Nuka World’s Raiders and the Minutemen, or: How a Fallout Loving Libertarian YouTuber Accidentally Made a Socialist Argument

Fallout fanatic Oxhorn joined Youtube on October 26th, 2011, and in those nearly 8 years he’s built a solid, successful channel with great production value. With over 1.2 million subscribers, weekly Twitch streams, a Patreon, a Discord, online merchandise, and over a third of a billion total video views, Oxhorn is pretty popular for a reason. His content is just good, his voice is really nice to listen to, and his explorations of the Fallout games and other games are extensive and excellent. He does cut content, easter eggs, full playthroughs, mod reviews, in-depth character analysis, quest walkthroughs, and his discussions about the social and philosophical questions in video games are very entertaining, thought provoking, and just generally agreeable; he just seems like a nice guy.

How is it that I, an open socialist, would agree with some of the social views expressed by a self-professed Libertarian, you might ask? Well, one, I’m not for echo chambers; most of my friends are liberals and centrists even though I’m neither, and as anti-religious as I am, one of my best friends is an orthodox Christian, and we’ve been friends for almost 25 years now, since we were 6. Two, the social and interpersonal views that Oxhorn and I probably have largely in common are rather distinct from the economic views I know we wouldn’t. He loves capitalism and “free markets” in his own words, and I very much don’t, but I’ll discuss politics and society with almost anyone, and I can happily find common ground somewhere with basically everyone who isn’t a religious theocrat or a neo-Nazi.

Apparently his real name is Brandon Dennis, and he appears to also be a published author, having a link in his YouTube bio to a novel called “The Tale of Cloran Hastings”. Google suggests that the man also may be dealing with some kind of controversy from the past, so I decided to look into that. Rumors are that he used to say bigoted and homophobic things online (who hasn’t when they were young and stupid?), and he has a video on his channel entitled “My Response to Recent Accusations”, claiming that trolls are attacking him and his fans, lying and manufacturing evidence against him for things. He admits to the homophobic things he said in his youth, and says he's grown past that, and no longer feels that way.

Brandon also admits in this video that that some years ago, he recorded an overweight woman in a revealing outfit, and he expressed that he found it distasteful. He apologized for that and recognized that he should never have done that. He claims that he’s being accused by trolls of giving paid positive reviews of Bethesda Softworks’ much maligned game, Fallout 76, and he says that he doesn’t give paid reviews. He says that he does criticize Bethesda and the problems with their games (which are many), and he says he’s accused of being a Bethesda shill. Maybe he is a nice guy, and maybe he has changed into a better person over time. I know I have, because I was raised by racists.

Forgive the initial digression, because I need to at first put this guy into context, both as a YouTuber and a person. I don’t know this guy, and I want to give him a fair shake, one, because I believe in honest journalism; two, because I’m not in the habit of muckraking or mudslinging. I try not to make a criticism unless I have proof, and I’m not endorsing these accusations from any party here, because I have no proof. If I’m going to criticize a person, I endeavor to do it right, accurately and fairly, and I just generally like this dude’s content.

So how is it that Oxhorn accidentally made a socialist argument? In this video, “The Evil Ending to Nuka World & Why It’s Evil”, Oxhorn makes a number of criticisms of the Raider factions as they pertain to Fallout 4, and they happen to be the same arguments, argued in much the same way, that socialists make toward the capitalist class. In fact, if you took his argument, and replaced the word “Raider” with “capitalist” or “bourgeoisie”, you might think he was a hardline leftist. After going through that quest line’s possible endings, in the last third of the video Oxhorn just starts slamming the Raiders and their way of life when a Fallout 4 NPC says Raiders are parasites, ones who force others to farm for them and do their work while they sit and get high.

