One of Us/Political Geeks

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Congressman Jared Polis of Colorado not only fought SOPA / Protect IP, but is an avid League of Legends player who posts on the official forums. (He claims he's partial to Anivia and Maokai, for those who are curious.)
  • Taro Aso, former Prime Minister of Japan, is a fan of Rozen Maiden. Otaku have nicknamed him "Rozen Aso" and claim him as one of their own, and this is referenced in Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei.
    • His opponent and successor at the post, Yukio Hatoyama, reportedly is quite the fan of manga and anime, mentioning I''s as a personal favorite.
    • During Takaaki Mitsuhashi's 2010 campaign for the House of Councillors, he cosplayed as Gendo Ikari.
    • Junichiro Koizumi. Huge Elvis Presley and X Japan fanboy. To the degree of using "Forever Love" as background music for several political campaign ads for the Liberal Democratic Party during the 2001 elections.
    • Considering the Japanese as a whole, it's likely that most positions in the government are filled with otaku of one level or another.
  • American President Barack Obama has demonstrated a deep familiarity with Star Trek, joked at the Alfred E. Smith memorial dinner about being sent by his father Jor-El to save the planet Earth, apparently dressed as a wizard to take his daughters to a midnight release of a Harry Potter book, and according to a possibly apocryphal report on tor.com is familiar enough with Internet memes to make Zero Wing jokes. You just know if he ever gets in a war, something will be called "Operation All Your Base Are Belong To US." He also collects Spider-Man and Conan comics; in fact, he is reputedly a collector of the mylar-bag-and-backboard, never read'em stripe. This has been escalated and expanded on here.
    • Wired has several more examples.
    • Don't forget the Spider-Man Obama crossover thing.
    • It was also pretty well publicized that he and Michelle bought their daughters a Wii for Christmas. Poking fun at his failed attempt at bowling during the campaign, he joked that he was much better at Wii Sports Bowling than real life. Gamers everywhere rejoiced -- well, except those too-"hardcore"-for-Wii gamers.
      • During Obama's visit to Poland at the end of May 2011, Prime Minister Donald Tusk gave him the collector's edition of The Witcher 2 Assassins of Kings as a gift.
    • When he met Leonard Nimoy, he greeted him with the Vulcan hand salute.
    • In a National News Conference about Health Care, Obama argued one of his points by talking about comparing costs for "A red pill and a blue pill."
    • John Hodgman had a whole speech on this.
    • There's also that Newsweek behind-the-scenes special (misquoted at the bottom of the first paragraph) where he was observed by one of their reporters making his wife roll her eyes at a joke about her belt having dilithium crystals on it.
    • And then there's him wielding a frigging LIGHTSABER [dead link] on the White House lawn in a photo-op for the Olympics.
    • And he is now going to show up in a MythBusters episode where they try to make the solar powered death ray work for the third time. The stated goal of the appearance is to encourage science and technology education.
      • Speaking of death rays... Obama named Stephen Chu Secretary of Energy. Chu is known for his strong critic of fossil fuels, for the Nobel Prize he earned for cooling atoms with laser: basically, the US president hired the inventor of the Ice Beam to fight against Global Warming
    • Not to mention Michelle herself; she was the salutatorian of her high school. Although she pales in comparison to Barack's nerdiness, that's still pretty damn nerdy.
  • Speaking of heads of state, Obama isn't the only one -- King Abdullah II of Jordan is an acknowledged fan of Star Trek, and even guest-starred on Star Trek: Voyager in a non-speaking bit role (as he was not a SAG-AFRA member) when he was still a prince. Later, when Michael Bay was going to film Revenge of the Fallen in Jordan, he ordered 38 military helicopters to transport the equipment to Petra, allowing the film crew those overhead shots of the same ruins that appeared in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Turns out His Majesty is a big fan of Transformers and loves the franchise.
    • King Abdullah has recently announced the creation of a Star Trek theme park to be built in his country, which he will be funding.
  • Jens Stoltenberg, the current Prime minister of Norway, is a gamer. He specifically likes games like Age of Empires and Total War because it involves building a society. It also involves killing lots of people. Should the Finns and the Swedes be watching their borders?
  • Although it's probably a stretch to describe her as a geek or a nerd, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is reportedly a big fan of Doctor Who. She's also a Wrench Wench (or at least she was during World War II).
