We can pack an article’s worth of information in merely an image
and then make it funny.
When you make it funny, their guard goes down
and all of a sudden, you’re influencing
hundreds of thousands of people,
if not millions.
Internet memes are among the most powerful, recognizable,
and influential images of our era.
Simple,
easily absorbed,
momentarily funny,
anyone using social media,
and that’s around 4 billion people,
will probably be familiar with images like this,
this,
and this.
As the internet has become central to the way we communicate,
political parties and groups of all stripes
have jumped on the meme bandwagon.
But there's a dark side.
Over the past few years,
memes have become one of the primary vehicles
by which the global far right has spread its ideas
and recruited new followers.
Who’s your little frog?
It’s Pepe. He’s become kind of a symbol.
How did this happen?
How did a bunch of goofy online images
become some of the key tools of global fascism?
How did an innocent drawing of a frog infiltrate world politics?
[Decade of Hate]
My name’s Tim Hume,
and I cover the far right for VICE World News.
The propaganda barrage.
To confuse,
to make them lose faith,
to divide and conquer.
Extremist political ideologies
have always invested heavily in propaganda,
from racist American films like
which glorified the Ku Klux Klan in 1915,
to the rise of Italian fascism,
and particularly in Hitler’s Germany.
Far-right ideologues have dedicated huge resources to producing posters,
magazines and billboards
to occupy public space and the public imagination.
They had a complete army,
20,000 men devoted to propaganda.
Because the Nazis were so good at creating their imagery of themselves,
history sees them through the prism of their own self-definition.
The most famous trials were those held in Nuremberg.
Twenty-one were found guilty, and ten were executed.
After World War II and the Holocaust,
it became somewhat less socially acceptable to be a raging racist.
It made things like fascism and specifically eugenics,
which had previously been thought of as quite trendy theories,
it made them really repulsive to lots and lots of people.
The rise of the internet, however, offered a new medium
that allowed users to cloak their racist ideas
in a heavily coded veneer of irony,
the meme.
I’m a proud ethnic Kekistani.
For centuries, my people have bled under normy oppression.
It is time to strike back.
I hereby declare a meme jihad on all normies.
The main difference between 1930s Nazi propaganda
and what internet message boards like 8chan and Reddit produce
is that online memes tend to work
by appropriating random and benign images from popular culture,
then repeating them over and over
until they take on the feeling of an inside joke.
Posters get the buzz of feeling controversial and transgressive
combined with the thrill of feeling part of an exclusive
and clever in-group.
And if anyone does get really upset,
they can always claim it was all just a big, ironic joke.
Irony is huge on the far right
because it gives far-right groups this air of plausible deniability
when the press or law enforcement come calling.
They can always say it was a joke.
And so what they do
is they produce these memes dripping with irony and sarcasm,
and you really don’t know what to believe.
So you’ll have Hitler serving McDonald’s at a drive-thru.
You will have a picture of Auschwitz
with the words not “Arbeit Macht Frei”
but actually with “The Left Can’t Meme.”
Or you’ll have pictures of German soldiers in World War II
and it would say “Celebrating Diversity.”
All the soldiers in the picture would be non-white.
Quite a lot of the time, far-right movements will use memes
to code and cloak more insidious ideologies and terminology
under the guise of humor.
And so it allows people to share and comment on this imagery
and say that they might not have known it had this insidious meaning
or say that it was just a joke,
completely dismissing the underlying motivations of the image.
Obviously, the other great revolution of the internet
is that to create this sort of racist content,
you don’t need a propaganda army of 20,000 photographers and journalists.
This stuff can be churned out by one kid in their bedroom,
then quickly spread around the world by suburban boomers on Facebook
who may or may not even understand the original message board joke
but can still be influenced by its ideology.
The internet also is wickedly good at exploiting filter bubbles.
And so you congregate with people of your own tribe,
and they dig each other deeper into their psychological ditches.
Probably the most famous example of just how far this can go
is Pepe the Frog.
A popular cartoon character- turned-internet meme,
Pepe the Frog has been added to the Anti Defamation League’s
database of hate symbols.
In a press release, the organization wrote the character had been,
“used by haters on social media to suggest racist, anti-Semitic,
or other bigoted notions as a hate symbol.
Originally created by the cartoonist Matt Fury,
Pepe had nothing to do with politics
until right-wing shitposters
decided to give him a dismissive, self-satisfied smirk
and appropriated the character in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink effort
to own the libs
and harass minorities, women, and journalists.
The appropriation of symbols
and turning them into far-right symbols has always been done.
The swastika was a Buddhist symbol.
Pepe the Frog is a good example.
By appropriating his face to all these far-right statements
and have Pepe smirking,
well, the point about Pepe is that he does smirk.
It is the adolescent smirk
taking a huge pleasure out of norm violation.
Now, this was one thing
when it was just a bunch of juvenile attention seekers
using frog pics to impress each other on message boards.
But then Donald Trump posted a pic of himself as Pepe,
and the frog leaped into mainstream stardom,
much to the delight of the online far right.
Donald Trump Jr., for example,
he put this image on his Instagram account.
It’s a meme of Pepe,
and for those of you who don’t know, Pepe is a white nationalist symbol.
It turns out that ridiculous pics on the internet
could impact global politics.
Another example of this online interplay of irony and nationalism
is the OK hand signal.
