the first released game in history to ever get an A-O rating for violence alone, barely drew any media attention when it was released a few years ago) with the moral ire instead focused on video games with uncomfortable social context, which includes - but is not limited to - first person raping simulators, games about shooting pregnant Mexicans and, of course, that all-time FPS classic, Ethnic Cleansing, in which you choose to play as either a skinhead or a Klansman and run around shooting blacks and Hispanics (with the game's end boss being a fight to the death with Ariel Sharon.)

As controversial as those games may have been (and to be frank, the damn things were so obscure that not that many moral watchdog groups got up in arms about them), I think it's safe to say none of them will hold a candle to the cross-cultural shitstorm the recently released Angry Goy: The Game is ABOUT to brew up. 

What is Angry Goy, you might be wondering? Well, it's a free-to-download 2D, retro-style shooter a'la NARC. Yeah, so what, there are tons of freeware games like that already on the market, right? Well, there's one mighty big difference between Angry Goy and all the other retro-revival 2D shooters - namely, the fact that the entire thing is meant to promote white nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment. Basically, it's Anders Breivik: The Video Game, with all of your adversaries represented as endless hordes of gibberish shouting Somalis, homosexual Marxist college students and Jew-owned police and SWAT responders ... all of whom you brutally murder with machetes and semi-automatic weapons en route to the game's grand finale, a five minute long tribute to the preachings of Adolf Hitler.

Since the game was released on Jan. 1, it hasn't generated that much publicity, but trust me, once the media gets a hold of this one, it's going to be the Mortal Kombat brouhaha all over again. You can almost smell the headlines on HuffPo and Salon now: "RACIST VIDEO GAME ENCOURAGES MASS GENOCIDE" and "ONLINE NAZI GAME RADICALIZES WHITE YOUTH" and "IS THERE ANYWAY WE CAN PIN THIS ON DONALD TRUMP?" It's only a matter of time until this thing goes nuclear, and I reckoned the sooner I covered this thing, the better for all of us (but mostly, my SEO rankings, I ain't going to shit you.)

As far as the developers of the game, a grand total of three people are credited as designers. It appears to be a "fan-made" production through and through, complete with narration from pro-Nazi Euro-SoundClouder Natt Danelaw and a soundtrack provided by techno-Hitler fanboys CyberNazi (don't ask me how or why, but apparently, neo-synthwave music has become the official soundtrack of the neo-neo-Nazi movement.) It isn't too difficult to find links to download the game, but there's been a lot of clamor from the early adopters that the game may secretly be F.B.I. spyware intended to collect potential alt-righters' personal info. I'm not providing the links myself, but for those of you that want to download Angry Goy, be forewarned that when the game  was initially released, it demanded you run it on administrator mode and it may or may not record your keystrokes - or so, that's what I've heard through the grapevine, anyway. 

Alright (or is that Alt-right?), let's get this little sucker fired up somebody else's laptop, why don't we?

Before you even being the game, you're asked to agree to a T.O.S. box that refers to the game as "an ironic shitpost" and beseeches you to "not hold the creators of the game responsible for anything (sic) harm that could possibly occur to you in any way from playing this game." We get a little segue screen letting us know all the music for the game was supplied by CyberNazi (although I'm more partial to GigaGestappo, personally.) Instead of using the arrows on your keypad to move your avatar around, you have to use the W, A, S and D buttons. The space bar shoots, Q switches weapons, R reloads and G ditches your item. 

A giant pixel art swastika greets you at the formal intro screen. You see a guy wearing a futuristic Nazi ensemble (perhaps inspired by Uwe Boll's Rampage series?) with five options available: new game, continue game, system options, achievements and controls. There is another disclaimer at the bottom of the screen stating "the entirety of this game is satire" and "does not support violence of any kind or hatred towards any individual group." 

Time for the opening cutscene. Somewhere in Europe, a guy wearing a skeleton jaw bandana is sitting in his apartment, watching a newscast about six million refugees being granted asylum throughout the continent. The reporter on TV says this is a big step towards progressive multiculturalism while a banner in the background displays several black caricatures - all armed to the teeth - labeled as "starving refugee children." The reporter rolls footage from earlier when he interviewed a Somali migrant at a refugee camp. The asylum seeker says "wherever I am, I might also rape." 

This causes your avatar to chuck his TV out the window. You get to explore his flat a little (it's, perhaps unsurprisingly, littered with swastikas, Pepe the Frog posters, signage of people getting thrown out of helicopters and images of a white family with the slogan "defend our home.") You acquire a handgun, but before you hit the city streets, you'll notice a flat above yours that is digitally padlocked. Huh, I wonder what delightful secrets it holds?

This is gloriously offensive ... all the way up until you lamentably realize it's factually accurate. 

You are immediately attacked by a horde of machete wielding Somalis (although the weapons look more like yardsticks to me, but whatever.) You get health by buying cola out of vending machines (trust me, you will be hitting these things up constantly.) One of the posters in the background heralds the arrival of the "Seventh Annual White Guilt Parade." Your avatar calls the attackers, among other things, "goat fuckers" and "sand niggers." Whenever you unlock an achievement (essentially, hitting a certain kill count) a brief clip of a Hitler speech plays in the bottom lefthand corner of the screen. 

