House Always Wins: Imperialism in Fallout New Vegas

So I released a video a little bit ago about sexuality in Fallout New Vegas, and recently Obsidian, the creators of New Vegas, released a new game, that's COMPLETELY PACKED with LGBT representation! Naturally I could see there was only one thing to do! Make another video about Fallout New Vegas! And make it a political analysis of imperialism! Who's hyped?
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
Section 1: Caesar
A quick overview:
You encounter Caesar’s Legion for the first time as part of a quest that stems from a quest that stems from your most basic character motivation at the start of the game. As is very typical in Obsidian’s writing - and just good RPG writing in general, there is a confidence that important story elements will introduce themselves if they have been given enough consequence and genuine importance. Your quest doesn't need to be go find out about the Legion for you to discover them, because their presence means chaos, destruction and death wherever they go so uhhhhh you'll find about them. You kind of can't help but find out about them.
New Vegas has very compelling story options to drive you to the place where you will encounter the Legion, but just in case you decided against it, and exercised your freedom - this is an open world RPG after all - the regions in every other direction from your starting town are full of things that are really upsettingly good at killing you, so odds are that at the very least by trial and error you're going to end up at Nipton. 
But if you took the story options like the brainwashed sheeple yet to open your eyes to the Flat Earth truth that you probably are, it went a bit like this. Benny had you tied up and stole the thing you were delivering, told you “this must seem like an eighteen carat run of bad luck, but the truth is, the game was rigged from the start” and then shot you in the head. Simultaneously the coolest opening scene in video game history and what future historians would come to determine as technically “a dick move”.
When you wake up in Goodsprings, near where you were shot, you get patched up, have a chance to decide your stats and create your Adam Driver, and then you're on your way!
You head along to Primm where the New California Republic - NCR - is in a standoff with escaped convicts, and you can find out from the people in Primm that Benny went to Nipton. Along the way to Nipton you might pop into the Mojave Outpost, where the NCR controls the flow of trade in and out of the region - you know, normal military stuff. A Ranger there will also tell you to go to Nipton because there is smoke rising from the town, and so you hurry along down there to ask the locals if they’ve seen Benny and… the whole town is in flames. The residents have been butchered. Everything is destroyed. This is how you meet Caesar’s Legion. The group of neo-fascist Ancient Rome cosplayers who enslave towns that they conquer and keep women as chattel. Naturally, you are morally obliged at this point to debate them civilly and calmly and defeat them in the marketplace of ideas.
After this point, however, you will be an official outlaw in the eyes of the legion, wanted for unlicensed debating and suspected possession of high-level important ideas. You’ll just be trying to get along with the game and a bunch of guys in leather skirts and moped helmets will run up to you and declare “The Caesar has marked you for death! And the Legion obeys! Ready yourself for [Rigorous Intellectual Debate]” and then you have to take time out of your day to explain how planned economies work and why public infrastructure is necessary in a modern society.
So eventually you make your way up to the Vegas Strip and find Benny, where you can use the Black Widow skill to seduce him if you’re a woman but not the Confirmed Bachelor skill to seduce him if you’re a man which is classic homophobia. Benny will double cross you, but you uncover the plot to seize control of the wasteland, and then eventually exit the casino where you are met with a message from the Legion!
They send Vulpes Inculta, the leader of the Legion squad in Nipton - or someone else, if your debate skills were too powerful for him - to broker peace with you and ask you to come meet Caesar. This gesture restores your reputation with the Legion to neutral, because the developers recognised that there was a good chance you might have made your reputation with the Legion very poor up to this point.
It’s probably important that we understand the reputation mechanic going forward. Reputation is what triggers the roaming gangs of Legion assassins sent to kill you anywhere on the map. It’s basically a system that checks what crimes you’ve committed against a faction versus what good deeds you’ve done for them - like when you come to my house and you eat all my biscuits Lilly you’re on thin fucking ice.
Reputation can affect your ability to be able to take part in quests for a faction, because there are points of no return with reputation - degrees to which you can piss off a faction so much that they will just shoot you on sight - and what you do to cause that degree of vilification is pretty telling as to what values that faction holds.
So, Caesar’s messenger comes to invite you to an audience with the big man, and this restores your reputation to neutral.
You finally meet Caesar, the man himself, and he gives you his sales pitch. Caesar is confident he is the only one who is fit to rule over the wasteland, because the warring factions are like petty children squabbling over nothing, and he can unite them by conquering them. It’s honestly pretty classic Bad Guy™ stuff. Caesar’s a fascist. He believes in fascism. Fascism is his actual for-real-no-pretending ideology.
