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Joan Rivers. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photo by Tom Briglia/FilmMagic

You want to make women in comedy cringe? Say the phrase women in comedy. You could be trying to be positive, like, It really is a great time for women in comedy or 10 Women in Comedy to Watch, but the words still trigger. It brings to mind mid-market morning-radio shock jocks asking, Whats it like being a woman in comedy? when you know they just want to find out if you sleep with fans. Or overly earnest journalists asking the same question and hoping the answer is traumatically bad. It makes female comedians think of ghettoized Ladies Night comedy shows or of being expected to discuss the Me Too allegations of comedians they dont know, while their male colleagues never are. This is complicated. Especially when you want to inform people of, you know, what it is and was like being a woman in comedy.

With Hysterical, a documentary about women in comedy, premiering on FX on April 2 (and heading to Hulu after), Kathryn VanArendonk joins Vultures Good One podcast to unpack the value of women in comedy projects, why were exhausted with them, and what happens when comedians get asked, Whats it like to be a woman in comedy? over and over again. You can read an edited excerpt from the transcript or listen to the full episode below. Tune in to Good One every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jesse David Fox: I want to talk about women in comedy as an idea that gets talked about as a whole. I dont really feel the need to talk about women in comedy in actuality because I dont think its, like, a remarkable, weird thing that deserves to be discussed.

Kathryn VanArendonk: I think what we want to talk about is the idea of pointing to women in comedy as some special, deserving class that requires distinct attention because so often it results in us overlooking the fact that there are actual, individual women who do comedy. I assume we are not the only people to have noticed that there are lots of women doing comedy! But also there is still a tendency to identify women doing comedy as some unusual, strange phenomenon that requires a lot of particular focus separate from the rest of the comedy world. And thats a phenomenon. The Lets talk about the funny ladies thing is something I feel really mixed about. I feel very conflicted about it as a kind of project.

Jesse: What did you think of the documentary?

Kathryn: Its by a filmmaker named Andrea Nevins, who has done other feminist-leaning documentary work. There was a big movie that she did on Barbie, for instance. Hysterical is a look at what its like to be a woman who does comedy right now and a little bit also a history of women who have had to deal with how tough it is to be a woman stand-up over the last couple decades. She asks people about their childhoods, and you get a bunch of different perspectives. She asks people about comedian terminology. Its very general. Like, Whats it like to be on the road? The sections are framed in ways that lead the viewer through a very explicit idea of what the big issues are if youre a lady. One of them is body issues, one of them is sexual harassment, and none of them are being a woman of color, although that does come up occasionally. But it is telling to me that thats not one that is pulled out as a special, special section in the feature.

My feeling watching the documentary was a combination of longing and frustration. I love archival stuff. I love historical stuff. I love really specific deep dives that I have not seen before. But my overwhelming frustration with this particular documentary was the way that the framing Heres this issue and then this issue and then this issue led to a real flattening of every individual that the filmmaker was portraying. It was: Here are the collective issues of what women have when they try to do comedy here. You can see them all speaking to it. Yes, they will say slightly different things, but theyre all grouped in the same category. You really are not given any space to appreciate the fact that theyre people instead of examples of this phenomenon.

Jesse: With Good One, regardless of gender, my favorite thing is when someone will say something in an episode like This is what comedy is about. You have to do a joke like this. And then the next episode someone will say the exact opposite thing. I try to leave it as thats their perspective. So as a whole, youre like, Oh, theres 9 zillion ways of doing this. I mean, Im the last person alive who cares about the divide of alternative comedy and club comedy, but it does feel like it flattened the types of experiences people have and the types of rooms people were able to create to address these specific issues.

This is a part of a sort of tradition of how the history of comedy is told, both looking back and at the time. This is not the first women in comedy documentary thereve been maybe four or five in the last five years. Theres also a variety of books and tons of academic coverage. Its partly because, as comedy is covered, theres four ways of canonizing comedy history. Theres the stand-up narrative that is almost exclusively men, with women dotted throughout it; there is the history of Jewish comedy; there is a history of Black comedy; and then theres a history of women in comedy. So theyre all separated from each other, and often they then do not get told in the context of the main history. They are effectively ghettoized as sort of a different history. How do you feel about that? Where do you think that tendency comes from?

