SPOILER - Is BPRE a Libertarian PsyOp?

As mentioned on the Discord, I'd like the opinion of Mech-level backers on this analysis of Echelon Software and the background and associations of its main creative mind, Jon Chang, the priniciple driver behind Black Powder Red Earth.

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I’ve got into this habit of giving my videos titles that are questions that I try to answer, because it helps to focus my attention when I’m writing and also serves the all-powerful algorithm. And yes, I do regret the alarmist, click-baity title on my video about Corvus Belli but, at the same time, everyone who thinks a small European manufacturing business reliant on a single product and a notoriously fickle customer audience doesn’t need saving is still wrong.

However, I want to double down a bit and say that I thought very, very carefully about the title of this episode. A contact alerted me to a rumour circulating that Black Powder Red Earth, which I’m going to call BPRE for my sanity, was promoting a fascist agenda and I want to get down, really clearly, that I have found no evidence to support that belief.

I have, however, found… stuff that I thought was interesting enough to make a video about it.

Before we kick off with the usual deep dive into BPRE and its publisher, Echelon Software, I should probably deal with the elephant in the room that, for once, isn’t Games Workshop, but, rather, the fact that I have an agenda of my own that is reflected not only in my show but also in my games.

I am what the US political spectrum would label a “liberal”. I am, in fact, a member of the UK’s Green Party and also volunteer for the Liberal Democrats who are traditionally the UK’s third party although at time of recording they might be about to become the new opposition party. I don’t agree with everything either of those parties stands for. For example, I’m actually quite conservative with a small “c” in the area of national defence; on balance I am just about still in favour of a nuclear deterrent and I certainly think the systematic evisceration of our Armed Forces over the last twenty-five years is deeply, deeply foolish.

All of this serves to explain why my games are published with what is hopefully an explicitly satirical setting that lampoons the values of English exceptionalism found in the UK’s far right parties. In this day and age, it’s surprisingly hard to do satire without some idiot taking it seriously. But the presence in my books’ cover art and in the fiction of non-white, non-male and queer characters is very much intentional. I believe that representation matters and that’s going to bleed into my work.

So if I come to you with evidence that BPRE’s principle author has a libertarian agenda, I’m very much aware that if they are a political pot, then I’m a political kettle.

Now, let’s get digging.

BPRE is published by a company called Echelon Software, which was founded in 2006 by Jon Chang, Altay Murat and Phil Smith.

Although Echelon was clearly always intended to be a game development enterprise, it doesn’t look like they actually did much for the first five years or so. Immediately before starting as the Chief Creative Officer for Echelon, Jon Chang was Creative Director for a business called Paltalk which apparently still exists and has the marvellous portfolio of products, Paltalk, Camfrog, Tinychat and Vumber which, seriously, if I didn’t know were real things, I would’ve assumed were made up for a comedy bit. But I’m going to take a wild guess that Jon had some kind of pay-out from that business. I wondered if it was an IPO and he had equity, but Paltalk didn’t got to IPO until 2021. But it doesn’t look like Jon did anything else between 2007 and 2011, so I have to assume that he had some decent reserves to not only sustain himself but also get Echelon up and running when it had no obvious source of income and, as we’ll see, Echelon isn’t Jon’s only entrepreneurial pursuit.

Jon seems to have known Phil Smith from working together on an independent animation pitch called Scratch Trigger Era in 2004; and Altay is a software guy. But I need to be clear that this story isn’t about Phil and Altay. Jon Chang is to BPRE as Matt Wilson was to Warmachine. This is his brainchild.

In 2011, despite their name, Echelon Software published their first real product in the form of Black Powder Red Earth. But not the game. Not yet. This was a comic book. Which, given Jon and Phil’s shared history, is probably not super surprising. And it needs to be made clear from the outset that, whilst my personal and professional interest is in miniatures wargames, BPRE is and has always been a property.

I approve of this, in general. Developing an intellectual property and exploiting it as widely as you can is a pretty good strategy and, if I had more energy and more spare money, I would probably like to do Horizon Wars comics and digital games and novels and key chains and onesies and Happy Meals. OK, maybe not Happy Meals. But I’m not going to throw any shade on Jon for his comic book. I love comic books, unironically, and feel no compulsion to call them graphic novels. But the key takeaway, at this point, is that Echelon Software, at this stage, isn’t developing either software or games but comic books and an intellectual property.