His followers are so enamoured by him and so dedicated to the myth of his power that some NPCs will tell you he has an army of hypnotised slaves.
All this will lead you to the ultimate conflict of the game - deciding whether you want to back the NCR, the Legion, or Mr. House, the ancient multi-billionaire who saved New Vegas the first time using forcefields and vault technology against the nuclear blasts. House wants you to help him keep outside influence out of the Mojave and let him rule it, guaranteeing he will always have the best answers to every problem the people face because he’s the smartest guy in town.
And so between the NCR, Mr. House, and Caesar, New Vegas sets up an army of moderate status quo defenders, a technocrat with specific fixes to specific problems, and neo-fascist cult of personality built around making America great again...
So there are pretty transparent real-world parallels - okay now, let’s be crystal clear about this. Fallout New Vegas was released years before Trump was president, but at the end of the day the parallels exist whether they were intentional or not - Caesar’s Legion are a bunch of asshole bros cosplaying fascists from the past, wearing Centurion armour together with aviator sunglasses thinking they’re ridiculously cool while everyone else in the world can tell they’re the dorkiest fuckers on the planet earth and who does that remind you of.

We’re going to talk about the real-world parallels, because frankly, I'm here to cry because Christine and Veronica can never be together even though their love is pure and beautiful, and think too hard about the politics of video games, and I'm all done crying… Oh fuck no I'm not.
So let’s talk real-world parallels for a second.


Caesar and Donald Trump don’t have to similar people exactly for this to be an interesting comparison. The way that the legion works is pretty standard for a fascist organisation. Some characters will even tell you explicitly that they think that when Caesar dies the Legion will fall apart, and they’re right. If you kill Caesar, that is the outcome. This is pretty typical, because fascist movements are usually cults of personality.
The majority of empires throughout history have been established in the span of one lifetime, and then handed over to the first emperor's successor and either crumble to nothing within their rule or immediately enter a decline period. Genghis Khan's empire rose and fell in 70 years.
However you'll also hear, repeatedly, that the Legion with Caesar in charge is not the scariest conceivable thing, because When Caesar dies, Legate Lanius will take over. Legate Lanius - Caesar’s second in command - is more brutal, and crueller, and crucially is viewed as an unhinged, unpredictable madman. It’s very important to the social role of Lanius that he wears a mask. Not the character, but the social role.
The second in command in a fascist movement is a social role that does not firmly exist, because fascists are inherently backstabbing manipulative infighting trash, and so at any time it is uncertain who would succeed the leader were they to be defeated or removed. If your worldview is built on a dominance hierarchy, dominance has to be constantly asserted and reasserted at all times to maintain status. This is why fascist leaders throw their followers under the bus non stop, and this is why their successors are always scarier than them. 
Simultaneously, this image of the scarier, unpredictable unhinged second in command works as a bluff, dissuading people from trying to depose the leader for fear of their successor, and also drives the continued evolution of fascist leaders into ever crueller, more corrupt, more repulsive and more disturbing iterations. Every new leader will dwarf the previous one in terms of sheer monstrosity. 
The rise of Donald Trump has made many people look with rose tinted goggles at George Bush, the man who devastated America, put a boot on the necks of LGBT people and ethnic minorities, and killed half a million people in Iraq. But it's all good now guys, he paints dogs! He hung out with Ellen! He gave Michelle Obama a candy! Maybe that candy can rebuild all the houses in New Orleans! Maybe Ellen can do a cool reveal on her show that the dog he painted found WMDs and there was a good reason to kill 500,000 people. I am of course, being glib. There is no good reason to kill 500,000 people. George Bush is a war criminal who should be in prison.
But at least he respected the office, right? Not like Cheeto-in-chief! Trump says bad words, is rude and tweets mean things!
Every new leader of a fascist organisation makes the last one look like a pussycat. 
I can already see the comments coming “so what? You're calling the Republican party itself a fascist organisation!? Is that it?”
Sure sounds like I'm saying that, yeah.

Since we're on comments, I get a lot of arguments trying to tell me that Caesar’s Legion aren't the clear, objective bad guys, and I think that comes down to two things fundamentally. Firstly, that Obsidian are really good at writing moral ambiguity. Where most people just write good guys with shitty views to achieve a moral grey area, Obsidian really shine when writing bad guys who kind of have a point, or know how to make you think they have a point, or who are just simply really cool. 