Graphically, the game looks like any number of the old I-Mockery flash games, a'la Abobo's Big Adventure. Structurally, the gameplay feels just like the old school arcade shooters of yore, like Smash T.V. and Ikari Warriors. 

Your avatar yells "We take back Jerusalem" after strolling past a poster that reads "White pride? That would be another Holocaust." You enter a park and gun down some Somalis, periodically quipping "nice try, Muhammad." You rescue a white child on a swing set. "We have to get you inside, these brown filth are dangerous," he tells the 16-bit girl. Your avatar advises she close her eyes and pretend he's a pony while he blasts his way through the horde of Muslim migrants. Eventually, you drop her off at her parents' flat, where the father (wearing a Soviet sickle shirt) accuses you of gunning down "12-year-old children" who were also his daughter's friends. While he's calling the po-po, you blow his brains out and tell his now-widowed wife he was "a faggot" and "a cuck." He says "I wouldn't be surprised if he was a sodomite" before giving the child - whose father you just murdered right before her very eyes - a lollipop. 

Back on the city streets, you get into a shootout with half a dozen cops. You enter an alleyway and encounter more migrants. "Reparations, you say?" your avatar proclaims. "Well, I hope you take lead." You go up some ladders and enter a rundown crack house, which serves as something of a mini-maze. Once you make it back to street level, you encounter more Somalis. "No, I think Meccas is THAT way" and "fucking Mussies, get out of my country, REEEE!" your ethnic cleansing "hero" mutters. Despite being a 2D game, the gore effects are surprisingly realistic. Whenever you shoot someone, their head caves into bloody bowl shaped wounds, complete with eyeballs flying across the screen once you register the coup de grace. 

At the Chosen Theatre, Dude Where's Your Argument, Jamal Wars and Fistful of Shekels are playing. Now the enemies are hiding behind cars and milk crates, making it sorta' like Gears of War, but, you know, with one less dimension and whatnot. Once you stumble upon Nip-Mart, a cutscene with an Asian stereotype supermarket owner is - pardon the pun - triggered. The owner - rocking a Fu Manchu mustache, buck teeth and a full-on Raiden hat - is on the roof of his store, armed with a sniper rifle. Small mounds of dead Muslims are scattered across the parking lot. A Somalian tries to sneak into the business. He shoots him dead and declares "I-uh really dis-rike niggers" and gives you an MSG to continue your quest. Hey, us Axis Powers gotta' stick together, I suppose.

We're still slogging through the ghettos. The laziness of the designers becomes apparent, with lots of the game space turning into generic splotches of grey and green. "Wow, this really challenges my preconceived notions," your avatar says upon splattering his 50th or so victim.

Now you arrive at the Cole B. Yearner Gender Studies Institute. And yes, that name is a joke ... sorta. Once inside, you do battle with students wearing clown makeup and bras screaming "you're fucking a white male" and dudebros with ganja leaf shirts. They are carrying dildos and bongs as melee weapons. School posters remind you to "remember, don't misgender" and that "feminism is reality." Say what you will about the racist inclinations of the game designers, you at least have to give them credit for clever achievement targets - i.e., being rewarded for breaking Anders Breivik's real life "high score" record. 

Portraits of Stalin and posters of the Islamic moon insignia (emblazoned with the subtitle "the religion of peace") are plastered all over the place. Eventually, you make your way into a lecture hall with a professor - clearly of the Hebrew persuasion - teaching his students that "evil times privilege squared divided by whiteness equals oppression." You chase him into the art room and stuff him into an oven set to 1488 degrees. This unlocks an achievement for making, and I quote, "Jew Pizza."

Back to the streets. Now the Somalis have AKs. You pass through "StarCucks," "Ade's Acrylics" and "Jeb! Authentic Guac Bowls" while mass murdering migrants and shouting "if it's brown, mow it down." You encounter a giant billboard declaring "diversity is our greatest strength" right before stumbling upon a major traffic pile-up (a reference to the France transfer truck attack last year, I take it?)

You loop back around to your apartment complex. Hey, the locked door is open now! You walk in, and there's your state of the art Nazi Iron Man suit waiting for you - along with an arsenal of super-powerful automatic weapons and even a futuristic-looking spiked metal baseball bat. Among other bric a brac in the room are bombs with Confederate battle flags attached to them and a poster praising William L. Pierce - you know, the guy who wrote The Turner Diaries and at one time pretty much bank rolled the entire white power music recording industry. Time for the first legitimate LOL quip of the game: "The Russians totally financed all this," your avatar declares.

Because fuck subtlety, that's why.

OK, so obviously your Nazi death suit (it kinda reminds me of Frankenstein's get-up in Death Race 2000) allows you to absorb way more damage before keeling over. You retrace your steps from earlier and wander into the Usury First ((("National" Private Bank)))." You have a dispute with the Jewish owner (a real plot twist, I know) and get involved in a lengthy shootout with cops and SWAT members. In the following cutscene, the Jewish caricature tries to bribe you into not killing him, but the number he offers keeps getting lower and lower. His death - the old two bullets to the skull chestnut - occurs totally off-screen.