“They don’t earn anything for themselves, they don’t work for themselves, they’re afraid of manual labor,” Oxhorn says. “And making them farm for themselves actually reduces settlement happiness, this incidentally is why they’re weak…without slaves to work for them, they’re completely incapable of supporting themselves.” This argument is on point, and it just happens to be an argument also made by none other than Karl Marx. As a journalist, writer and philosopher, Marx was a fan of the notoriously difficult to comprehend philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

The Marxist concept of “dialectical materialism”, a variant of Hegel’s “Master/Slave Dialectic” says that the Master (capitalist) enslaves the Other, and that the Slave (worker) is used to do the manual labor that the Master doesn’t want to or can’t do themselves. All of that labor develops the working Slave into a stronger, smarter, more capable, and more resourceful person, says Marx. The Slave’s ability to survive increases exponentially while the Master’s survivability stagnates, and eventually the Master becomes aware of this, running into a moral problem. If the Slave is allowed to grow too much, the Slave will eventually realize they don’t need the Master and never did, but if the Master tries to crush the Slave, the Slave will die, and then eventually so will the Master.

The title of Master is itself an illusion essentially, because the Master, the I, the Me, needs the Other, the Slave, to live. If the Slave figures this out, they’ll violently revolt and the Master will die anyway. The Master can’t really see how they’re doomed, says Marx, and so this dialectic of Master and Slave is only an illusion meant to temporarily bolster up the control the Master thinks they have over the Slave. In reality, the Master isn’t one, and by trying to hold onto power forever, the Master is dooming themselves into eventual execution.

Put in the context of Fallout 4, the Raiders (Masters) need the Wasteland Settlers (Slaves) to survive, but all the Settlers need to do to vastly improve their quality of life is to rise up and kill their oppressors. The only thing preventing them from doing that is not having the knowledge that it’s the Raiders who need the Settlers, not the other way around. Marx called this “class consciousness,” which is also why one of the biggest long-term detriments to the American diasporan slave trade was teaching slaves to read, because eventually they figured out how unfair the whole thing was. Education, or in this Marxist context “class consciousness”, led to many slave revolts in world history, some of them successful.

“The reasons for doing those things does not matter, it’s the actions that matter, and the results of those actions mean evicting people from their own homes…attacking settlements and forcing them to send you tributes…while sitting on your laurels all day taking chems from a chem dispenser and brewing booze? Yeah, I gotta say, that’s evil.” Well put Oxhorn, because guess what you just described in the real world? Landlords, particularly slumlords, and the property managers of high-priced gentrified condos. Rent is essentially a survival tribute to your landlord (Master), who doesn’t actually need to do anything except own the property and collect your rent, and can throw you out if housing market shenanigans increases your rent to an unsustainable level.

How about the fact that people are forced to leave their homes, even their hometowns, when affordable housing gives way to expensive gentrified housing? If you can’t afford the luxury condo and it’s all there is left to live in your hometown, then all of a sudden you can’t live in that town anymore, because you can’t afford a rent that skyrocketed upwards by about $800 a month from where it was at previously in an affordable housing block. “It’s also unsustainable,” Brandon says. “And the only reason that these Raiders can get away with this is that there are hardworking people who are farming. If those people weren’t farming, guess who would have to farm?” You are preaching to the choir, brother.

“If everybody became a raider, the raider lifestyle could not be sustained.” Don’t you mean capitalist bourgeoisie? Because that’s true too, if literally everyone was a landlord or a billionaire, society would collapse because nobody was doing the “lowly” hard work that kept society operating. “In contrast, the Minuteman lifestyle fights hard to allow settlers to maintain their individual liberty.” It’s almost like if there were no rich people, everyone would have to do their own share of work, and they wouldn’t be exploited to work for slave wages…you know, like when a business owner pays undocumented workers under the table, and then gets to fire them and call ICE at the slightest hint of trouble.

Oxhorn continues, “A society can be built in a world where there are no raiders. No society can be built in a world where there are no farmers.” Right, so remind me again what happened to all of that food in the California farms when the Trump administration went deportation happy on thousands of undocumented immigrants. Did thousands of white, rich Americans happily roll up their sleeves and reap the crops in those farms to create food to feed thousands of hungry people? …No? They let it sit there and rot until it was a waste of literal tons of food? Oh. It’s almost like they were too busy indulging in their decadent lifestyle while abused, lowly workers did all the hard work for them. How very Raider of the American “upper class”, don’t you think?

