MAGA to the Maxson: Apocalyptic America and Fallout 4’s Brotherhood of Steel

American political rhetoric has become increasingly zealous in its use of right-wing, Christofascist and apocalyptic imagery. While its contemporary moment is deeply connected to the current Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, it has a much longer history in American popular culture. This article specifically links this contemporary movement to the Fallout franchise, a popular post-apocalyptic video game series to illuminate cultural patterns of America’s apocalyptic political rhetoric. The video game series begins as a trope-laden post-apocalyptic western of survival by the gun. Later and more recent iterations have emphasized settler-colonialist nation building, and other forms of troubling American exceptionalism in a post-nuclear world. The explicit connections between these militaristic and political conceits is so ubiquitous in American media that it has become a cultural point of identity.