Kathryn: This is where I get very conflicted about this as a kind of project. I think its pretty clear that neither of us find this particular documentary an impressive example of this type of project. But I do think theres a bigger and less easy question about whether women in comedy, as a kind of project, is a valid, valuable way to frame any of this. I come at it from academia because thats a form of institution Ive spent a lot of time in and know generally what the institutionalized histories end up looking like. It reminds me of the way that big departments say, an English department are going to look at their curriculum, are going to look at their professors, are going to look at their students and be like, Wow, we dont have any coverage of, say, the Afro-Caribbean traditions. Theyre going to hire one person who is going to be that one professor who will only teach about that one thing and then the students who go to those classes will know exactly what theyre getting. And it will stay as this completely separate, as you said, ghettoized experience of what the rest of literature is.

Jesse: The downside of that, I think, is pretty clear. Its a way of saying theres the real thing and then theres this other thing that is not as real. Youre saying theres the main narrative and theres this other one.

Kathryn: As soon as you frame it that way, thats how it gets treated. Thats how the money works. A lot of this is institutionalized, right? So as soon as you have funding for one small thing, it sort of stays that one small thing, and theres no reason to make it part of what the bigger narrative is.

But there is a positive to that kind of choice as well because, for most institutions, if you didnt hire your one Afro-Caribbean professor, there wouldnt be anyone! This is the way that journalism often works too, and documentaries often work the same way. This is the way you get your project made. Its the angle. It is the organizing choice.

And you and I have both written lots of lists in our lives. We both know that lists are useful services for readers, that lists are sort of fascinating intellectual exercises for the writers. But also the lists ghettoize the things that you are designating as that one topic of the list. If Im making a list of women comedians, Im saying its a separate list than the main comedians. But this is the way that people find stuff. This is the way that histories that are often lost get remembered.

The other way to think about it is, rather than sidelining a group of people, projects like these create safe platforms for them. The reality is that I would love if women were always a part of a mainstream narrative of what comedy history is, but we create safe spaces and separate spaces because they wouldnt be there otherwise. So separate lists, separate projects like this have to write back against what the main narrative was.

Jesse: The version of this that Ive found most useful is We Killed, which is the oral history of women in comedy. What it really succeeds at doing is it just retells time periods. It is, Here are the different time periods in the history of comedy, starting from the beginning, and all it does is say, What if we told it from the perspective where were not ignoring that women were not dominant? The most telling is that they tell the history of alternative comedy, which was so female-led. You dont read it and come away with thinking, This is the history of women in alternative comedy. It is the definitive history of alternative comedy or alternative comedy in L.A.

Too often when you do this type of thing, it has a binders full of women phenomenon, which is, We got these women, and here they are. But there is a feeling of, you know, wanting the story to be told better. There are documentaries about specific women. Theres a Joan Rivers documentary, which is one of the gold standards of what a comedy documentary is. Theres a Moms Mabley documentary, which is fantastic. I just want so many more of those because I do think they have specific stories to be told.

Theres this question that comes back often: Whats it like to be a woman in comedy? There are different versions of that question, but that is the main underlying question. Theres also Are women funny? which is another version of Whats it like to be a woman comedian? For a long time, if there was a woman comedian on television, they would be on and the question would be like, Are women even funny? Isnt being a comedian something men do? Thats what Joan Rivers had to answer all the time. And then I guess in some bleary-eyed attempt to be whatever the past version of woke was where the question became, Whats it like to be a woman in comedy? Because I understand there are differences, and I want to hear what its like.

But ultimately, that then became bastardized by places like morning radio, which is really acting it up: Youre a woman in comedy. Isnt that weird? More recently, the contemporary version is Whats it like being a woman in comedy when theres sexual assault happening all over the place? Or instead of asking someone whats it like to be a woman in comedy, you ask every single woman in comedy, no matter what theyre promoting even if they dont talk about this stuff at all, even if theyre just playing this second lead in a sitcom or the zany roommate What about Louis C.K.? That question is not a question about what its like to be a woman comic, but thats what it becomes when its a question youd never ask a man.

Kathryn: And anyone asking that question also is not really interested in the ramifications of the answer, right? Because then that means there have been generations of comedians who have been left out because they had to leave, because it was too soul crushing. Someone asking that question is generally not actually interested in how hard it still is, and part of what this documentary and most versions of that question imply is: Louis C.K.s someone weve already gotten rid of, so now I can ask you about him. Its not, Who are all the other guys? Who are the Louis C.K.s who we dont know about yet?