Time for another shootout with SWAT on top of the bank (which, for some reason, has the Freemason logo on it.) You walk across a two-by-four catwalk into a crack house, which connects you to another rooftop SWAT battle. You know, this feels VERY reminiscent of Predator 2 on the Sega Genesis, actually. "That's what you get for covering up for rapists!" your avatar justifies his mass murder of police officials. 

Back to the city streets. You walk by a public utility building with a poster reading "We push the Fluoride Scam" and another billboard feature Penn Jillette as a black man (one of you kids is going to have to email me about that one - I have no earthly clue what it's supposed to be referencing.) 

Next, you enter an abandoned, darkened building (you hit Q and R simultaneously to flip on night vision goggle mode.) Everything has a blurry red tint to it. It's a fairly confusing labyrinth, mostly because the yellow guiding arrow keeps leading you astray. Eventually, you'll enter the sewers then an elevator that chugs along at a snail's pace back to the surface. Interestingly, a portion of one of Hitler's speeches plays while you're slowly inching your way up, in what may or may not be an oblique nod to the one "ladder climb" sequence from Metal Gear Solid 3. "We will win," some highlighted graffiti declares right before the sequence concludes.  

Now you enter a refugee crisis center and - surprise! - kill more Somalis. I don't know if it's a common bug with all versions of the game, but my copy got insanely glitchy here - in fact, I had to kill switch the thing a couple of times to make it through. I'm guessing Q.A. wasn't really emphasized during production - indeed, if you even touch a dead enemy's rifle, the fucking game locks up on you!

So, you keep killing everything with a tan, weaving your way in and out of abandoned buildings and more migrant camps. You eventually amble past the local welfare center ("Make Green for Being Brown" the billboard reads), a boarded up liquor store and a pharmacy with an ad suggesting "Cough syrup! Try it on hamburgers!" all while gleefully screaming "keep that HIV-ridden nigger blood away from me!" into the night. 

Yep, we're still blasting through the slums. You cross the movie theater again, see the same bus wreckage and hear the same 20 or some quips a million bajillion times as you massacre a small armada of Islamic sanctuary seekers. After what feels like an hour of mindless blasting, you come across the Channel 4 News Network (since I'm a Yank, I don't know shit about the BBC - is BBC 4 especially liberal or something?) The anchor - yep, the same guy from the opening intro - lets us know the suspect responsible for the mass slaying is named "Sam Hyde." I know Hyde is a pretty counter-cultural dude and all, but come on guys - you just know equating a stand-up comedian with a neo-Nazi mass-murdering simulator is just lawsuit bait with a capital "L." 

The anchor is killed offscreen, and this cues a 20 minute long shootout in the prop room, with wave after wave of SWAT members and cops coming after you. Thankfully, there is a vending machine smackdab in the middle of the room, so it's pretty much impossible to run out of health - that is, unless your index fingers give out, naturally.

And after you finally off all the officers? Your reward a cutscene in which your avatar pops a VHS in the control room to show the whole world "that Hitler was right." This leads to a five minute long video which cues a Hitler speech about the media swaying public opinion and warning us about "giant capitalists" (that's codeword for "Jews," y'know) while clips of white babies and Sweden roll in the background. "Gentiles, rise up because we've done it before and we will do it again," the video concludes. "Stand up to Jews of the world. Organize against Jewish tyranny and fight for your people." And the very last image of the game? A vacant screen, reading "#hitlerwasright, make the truth go viral." 

How disgusting. Can you imagine the roles being reversed and a video game encouraging the wholesale slaughter of Nazis instead?

Yep, that's the ending. No boss fights, no cutscenes describing the consequences of your avatar's actions, nothing - just the designers going all #Kony2012 on us and pushing a shitty propaganda video down our throats that nobody in their right mind would ever think of posting on their Facebook timeline. Anticlimactic endings suck hard enough, but to give those of us who waited a good 14 minutes for the game to download no ending whatsoever? Now that's just the zenith of laziness, you goose-stepping goof-offs. 

Before I get into the sociocultural implications of the game, I'll quickly go over the technical merits of the offering. Simply put, even as a freeware title, Angry Goy leaves a lot to be desired. The visuals are pretty good and the soundtrack is surprisingly awesome (then again, I do love me anything that sounds like a John Carpenter score) but the controls are clunky and the gameplay is super repetitive. Because it's damn near impossible to avoid enemy fire at close range, virtually every time you get gang tackled by three or more foes you're going to incur a lot of unavoidable damage. That means you pretty much have to backtrack to the last vending machine checkpoint, refill your energy, and repeat over and over again. Get health, kill one mob, go back and get more health, kill another mob a little bit further down the street, retreat to the vending machine, refill, rinse and repeat ad nauseam. The melee weapons are practically useless and as stated earlier, the game tends to glitch out a lot. Whether or not that can be attributed to characters from other video games trying to go "turbo" a'la Wreck-It Ralph for the white nationalist movement, however, is unlikely to be the case - frankly, these guys just rushed the game out there, and oh boy, does it show. It's strictly a solo player affair, and there are no online scoreboards to show off to your buddies on Stormfront. There's virtually no incentive to replay the game once you already beat it - no unlockables, no alternate endings, etc. - so it's pretty much the epitome of a play once and destroy game. Without the alt-right humor, this would be a totally unremarkable game, without question. 

