We all know what happened at this point. A young man parked a car, took out guns, said a meme from a popular YouTuber, walked into a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and murdered 49 Muslim worshippers. Before the massacre, he published a 18,000-word manifesto. The text contained a few popular internet text memes, but the vast majority consisted of boilerplate white supremacy. During his mugshot after his arrest, he flashed the OK symbol now a common signaler among the extremist groups.
This is a pattern. This has a cycle.
For the past decade or so, there has been a growing triangular relationship, an unholy trinity, between racist right-wing media, “ironic” meme culture, and the inevitable white supremacist terror that can be the result. These 3 elements feed off of and reinforce each other, creating a feedback loop that makes a lot of media companies very wealthy and a lot of dead bodies.
These parts are interdependent and symbiotic, using each other. These things could exist independently, but they would be much weaker. Due to how social media is rewarded and how modern information flows, they exist in a confined ecosystem of fascist rhetoric that makes events like the Charleston massacre, the Charlottesville attack, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and now Christchurch increasingly more inevitable.
Talking Heads
At the top of the pyramid is racist right-wing media that is traditionally consumed: television, print, blogs, social media, and radio/podcasts. These forms of media are easily accessed and popular due to their low barrier to entry and availability.
This media has deep cultural roots with sometimes decades of perceived institutional authority. Right-wing media like Fox News, the conservative blogosphere, evangelical mailing lists, etc provide the ideological legitimacy for racist violence by proving a contradictory but accessible narrative of “your values are under attack”. Figureheads in this media environment do everything but call for domestic violence.
That is the one thing they can’t do, which would threaten their corporate sponsors and spoil a potential audience. However, there’s nothing to stop someone like Tucker Carlson from laying out a complete justification for violence: “invasion” from illegal immigrants, “white genocide” through demographic changes, fear of black civil rights activism, admiration for the ethnostate of Israel, and the ever-present spectre of “cultural marxism”. These talking heads will walk right up to that line, explain that “Western civilization” is under attack, and then say “that’s all folks.”
The Christchurch shooter parroted these talking points almost to the letter, simply adding in the “we gotta murder these people” parts. Rightwing media worships glorious political violence to the point of almost encouraging a type of death cult. “Only the honored dead shall be worthy” type of stuff. In fact, the shooter’s manifesto was titled The Great Replacement after a Lauren Southern video espousing white cultural extermination through demographic change, which she has since taken down. Wonder why, huh? (NOTE: The video is back up. Don’t watch it or search for it.)
What’s important to understand about this media is that it is intentionally alienating from any sort of common solidarity that threatens their cultural power and economic base. Social media is the most powerful form of alienating media because its traffic, being advertising funded, is amorally concerned with traffic numbers and ad clicks.
An ever-increasingly escalation of outrage is required to sustain their business model, with conservative media having a regular supply of cultural resentment to fuel it. Explicit right-wing media provides a baseline cultural context for edgy memelords to draw inspiration from. Constant depictions of non-white criminal suspects on the news, a pro-authority framing, and support for imperialist war is more than enough fodder for meme culture.
Ironic Racism is Still Racism
Testing the boundaries of social acceptance through transgression of its values is a necessary, healthy part of cultural growth. Satire is a potent cornerstone of political thought and good satire has a powerful target and a tangible political purpose.
The context of the cartoon was a mocking response to Meghan McCain’s teary blubbering in defense of Israel after Rep. Ilhan Omar’s tame criticism of the AIPAC lobby. Eli Valley is a master satirist who is making a specific and pointed argument that Meghan McCain is not an ethnic or converted Jew, yet evangelical Christians cloak themselves in religious and cultural Jewish artifacts in defense of an apartheid ethnostate government. The humor here is in exaggeration (note the Matisyahu CD in the corner). The best thing about the cartoon is that it needs little explanation in context, even if you were only tangentially following the controversy.