The question is inherently progressivist. Its saying, And now its better! The documentary does the same thing, which is to heavily suggest that things are much, much better now. It plays a clip of Kelly Bachmans Harvey Weinstein set, which feels extremely discordant, you know, within the rah-rah sisterhood context of the end of the documentary. Its a little wild watching it and then looking at, say, reporting thats come out quite recently about the connection between stand-up clubs and the alt-right and knowing what some comedy podcasts are like and the desire to ignore all the things that are still really bad.

Jesse: Do you have an assessment of what we should look at when we look at these projects? Something thats both critical of it but also trying to imagine what value they have and how should people aspire to do it?

Kathryn: Something that I think is applicable to documentaries, longform writing, book projects, lists, anything where youve chosen to pull out a particular group of people: It is always useful to think about what this list or project is portraying as general that is actually very specific. Or vice versa. Where is the misconnection or the fuzziness happening there? This particular documentary is a project that tends to take a lot of specific things and then say, No, its a big general narrative, and then clump them all together. And look, I have written things quickly and regretted it later, and thats a fallacy weve all fallen into. I am certainly not above doing exactly the same kind of thing. But when you have time and money and editors and people watching your stuff, that is a really useful avenue to press on as far as what might be getting elided in a project like this.

If you find yourself in the position of getting ready to work on a project like this, theres also a really useful question to press on and not let yourself have an easy off-the-cuff answer: Why am I doing this? Why am I making this particular thing? Watching this documentary, it seems like the answer for that question was Because I think women are funny. Im not saying thats a bad answer, but an answer as broad and simple as that is then going to lead back to a fairly broad, simplistic viewpoint. And if instead the answer is like it was for We Killed something like, Because you see a very different understanding of what the history of comedy is when you recenter who the storytellers are you end up with a very different project. Even if, on the surface, both of those things could be summarized as women in comedy.

Jesse: One central question we keep returning to is, What is lost? When you ask women what its like to be a woman comedian, what is lost is you then dont get to ask them a different question. You hypothetically have 15 minutes with a comedian, and you spend five of it asking a question that they get asked a million times. That adds up. Truly, lets say you can do the math; lets say 10 percent of every interview a woman comedian does is spent having to answer this question. That literally puts them 10 percent behind in terms of communicating to an audience their actual point of view and their art. Thats a story that doesnt get told enough.

See original here:
Do We Really Need Documentaries About Women in Comedy? - Vulture

Churches around the world will be holding services for their three most important days during this Holy Week: Holy Thursday, sometimes called Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Easter commemorates Christs resurrection from the dead, the fundamental belief of Christianity. It is the earliest and most central of all Christian holidays, more ancient than Christmas.

As a scholar in medieval Christian liturgy, I know that historically the most controversial of these three holy days has been the worship service for Good Friday, which focuses on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Two parts of the contemporary Good Friday worship service could be misunderstood as implicitly anti-Semitic or racist. Both are derived from the medieval Good Friday liturgy that Catholics and some other Christian churches continue to use in a modified form today.

These are the solemn orations and the veneration of the cross.

The solemn orations are formal prayers offered by the assembled local community for the wider church, for example, for the pope. These orations also include other prayers for members of different religions, and for other needs of the world.

One of these prayers is offered for the Jewish people.

For centuries, this prayer was worded in a way to imply an anti-Semitic meaning, referring to the Jews as perfidis, meaning treacherous or unfaithful.

However, the Catholic Church made important changes in the 20th century. In 1959, Pope John XXIII dropped the word perfidis entirely from the Latin prayer in the all-Latin Roman missal. This missal, an official liturgical book containing the readings and prayers for the celebration of Mass and Holy Week, is used by Catholics all over the world. However, when the next edition of the Latin Roman missal was published in 1962, the text of the prayer still mentioned the conversion of the Jews and referred to their blindness.

The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, a major meeting of all Catholic bishops worldwide held between 1962 and 1965, mandated the reform of Catholic life and practice in a number of ways. Open discussion with members of other Christian denominations, as well as other non-Christian religions, was encouraged and a Vatican commission on Catholic interaction with Jews was established in the early 1970s.

Vatican II also called for a renewal of Catholic worship. The revised liturgy was to be celebrated not just in Latin, but also in local vernacular languages, including English. The first English Roman missal was published in 1974. Today, these post-Vatican religious rituals are known as the ordinary form of the Roman rite.

The completely reworded prayer text reflected the renewed understanding of the relationship between Catholics and Jews mandated by Vatican II and supported by decades of interreligious dialogue. For example, in 2015 the Vatican commission released a document clarifying the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism as one of rich complementarity, putting an end to organized efforts to convert Jews and strongly condemning anti-Semitism.