This began as a simple gesture used by scuba divers
to signal they were OK while underwater.
But in the mid 2010s,
users of 4chan cooked up a plan to troll the mainstream media
into reporting that the symbol was actually
a hidden white nationalist code.
Kelly Donohue has been the target of a social media firestorm
after a gesture he made at the beginning of Tuesday’s episode.
Now he calls it “a terrible misunderstanding.”
In a response, Donohue said,
“I absolutely, unequivocally condemn white supremacy of any kind.”
What were they thinking?
Cadets and midshipmen
flashed a sign that to most people simply means “OK”
but has been classified as a hate symbol by the Anti Defamation League.
But the joke ended up being so successful
that many among the far right did actually adopt the symbol,
They wanted to bamboozle the media and troll everyone
by making this a white nationalist symbol.
And they did this by saying
that it looked like a W and a P for white power.
Sure enough, as it normally happens when something is born on 4chan,
white nationalists did end up using the OK hand sign.
I refuse to apologize...
For creating the modern world.
for creating the modern world.
And now you have groups like the Proud Boys,
who use it as one of their main symbols.
And then when people ask them,
“Hey, isn’t that a white nationalist symbol?”
they go, “Come on, come on. You guys are crazy liberals.”
I am a western chauvinist.
It shows this morphing of a meme from joke to not a joke
to totally confusing
to the point where the media doesn’t cover it anymore.
We are gay!
-
And this is another example of the insidious power of the meme.
It's one thing to get morally outraged over pictures of Auschwitz
or immigrants being kept in cages.
But the minute any critic finds himself
having to publicly condemn a cartoon frog,
it’s the critic who could end up looking faintly ridiculous.
You could put half of Trump’s supporters
into what I call the basket of deplorables.
This is exactly the trap that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign
fell into in 2016,
when an article posted on her website sought to explain who Pepe was
and his ties to white nationalists.
In August 2017,
a huge far-right rally took place in Charlottesville
at which a counter-demonstrator was murdered by a white nationalist.
They just literally came down the street at 80 miles per hour
to fucking hit us just now.
I had to jump out of the way.
I almost got hit by the car my fucking self.
Unite the Right happens,
and all of a sudden you had the same sarcastic trolling groups.
Fuck you, faggots!
You had members of the Proud Boys out there
and you had members of all these different far-right factions,
but they were sitting next to people who said,
“We aren’t going to tiptoe around this symbology anymore.”
You will not replace us!
And so you had swastikas and you had SS symbols,
you had just straight up neo-Nazis marching alongside memes.
-Our streets! -Whose streets?
Our streets!
Fast forward to 2019,
where memeified violence reached terrifying new heights
when the white nationalist Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 people
at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
This is one of New Zealand's darkest days.
The 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant didn’t enter a verbal plea,
but he did send a clear message in the courtroom,
a white power hand sign that’s often used to troll or just upset liberals.
Tarrant announced the beginning of his attack by posting a meme on 8chan
before he livestreamed his mass murder on Facebook.
The comment reactions to it
were a real time series of in-jokey shitposts,
turning mass killing into just another meme to be shared.
Even his weapons, emblazoned with famous battles in history
between Christians and Muslims,
became a meme.
But for all that veneer of modern technology,
the actual ideology that Tarrant followed was pretty old fashioned.
And this is one of the key things to remember
about the far-right use of memes.
Though they like to paint themselves as doing something new,
subversive, and clever,
the actual ideas they spread
are largely the same tired conspiracy theories
about a supposed great replacement of white people
that have been doing the rounds for decades.
Now, today what we have is the notion of the great replacement.
In other words, the idea that Islam specifically
is actually an existential threat to Europe.
This is what the Nazis did with the Jews,
that the Jews were somehow a threat to German culture and life.
All of this is proving to be a major challenge
for the Big Tech social media companies.
How are they supposed to respond to people posting dumb,
semi-ironic pictures online
without either limiting free speech
or abetting extremist violence?
Memes are used in a way to obfuscate hateful ideology and imagery
to the point where if a platform like Twitter or TikTok
creates a hate speech policy
and says you can’t put imagery of, say, lynchings on TikTok anymore,
the people that make memes
are going to immediately work to find the loophole there.
They will always be complete masters of the technology.
So all attempts to cut them down and so forth,
they’ll always find a technological way of outsmarting that.
The future of memes, though, is unpredictable.
For freedom!
Stand with Hong Kong!
In 2020, protesters against growing Chinese authoritarianism in Hong Kong
who had no idea about Pepe the Frog’s racist baggage
reappropriated Pepe as a symbol of freedom, openness and unity.
But what is certain
is that the DIY nature of social media content
has been weaponized to spread far-right propaganda
faster and further than ever.
The racist ideas that these memes propagate
may be older than all of our grandparents,
but the toxic mix of irony,
disinformation, and cartoonified violence they spread online
has led to new waves of hate, terrorism, and mass murder
in the real world.
Whether you’re on Facebook, whether you’re on 4chan,
whether you’re on freaking TikTok,
you are one to two clicks away from abhorrent imagery
celebrating mass shootings and Nazis and lynchings
on any site that you go to.
I think memes are going to a very dark place.
Unless we are able to educate people
about the imagery they’re seeing,
we’re going to see a lot more people indoctrinated,
and we're going to see a lot of hateful ideology normalized.