In The Outer Worlds the main antagonists turn out to be planning to implement a sort of hyperfascist capitalism because of the scarcity of resources in the colony, and this is a pretty persuasive case, because the problem of resource scarcity is a monolith - an immovable object. If there just isn't enough for everyone something has to be done. Of course, if you dig a little deeper, it turns out that
SCARCITY IS MANUFACTURED FOR PROFIT
but the bad guys really knew how to make you think they had a point there, right? 
And likewise with Caesar. He's charismatic and persuasive and he knows what to tell you to make you think he might just be the right man to rule over the Mojave, but at the end of the day he's a fascist, so you just gotta debate him. Just calmly and civilly defeat him in the marketplace of ideas, right in the face, with a plasma rifle.
The other reason I think I get these comments telling me that the Legion aren't the clear bad guys of New Vegas is because they're fucking right. 
Section 2: The NCR
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Okay, let me clarify that one. Caesar’s Legion are clearly bad guys. But they aren't The Bad Guys of the game, because they aren't the only clear villains in the Mojave.
But they are evil… like… evil in a league of their own. Those commenters are very wrong. Let’s talk about it.
The best storytelling in RPGs like New Vegas is in the details that use your natural curiosity to communicate information. New Vegas makes you think, at various points:
“Is this a forest, in the nuclear wasteland?”
“Oh shit an ash pile - someone’s been killed with a laser weapon! There’s a “rebar club” in the ash pile? Who’s strong enough to… there must be mutants here.”
“Woah a big statue of two guys! Very reminiscent of the Kentucky flag. Fuck now I had to think about that shitty flag. Gross. Oh. Ew. I threw up in my mouth a bit”
“Is that… a dinosaur? Yep, that’s a dinosaur.”
Naturally therefore you need to keep your eyes open if you want to really understand what’s going on in the NCR. One of your companions, Boone, an ex-NCR sniper tells you this about the NCR presence in the Mojave desert:
“Coming east was about securing the land so people could live without fear.” and of the Mojave in general “It’s NCR land for the most part. We tamed it, now we’re settling it.”

See I’ve studied some maps very closely, looking at where Fallout locations would be in real life, and you have to look really, really carefully to understand this, but basically, Las Vegas is technically “not in” California. So for the NCR to claim New Vegas and the surrounding areas, it would have to be a sort of expansionist political force. Like… a type of civilisation that conquers surrounding areas and incorporates them into itself… I know there’s a word for this…
See, Caesar’s Legion is evil and bad, because they’re an imperialist force and their moral justification is that for society to return to normal, people can’t be trusted to rule over themselves, and the NCR is good because they’re just kind of trying to get things back to normal. You recognise the society that the NCR is trying to create. It’s regular-degular America. So even if it’s not perfect, it’s good.
Well let’s start at the beginning. Both at the start of the NCR presence in the Mojave, and the start of the United States of America. After all, they start with the same thing - massacre.
The first settlers of the Mojave after the nuclear war were the Great Khans. They had a relatively peaceful existence on the land that the NCR would later come to claim and colonise. Honestly, New Vegas is doing a Native American allegory here I can't say I'm totally comfortable with, especially as it kinda seems like no actual Native American people survived the fallout, and also because the Khans are basically a large gang, not an ethnic group.
Nonetheless I think the revelation that the Khans were violently excised from their homeland has a really interesting effect on the player, and that effect is most likely very little. Just as most people know in real life that America is built on violent colonisation and genocide, this revelation has a pretty small impact, because in both cases it is fed into a foundational myth that cruelty is necessary to create a stable society where people can be safe and enjoy personal freedoms. A huge number of people know about the struggle of indigenous people under colonisation the world over, but if you don't have the chance to do anything about the existing power structures that are built off that brutality, why bother being mad? You can't do anything, right? And the people in charge now aren't literally the same people as the people in charge then, right? And the people in charge now wouldn't treat people with such a basic lack of respect for their humanity, would they? 
There are two things I knew I really really wanted to talk about if I ever did a video about New Vegas again. One of them is the quest White Wash. In the quest, you the player are asked to find out what’s going on with the NCR water supply, because the crops aren't getting enough water and if those boys aren't moist they can't grow right! 
So you go investigate why those boys don't get moist enough and you discover that the NCR officer, Colonel White, who went to investigate before you has been murdered! He found out that a Follower of the Apocalypse - don't worry about those guys they're filthy commies - redirected the water flow so that a poorer area of New Vegas could grow their own crops. See, despite their poverty, the NCR was insisting on depriving them of water and agricultural knowledge and selling them crops instead.
