Vampire Congressman! Coming Soon to Showtime!

Republican Jake Rush stands for
typical conservative causes like reducing government spending,
securing the borders, maintaining a strong foreign policy, opposing
abortion, and supporting gun rights. He’s offering up a primary
challenge to Republican Ted Yoho in Florida’s 3rd District. Though
Rush’s site and
campaign advertisement don’t say exactly why he has a problem
with Yoho’s performance, Yoho is part of the libertarian-leaning
Republicans endorsed by Ron Paul prior to his upset victory in
2012. He has
joined up with other recognizable libertarian-leaning
Republican representatives like Justin Amash (Mich.) and Thomas
Massie (Ky.) to oppose military action in Syria and Egypt. Rush’s
site warns against American “isolationism” and calls for a
“proactive foreign policy.”

Rush also says on his site, “We should be focused like a rifle,
not on sideshow issues,” so of course it turns out Rush plays
role-playing game where he pretends to be a vampire and of course
that all comes out now. Jake Rush has an alter ego named Chazz
Darling, and he’s a member of the Mind’s Eye Society, a group
that hosts Live Action Role-Playing (LARP—one of the most fun
acronyms to say in the world) sessions based on the modern fantasy
gothic settings of role-playing game company White Wolf. Popular
around the time novelist Anne Rice was popular in the 1990s—and for
similar reasons—White Wolf published role-playing game guidelines
for bringing horror characters like vampires, werewolves, and
ghosts into modern settings. (Full disclosure: I did back in the
‘90s play Vampire: The Masquerade for about a year, but
did not engage in any LARPing.)

Rush’s hobby was revealed on
SaintPetersBlog, where his behavior is described as a “bizarre
double life” and Peter Schorsch’s reporting of Rush’s gaming reads
like the role-playing gaming panics of the 1980s, where misguided
adults thought teens were actually trying to cast magic spells from
Dungeons and Dragons in the basements and dens of their
family’s suburban homes. Here’s a sample of Schorsch describing
Rush’s role-playing:

Chazz Darling appears to be one of Rush’s favorite personas. As
Darling, Rush published regularly in both the Camarilla Wiki
Project, a wide range of message boards and sites connected with
White Wolf Publishing, the company which created the first Vampire:
The Masquerade role-playing game in 1991.

Rush is certainly living a double life, one that would rival
Jekyll and Hyde—except it is all too real.  

As a Gainesville native with a degree from the University of
Florida and a 2007 graduate of Stetson Law School, Rush—at the same
period as his life in Camarilla—served in the Florida Bar as the
Young Lawyer’s Division Board of Governors representative for the
Eighth Judicial Circuit.

It is not “all too real.” It is a game. In retrospect, it’s
funny how panics about role-playing gamers turned out to be a lot
of projection. It turned out that the people who attack gamers are
often the ones who were often unable to determine the difference
between reality and fantasy. Kids playing Dungeons and
Dragons probably never thought the spells were real (if only!)
but certainly religious objectors to the game did and thought they
were tools of Satan.

Rush’s hobby got picked up and reported by a
number of
sites. Rush subsequently sent out a statement
defending his activities, describing and owning his background
in gaming and theater:

As a practicing Christian, I am deeply offended that the
opposing campaign and their supporters would take a gaming and
theatre hobby and mischaracterize it. The very definition of acting
is expressing ideas and thoughts that are not your own, just like I
don’t believe I am MacBeth, which I have played, I am none of the
characters….

Bottom line—There is nothing wrong with being a gamer. It’s
kinda nerdy, but North Central Florida deserves a legitimate debate
on the issues instead of Ted Yoho’s usual sideshow
distractions.

He also included a totally awesome picture of himself dressed up
as The Flash from D.C. Comics and his wife as Phoenix from Marvel’s
X-Men.

Libertarians may disagree with
Rush’s foreign policy views, but good for him for not being
embarrassed by a hobby enjoyed (though perhaps not as intensely) by
millions of Americans. This allegedly strange, mysterious game Rush
participates in had enough of a following to inspire a television
series back in 1996 called Kindred: The Embraced,
though it didn’t have quite enough of a following to last even a
whole season. Given the current popularity of Twilight,
True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries, it’s really
silly for the media to be playing dumb about all this.

In the event Rush actually makes it to Congress, he won’t be the
only gamer there. Our upcoming June issue of Reason
focuses on the “Rise of the Gamer.” Though the issue is focused
mostly on video games, certainly the connection between table-top
gaming and video gaming is strong (there have also been video games
based on this same vampire setting). We have an interview with
libertarian-leaning Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), who talks about his
background as a gamer, and how he ultimately used it to help fight
against some bad copyright enforcement legislation. It doesn’t
appear that Rush and Polis will see eye-to-eye on many issues (if
any), but maybe they’d be able to hammer things out with a few dice
rolls or a game of Civilization.

Given the connection between Gen Xers (at 35, Rush is at the
younger end of the generation) and games, we are likely to see more
guys like Rush and Polis in the halls of political power. Rush may
or may not have a chance against Yoho, but someday—maybe
soon—Americans will be voting an imaginary vampire into federal
office. This is assuming they haven’t already.