And now, we come to the biggie. Does this game ACTUALLY have anything to do with satire, or is it just disgusting racist propaganda disguised as entertainment? You know, we've been having this argument for centuries - can agitprop be art, and vice versa? - and while I can't say I approve of the game's Hitler-espousing, super-mega-duper xenophobic themes, I can at least see the developers attempted to wedge some halfway legitimate social commentary in there. You may not like it or think it's funny, but the game clearly passes the old Miller v. California SLAPS test - it's a carefully crafted (if not sophomoric) absurdist comedy that panders to the The_Donald subreddit crowd by making fun of leftist sympathizers' hypocritical stance on "globalization" and "multiculturalism." Yes, the game is about killing wave after wave of African Moslems, SJW college students and purportedly Jew-owned police officials, but I think it's a stretch to say the game is designed to incite gamers to go out there and murder migrants and liberals and international bankers in real life. If you're going to piss and moan about this game "radicalizing" the Voat community, you might as well go after They Live for encouraging viewers to gun down Reaganites, or blame the Dallas sniping massacre on Grand Theft Auto. Satire is supposed to have a hard edge to it, and yes, that First Amendment protection is afforded to parodies even IF they don't jive with your own personal ideologies and you find the general statement of the work in question dangerous, depraved and morally indefensible. 

Angry Goy isn't a good video game and it can hardly be considered masterful comedic storytelling. Alas, like 2 Live Crew and the photos of Robert Mapplethorpe a quarter century before it, it's a game destined to redefine what it is, precisely, that constitutes art. Perhaps the greatest cultural inversion of my lifetime has been the total 180 of free speech in the States, where it is now hardline conservatives - the DailyStormers and Million Dollar Extremes and Milo Yiannopouloses of the world - that are crusading on the frontlines of the cultural First Amendment battle, while liberals (yes, the very same people who defended "Me So Horny" and "Piss Christ" as crucial free expression 25 years ago) are now posited as the guardians of morality, destined to bar any and all racist, sexist or homophobic commentary from poisoning the minds of the masses. Undoubtedly, Angry Goy is going to cause quite the commotion, and might even represent the first volley of a new high court culture war. 

Freedom of speech was never meant to protect the status quo. It was meant to protect unpopular opinions from being silenced by the majority. The very same reasoning that safeguarded liberal heroes Chris Ofili and David Wojnarowicz from torrents of religious right oppression in the 1990s is why even vile, hateful works like Angry Goy ought to be protected today. The game isn't a "hate crime" anymore than Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ - it's a mere idea, however distasteful, encapsulated in a fixed medium. And the very minute we start persecuting people for ideas - or considering hateful speech on the same level as hateful actions - we've already begun that long, miserable march down the road to fascism, kiddos. 

The biggest social crisis of my lifetime, I have long surmised, will entail how exactly U.S. culture seeks to define the First Amendment. There is an ever growing contingent out there that is hell-bent on changing 1A to mean it's the government's duty to protect the citizenry from being offended, and we may be just a few years away from the first wave of freedom-eroding Supreme Court cases hitting Capitol Hill. 

Angry Goy is shitty art made by shitty people with a shitty agenda, but there's no doubt that under the First Amendment as is, they have a right to peddle their propaganda to the masses - and if you don't like it, well, tough titties. Alas, a game this caustic is sure to rankle the easily aggrieved P.C. police, and I'll give it about a month before Slate and The Washington Post picks up on it and we have ourselves a level three - possibly even level four - sociocultural shit storm.

Don't say I didn't warn you well in advance, folks. Don't you even.

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Why the Government SHOULD Be Spying On Our Online Data…

An argument in defense of federal collection and examination of our Internet records and information…

Recently, the Obama Administration was lent a staggering one-two body blow; first, documents popped up indicating that the NSA has been forcing Verizon to hand over the cell phone data of every single one of its subscribers, and just a day later, info about the PRISM program -- which appeared to reveal collusion between the feds and some of the tech industry’s largest players, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo -- got leaked by the Washington Post. As expected, hardcore contingents on the left and the right responded with seething outrage, with the New York Times -- considered by many to be one of Obama’s most obedient media lapdogs -- stating that this new scandal completely destroys any and all credibility the O Cabinet used to have. Needless to say, this newfangled information doesn’t put the Obama Administration in any better standing that it has been this year, but is all of this government “spying” really as awful as some folks on the Web would have you believe?

First off, let’s clarify a few things. Allegedly, this whole PRISM thing appears to have started as an initiative under George W.’s watch in 2007, so you really can’t come out and call it an outright Obama project. Similarly, a lot of these “spying” programs were actually green lit by House and Senate approval…meaning as much as the nation’s conservative contingent (and for that part, the hyper-individualistic/hyper pro-privacy liberals) want to bitch and moan about the U.S. turning into an Orwellian state, the fact of the matter is that our democratically elected officials have had NUMEROUS opportunities to stop programs of the like from being authorized, and they haven’t.