When Colonel White found out, he was going to expose the moisture heist and so the Follower killed him to cover it up.
Exposing the murder and therefore the scheme will result in the poor neighbourhood losing food and water, but doing nothing lets a murderer go free. You could kill him yourself… If you feel comfortable with execution as a punishment, and with being the executioner.
Holy shit! This writing! 
This is why I wanted to talk about this quest as an example of the writing in New Vegas! Even if you know for sure which course of action you'd pick, you can see why someone else would choose something different. It's so good!
And in real life, the city of Flint, Michigan, has been without clean water for 5 years. The situation is, as you might expect 5 years in, a little more complicated than that - slow progress is being made at replacing the systems that are leaking lead into the water supply - but it may be years before it’s a safe place to live. 
Why? Well it isn’t because America can’t deal with a crisis quickly - it’s the richest nation on earth. The population of Flint is 57% black, and the poverty rate there is more than double that of the rest of the state. In a crisis like this, if the government doesn’t act fast enough, the people who can afford to move away will do that, and the city overall will become poorer. And under neoliberal capitalism, that means a government that didn’t really care much to begin with cares less and less all the time.
As far as I can see, the NCR has the same attitude towards poor neighbourhoods. It doesn’t care, and will only care less as time goes on.
All through this game, the NCR are controlling basic resources and either simply sending the lion’s share to themselves or selling them back to ordinary people, who could just have access to them for free.
When you do a quest to fix the solar power plant HELIOS ONE, you have to choose between just giving all the power to the NCR, or giving an equal share to everyone, and at least in my mind this is a pretty fucking easy choice but be careful, because if you chose to share equally then you just did a communism, babey!

Look at these propaganda posters. Pretty standard, “The troops are your friends”, pretty average “the legion is evil”... you bring democracy? Soldiers bring democracy? Okay let’s talk about neoliberalism.
History Lesson Detour!
Setting: the 70s! A man had walked on the moon, the Beatles had just broken up, and people were on so many drugs! And a 61 year old American man called Milton Friedman had taken way too much of the most powerful drug known to man: RADICAL FREE ENTERPRISE.
Friedman, absolutely out of his mind on the sheer concept of the free market had been pushing a new economic theory, counter to the popular keynesian economics of the time. Keynesian economics, if you aren’t familiar, was a theory that said, put really simply: you need to watch the economy really closely like a really dangerous science experiment - like one involving fireworks and children.
What Friedman, deep in his K-hole (K here being the variable in economics representing capital) said, was nah, it’s fine. We shouldn’t watch the babies and the fireworks. The experiment won’t succeed if we make sure the babies play with the fireworks safely. In fact, we should lock the doors and not let anyone in to tamper with the firework babies from now on.
And then in 1973, in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet came to power in a violent coup. At the time, the US was quiet on the coup, and a report in 1973 said there was “no evidence” of support from the US, but academic political scientists and historians have since confirmed the material assistance both in destabilizing the socialist government that came before and helping the military dictatorship that came afterward, despite publicly condemning Pinochet’s human rights violations. Pinochet’s government terrorised, tortured and murdered political opponents, and of course swathes of the public suspected of being political opponents.
This, to severe capitalism addict Milton Friedman, seemed like the absolutely perfect playground to try out his free market bullshit.
In her book on the rise of global neoliberalism, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes:
“Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale shock or crisis in the mid-seventies, when he acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock following Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatized by severe hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy— tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation. Eventually, Chileans even saw their public schools replaced with voucher-funded private ones. It was the most extreme capitalist make-over ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a "Chicago School" 
revolution, since so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago. Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that "facilitate the adjustment." He coined a phrase 
for this painful tactic: economic "shock treatment." In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or "shock therapy," has been the method of choice.”
She also explains that “by 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent.”
So in case you had noticed that there are protests in Chile right now and were wondering what they were about… that’s what they’re about.
https://t.co/HCqaJYQPOT 

But the hegemony of free trade all feels so familiar and even natural that it seems utterly bizarre to talk about a time when these ideas were new, and needed implementing.
But that’s how a hegemony works. Neoliberal policy has to be as familiar to you as the taste of oxygen, or you could critique it on its own merits, rather than simply take it as the default position and debate anything else as a change away from it as the default.
