Meme Frameworks

2 The Left Can’t Meme / So This is the Right’s Fabled Memeing Ability

Nagle (2017) cites the Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash facebook page and the reddit forum The_Donald as two examples from each side of the American political spectrum that arose during the 2016 election. While these groups are perhaps more visible, communities that work to galvanise political thought are now commonplace. Shit Bootlickers Say and Sassy Socialist Memes are ‘leftbook’ 2 pages that boast followers in the six figures. New Zealand has its own political meme pages such as Freshly Picked Green Memes, and David Seymour Memes for Overtaxed Liberal Teens, there’s even a rare bipartisan meme group NZ Swing Voters Against Dogmatic Party Affiliated Memes. It is now fairly commonplace to see memes from these groups liked or shared from the online accounts of political figures. Networked publics are the ground for a new generation constructing and reconstructing their political beliefs using the materials they have, as apolitical as those materials may seem at first (Metahaven, 2013).

A paradigmatic example of the infiltration of political discussion by meme culture was Donald Trump Jr. sharing a meme depicting ‘the deplorables’ (Pelltier-Gagnon & Diniz, 2018). The meme is a remix of a promo image for ‘the untouchables’ featuring the faces of Donald Trump’s campaign team as well as a cartoon version of Donald Trump as cartoon character ‘Pepe the frog’. This image requires a range of intertextual understanding to fully parse. The term ‘deplorables’ was in response to Hillary Clinton declaring Trump supporters “A basket of deplorables” (Chozick, 2016), and its inclusion is a response in an ironic, devil-may-care tone. The Pepe the frog image is more sinister in nature - originally a character from Matt Furie’s cult comic Boy’s Club (Frank, 2016), Pepe was adopted as a ‘reaction image’ 3 on online image boards such as 4chan. 4 Pepe evolved into a fully blown meme when the peculiar practice of ‘collecting’ ‘rare pepes’ emerged on 4chan, which involved content producers remixing images of Pepe for consumers/collectors (Yopak, 2018). When Pepe went mainstream (Pepe memes were shared on instagram by the likes of Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj [Kiberd, 2015]) 4chan users sought to make this practice inaccessible to outsiders. Given that the board’s user base, specifically the members of the subforum /pol/ 5 are historically far-right leaning, the logical move to prevent ‘normies’ from sharing Pepe memes was to associate him with the far-right ideology (Pelltier-Gagnon & Diniz, 2018; Yopak, 2018). And thus, the most widely known meme-as-dog-whistle 6 was born.