Similarly, I haven’t really detected that much ire towards these mega-huge-conglomerate entities, who are only, you know, half of the goddamn equation. So, the feds come out and ask Google and Verizon to hand over some user data. Instead of saying “no” and turning over documents to the media (who, assuredly, would’ve gobbled the info up like free munchkins on National Doughnut Day), they willingly complied with the fed’s wishes and kept the shit under lock and key from the public. As the old adage goes, it takes two to tango, so why aren’t we singling out both dancers in this Grand Funk Railroad of duplicity?

That, in itself, raises a pretty interesting question : how come there’s so much concern about our “private data” falling into the hands of the feds, when our “private data” has been visible, collectible and archivable by Google, Facebook and Microsoft this whole time, anyway? If you want to complain about the government for “spying” on allegedly “private” Web info, then I think it’s a little hypocritical -- and woefully ignorant -- to not ALSO harp the hell out of these Internet firms for doing the same.

I sound like a government apologist right now, don’t I? Well, while it is cool to be all Libertarian and anarcho-radicalist on the Web in the wake of this leaked data, all it took was one quote from President Obama to get me to COMPLETELY accept all of this spying and data collectin’ without any ill feelings whatsoever.

"You can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society."

That line right there has to be one of the most intelligent things I’ve ever heard a politician, of any ideology, say. The reality is, we live in a social structure that promises us freedom from the kind of mayhem that goes on in a good 90 percent of the world; and to afford us that freedom from mass death, maybe, just maybe, we have to give up a little bit of personal freedom for guaranteed mass protection.

This idea isn’t new, you know: I mean, shit, how long ado did Rousseau pen “The Social Contract,” anyway? Even amongst hardcore Libertarians, the government’s function as social protector is vaunted pretty strongly. So here, we have the federales doing the one thing even Ayn Rand believes it should be doing, and of course…the masses cry “foul.”  Of course they would. Of course they would.

Now, I’m not exactly a big fan of that George W. character, but in hindsight, I have to respect some of  his executive decisions. It took a lot of brass to authorize something like the “PATRIOT Act” and give so much authority to the NSA, but in hindsight, I think it has to be considered a right call.

I don’t know if you kids remember this or not, but about 13 years ago or so, a a bunch of highly pissed off jihadists took control of a few aeroplanes and decided to smash them into some fairly expensive real estate. The brutal deaths of about 3,000 Americans, not to mention billions in architectural damage costs (you have to factor in property in the equation…after all, that’s the only kind of value you can get some individuals to consider significant), revealed something quite telling about U.S. domestic security: that, it was, in a word or two, pure shit. Looking back on 9/11, it was ridiculously clear that the U.S. -- the most formidable military presence in history -- had a MASSIVE weak spot on the domestic front. And seeing as how a couple of million militant extremists want us dead, maybe you can determine for yourself why so many political higher-ups have been on a nearly 15 year long national security improvement spree ever since.

Geopolitics is a game we all like to play in our heads, but the fact of the matter is, we don’t really know how complex and challenging this whole “keeping the U.S. safe from atomic briefcase attacks” business actually is. Odds are, it’s probably a billion times scarier than what we think it already is…and the fact that we’ve had two presidents in a row, with completely antithetical political ideals, becoming hardline advocates of intensified domestic security ought to be “clue #1” to anybody.

I imagine President Obama’s first joint chief of staffs meeting…the really secretive kind, where he convenes with generals and defense administrators underneath Camp David in a top-secret, radiation proof bunker with robotic maids and shit…to go a little something like this.

Obama: “I just want you to know that, like many Americans, I too am outraged by the excesses of the War on Terror, especially all of this NSA wire tapping stuff. So, what’s going on in the military world, mi amigos?”

Defense Advisor One: “Well, Intel has detected increased radioactive hotspots in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and parts of southeastern Russia. These, it is worth noting, have completely different frequency signatures than what we’ve already picked up in North Korea, Syria, Lebanon and  Iran. And they appear to be moving around, Mr. President.”

Obama: “Umm…what do you mean ‘moving around,’ exactly?”

Defense Advisor Two: “Most likely, they are in the process of being actively transferred. As you can see here on this display [A flat screen monitor automatically unfolds from the ceiling], these signatures are not stationary. The green spots, where most of our silos and Russian sites are, indicate stationary atomic weaponry. These red ones indicate stationary atomic activity, albeit in much smaller scales, in China, Pakistan, and Israel.”

Obama: “And, these beeping yellow dots…you mean its’ moving atomic weaponry?”

Defense Advisor One: “More than likely, Mr. President.”

Obama: “So you mean all that shit about suitcase bombs and dirty bombs was real all along?”

Defense Advisor Two: “Very much so, Mr. President. And this map is just indicating confirmed nuclear armaments hot spots. Here’s a map of what Intel believes are potentially active sites…”

[Hundreds of yellow dots pop up on map, followed by thousands of miniature blue ones all across the globe.]

Obama: “So, uh, what are the blue ones, exactly?”

Defense Advisor Two: “Unconfirmed biological weaponry. The Chinese have been creating super-strains of SARS for the last decade, and former Soviet satellites have been actively engaged in the production and sale of designer germ weapons since at least 1988.”