    • About the Doctor Who thing... SHE'S BRITISH! OF COURSE SHE'D BE A FAN!
      • To elaborate from that: Note that Michael Grade was the only BBC controller to have never been knighted. Michael Grade is also the man most people consider to be responsible of the cancellation of the classic series. Take from that what you will.
    • She's also a techie; at an age (born in 1926) where many people have long since stopped keeping pace with new technology, she is an avid BlackBerry user. Let the speculation as to whether she and Obama exchanged private numbers begin!
    • And in the 1970s, she sent what's considered to be the first email in the UK...
      • Note that when Obama first met with her, he considered an iPod to be an appropriate gift for her -- and she already had one.
        • It's not just that: the iPod was her idea, as she had mentioned that hers was a generation or two out of date.
    • She also enjoys playing Wii Bowling.
    • Not to mention that it was her idea to televise her coronation (television then having only one channel that went off the air by the evening and still not as popular as radio), which gained popularity by the coronation.
  • Elizabeth's son and heir Charles is, if anything, an even bigger nerd than his mother. Among other things, he is, as Prince of Wales, the highest ranking noble Monty Python fan.
    • More significant he is also a major fan of The Goon Show to the point of making fan film (and doing a very creditable Bluebottle impersonation).
  • The late former Senator Ted Stevens was known to be a huge comic book nerd and often wore a Hulk tie on the Senate floor.
  • Queen Margrethe II of Denmark is a major The Lord of the Rings fan, and has illustrated several editions of the Danish translation. She also studied archaeology when she went to uni, and remains an avid amateur archaeologist.
  • Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont is a huge Batman fan. In fact, he lent his voice to an episode of Batman: The Animated Series, and had a cameo in both Batman and Robin and The Dark Knight (here it is). He gets props for donating the money he earned from those gigs to the Montpelier public library.
    • To clarify, he requested the cameo spots.
  • Kim Jong Il, according to rumors, loved all kind of genre movies. He even ordered a South Korean director kidnapped to make them. Okay, so he's half "one of us", half "one of the James Bond villains". He actually loves all the Bond films, except (surprise, surprise) Die Another Day.
  • Former Vice President Al Gore is a member of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Information Club.
    • And an avowed fan of Frank Zappa, stating so on the congressional record during the PMRC hearings, and a clip of the statement was used by Zappa himself in an audio collage on the hearings.
      • Oh, and he's also had a couple guest appearances on Futurama. Although how much of that is nerdity and how much is the fact that his daughter is one of the writers is uncertain.
  • Chuck Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa, is a Japonophile who used Gratuitous Japanese to imply that the people responsible for the mortgage crisis should take the honourable samurai way out.
  • Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain is a fan of 24 and appeared in an uncredited split-second cameo as a CTU suit.
    • He's also said on-record that his favorite superhero is Batman.
    • In a speech on the floor of the Senate, McCain used a rather stiff reference to The Lord of the Rings to criticize some fellow Republicans for, as he saw it, playing at being heroes. The kicker was when one that he named, former Senate candidate Sharon Angle, responded in kind and took being called a Hobbit as a badge of honor.
  • Alan Grayson, in reference to Dick Cheney, recently said "On the Internet there's an acronym that's used to apply to situations like this. It's called STFU."
    • He recently sent out a fundraising email based entirely around how the recent Green Lantern film could have been better if it had included an iconic exchange from the Dennis O'Neil/Neal Adams run on the comic.
  • Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is a fan of classical Hard Rock (Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin, among others), which is geeky nowadays... especially in Mother Russia, where even geeks are badass.
  • Radicial Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, best known for being a pain in the ass to the US in Iraq, received the derisive nickname "Mullah Atari" in seminary because he was gaming when he should have been studying.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. was a fan of Star Trek, and even convinced Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols not to quit the show.
    • King, however, was less interested in Star Trek and more in the fact that she was cast in a role that had her as an equal among her crew in a job that wasn't a stereotype.
  • Walter Mondale is a fan of Monty Python.
  • Lee Teng-Hui, the first native Taiwanese to become president of said country and later its first democratically-elected leader, is quite the "Japanophile", along with many men and women of his generation, having graduated with honors from Kyoto University and volunteered for the Japanese Army in 1944. Geekier, he's a known otaku and after his retirement, cosplayed as the hawkish principal (with a similar military background to his own) from Sakigake!! Otokojuku to promote Japanese cinema and the show.
