Right-wing memes
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If you've spent any browsing the internet the last few years, you should have noticed it has become completely overrun by right-wing ideologues. Further, you may have noticed that their discourse is entirely dependent on stale internet memes. This page is meant for cataloging these memes and making sense of them.
Alt-right memes
"The Red Pill"
This meme is taken from the (ironically socially progressive)[1] film The Matrix. In the film, the main character is presented with the choice between a tiny blue pill, allowing him to forget what he knows and continue with his life normally, and a tiny red pill with which he will learn the true nature of his reality. Among the internet-right, being redpilled has become shorthand for accepting infographics laying out common right-wing conspiracy theories. Among these are government pedophile rings, black IQ statistics, Holocaust revisionism, Jewish cultural Marxists subverting Western culture, and creepy analyses of female sexuality.
It has been theorized that the red pill is a kind of laxative: all it seems to produce is shit. If a right-winger tries to "red-pill" you, you should see if he cites any sources. More often than not they will say the exact opposite of what they are cited to say. This again confirms the suspicion that the right-wing fascination with hard facts is just an ideological phenomenon.
Pepe
Pepe the Frog is a cartoon frog that used to be popular on online image boards because of its unusual facial expressions. Right-wing online culture is largely derived from image boards, and they made ready use of this frog. After news outlets came to associate the frog with white nationalism, its adoption among right-wingers came to accelerate.
Creator of the character Matt Furie has since tried to reclaim it from the far-right, taking aggressive legal action against people using it this way.
Because of their use of Pepe, inhabitants of the alt-right cultural sphere can be referred to as frog people. This stresses the importance of memes in their collective identity and therefore serves to deeply annoy them.
Kek
Similarly to Pepe the Frog, Kek is a meme derived from image board culture. Originally it was an ironic variant of "LOL" ("laughing out loud"), a pattern of which "lel" is another popular example (here without far-right associations). When the kek is particularly strong—i.e. something is extremely laughable—people will take to the expression topkek.
After users of 4chan's /pol/ image board discovered Kek is also the name of an ancient Egyptian frog-deity associated with chaos, they built a semi-ironic cult around it, choosing Pepe as its holy prophet. Kek is considered the patron of meme magic, a pseudo-occult belief that things that are memed thoroughly enough eventually come true. This is jokingly supposed to have caused the 2014 Ebola outbreak and gotten Donald Trump in the White House.
Soiboys
Cultural Marxism
Cultural Marxism, also postmodern neo-Marxism and other variants, is a modern adaption of a proto-meme[dubious ] from Nazi Germany called cultural Bolshevism. The Nazis claimed that Cultural Bolshevism existed in every sphere of culture they disliked. Similarly, cultural Marxism is used for anything contemporary right-wingers do not like. This includes modern art, gender-studies departments, liberal identity politics, critical theory, and even the mass media.
If you ask any right-winger what they mean by cultural Marxism, you are likely to get one of two answers. One traces it back to the Frankfurt School. The implicit assumption is that the Frankfurt School theorists started an organized effort to prepare Western culture for a communist take-over, by infiltrating the media to promote things like female promiscuity and shitty pop music. Note that the Frankfurt Theorists were nearly all Jewish. The theory is deeply anti-Semitic.
The second answer you'll get is less outrageous, but infinitely more stupid and dishonest. They will draw some weak analogy between contemporary identity politics and classical Marxism. Most of the time there is no more substance to it than that they both have an oppressing and oppressed class. If they take this course there are a couple of things you can easily point out. There are many other political narratives with in which oppression takes a key-role, for instance the clearly non-Marxist Nazis. Also, in Marxist theory "class" and "exploitation" have very technical meanings, and do not simply signify "oppression."
If they are more advanced, they will try to show some continuity between the Marxist and contemporary Left. According to this variant, after the atrocities in the USSR and PRC became widely known, the Marxists found that their economic narrative was not viable anymore, and chose to change their strategy to promoting minority rights.
In effect, the use of the term "Marxism" is just a vain attempt to make it sound scary.
Western civilization
Right-wingers often claim to be deeply concerned about the proliferation of Westen culture and civilization, which is apparently under threat by feminists and brown-skinned immigrants. Although they proclaim this concern they will usually defend corporate power, a force which actually does threaten culture.
The fact of the matter is that many right-wingers will disavow almost all modern Western achievements, and share more in common with the Islamist brown people they claim to oppose. They have a similar distaste for women's rights, homosexuality, internationalism and democratic rule. They do not like any Western cultural movements of the last century. They deeply dislike the personal ethics and interests of their Western peers. If there is anything genuine about their concern for "the West," it is for a mythical West, not the one that actual exists. Accordingly, they will often regress into fantasies involving Vikings and crusaders, who they consider to be more proper representatives of their culture.
Libertarian memes
Libertarians, especially anarcho-capitalists, are usually more worthy opponents than the alt-right, but this does not change that their responses often fall into very predictably patterns.
"True communism has never been tried!"
When you disavow the Soviet attempt at communism, libertarians will usually try to frame your argument as a "No True Scotsman" fallacy. It is important to not allow them to do this.
Statism
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See also
References
- ↑ Liam O'Dell (January 11, 2023). "Has Andrew Tate even seen The Matrix? Breaking down right-wing obsession with hit movie". indy100