Obama: “…but there are blue dots on that map in America!”

Defense Advisor One: “About 90 percent of those are lab stock. The other 10 percent, Mr. President, are unconfirmed.”

Obama: “Unconfirmed?”

Defense Advisor Two: “Quite possibly dirty bombs or black market stocks, Mr. President. NSA records indicate that transfers have been attempted at least three times this week already. If it wasn’t for that cell phone data, they likely would’ve gone completely unchecked.”

Obama: “…unchecked?”

Defense Advisor One: “Two attempted transfers between Al-Qaeda sleeper cells and one attempted transfer from a Russian nationalist to a Turkish extremist group outside of D.C. In that one, the CIA netted a pretty nasty strain of designer Ebola mixed with rubella. Completely indistinguishable from chicken pox, but at two weeks onset, results in extremely fatal hemorrhagic fevers, with a 95 percent kill rate. In all likelihood, an entire city could be contaminated in the span of an afternoon.”

Obama: “…and, uh, the only way you knew about that stuff was from wiretapping?”

Defense Advisor One: [nods head.]

Obama: [Lights up Marlboro, and paces back and forth for about ten uninterrupted seconds.] “All right. Keep it up, then.”

Defense Advisor Two: “Thank you, Mr. President. Now, here’s a map of suspected domestic terrorists, including one militia in Colorado that has been exchanging plans to blow up the Hoover Dam on Skype…”

Obama: “You know what? Fuck it, canvas the entire Internet if you have to. I’ve seen ‘Deep Impact’ before, and I’ll be damned before I become known as ‘the First Black President…who also let Saudi hi-jackers blow up a nuclear power plant!” [slams fists on table, dramatic music begins playing.]

And so, President Obama (as will every commander-in-chief this country will have from hereon out) faces a moral dilemma: while he or Hilary become known as “that one asshole that trampled on our civil liberties,” or “that one asshole that let terrorists fly two jumbo jets into the Sears Tower?,” or “that no good prick that was asleep on the job when Chinese infiltrators laced the water supply of Philadelphia with smallpox?”

Everybody that wants to rag on the executive office over this PRISM/Verizon/drone strike stuff have seen “The Dark Knight,” but seemingly none of them have picked up on the general lesson of the film: If you’re in a position of power, and you have the ability to stop mass destruction on one’s home front from transpiring, and you can avert another instance of milli-death (or, much, much more horrifically, even mega-death) from happening by combing through phone call transcripts and a few Google searches, then what’s necessarily immoral about doing a little proactive snooping from time-to-time?

And all of this brings us back to Obama’s quote from earlier. You and me live in a society, where we agree to sacrifice some of our fundamental liberties in exchange for mass protection. So, yes, we can cry and bellyache about the government MAYBE taking a look at our cell phone logs and YouTube videos, but do we ever praise and celebrate them from keeping international and domestic terrorists from blowing up our power grids, or knocking down our buildings, or unleashing genetic nightmares on entire metropolises? Of course we don’t, because it’s stuff we don’t know about. It’s easy to complain about an unfair trade-off when you only know what you’re being asked to trade. So, we’re giving the feds access to our electronic data, and what are they giving us in return?

Well, all I can say is that since 9/11 -- and since the PATRIOT Act and the NSA re-authorizations and the PRISM project have been enacted -- there hasn’t been a single wide-scale, cataclysmic domestic terror attack on U.S. soil since.

And if the occasional peak at somebody’s Reddit account is enough to keep bridges from being blown up and children from being immolated in burning buildings? All I can say is “keep up the good work, Senor Presidente. Keep up the good work."

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Gay Rights, Wrong Ideals?

The Excesses - And Potential Dangers - Of The "War On Homophobia" 

[WARNING: I can tell already that a lot of you are going to think this article is apologetic towards homophobes, or even encouraging homophobia. That, obviously, is not the intent of the article, but rather to discuss some logical inconsistencies within the arguments of many hardcore “gay-rights” proponents, particularly on the issue of “hate speech.” If this is too much for you to handle, here’s a link to play Mega Man 3 instead – a good day to you. –Thnx, Mgmt.]

Back in the third grade, I had to sit out of recess once because I called some kid - a fellow male student, by the way - on the playground a “lesbian.” Since this was before the days of the Internet, I really had no idea what a “lesbian” was, just that I heard it on the news a lot and figured it had to be something negative as a result. I mean, Peter Jennings was always going on and on about “layoffs” and “trade embargoes,” so I figured if anything was talked about on the evening news, it probably had to have some sort of detrimental or harmful ring to it. Hell, I just as easily could have called my playmate a “beneficiary of NAFTA” after he threw a dirt clod at me, and I never would’ve known the difference.

According to a lot of people these days, however, such a remark, even if uttered by someone that had no idea what the complexities of the term entailed, would be considered a “homophobic attack.” In fact, a lot of the pre-college culture I experienced would be labeled “homophobic”, with some of the more extremist gay rights folks saying that my milieu was a living, breathing hate-crime morning, noon and night. What’s even more amazing to me is that kids of this generation are able to detect an aura of “bigotry” and “discrimination” that, for the life of me, I never knew we were guilty of.

