We Will Rise Again: The Song That Explains How Fascists View Media
Image; Ubisoft
“Everytime there’s a fire in Hollywood I come back to this video…with everything happening around us and the government. Rothschild and Soros doing everything they can to break our traditional values, dignity and [the] formation of families.”
The hateful comment above was posted under the Ubisoft video for the song We Will Rise Again (voiced by Meredith Godreau), a satirical propaganda song from the video game Far Cry 5 (2018). In Universe, it is sung by members of the Project at Eden’s Gate cult in fictional Hope County, Montana. The song has a Christian nationalist ethos about righteous followers rising from the death and destruction of the apocalypse, with lyrics such as:
“Oh Lord, the great collapse
Won’t be our end
When the world falls into the flames
We will rise again”
While many did see these terrifying lyrics for the satire they were intended to be, the reaction I noted above was sadly all too common. As another commenter remarked below that video: “It was supposed to be antiwhite music. It was supposed to mock White people, our culture. And then White people loved the music and lyrics. It’s hilarious. The antiwhites are so filled with hatred that they make a display of beauty, thinking it will repulse us.”
This racist reaction, I believe, reflects something crucial to how fascists and authoritarians consume media. It’s all about how the media makes you feel, an analysis focused solely on spectacle that disregards all context so that fascism can spread.
Fascists loving Far Cry
This song first got on my radar back in 2021 when I wrote an article on how fascist music was circulating on social media platforms (see The Music of Hatred is Alive and Well on the Web). One of the things I was commenting on was the Fashwave genre, where right-wing authoritarians take music not intended to be fascist in nature and superimpose it with fascist imagery, such as pictures of dictators and WWII memorabilia, and weaponry. And there, paired with Nazi symbols, was this song.
We Will Rise Again continues to have its right-wing authoritarian supporters who cover it from time to time. The channel Sumrise last year paired it with footage from the Waco Seige — an event where law enforcement stormed a religious cult that is often used as a rallying call to those on the authoritarian right. Three weeks ago, the authoritarian channel peacedozer posted a cover of the song, superimposed with images of Geroge Soros, Bill Gates, and other rightwing conspiracy theorist dog whistles.
There is a sick irony to the right’s love of We Will Rise Again because the Project at Eden’s Gate cult, the people who sing this song in the game, are Far Cry 5’s main antagonists. The player can, in fact, come across a grunt singing We Will Rise Again and gun them down without mercy, like they would any typical video game villain. They are the oppressors the player spends most of their time liberating Hope County from, and so it’s weird seeing viewers gush about this cult’s propaganda. “Joseph Seed [the main antagonist] was right,” laments one user, “He saw the world going into a path where peace was no longer an option.”
This right-wing appreciation applies to other songs in the Far Cry 5 discography as well (see also Help Me Faith and The World Is Going To End Tonight), but We Will Rise Again is the most prominent. The lyrics are so on the nose that even though the game essentially makes fun of this perspective, it has garnered quite a fan base.
And this makes sense as Fashwave was (and continues to be, as it has hardly died) an appropriative genre. It’s all about repurposing existing media for one’s own agenda. As I write in that 2021 article:
“Much of Fashwave music comes from artists who are not fascists…Fascists are really good at reappropriating rebellious music and simply pretending that the artist is rebelling over the same thing (i.e., the irrational fear that a white utopia is slipping away from them).”
However, this appropriation is not unique to Fashwave and is, in fact, a key element of fascist media appreciation overall.
When fascists appropriate media
It’s not hard to come across conservative commentators claiming that media represents the exact opposite of its intended message, such as when commentator Meghan Dillon claimed the overtly anti-capitalist Squid Game (2021-present) was an anti-communist commentary or when Steve Krakauer asserted that Wicked (2024), a movie that alludes to race throughout the narrative, was secretly about conservatives voting for Trump.