However, another important development took place in 2007. More than 40 years after Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI allowed a wider use of the pre-Vatican II missal of 1962, known as the extraordinary form.

At first, this pre-Vatican II missal retained the potentially offensive wording of the prayer for the Jews.

The prayer was quickly reworded, but it does still ask that their hearts be illuminated to recognise Jesus Christ.

Although the extraordinary form is used only by small groups of traditionalist Catholics, the text of this prayer continues to trouble many.

In 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwiz, Pope Francis repeated the vehement Catholic rejection of anti-Semitism. While the pope has not revoked the use of the extraordinary form, in 2020 he ordered a review of its use by surveying the Catholic bishops of the world.

There have been similar sensitivity about another part of the Catholic Good Friday tradition: the ritual veneration of the cross.

The earliest evidence of a Good Friday procession by lay people to venerate the cross on Good Friday comes from fourth-century Jerusalem. Catholics would proceed one by one to venerate what was believed to be a piece of the actual wooden cross used to crucify Jesus, and honour it with a reverent touch or kiss.

So sacred was this cross fragment that it was heavily guarded by the clergy during the procession in case someone might try to bite off a sliver to keep for themselves, as was rumoured to have happened during a past Good Friday service.

During the medieval period, this veneration rite, elaborated by additional prayers and chant, spread widely across Western Europe. Blessed by priests or bishops, ordinary wooden crosses or crucifixes depicting Christ nailed to the cross took the place of fragments of the true cross itself. Catholics venerated the cross on both Good Friday and other feast days.

In this part of the Good Friday liturgy, the controversy centres around the physical symbol of the cross and the layers of meaning it has communicated in the past and today. Ultimately, to Catholics and other Christians, it represents Christs unselfish sacrificing of his life to save others, an example to be followed by Christians in different ways during their lives.

Historically, however, the cross has also been held up in Western Christianity as a rallying point for violence against groups that were deemed by the church and secular authorities to threaten the safety of Christians and the security of Christian societies.

From the late 11th century through the 13th century, soldiers would take the cross and join crusades against these real and perceived threats, whether these opponents were Western Christian heretics, Jewish communities, Muslim armies, or the Greek orthodox Byzantine Empire. Other religious wars in the 14th through 16th centuries continued in this crusading spirit.

From the 19th century on, Americans and other English speakers use the term crusade for any effort to promote a specific idea or movement, often one based on a moral ideal. Examples in the United States include the 19th-century antislavery abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement of the 20th century.

But today certain ideals have been rejected by the wider culture.

Contemporary alt-right groups use what has been called the Deus vult cross. The words Deus vult mean God wills (it), a rallying cry for medieval Christian armies seeking to take control of the Holy Land from Muslims. These groups today view themselves as modern crusaders fighting against Islam.

Some white supremacy groups use versions of the cross as symbols of protest or provocation. The Celtic cross, a compact cross within a circle, is a common example. And a full-sized wooden cross was carried by at least one protester during the United States Capitol insurrection in January.

Prayers and symbols have the power to bind people together in a common purpose and identity. But without understanding their context, it is all too easy to manipulate them in support of dated or limited political and social agendas.

Joanne M Pierce is a Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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Why parts of Good Friday worship have been historically controversial - Scroll.in

Churches around the world will be holding services for their three most important days during this Holy Week: Holy Thursday, sometimes called Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Easter commemorates Christs resurrection from the dead, the fundamental belief of Christianity. It is the earliest and most central of all Christian holidays, more ancient than Christmas.

As a scholar in medieval Christian liturgy, I know that historically the most controversial of these three holy days has been the worship service for Good Friday, which focuses on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Two parts of the contemporary Good Friday worship service could be misunderstood as implicitly anti-Semitic or racist. Both are derived from the medieval Good Friday liturgy that Catholics and some other Christian churches continue to use in a modified form today.

These are the solemn orations and the veneration of the cross.

The solemn orations are formal prayers offered by the assembled local community for the wider church, for example, for the pope. These orations also include other prayers for members of different religions, and for other needs of the world.

One of these prayers is offered for the Jewish people.

For centuries, this prayer was worded in a way to imply an anti-Semitic meaning, referring to the Jews as perfidis, meaning treacherous or unfaithful.