  • Libertarian leaning Republican congressman Ron Paul has compared neo-conservatives to Orcs for their aggressive foreign policy. He has also made references to a Batman comic book where Batman rescues the work of von Mises from the Nazis.
  • Rick Snyder, Republican candidate for governor of Michigan, is a huge fan of Star Wars, MythBusters, Good Eats, and classic rock. Heck, he even calls himself a nerd in his own campaign tagline.
    • With a resume like that, he naturally won the election.
  • Uday and Qusay Hussein were apparently such huge Star Wars fans that they based some of the helmets on Imperial helmets.
    • On the American side, the military regularly makes Star Wars allusions. There are projects codenamed "X-wing" and "Death Star." Many soldiers are Fandalorians, to the point of units getting tattoos that say "vode an".
      • Common in many western militaries. During the late 80s-early 90s, the one show guaranteed to fill a television lounge on a Canadian base? The newest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  • Paul Deprat the Prince of Wy painted the Moe Anthropomorphism representing his "land" in Axis Powers Hetalia.
  • Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper has shown his side for singing and playing the piano. He's also a Trekkie.
    • Note that a fair bit of that public display of artistry was done in response to Mr. Harper's public defamatory statements about Canadian artists during the 2008 campaign. In other words, he's trying his best to look like One of Us.
  • The late Jack Layton, the former leader of the Canadian Official Opposition, as well as his wife and fellow member of parliament Olivia Chow, were both Trekkies. Yes, that is indeed him at a Trekkie convention. In a custom-tailored Starfleet uniform.
  • The First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond, a self-described Star Trek "obsessive," was awarded an honourary membership of the Starfleet fan organisation in 2010.
  • Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, arch-conservative politician, activist, pundit, and Presidential candidate, spends much of his free time reading spy novels and reviewing them on Amazon. A somewhat tame example, but a lot more than you'd expect from a 67-year-old Southerner. And never let it be said that his reviews are half-assed; at one point, he was an Amazon Top 500 Reviewer.
  • Gaius Julius Caesar wrote fan fiction about Hercules (the Superman of his day) in his youth.
  • Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain has quoted Pokémon 2000 in debates and and his announcement of dropping out of the campaign (where he did actually mention it was from Pokémon), and his 9-9-9 plan may have been inspired by SimCity. Whether he's a nerd or just has a nerd in the family he's soaked this stuff in from is uncertain, however, and an interview where he seemed to say that Superman used Kryptonite like Batman used gadgets would make the latter seem more probable.
  • Alfred the Great was a prince from a semi-civilized country where almost every noble was a Jerk Jock by inclination. He studied classical literature, wrote about theology, and sent many a savage plundering Northman to his doom. He was a nerd with a sword.
  • Niccolo Machiavelli, best known for The Prince, used to dress up in a toga and pretend to be a Roman, imagining himself in the Roman Senate and other surprisingly nerdy things for a man with a Magnificent Bastard reputation.
  • David Cameron is a big fan of Spooks.
  • On a darker note, Adolf Hitler was also a huge film buff who enjoyed Disney movies and whose favourite film was King Kong. He allegedly drew fan art of the dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and had a copy of it in his personal collection.
    • He also loved Norse Paganism (though Himmler was the one really obsessed by it) and had a romantic idea of the powers of technology which caused him to support R&D ideas that really couldn't compete with the Allies' Boring but Practical idea of just using More Dakka. If it were not for that little distraction of wanting to be a dictator he might have made a great Speculative Fiction geek.
  • Pope John Paul II was a football fan during his youth, and his enthusiasm for the sport never waned.
  • Pope Benedict XVI is a known classical music fan, with his favourite composer being Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The irony is not lost with Pope Benedict's affinity for Mozart considering the latter's membership into the Freemasonry (Though Mozart saw no conflict between the Masonic order and his religious beliefs). Pope Benedict himself is also an accomplished pianist, having recorded an album of contemporary classical music in which he sings and recites prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
  • Pope Francis is a huge Tolkienite, having incorporated LOTR references into some of his writings (J. R. R. Tolkien himself is a devout Catholic). He is also a HUGE football fan, and is a member of the San Lorenzo de Almagro football club.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/One_of_Us/Political_Geeks?oldid=1981906"