My favorite example comes from the 2016 election cycle. You may remember years ago when Trump made a point of playing the Bruce Springsteen song Born in the USA at his rally, despite the song being the antithesis of Trump’s political beliefs. It is about a veteran returning from the Vietnam War only to be discarded by his country. There is a poignant verse talking about how the veteran can’t get work in America. Springsteen singing:
“Come back home to the refinery
Hirin’ man says, ‘Son, if it was up to me’
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said, ‘Son, don’t you understand,’ now.”
If you listen to this song’s verses, it’s easy to walk away disillusioned with America.
Most conservatives, however, only absorb the energetic chorus where Springsteen sings “Born In The USA” repeatedly, and consequently, they label it as a nationalistic song when it is anything but. The point is to only cling to the aesthetic of media. To collapse its original context to fit the fascist’s political aims, even if they conflict with the message the media is trying to convey.
Through Trump’s co-opting and appropriative use of Born In The USA during the spectacle of his rally, he remade it, and it’s hard not to see the same process having occurred with We Will Rise Again.
Appropriation is how fascism spreads
These spectacles I am so focused on — the culture war articles, speeches, online comments, etc. — are not ancillary to the fascist project but what, in fact, makes that project real. As Federico Caprotti writes on the relationship between Italian fascism and spectacle:
“Through spectacle, fascism ceased to be lived and became representation: the regime distanced the masses from everyday life through the presentation of an alternative reality in the image.”
For fascists, all there is is this alternate reality. The creation and maintenance of this image occurs through spectacle — through rallies, YouTube videos, Babylon Bee articles, and all the other ways that fascism spreads in America. These spectacles take elements of reality — songs, words, concepts, ideas, etc.— and then coopt and appropriate them, bringing them into fascist unreality.
A movie decrying the rise of fascism (see ‘Wicked: Part I’ Shows Us How Fascism Is Already On Its Way) is used to explain how such fascists are oppressed.
A show criticizing the dehumanizing nature of capitalism becomes yet another reason it must be enforced.
A song satirizing Christian nationalism transforms into yet another explanation for why the ideology is correct.
Look at the word “woke.” It was originally about activists telling people to be aware of important issues, but this meaning has been willfully discarded, and conservatives have now appropriated it to mean anything they don’t like. In the past few years, we have seen conservatives claim that woke institutions are trying to destroy America. And while there is no such movement in America (it’s hard to imagine what that would even look like), this image of wokeness, warned about in talk shows, video essays, and political speeches, has become all too real to the fascists who consume such spectacles.
It doesn’t matter if the threat is real; fascists are acting upon the information they receive from this alternate reality. As I write this, the fight against “wokeness” is being used to propel the fascist project forward in America: curriculums are being rewritten to exclude real history, funding is being denied to those who focus on marginalized groups, and so much more. All because of the appropriation of a word conservative fascists never really understood.
The conversation around fascist appropriation has implications that are far more dangerous than someone merely being wrong about how they view a piece of media. Appropriation is fascism’s fuel. It is the key way the ideology makes its vision of unreality real.
A conclusion that will rise again
When I look at conservatives fawning over We Will Rise Again, my first thought is not to make fun of how much conservatives don’t “get” it but to see fascist appropriation and cooption in action, as a satire is transmuted into a rallying call. As another person commented under that Ubisoft video of their embrace of this satire:
“Imagine trying to make a game that demonizes a group of people and accidentally [making] a modern Yankee Doodle album.”
This is what fascism does. It’s a black pit that erases all context, bringing everything into it.
We Will Rise Again has the added bonus of satirizing the fascist project, which means its lyrics describe a real perspective people have. It’s probably the reason they resonate so much with the conservative commentators we have criticized today. When Meredith Godreau sings, “Let the wars begin, we’ll keep our pistols near,” people see themselves in those words.
If you want to understand the fascist perspective in America, We Will Rise Again is a song you might want to listen to, if only to realize just how far fascists see themselves going in the months and years to come.
Unlike Far Cry 5, America’s fascists are not playing a game.