“It takes much greater strength to defend a group of ungrateful people without wanting anything in return, than it does to selfishly take from others something you did not earn, and then immediately consume it.” Right, like collecting rent money from tenants, or inherited wealth, or when you buy a company just to liquidate all of its assets, lay off its entire workforce, and then sell off the remains to another buyer to make money in the process. “One might think that it’s stronger to be a raider. Raiders are violent, they go out there with their might and their guns and their arms, and they take what they want. Raiders are men! And yet, the opposite is actually true.”

“Raiders are children. Children take what they want, without thinking of the consequences.” Right, like when a handful of douchebags exploited a financial weakness in the American economy, and crashed the entire housing market in 2008. Tens of millions of people lost their homes and everything they had, and thousands of people literally died from exposure, malnutrition and disease, brought on by a catastrophic drop in their quality of life due to being suddenly homeless and penniless. What these so-called financial experts never tell the public is that every stock market crash they cause, like in 1929, like in 2008, can literally be measured in thousands of innocent people’s lives.

“Children throw a fit when they have to clean their rooms. Raiders refuse to do manual labor. That’s because children have a hard time making long term decisions, they think of only themselves in the moment, at the moment, now.” You mean like when corporations pay lobbyists to legally bribe Congress to relax federal environmental laws, so that CEOs can make more money in the moment, at the moment, instead of thinking about the long term consequences of environmental damage to the planet?

“They don’t think about themselves when they’re 20 years old, 30 years old, 50 years old, and neither do Raiders. Raiders have the mindset of children, they want what they want, and they want it now.” Wow, you mean like strip mining the planet for money now because you know that a climate apocalypse won’t destroy the ones who are old now because they’ll die first, but it absolutely will destroy the future generations? You mean like those long term consequences? It’s almost like that’s bad or something.

“Because this is a game, your character is the Kingpin, he is the Overboss, but in real life, if this were real how many of us would be the Overboss? Very few; I mean if we ever did adopt Raider culture in real life, we would be the grunts. There are very few people at the top of the pyramid, ladies and gentlemen, the vast majority of us hold up that pyramid, the vast majority of us would be the base. And the people who are not at the top have horrible lives.”

“They’re expendable, they’re disposable. They exist only to make the Overboss richer, happier, more powerful. Conversely, the Minutemen lifestyle raises the standard of living for a much wider group of people.” Oh, like how workers are expendable to capitalists, and how if we got rid of the concept of being wealthy, we could redistribute wealth more evenly to the 99% who need it, and their standard of living would go up collectively?

It’s almost like we could wipe out homelessness, hunger and poverty with a simple wealth redistribution, and then we’d have a classless society with no rich or poor class distinctions, and everyone could have enough to live comfortably. “Now anyone can have a moderately successful life,” Oxhorn says, and I agree. “A Raider (slave wage worker) can’t go out and start a farm, build a house, get married, have a family, raise some crops, raise some personal wealth, no. All of that belongs to the Overboss (capitalist class).”

“Only individual settlers whose freedom is protected by the Minutemen (class consciousness leading to worker ownership, operation, and control of industrial means of production, and guaranteed protection via the Second Amendment) have that option…The Minutemen raise the standard of living for more people in the Commonwealth, while Raiders tear it down. And any other faction that compromises this also does a disservice to the people of the Commonwealth.”

Huh, it’s almost like the workers who are at the bottom of the pyramid need to unite for their own survival, and that all they have to lose is their chains. Weird, that a Libertarian YouTuber just basically figured out why socialism is necessary without realizing that that’s what he did. Almost like uniting together for mutual cooperation and survival is necessary, and that the reason more people don’t know that is because of decades of government suppression, censorship, political brinkmanship and fearmongering. It’s almost like government abuses (which Libertarians are supposed to be really against) are justified when people think they could come out on top, too.

You know, with that whole “those of us at the bottom are expendable and disposable” thing, it’s almost like we need to band together. It’s almost like the United States has spent decades convincing us to act against our best interests, too. It’s almost like if we want to survive, we need to destroy this system that is enslaving us. Huh…weird.