Ultra conservatives in the U.S. create game against Obama

By David Brooks

From La Jornada, Mexico

President Barack Obama launches a coup, dissolves the Constitution and the country in order to establish the Union of North America, with the help of Mexican President Felipe Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It all begins when Obama holds secret talks in 2010 with Calderón and Harper. Certain of a massive defeat of the democrats in the legislative elections of the present year, in part because of suspicions about the secret talks, Obama decides to act before the new conservative majority in both chambers of Congress is sworn in. He announces that the new Congress will not be in session, dissolves the country, establishes the Union of North America and declares a ban on firearms, according to a new UN global treaty. Obama deploys civil defense troops, while conservative public figures (particularly those in radio and TV) are disappeared or assassinated in government concentration camps. Obama declares himself the “legendary lost imam”. According to the game: “The Marxist coup has begun! It was obvious that Obama’s officials and czars were Marx’s followers.”

In that police state everything depends on rebel patriots who will have to find a way of recovering the country, millions rise up and thus the “second revolution” begins. The enemy includes Democrat congressional leaders, top officials and Black Nationalists, such as the “Black Tigers”, a kind of Obama’s Praetorian Guard.

This is an online video game designed by conservative Libertarians in Brooklyn a couple of months ago, and players have the responsibility of joining the revolution to fight the unpatriotic forces that have stolen the country. The game is called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails.”

But this is not only a game. What makes it more serious is that it is a window into an increasing, ever more powerful and diverse ultraconservative grassroots movement in this country that is making upper echelons more concerned and is even having a national political impact.

Although the game designers claim that it is only entertainment full of action with a satirical tone, they warn that “if present events continue to transpire in this manner, then the 2011 Obama coup could in fact become a dark chapter in U.S. history.”

The designers have declared in interviews with Wired and separately with Mother Jones that “we equally detest Republicans and Democrats,” and that they plan another game in which the objective is to ambush George W. Bush (although they have not yet kept their promise). That is, just what a wide sector of that movement thinks.

Members of this movement made possible the victory at the special legislative election for Senator Edward Kenney’s Senate seat, in which an unknown conservative won over the powerful machinery of the Democratic Party, which shook the Obama administration and the congressional leadership in Washington. They are also the ones that have achieved national demonstrations attended by tens of thousands in Washington, but have also been the popular face of an effort to defeat and weaken Obama’s political agenda in countless towns and cities throughout the country.

Although initially discarded as crazy extremists because they displayed banners or chanted slogans accusing Obama of being a Socialist, an undercover Muslim, a Hitler lover, African foreigner, enemy of freedom and even more; the fact is that their number and influence, as well as its decentralized organization, continue to grow with the recruitment of more moderate people that share the same suspicion that Washington and Wall Street have kidnapped the country, and that the government not only represent its interests, but it is also an enemy of freedom and U.S. values.

They have been identified as the Tea Party movement, or “tea baggers”, after the act of civil disobedience at the beginning of the independence revolution of the colonials against a tax on tea by the British authorities. Those colonials went aboard British ships in Boston Harbor and threw their cargo of tea into the sea. It was part of the rebellion that had the slogan “no taxes without representation”, that is, they refused to pay taxes to a government in which citizens were not politically represented. The present tea baggers have the same slogan.

Every day new associations crop up identifying themselves as part of the Tea Party movement, increasingly spooking Democrats, but also worrying republicans, for their anger and rejection is against the government in Washington in general, independently of the party in power.

In fact, now Republican leaders are trying to incorporate these bases, and not impose on them. Indeed, some recent surveys indicate that if suddenly the tea baggers formed a Party, their popularity would be greater than the Republican Party’s. According to The New Yorker journalist Ben McGrath, “After the Massachusetts defeat, it is obvious how Obama and other analysts underestimated the movement’s strength, as well as the extent of the resentment that nourishes it. In focusing on the more exaggerated banners and mocking the internal conflicts of the tea baggers, they ignored the gradual consolidation of the movement.”

The movement has borrowed many of its tactics from the progressive movements of the past decades, with some describing it as the first right wing populist movement of present times. Suddenly it has inserted itself in national political dynamics. Suddenly, it is no longer just a game (which you can see at: www.usofearth.com/2011-oba m as-coup-fails.php ).

David Brooks is the U.S. correspondent of La Jornada.