Meme culture skews young, with alienated and angry white male teens having a lot of free time on their hands, dosed to the gills with internet that amplifies extreme behavior. With the lack of a leftist anti-capitalist narrative for their anger, hard-right media stepped in with content (cultural resentment and outrage) that is rewarded on social media due to its ease of transmission. In return, right-wing racist media gets the younger audience it so desperately needs, since their core Facebook grandpa audience is literally dying off. No surprise the Christchurch murder livestreamed his massacre.
This ambiguity and overuse of “irony” as a defense is a common tactic for white supremacists to push far-right ideas under the guise of comedy.
This ambiguity and overuse of “irony” as a defense is a common tactic for white supremacists to push far-right ideas under the guise of comedy. It’s designed to be a little confusing to figure out where the irony stops and the real hate begins, thereby making an effective cover for racist violence. “Oh that mass shooting that targeted Muslim worshippers? Just a prank, bro!”
“Ironic” racist memes are used as a way to transgress against a culture that is gradually becoming more accepting and diverse. The issue is not that they’re transgressing, which I mentioned before can be healthy, but it’s what they’re transgressing against. Also, most internet edgelords are more concerned with a negative rise in a viewer than the actual content itself. Ironic racism that is indistinguishable from real racism has the exact same effect. Memes are spread quickly and wide, so unless there’s going to be a little pop-up window detailing the obscure semantic quality of an “ironic” racist meme, people will take it at face value.
Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, has had a troubling history of doing racist “satire”, making it easy for white supremacists to like him. Since 2016, he has posted 9 videos with anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi references in them, including a Seig Heil salute during a video, paying 2 African freelancers to hold up a sign that said “Death to All Jews”, making Harambe jokes over images of actor Leslie Jones, and dropping an n-bomb during a livestream. In 2018, the same year he promoted an anti-semitic YouTube channel, he had hate speech radio host Ben Shapiro host his popular segment “Meme Review”.
On social media with millions of fans, he follows:
- Steven Crowder
- Ben Shapiro
- Mike Cernovich
- Nigel Farage
- VP Mike Pence (but not the President, weirdly enough)
- Jordan Peterson
- Ian Miles Cheong
- Paul Joseph Watson
- Stefan Molyneux
- Sam Hyde
- Count Dankula
- Laci Green
- Brittany Pettibone
- Joe Rogan
- Lauren Southern
- Dave Rubin
A veritable who’s who of rightwing media personalities, some identified as core members of an alternative influencer network aimed at spreading far-right extremist ideas. He also followed Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, before Benjamin’s suspension from Twitter in 2018. PewDiePie is at best a cynical grifter who sees a trend in his fans, or at worst a supporter of this rhetoric.
Context or lack thereof is not the real problem here, really. It’s the result: the spread of racist content by powerful internet voices. Part of PewDiePie’s legacy is that his brand name was uttered by a mass murderer moments before he walked in and killed 49 people, including children. The phrase “subscribe to PewDiePie” has been cited by white supremacists as code for how to recognize each other.
The white supremacist YouTuber promoted by PewDiePie in early 2018 was asked about how to spread anti-Semitic propaganda, summing up the intentional vagueness:
“Pretend to joke about it until the punchline really lands.”
And guess what? It does land. Hard.
A Dead End
Most racist violence is used in the guise of cultural self-defense, something the Christchurch shooter explicitly laid out in his 18,000 word manifesto. I read it so you don’t have to. It was an exhausting and draining experience, mainly because of how ugly yet uninformative it was. I learned nothing about the killer that I didn’t already know. The text is boilerplate white nationalism and desire for an ethnostate. It’s repetitive and self-congratulatory, the shooter having a ridiculously over-inflated sense of mythical importance to his upcoming murders.
The mental gymnastics the shooter had to go through to force his narrative to make sense is kind of staggering. White nationalism is an ideologically incoherent narrative, but it is a narrative. I’m not going to go into too many specifics, because fuck him, but the main fascist contradiction is the existential fear of cultural replacement through “invasion” by non-whites. First of all, so-called “white genocide” is a myth designed to protect the cultural and racial superiority of the concept of whiteness. The main fear from white nationalists is that the way white countries treated their native populations will in turn happen to them if the tables were turned.