For example, I had no idea that my pop cultural oeuvre - at the time, a goulash of the most low-culture things you can think of - was really a festering bin of hatred. When Korn and Eminem - back when both were relevant and/or gave a shit about what they were doing - dropped the terms “homo” in their lyrics, I didn’t know that, by proxy, I was guilty of supporting an oppressive, hetero-normative hierarchy. Nor was I aware that the crude chants often overheard at pro hockey and pro wrestling events in my youth - specifically, the fan favorite “(insert disliked figure here) takes it up the ass” - was actually a means of subjugating an entire subgroup of the U.S. populace. This entire time, I just thought that I was giving Claude Lemieux and Shane “The Franchise” Douglas a hard time, when all the while, I was really propagating an institutionalized hegemony that devalued my fellow man. The fact that I found Eddie Murphy’s jokes about AIDS in “Delirious” amusing when I was 13 is the modern day moral equivalent to being a closeted SS officer, I imagine.

I bring up all of the above aspects of my youth culture because they have all been criticized by the generation ahead of me for being homophobic. According to myriad YouTube users, the lyrics of Limp Bizkit, the rowdiness of late 90s’ sporting events and virtually all forms of stand-up comedy up until 1991 were all blatantly anti-gay, and the theoretical amusement we procured from such media is comparable to all of the old white guys that used to get their giggles watching minstrel shows and D.W. Griffith movies. 

To them, its absolutely unimaginable that we couldn’t have seen such displays as inherently discriminatory, and it’s super-duper-mega-unimaginable that we can’t see them as such in hindsight today. And if you even look like you’re to be an apologist about the pop culture of twenty years ago, even in the remotest, you might just get ran out of town by people holding pitchforks and torches.

“Homophobia” is the new social blight, the same way “racism” was the cultural albatross up until fairly recently in American discourse. Alike “racism,” I think it’s pretty clear that nobody is a big fan of “homophobia,” and, most certainly, nobody wants it to be used as a component that skews political or social decision making within our culture. Nobody, repeat, NOBODY in the United States wants “institutionalized homophobia.” Even the most hardcore of the hardcore, your Fred Phelps types and the like, aren’t necessarily vouching for the institutional disempowering of gays and lesbians. They may say a lot of heavy-handed stuff pertaining to their religious beliefs, but they’re not lobbying to keep gays out of political office, or even for social impositions. They don’t want gays out of public schools, and they don’t want gays to have to use separate bathrooms - they may not like ‘em, but they’re not really trying to get them factored out of the general social system, either.

As far as the modern gay rights movement goes, the only two institutional blockades I can think of involve gay marriage and adoption, which are two social obstructions almost guaranteed to be knocked down by legal proceedings within the next 20 years. You could argue the whole “don’t ask, don’t tell” thing, but seeing as how that isn’t a general imposition on American society (for example, your sexual orientation can’t be used as an element for your hiring as a bank officer, a non-bat-shit-crazy-university professor, or the President of the United States), I really wouldn’t deem it as a cultural restriction. At this juncture, the term “gay liberation” is a complete and utter oxymoron, as there really isn’t an institutional inhibition for said gays and lesbians to surmount.

A lot of gay rights crusaders like to compare the GLBTQABCLMNOP movement to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, although it’s kind of apparent that the cultural restrictions placed on blacks during that time-frame was considerably harsher than anything most gays and lesbians have had to overcome. Whereas the Civil Rights movement was mostly about equal representation in society, the gay rights movement of the early '90s to today has, generally, been a quest for equal recognition and acceptance - a completely different struggle, because a lot of gay hardliners want not only changes to social policies, but a change to social thinking itself.

The things blacks were fighting for during the Civil Rights era - access to education, employment and the guarantee that they won’t be denied institutional rights like voting and municipal services - are all things that gays and lesbians have had in America since, well, forever. The things gays and lesbians seem to be fighting against nowadays aren’t institutional barriers, but rather, individualistic displays of homophobia, be it perceived or perfectly blunt. The problem here is quite obvious - while blacks wanted infrastructural changes to policies and social services, gays want across-the-board toleration and acceptance from the culture in its totality, with the added incentive of protection from criticism from individual members of that cultural milieu. The hardcore gay rights advocates aren’t just fighting against “homophobia” - an intangible, subjective term, lest we forget - but the complete eradication of whatever it is that “homophobia” entails. This is a “goal” that is not only incredibly naive and unrealistic, but ultimately, one that is far more harmful to the social well-being of both hetero and homosexuals than ANYTHING you’ll hear the Pat Robertsons and Dr. Lauras of the world spout out of their ironically sphincter-shaped oral cavities.

For the most part, it’s the gays and not the hetero-normative detractors that are the ones vouching for separatism, in the form of reductionistic social enclaves that eliminate “perceived” homophobia by getting rid of all non-homosexual ideologies - and the more extreme circumstances, influences - whatsoever. The term “gay” today means something more than a sexual preference, it indicates a certain counter-cultural stasis, complete with its own tracts, texts and experiences that are specifically homosexual. In every major city in America, there’s at least one “gay district” in town, in which the sociological constituency is overwhelmingly homosexual - they have gay bookstores, they have gay movie theaters, they have gay bars, everything a “normal” community would have, only with the prefix “gay-” welded onto it. The inherent “gayness” takes precedence over all other qualities to such a degree that the element of sexual orientation - the thing that the gays want the hetero-normative detractors within society to totally ignore - becomes not only the central aspect of one’s life, but the utmost qualifier of his or her being.