However, the Catholic Church made important changes in the 20th century. In 1959, Pope John XXIII dropped the word perfidis entirely from the Latin prayer in the all-Latin Roman missal. This missal, an official liturgical book containing the readings and prayers for the celebration of Mass and Holy Week, is used by Catholics all over the world. However, when the next edition of the Latin Roman missal was published in 1962, the text of the prayer still mentioned the conversion of the Jews and referred to their blindness.

The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, a major meeting of all Catholic bishops worldwide held between 1962 and 1965, mandated the reform of Catholic life and practice in a number of ways. Open discussion with members of other Christian denominations, as well as other non-Christian religions, was encouraged, and a Vatican commission on Catholic interaction with Jews was established in the early 1970s.

Vatican II also called for a renewal of Catholic worship. The revised liturgy was to be celebrated not just in Latin, but also in local vernacular languages, including English. The first English Roman missal was published in 1974. Today, these post-Vatican religious rituals are known as the ordinary form of the Roman rite.

The completely reworded prayer text reflected the renewed understanding of the relationship between Catholics and Jews mandated by Vatican II and supported by decades of interreligious dialogue. For example, in 2015 the Vatican commission released a document clarifying the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism as one of rich complementarity, putting an end to organized efforts to convert Jews and strongly condemning anti-Semitism.

However, another important development took place in 2007. More than 40 years after Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI allowed a wider use of the pre-Vatican II missal of 1962, known as the extraordinary form.

At first, this pre-Vatican II missal retained the potentially offensive wording of the prayer for the Jews.

The prayer was quickly reworded, but it does still ask that their hearts be illuminated to recognize Jesus Christ.

Although the extraordinary form is used only by small groups of traditionalist Catholics, the text of this prayer continues to trouble many.

In 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwiz, Pope Francis repeated the vehement Catholic rejection of anti-Semitism. While the pope has not revoked the use of the extraordinary form, in 2020 he ordered a review of its use by surveying the Catholic bishops of the world.

There has been similar sensitivity about another part of the Catholic Good Friday tradition: the ritual veneration of the cross.

The earliest evidence of a Good Friday procession by lay people to venerate the cross on Good Friday comes from fourth-century Jerusalem. Catholics would proceed one by one to venerate what was believed to be a piece of the actual wooden cross used to crucify Jesus, and honor it with a reverent touch or kiss.

So sacred was this cross fragment that it was heavily guarded by the clergy during the procession in case someone might try to bite off a sliver to keep for themselves, as was rumored to have happened during a past Good Friday service.

During the medieval period, this veneration rite, elaborated by additional prayers and chant, spread widely across Western Europe. Blessed by priests or bishops, ordinary wooden crosses or crucifixes depicting Christ nailed to the cross took the place of fragments of the true cross itself. Catholics venerated the cross on both Good Friday and other feast days.

In this part of the Good Friday liturgy, controversy centers around the physical symbol of the cross and the layers of meaning it has communicated in the past and today. Ultimately, to Catholics and other Christians, it represents Christs unselfish sacrificing of his life to save others, an example to be followed by Christians in different ways during their lives.

Historically, however, the cross has also been held up in Western Christianity as a rallying point for violence against groups that were deemed by the church and secular authorities to threaten the safety of Christians and the security of Christian societies.

From the late 11th through 13th centuries, soldiers would take the cross and join crusades against these real and perceived threats, whether these opponents were Western Christian heretics, Jewish communities, Muslim armies, or the Greek orthodox Byzantine Empire. Other religious wars in the 14th through 16th centuries continued in this crusading spirit.

From the 19th century on, Americans and other English speakers use the term crusade for any effort to promote a specific idea or movement, often one based on a moral ideal. Examples in the United States include the 19th-century antislavery abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement of the 20th century.

But today certain ideals have been rejected by the wider culture.

Contemporary alt-right groups use what has been called the Deus vult cross. The words Deus vult mean God wills (it), a rallying cry for medieval Christian armies seeking to take control of the Holy Land from Muslims. These groups today view themselves as modern crusaders fighting against Islam.

Some white supremacy groups use versions of the crossas symbols of protest or provocation. The Celtic cross, a compact cross within a circle, is a common example. And a full-sized wooden cross was carried by at least one protester during the Capitol insurrection in January.

Prayers and symbols have the power to bind people together in a common purpose and identity. But without understanding their context, it is all too easy to manipulate them in support of dated or limited political and social agendas.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversations newsletter.]

See more here:
Why parts of Good Friday worship have been controversial - The Conversation US

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

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