And we need to give some context to explain what that property actually is, because this will become relevant.

BPRE basically imagines a realistically dystopian future or, possibly, alternate present as the story that was originally begun in 2011 was set in 2019. In this future, the Middle East and Africa are almost entirely composed of failed states in which warlords fight for access to resources, leading governments propped up by Private Military Contractors conducting a proxy war between the US and Russia.

It’s pessimistic. And I say that as someone who imagined Britain accidentally starting a global nuclear catastrophe after invading France as a TikTok stunt.

BPRE’s pessimism, though, is firmly grounded in the real-life experiences of members of the US military and its healthy private military contracting sector.

The style of the comic books was dark, gritty and realistic. There were initial complaints that the plot was slow and the character arcs limited but I’m going to again be fair to Jon on this. He set out to write a narrative informed by real-life experiences and I can tell you from personal experience that life in the Armed Forces, when deployed, is extremely dull right up until the point that it isn’t. So the slow pace is, I suspect, very much intentional.

But Jon Chang, it needs to be said, has never been a member of any Armed Forces. He has not worn his country’s uniform. He has not served beneath its flag. So where is he getting all of his real-life experience from to inform the content of his comics?

In 2011, the same year that BPRE was published, Jon co-founded another new business: Haley Strategic. He did this in partnership with a guy called Travis Haley.

Travis spent seven years in the US Marines, including time in Force Recon, before moving into private military contracting, so it’s fair to say that he knows his stuff. For my British audience, the US Marines Force Recon is their closest equivalent to the Royal Marines Commando over here. So it’s not, like, special special operations. It’s not Delta Force or Seal Team Six. But it’s the real deal.

Travis has pivoted his military and private contracting experience in several interesting directions, including selling off one enterprise to Magpul, who are a moderately serious name in the small-arms industry in the US. How Jon and Travis ended up working together, I’m not sure. But at a wild guess the origin might well be that Jon sought out Travis to be the military consultant for BPRE, before they decided to go into business together in Haley Strategic.

Haley Strategic makes tactical gear. If you imagine the food chain of military hardware, we might put someone like Lockheed Martin at the top, making the F-35, with BAE somewhere under that, building the Challenger in partnership with Rheinmetall. Heckler & Koch, as predominantly small arms manufacturers would be in the next tier, with the aforementioned Magpul beneath them. Haley Strategic, in this picture, are the bottom feeders. They don’t make weapons. They make weapon accessories. They make chest rigs and magazines and pouches and backpacks and suchlike.

Now, I want to walk back that “bottom feeders” joke a bit, because that’s not fair. When I served, companies like Haley Strategic were absolute gold. As a soldier, you don’t get much say over what weapon you carry or what rounds you put in it. That’s dictated to you. But you get a lot more leeway over what boots you wear, how you organise your carry equipment and what things you carry to make life safer, easier and more comfortable. The work of businesses like Haley Strategic saves lives and I don’t want to diminish that.

But…

As large as the US Armed Forces are, they are a poor market to exploit on their own, which is why Haley Strategic’s biggest market isn’t the military, but what we might call “military enthusiasts”: airsofters, survivalists and America’s most politically awkward category of geek - gun nuts.

If you’ve not entirely lost the thread of this story, you might be asking yourself what Jon Chang’s role was in all this? What could a comic books and gaming nerd possibly bring to the table for an all-American like Travis Haley? And the answer seems mainly to have been promotion. It seems to have been Jon Chang’s job, from 2011 to 2015, to turn Travis Haley from a human being into a brand. Through a series of videos, marketed under the title of “American Gunfighter”, Jon made Travis and his combat experience the primary marketing tool for Haley Strategic.

And this is why Travis Haley’s position on the 2nd Amendment is our first troubling sign that all may not be entirely sane in the vicinity of BPRE.

I am conscious that I am, of course, British. I do not comment on the politics of other countries lightly and I’m sure it will be of little surprise to anyone that I’m not a huge fan of US gun culture. However, I do genuinely consider the US Constitution to be one of the single most important documents ever written: a pinnacle of Enlightenment achievement. The victory of the American colonists in the War of Independence was, on balance, a far better thing for the world than the alternatives. I even think that the Second Amendment, in itself, is not an entirely bad idea.

