Nazi Memes and White Supremacist Dogwhistles
Nazi Memes
As mainstream white supremacy has been on the rise in the past couple of years, the internet and meme culture has been instrumental in recruiting new people (typically young middle class, straight, white men) into its ideology. Edgy and dark humor has been weaponized to desensitize young men from the struggles and even humanity of minorities, and give these hateful views plausible deniability through claiming it’s just irony. New memes are also either appropriated or created without overtly stating the meaning behind it, so that only the ‘in’ group can understand it and the general public is left guessing. The main issue is in how this movement has become widespread, no longer on the fringes of society, and more bold, and are more dangerous. No better is these issues exemplified than by the Christchurch Shooter’s manifesto. While this form of internet culture spawns bigotry against the LGBT, women, disabled people, and a numberof other minorities, it is incredibly racist and focused on white supremacy. Within the maniofesto, the shooter repeatedly references memes, shitposts, copypastas, and other forms of internet culture as a common white nationalist strategy that obscures the extremist rhetoric by tricking the general population into dismissing it as a joke, distract the public by making so they spend time trying to understand the format, and then hiding the actual, incredibly hateful meaning behind the joke and spreading it so that the message gets spread as it circulates. What makes the meme format so influential is the plausible deniability it gives the person to the public while simultaneously enforcing solidarity among the in-group and unifies them in their radical hate and extremism. The white extremist meme strategy is especially good at manipulating public and media by anticipating reaction to the act and then spoofing it, so that journalists are so busy having to dispel false information meant to confuse, that they can’t adress the extremism.
This way of coding hate is incredibly complex and has had a profound impact on internet culture and further, to even our youth culture. The article references a couple memes that are dogwhistles to white nationalists such as the Subscribe to Pewdiepie and the Navy seal copypasta, however, that’s just some. With the rapid pace of internet culture due to the short life span of memes, it is incredibly to keep up with which ones are relevant or what they mean and that further confuses people. Just a couple that I can think of are the NPC meme which was big in 2018 and essentially means that progressives don’t have souls, and that it’s only by “breaking the normie barrier to invoke a real discussion” (Read; become a nazi,instead of being a brainwashed)
Another more well known meme is the okay hand sign. Now, even though you’re old, you might’ve heard that it means “white power”. I started out as something that peoplenoticed Trump and Trump supporters doing in photos, a couple months later, a meme on 4chan(a online imageboard website that is made up of mostly altright shitposters) urged people to spam comments that the OK sign symbolized white power to trick the medias a joke, and eventually journalists started picking it up and reporting it. The OK sign never actually meant white power, however through the media’s recognition of it, and the ties to people who believe in these white supremacist ideologies, it was actualized into the white power symbol, and the christchurch shooter even did it after he was arrested.
The most popular meme currently is “clown world”, “honk honk” or “honkler” meme that is a video of pepe the frog dressed up as a clown. The basic message behind it that I have come to understand is that the idea of a “clown world” is used to described the situation of the world (specifically socially and politically) as ridiculous or nonsensical so that it “would only be real in a world of clowns”. The nonsensical aspect usually used to describe modern feminism and progressive thinking. The second most popular urban dictionary description makes the extremist viewpoint clear;
“We appear to be living in a clown world. Men are turning themselves into women, women are turning themselves into men, and brainwashed kids, god bless ‘em, don’t know what to turn themselves into. Meanwhile, small-souled bugmen [a normie who is brainwashed by consumerism]are protesting outside McDonald’s for Szechuan sauce because of a cartoon, and deranged SJWs[“social justice warriors” or people who advocate for social justice.Its a derogatory term with connotations that social justice isn’t nesecary and that those who advocate for it are crazy] can’t pull their eyes away from Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
Faceless corporations are pretending to be social justice revolutionaries while at the same time warping the capitalist system out of all functional recognition for their own gains. Governments and the media are no longer even trying to hide their support for cultural Marxist[a word for liberals that describes them as authoritarians of pc culture, the word itself has roots in nazism of “cultural bolshevism”] policies , and as community spirit across the West[in context, the ‘West’is a dogwhistle for white society] continues to disintegrate, more pea-brains take to social media to shout at each other and drive culture deeper into the gutter
Once-great Western cities have been reduced to barren corporate wastelands populated by millions of atomized, cultureless[read; non traditional, not white culture] and basically useless consumers.
The internet has people living in something akin to a permanent state of road rage as they desperately try to fill the emptiness in their lives by becoming hysterical over events that have little to no impact on them. The morbidly obese are plotting to normalize their immoral and disgraceful lifestyles in favor of sorting themselves out, and Tinder has turned the sexual marketplace [word used by incels and the manosphere to describe the dating world,claiming that woman are only interested in marrying a rich man to provide for her and then cuck him by sleeping with an ‘alpha’male] into a loveless hellscape.
Ha, we truly live in a clown world...
Me: "We really live in a clown world, don't we?”
This displays who the people who use this term are, and what they believe. I highlighted and defined the best I could the dog whistles imbedded in the defintion to show how complex and deep the culture is.
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