His take on cultural replacement is the most incoherent because he hails from Australia and murdered immigrants in New Zealand, both post-colonial settler states of the British Empire. The Māori and Aboriginal Australians have a more legitimate claim to genocide and invasion, because their cultures were actually nearly destroyed, their languages forbidden, and their people murdered. Māori only make up 14% of the New Zealand population, and aborigines only make up 3% of Australia’s population now.
I would like to point out they were not non-violently relocated, but systematically destroyed through disease, slavery, and war. The ideology that killed those native peoples is the exact same as the shooter’s. This is simply not happening in Europe and North America to white people because Muslims openly worship in mosques.
The natural conclusion of white nationalism is genocide.
Combine this with social media and an internet media atmosphere that rewards a continually escalating extremist narrative, cheap fame-chasing, and easy access to firepower, the random terror of mass murder is inevitable. The natural conclusion of white nationalism is genocide.
Unlike edgy 4chan nihilists, the actual fascist right has a core ideology: a white ethnostate populated with themselves and free reign to inflict cruelty on those they deem weaker. White nationalism is fascism, and fascism is built on the pretext of totalitarian violence.
Racist media wants the results of white nationalism: death, blood, and terror in the creation of a society that perpetuates their supremacy, but they can’t openly advocate for that. The Roman bust avatars get bored and move on, leaving only the mass murderers in waiting and the corporate scumbags that feed them the reddest of meat. Rightwing racist media is going to ratchet up the tension, because they’re hardwired to. The dopamine rush of permanent outrage is difficult to sustain.
The cycle feeds in these 3 directions, a system happy with no accountability, and willing to stack the bodies high. It is a beast that is always hungry.
How to Engage With Fascist Rhetoric
I’d like to leave you with some best practices with how to engage with fascist rhetoric or ironic racism when you see it. Since this system is a cycle of interdependent media, we must stop perpetuating a major goal of white fascism: legitimacy in non-rightwing media circles.
Have a clear and accurate definition of fascism. Fascism is the authoritarian ideology of pan-national white supremacy that seeks to create a single white ethnostate based on immutable, inherent biological traits. This goal must be achieved by any means necessary, including the genocide of non-whites.
Be precise in your language. Also make the distinction between something having fascist leanings and clear support. There’s levels of degrees here. Do not be goaded into a pedantic argument about terminology.
Call it out: ironic meme racism is still racism. It’s not satire, because it has no clear satirical target. It’s destructive because it perpetuates the same damage than unironic racism does, and most people won’t be able to tell the difference. Some might even be attracted to it.
Don’t debate the merits of fascist media or hate speech ever. Even in the guise of “free speech”. They have no right to a megaphone. You will be buying into the lie that they care about the concept of liberal debate, which they don’t. Always frame fascist rhetoric with “this is what this rhetoric is trying to do” rather than attempting to debunk it. History has already clearly shown what fascists would like to do to their enemies.
Learn what media tactics that fascists use. These include dog whistling, coded language, framing, and ironic meme culture. Be aware their messaging changes constantly to avoid being accurately identified.
Don’t ignore fascist media. It will not go away on its own. Just like mushrooms, fascist rhetoric flourishes in the dark when fed shit. Confront it when you see it with confidence and clarity, especially in real life.
Do not depend on capitalist media to purge them. Hard right rhetoric is built on outrage, which drives traffic, which means more advertising dollars. Corporate media will only react when their brand identity is threatened.
Be skeptical of those who interview far-right figures or debate them, even in good faith. Be equally skeptical of “free speech” advocates who seem to only publicly support racist or sexist voices.
The main piece of advice I can give you is to remain firm in your moral convictions. Anti-fascism is, always has been, and always will be on the right side of history.
CORRECTION: The article incorrectly attributed The Great Replacement YouTube video essay to Laura Loomer. The creator is Lauren Southern.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.