My issue with Travis Haley isn’t that he is a 2nd Amendment absolutist. It’s that his reasoning, which he lays out in a 2013 YouTube video, is rhetorically powerful but riddled with logical fallacies, which means one of two things: either Travis Haley is actually quite stupid, in which case his opinions carry far less weight, or he is actively seeking to manipulate the credulous, in which case his involvement with Echelon Software and BPRE should be considered very concerning.

But this video isn’t about Travis and I don’t plan to do a point-by-point reaction. By way of homework for those of you who are interested, though, listen to his hypothetical scenario about receiving a note telling you that your family is about to be viciously attacked and ask yourself whether he really explores the many, many alternative interpretations of that scenario in good faith or if he just instantly leaps to murder with an enthusiasm that isn’t just a teeny-tiny bit… chilling.

No, our real concern with this is that Travis clearly seems to be a major influence on Jon Chang’s perspective. Jon is a geek. He’s like you and me. He’s into comics and animation and art and video games and toy soldiers. But if you dig into Echelon’s website, you quickly find that comics, video games and toy soldiers isn’t all that Echelon sells. You see it has another close business association with something called Bravo Company Manufacturing, and BCM sells firearms.

Specifically, BCM sells modified AR-15 rifles, using its proprietary range of accessories for this most popular of gun-nut fetishes. As you’re probably aware, the AR-15 and its variants is not only the most popular long-arm firearm among US gun owners but also the weapon most associated with mass shootings, making it an important symbol to both 2A absolutists and to abolitionists and it is clear that neither Echelon nor Jon Chang are anywhere close to the abolitionist side.

Before you slap me with the big “so what?” - and I know some of you will - let me first cover off a few other points to keep in mind. The first two are about Jon Chang and his business interests, because Jon has also worked with a company called Northern Red, who provide firearms training to military, law enforcement and civilian firearms users, which is a pretty benign fact until you realise that Northern Red uses as its logo a symbol associated with the neo-Nazi movement and been specifically called out by campaigner and former white supremacist, Chuck Leek, over the company’s troubling associations with law enforcement and military personnel.

And one more thing: Echelon is not Jon’s only commercial enterprise. He has also launched a clothing brand. And, you know, it’s nice stuff. It’s well made, responsibly sourced clothing that honestly looks like the kind of thing I would wear, except…

Well, first the brand is called The Dread and Fear of Kings which is so cringingly edgelord-y that I can’t bear it and that’s coming from someone who called his business “Precinct Omega”!

Second, the brand’s logo is a stylised Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, which is internationally recognised as the symbol of the Royal Marines Commando. As the son of a Royal Marine, I feel offended by association. Again, it’s edgelord-y but it’s also appropriating imagery associated with an honourable military record for commercial exploitation, which rubs me the wrong way.

But the biggest red flag waving around this enterprise is the mission statement, in which Jon states:

“The Dread and Fear of Kings is both a nod to the line from Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice–and a standard we hold ourselves to. The true Dread and Fear of Kings is not the power politicians wield against the population, but rather a capable and thinking population that is not easily misled by opportunists.”

So let’s just first acknowledge that this is basically a fancy way of saying “do your own research”, which is the rallying cry of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. Then let’s facepalm the illiterate understanding of Shakespeare which literally refers to the dread and fear of kings as being, in the same line, “the force of temporal power”, in a speech by Portia that literally praises the act of mercy and not taking a life as being an even greater power.

And finally, let’s also recognise the deep, deep irony of a company exploiting unearned valour and misquoting Shakespeare in praise of a “thinking population not easily misled by opportunists”.

But so what?

Yes, we’ve got there at last. So what if Jon Chang has been drawn into being a libertarian Second Amendment absolutist through the influence of a charismatic veteran with a strong line in logical fallacies? What if all you want is to play a fun, fast, tactical skirmish game with cool minis? Why should you give a monkey’s about the author’s skin-deep politics when all you want to do is roll some dice?

