"While smearing your shit along the walls, you accidentally bump into a police officer," reads one of the event cards in the new board game Storm the Capitol. "'Please don't shoot! Blue lives matter!' you cry, only to realize that the officer is also smearing shit along the wall." Other cards have players setting off fire alarms with a tiki torch and walking in on various senators performing various sex acts.
Brace Belden and Liz Franczak, hosts of the irreverent podcast TrueAnon, are selling this Monopoly-style board game about the January 6 riot, in which players compete to steal 100 electoral ballots before the National Guard arrives. It's clearly designed to mock Donald Trump supporters, yet the game has enough widespread appeal that the TrueAnon team has been able to sell copies to fans of the ex-president outside Trump's trial.
Belden and Franczak don't take January 6 seriously, because they don't believe the rioters themselves were serious. "It was pathetic, as opposed to this terrifying spectacle," Belden said in a January 10, 2021, episode of TrueAnon. "The vast majority of people, once they got in there, didn't know what to do. And they just started making content." The FBI was able to track down many rioters, he noted, "because they couldn't stop posting pictures of themselves." Franzcak quipped that it was the "Night of Long Posts."
There's where the game gets meta. The same sense of spectacle that makes Storm the Capitol fun for everyone also led to the actual storming of the actual Capitol. It's a testament to the danger of irony poisoning: As Belden and Franczak acknowledge on TrueAnon, the riot, however absurd or ineffective, still had deadly and life-ruining consequences. Storm the Capitol is a parody of something that was already a sad farce.
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