
In 2019, two years before the United States Capitol attack in Washington D.C., the uprising was already playable: In the video blockbuster Tom Clancy's: The Division 2, players are tasked with liberating the halls of US democracy from the True Sons, a civilian militia that bears a striking resemblance to real paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys. These prophetic parallels serve as the starting point for Total Refusal’s research. They are self-proclaimed media guerrillas, a Viennese collective of artists, researchers and film makers who appropriate mainstream formats to transform them into political narratives. In the live gaming lecture performance Sons and True Sons, which was updated for Trump 2.0, the collective re- and de-storms the Capitol and connects the dots between the hyper-militarised gaming world, politically motivated misogyny and the narrative decay of liberal democracy.