Well, the good news is that BPRE is a pretty good game. It’s competing with things like Spectre Operations from the UK and InCountry from Enemy Spotted Studios and, mechanically speaking, I would say that it’s probably the superior choice among those in terms of striking a balance between immersive crunch and swift, decisive gameplay. InCountry is a little faster, but sacrifices that on the altar of simpler rules. Spectre is better for technical detail, but loses something in the speed of execution.

I am not here to tell you that BPRE is a bad game.

But I am here to point out some things you should probably, at the very least, be conscious of before you play it.

First, it is not as accurate or as realistic in its depiction of Private Military Contractors as you might expect. Real-life special forces types look like… well, they look a lot like Travis Haley. They tend not to be buff, square-jawed iron-pumpers. They tend much more towards the slender or even the skinny, because that’s the kind of physique favoured by their training and equipment. If you think it’s hard to find a shirt to fit when you’re benching 200 pounds, try finding a plate carrier!

Furthermore, US law puts pretty strict limitations on what PMCs are allowed to do while under contract to foreign agents. And I’m not going to pretend that Blackwater and their ilk always abide scrupulously by US law when overseas, and I do recognise that BPRE is set in a parallel reality. But that’s important to keep in mind.

On a related note, people who wear masks when going into a combat situation do it because they don’t want their faces recorded by any inconvenient camera devices. And people who don’t want to be recorded doing things in combat are people who are going to do things they aren’t supposed to do. Like, y’know… war crimes.

Oh, sure, sci-fi games that I love, like Infinity and BLKOUT also use minis with full face helmets and, yes, I think that’s also a bad call. But sci-fi - especially less grounded sci-fi - gets a lot of leeway on this stuff. If you are going to tell us that your game is explicitly based on accounts by real special forces veterans and grounded in the tactics articulated in the Infantry Combat Manual of the US Army, then you’d better believe that I’m going to hold you to a higher standard.

The point being that, if you are playing BPRE, you should be conscious of the fact that - a bit like playing 40k - regardless of your faction, you are not playing the good guys. And whilst 40k mostly gets a pass because it’s the grim darkness of the far future, BPRE is the grim darkness of, like, now. Those are bad people, doing bad things.

Also, the BPRE setting is also quite racist.

Ooh, that’s a tricky word to use on the Internet, I know. And I don’t throw it out there lightly. But BPRE is pretty much exclusively set in Africa and the Middle East on a premise that those regions are inherently unstable and fundamentally destined to be failed states that will rely on the military expertise of Americans, Russians and the Chinese to get anything practical done at all. Now, wargaming ultramodern conflict is never straightforward when one wants to stay grounded. I chose to make Britain the villain in the Horizon Wars narrative not only because it was funny, but because it was a conscious break from what I felt was a stereotypical and overused trope of conflict in the Middle East. As someone who has studied, lived and served in the Middle East and North Africa, I can assure you that there are very few things fundamentally wrong in those states that cannot basically be causally linked to interference by more powerful states - mostly, but not exclusively, Britain and America.

But BPRE embraces the perceived inability of African and Middle Eastern nations to create functional states. Their default OPFOR is Hongbin, a generic Russian/Chinese mercenary force that supplements their elite troops with Aayari Shurta - local cannon fodder wearing a headdress vaguely resembling a shemagh to, again, cover their faces but in a way that is consciously and deliberately primitive compared to the foreign mercenaries. Bear in mind that the governments of African and Middle Eastern states routinely equip their forces with the same tactical equipment as US and other states, and have their own professional soldiers who are at least as well trained and considerably more experienced than most US soldiers - particularly in the specifics of their home turf. So the depiction of the Aayari is an especially lazy and racist stereotype.

Sometimes, I think this stuff is just a naive mistake. Although I still think that AK Interactive’s glossy coffee table book on how to reproduce dioramas of 20th Century atrocities was horrific and their failure to withdraw it or apologise or make any kind of gesture is extremely cowardly, I do more or less think that it was just stupid and naive rather than being motivated by a desire to actually celebrate genocide.

And I certainly don’t want to suggest that BPRE or Echelon Software is fascist.

I’m just putting it out there that, like me, Jon Chang has a political agenda and, like me, he lets his agenda leak into his game design and narrative. And you should be aware of that before you give him - or me - your money.