Hat Trick

It seems like a fairly straightforward idea. Wear a hat that says "Make FPS Great Again." FPS, in this context stands for First Person Shooters, the genre of video game pioneered by Wolfenstein 3D back in the day, and is still going fairly strong today, with titles like Halo and Destiny (both created by Bungie) being big players in the space.

I would say that it created controversy, but I'm not sure that such would an accurate way to put it. But there were complaints, which I happened to come across on LinkedIn:

While I've always understood why people who don't identify with the American Left consider it a censorious bunch, this seemed to typify the trend for me.

I don't see anything particularly Trumpist about the hat. A lot of people have used the Make [blank] Great Again formulation for things, like the book Make Healthcare Great Again or the documentary Make Democracy Great Again. And there have been open parodies of President Trump and his supporters using variations on the formulation, such as when Neil DeGrasse Tyson was shown with a series of red hats, one of which read "Make America Smart Again."

From where I sit, the problem with Ian Proulx and his hat is that no-one really knew who he was, outside of the fact that he was a White guy ran a video game studio, and that gap made his politics uncertain. And in that uncertainty grew fear that perhaps his goal was to express support for President Trump to the largest audience for video games in the United States: young White men. It's "if you're not obviously with us, you might be against us." And that sort of binary isn't really useful. Allowing only people whose politics are clearly known to parody, or otherwise play on, political slogans doesn't do anything useful. Mainly because it buys into the idea that unknown qualities are best thought of as threats. And we have enough of that already.