Friedman, and his students, served as advisers on the economic policies of Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela, and inspired this ideological shift to neoliberal economics across the world in asia, europe, australasia, Canada, the US, and here in the UK. The American imperialist project forcefully implemented neoliberalism throughout the middle-east in countries that america sent troops to. Friedman personally advised Thatcher that she should try out some of the things that Pinochet had done in Chile to shock the country into submission, and although she didn’t take it as far as that, she was a proud supporter of Pinochet for many years and called him a “true friend”. True governments for my sham friends, coup governments for my true friends I guess.
In Out of the Wreckage, George Monbiot said “The freedom which neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows. 
“Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that binds society together.”
And I think that’s an important summary to bear in mind when you look at the modern state of politics. The changes of Friedman, Reagan, and Thatcher weren’t just a crazy phase where everybody thought the market could solve every problem that they moved past - neoliberalism became the foundational ideology of all our politics. Which brings us to Barack Obama.
The Flint water crisis started under Obama, the American imperialist military machine continued full-steam ahead under Obama, and even Obama’s most lauded progressive successes, such as the Affordable Care Act are moderate, compromised neoliberal policies.
There are two things you might say here, of course - firstly that Obama was a sitting duck through most of his time in office, unable to do anything because of the Republican government around him, and secondly that he had to pass policies that were acceptable to the existing framework. The thing is, Obama is pushing back against Bernie Sanders, and Medicare for All right now, and he wouldn’t be doing that if he didn’t basically believe in the centrist neoliberalism that he enforced.
And then there’s the drones.
Obama oversaw a massive expansion of drone-strikes. His administration did so many drone strikes that children in Pakistan are afraid of clear blue skies, because that’s when the drones can see them. That has to easily be one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard - children afraid of blue skies. And then Obama joked about his drones at the correspondents dinner. Haha! What a classy guy! Having a normal one, there, as ever, America.
The Shock Doctrine really is an excellent resource if you want to understand neoliberalism inside and out. In it, at one point Naomi Klein tells a story about being in New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina, and after visiting packed crowded medical centers and emergency relief clinics, she was in a car accident. The paramedics, who had been trained to evaluate people on appearance to guess what kind of health insurance they had, took her and the rest of her party to a private hospital that was quiet, and uncrowded, and where staff outnumbered patients. People were waiting hours for treatment at the emergency centers, and here this private hospital had quietly closed its doors to the disaster.
Quoting a New Orleans lawyer in the book, she says:
"What is happening in New Orleans is just a more concentrated, more graphic version of what is going on all over our country. Every city in our country has some serious similarities to New Orleans. Every city has some abandoned neighborhoods. Every city in our country has abandoned some public education, public housing, public healthcare, and criminal justice. Those who do not support 
public education, healthcare, and housing will continue to turn all of our country into the Lower Ninth Ward unless we stop them."
Okay, history lesson over. Neoliberalism sucks and everyone who upholds it is a ghoul. Okay hang on no… in Fallout ghouls are kind of an underclass of people, because they were deformed and driven mad by radiation sickness. I’m gonna need a new insult. Um…
The people upholding neoliberalism are Centaurs.

Shit no the name still sounds cool.
People upholding neoliberalism are Spore Carriers! They live in a hole in the ground and their brains are full of fungus!

These parallels are interesting even if we don’t see this as trying to convey any kind of message. According to facebook data on what political leanings different gaming fandoms have, open world moral choice RPGs like Fallout are generally beloved by centrists, the game contains the Legion in case you’re a fascist and want to kid yourself you have good opinions, and the basic concept of the wasteland itself fundamentally plays right into the hands of the most powerful brain-genius faction of modern politics: libertarians.
My point is, there is room for aggressive readings whatever your politics are, but these parallels can really help us decipher the political machinations of the different factions in the game.
Viewing the NCR as an imperialist neoliberal project really helps to understand it, and viewing it as representative of the kind of politics that says voting Joe Biden in will just “put everything back to normal” works even better when compared against the Legion.
It is absolutely crucial, and deliberate, that you can become so hated that people shoot you on sight in nominally civilian areas like the Crimson Caravan, just by not working with the NCR. While Caesar’s Legion were more or less fairly hostile, an NCR rep will show up to put you on notice when you progress far enough through the plot, if you haven’t been explicitly helping to further their goals.
The point is, the status quo is actually pretty fucking bad, and so the people defending the status quo are pretty bad too.
Noam Chomsky once said: “In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.”
And that rings in my mind when I look at the NCR and the Legion, and for that matter Mr. House too. They may have different outlooks and approaches, and maybe even one is catastrophically worse than the other, but they’re all playing the same game.