Remember, these “gay enclaves” aren’t examples of social subjugation, as nobody forced the gays within the community to group together and live as an individual subsystem. Rather, it was a conscious, structured decision by local gays themselves to socially transform an area into an idealistic utopia, if only for a few blocks. Of course, some critics would say that this self-selected isolation was reactionary to the “general” homophobia of society, and as such, is a preemptive means of avoiding “homophobic” sentiment and influences. Not surprisingly, this has led to the comparable phenomenon of privately funded “gay high schools” cropping up amongst the more liberal hinterlands of the United States - in essence, the literal and not just figurative endorsement of social segregation by those that claim to be “oppressed” by a largely “unavoidable” hetero-normative culture.

A recent Rolling Stone article brought up the story of a small town in which a rash of teenage suicides plagued the community. Over a fairly small length of time, nine students (of which four were “outed” homosexuals) killed themselves, with many gay advocates claiming that homophobic bullying and the institutional inability for the schools to address homophobia were the chief drivers of their suicides. Scientifically, it’s not really a sound assumption, since a majority of the students that killed themselves during the time-frame were reportedly quite heterosexual. Nor does that assumption take into consideration socioeconomic factors (far and away the most important physical and mental determiners of one’s behavior, and certainly more influential than sexual preference, religion or race combined), or even the notion of suicide clustering, a freak social phenomenon in which teenagers respond to traumatic exposure to death by causing their own deaths as reactionary statements (which means, for all intents and purposes, “Heathers” is probably the most sociologically-accurate teen movie ever made.)

The danger here is really obvious; per the gay rights proponents, one of those essential rights is the right to “not by offended or criticized,” which is a right allotted to a grand total of nobody else in society. Many, many advocacy groups are trying to turn these suicide rashes into a social imperative, with the assumption that unless drastic, precautionary measures are taken to insure that gay students will not experience anything “offensive or critical” in regards to their gayness, the cultural and academic milieu is at fault for their deaths.

This, of course, brings us to the topic of “hate speech regulation,” an Orwellian construct advocated by hardliner gay activists that stands out as perhaps the most daunting civic obstruction of our time. To the hardliner gays, their perceived right to avoid indignation is so great (and apparently, centric only to them) that formal abridgement of the civil rights of others is worth sacrificing. In other words, they feel as if the freedoms of others HAS to be eliminated for them to fully enjoy their freedoms, an idealistically-sharpened dagger pointed right at the very heart of our First Amendment convictions.

Sure, it’s easy to target extremist homophobes like Fred Phelps and his merry clan of Kansan fundamentalists, but the extremists on the other side of the pasture never seem to get the ink that the unabashed gay-haters get. What of iconic lesbian writer Valeria Solanas, who once said that heterosexual culture is an oppressive regime that must be destroyed in order for everybody that’s a non-heterosexual, Caucasian male to live complete lives? Seeing as how she put a bullet in Andy Warhol, it stands to reason that she’s done more damage to the homosexual community than ANYBODY she accused of promoting a hetero-normative hegemony. And what about the feminist organizations of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that harassed women for bringing their male infants to rallies and vigils? For that matter, what about the radical lesbian contingents that have publicly declared their desire to genetically phase out males from the human gene pool? Last time I checked, hatred isn’t a one way street - logically, if “homophobia” exists (and is worth restricting free expression to keep in check or prevent), then is it really that far-fetched a consideration to say that comparable free expression restrictions should be implemented to curtail a perceived “hetero-phobia?”

The locus of gay activism in the modern era is almost wholly dependent on a Marxist impression of perceived oppression. You really can’t use the term “gay rights” or “gay awareness”, since gays are most certainly entitled to virtually all social services that “straights” are guaranteed (marriage and adoption currently notwithstanding) nor is it really acceptable to say that gays have been culturally marginalized via systematic under representation (the popularity of Lady Gaga and “Glee” clearly contradicts this - in fact, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find a contemporary television or film offering that doesn’t have a “queer” angle to some extent.) In this, the only thing gays and lesbians have to fight for is the unobtainable aspiration of a persecution-less social milieu, which by proxy, becomes a “battle” against the more extreme homophobes and a perceived threat from the hetero-normative majority, whom they gays and lesbians fear are working against them based on longstanding, although unstated, political or religious grounds. And what do the socio-politically bellicose do in the absence of true battles?

They just make one up, of course. With perceived homophobia in check, why not go after perceived historical homophobia next? That way, they can adjudicate the blameless of today very-much-to-blame for contemporary “injustice” based on retroactive cultural milieus and whatever faint connections the individual in question has to such long-gone structures. In a quest for perpetual victimization, you just have to go on a good old fashioned witch hunt every now and then - a rather shameful way to maintain group pride, don’t you think?

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