Wall Street bankers call economically thriving markets “bull markets” and economically weak or unsteady markets “bear markets”. There’s not a great philosophy to explain behind this - bankers are macho pricks and they want everything they talk about to sound cool to 12 year old boys - but it seems like a funny coincidence that the symbol of the NCR is the bear and the symbol of the Legion is the bull, and the Legion come in from the east and the NCR from the west, like right and left wings of - you know what fuck it fine I’ve already committed to the Horizon Zero Dawn triangle conspiracy this is my hill to die on Fallout New Vegas is a contrived communist dogwhistle you cannot change my mind.
Section 3: The Bull and The Bear
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Okay, earlier I said there were two things I really really wanted to talk about if I ever did another New Vegas video, so here’s the second one. I played New Vegas probably three whole times through before I discovered all the side quests and extra details, and one of those side quests involves taking a dog to the vet this story is going somewhere I promise. 
You see the dog is a cyborg, so needs a specialist vet to treat him, and so you have to find the only one in the Mojave, who lives up in the mountains. As you follow the mountain trail up into the west, you see trees. Loads of trees. A whole forest! And this is striking against the bleak plantless wasteland of the rest of the game. So striking I felt a bit shaken, actually. Maybe if there can be a forest in the wasteland, there’s hope after all.
And as you continue into the forest, you reach Jacobstown. Jacobstown is a safe-haven for mutants and nightkin following Marcus, a character from previous games.F 
It’s not exactly like I think Jacobstown was conceived as the developers’ model society or ideal vision of civilisation, but these are characters that the developers clearly care a lot about, and want good things for. To some degree, they’ve got a soft spot for Marcus, and I love that, and I think you can see because of that, that the way folks do things in Jacobstown is meant to be pretty great.
The original settlement, Broken Hills, was created when Marcus and a Knight from the Brotherhood of Steel fought until they were at a total impasse, and eventually sat down and decided to talk. That was Jacob. It became a place where humans and mutants and ghouls could all live together peacefully. You can see the legacy of that in Jacobstown, where the nightkin are treated for their sickness instead of being persecuted.
In Jacobstown, the sick, the downtrodden, the outcast, the homeless all find refuge and community.
Apocalyptic fiction is always used to talk about real problems our society faces, just amped up. Racism on steroids, governmental corruption on steroids, neo-fascism on steroids. Well, in Fallout they’re living after the end of the world. They are staring the apocalypse right in the face and trying to just barely survive. In real life, we are staring the apocalypse right in the face too. Climate change is a looming threat that could easily be the undoing of all of us.
I have the ability to ban users from my channel without them even realising it’s happened, and I do not tolerate climate skepticism.
So to some degree we can see the responses that different factions have to the wasteland as a little like different reactions within our society to climate change. In recent years, eco-fascism has been a rising problem, with white supremacists who do believe in climate change blaming it all on the poorer countries and suggesting ethnic cleansing as the solution or saying there is no solution but we should all just go into prepper mode and defend our borders against climate refugees. Can you think of a sadder reaction to catastrophe? Rather than banding together to tackle it, focusing even harder on something as illusory as race? Or for that matter if there were nothing we could do, do you really want to spend your final years playing make-believe border cop? It’s the end of the world and you aren’t going to stage one single prison break-out at the zoo? 

In On Fire, Naomi Klein puts it straight-forwardly:
“We need something we’ve never tried, and to pull it off we will have to recapture the sense of possibility and the can-do spirit that have been sorely missing since Ronald Reagan anounced that ‘the 9 most dangerous words in the english language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.”
The liberal approach to the climate crisis is simply not going to be enough. Kicking out the fascists and putting things “back to normal” isn’t going to be enough. We need to be more radical. And I think on an instinctual level most people know that.
If you have an uneasy feeling about giving power to the NCR - If you get to the end, and beat Lanius, and then the General comes through and asks you to hand the Mojave to him, and you just don’t… quite think it’s the right thing to do, but you can’t say why: that’s why.
When you have no power to change the state of things, these status quo defenders seem… fine. Acceptable. Sustainable. Meh.
But if you have the option to throw the NCR General off the Hoover Dam and kick these Spore Carriers out of the Mojave forever, you want to take it.
Bringing back the NCR, bringing back the old way is not the clear win it might be made out to be. 
You might think that in playing your game, of trying to keep everything the same as it was before, the sudden appearance of fascists is alarming, surprising and totally unpredicted.
The truth is, the game was rigged from the start.