Memes

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

France is throwing a tantrum at Trump

From our US edition

France is intensifying its counter-offensive against what it calls misinformation. Earlier this month, Paris prosecutors confirmed they have opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk and X. Musk had ignored a summons to appear for a voluntary interview on April 20. The French state requested Musk assist in an investigation into algorithmic manipulation and the spread of AI deepfakes on X. Musk responded to the criminal investigation by labeling the prosecutors “faker than a chocolate euro and queerer than a pink flamingo in a neon tutu!” On the same day, Paris unveiled its “French Response” strategy. The head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, posted a video on X (where else?

France misinformation

Tuesday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Iran is winning the meme war

From our US edition

The opening strikes on Iran forced the country’s military to operate without a centralized command structure. Despite this enormous setback, something like a unified approach has emerged, and nowhere is that more evident than on social media.  Iran’s embassies have become meme factories, centers of information warfare churning out images and videos designed to do just one thing: mock the US and Israel and, in particular, Donald Trump. Courtesy of Iran’s overseas missions, we’ve now seen Donald Trump as a minion from Despicable Me; a Lego man fleeing a Lego Jeffrey Epstein; and a Pirate of the Caribbean trying, and failing, to hijack the Strait of Hormuz.

Saturday

Cockburn

Jeffrey Epstein: pro gamer

From our US edition

One of the many mysteries surrounding the Epstein saga is Jeffrey Epstein the man. Beyond simple hedonism, his motives seem inscrutable – and how did he make his money anyway? The latest cache of released Epstein files has shed new light on his character. Part of what emerges is Epstein the compulsive video gamer, who was banned from online play due to abusive behavior and who liked to cruise anonymous online forums for odd genres of pornography. A December 2013 automated email to Epstein from Xbox Live (the online multiplayer feature for the Xbox console) informed him that he had been banned from the service due to “harassment, threats, and/or abuse of other players.

Epstein

Thursday

Sean Thomas

Amelia: the purple-haired goth girl who became a nationalist icon

It has been obvious for some time that there are basic concepts that the liberal British Establishment simply does not understand. Like money. Or tax. Or business. Or going to the pub. Or the fundamental value of free speech. Well, now we can add a whole new roster of more baroque concepts to this list: meme culture, e-girls, semiotics, détournement, the subtext of black chokers and basic human nature. And all because of a purple-haired young cartoon woman called Amelia. Before we get to Amelia, we need to understand what created her – because the joke can only be grasped once you appreciate the lunacy that came before her minxy pink dresses. Amelia comes from a game called Pathways: Navigating Gaming, the Internet and Extremism.

Jack Rivlin

Memes vs Wall Street: how Reddit took on US hedge funds

What did you do this week? I spent it drenched in sweat, launching a vicious assault on Wall Street hedge funds which cost them $5 billion (£3.7 billion). And I didn’t even have to put my trousers on. Along with thousands of other degenerates, I bought shares in GameStop, a struggling US video game store whose value has soared by 2,000 per cent in the last four weeks. Behind the surge is a wild Reddit community called WallStreetBets, where bored young men gamble on barely researched stock tips and crack tasteless jokes. The community, whose tagline is ‘like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal’, has a long and hilarious history of aggressive stock market bets leading to eye-watering gains and losses.

Thursday

Cockburn

The sombrero memes will continue until morale improves

From our US edition

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is shocked, shocked, that President Taco Bowl is using memes online to mock his comportment during the government shutdown. Jeffries calls the memes, which depict Jeffries and Chuck Schumer wearing sombreros and sporting handlebar mustaches “racist” and has tough-guyed Trump to “say it to my face.”   Cockburn enjoys a good troll-meme and suddenly finds himself in a world where Republicans are the ones with a sense of humor. House Speaker Mike Johnson told “my friend Hakeem” to “just ignore it.”   “These are sideshows. People are getting caught up in – in battles over social media memes,” Johnson said in the Hill. “This is not a game. We’ve got to keep the government open for the people.

Memes

Sunday

Neeraja Deshpande

Boomer hate has gone too far

From our US edition

Charles Murray, whose work on race and IQ has made him something of a darling of the online right, found himself out of favor with his fan base when he posted on X that a young married couple – each making $15 an hour and working 48-hour weeks – can afford a baby and a place to live. The reaction was furious. “Charles Murray is a good man,” wrote Zarathustra, a popular dissident right-wing poster. “Sadly, however, he’s also a Boomer. Which by necessity, means his bumper sticker talking points on political economy are comically out of touch garbage, and read like a moldy Reagan Youth pamphlet from 1982.” Murray’s post broke X containment and made it to the subreddit r/BoomersBeingFools.

Monday

Neal Pollack

The Trump White House is government by meme

From our US edition

On Monday morning, the nation awoke to learn that 100 "Wanted"-style posters now line the driveway to the White House, featuring faces of people the Trump administration has deported and the crimes they’d committed. A perpetual shriek, warning about the rise of fascism, arose from the online cosmos, as people began posting, again, “This is how it starts.” I saw more than one person compare the display to a medieval king posting heads on spikes around a moat, or Nazi propaganda magazine spreads about dangerous “Juden.” Perhaps. Or maybe it was just oppositional troll-bait. This is how the Trump White House operates. It’s government by meme, and it can be very effective.

meme

Thursday

Charles Cornish-Dale

Whatever happened to the Panther Den Show?

From our US edition

“The laughter of children is like the blossoming of a flower,” wrote French poet Charles Baudelaire. “It is the joy of receiving, the joy of breathing, the joy of opening out, the joy of contemplation, of living, of growing. It is the joy of a plant.” Conservatives and most right-wingers have a hard time understanding laughter, I’d vouch, especially the laughter of children – by which I mean the laughter of zoomers and their even younger peers, Generation Alpha. But laughter is an increasingly powerful political tool, one that has the ability to mobilize the young even as it confounds and confuses older generations. Today’s conservative establishment ignores laughter at its peril. Laughter is a vital force propelling the right to new success. Just look at Donald Trump.

panther den
ok
Meghan Murphy

Actually, it’s not ‘OK’

From our US edition

‘It’s ok’ is a meme that enables lazy millennials across social media to bail on plans last minute in favor of wallowing in self-pity. It seemed to have already completed its meme rounds, having come to its satirical end in January. Now, however, ‘It’s ok’ has experienced a resurgence — thanks to Lord COVID.Social media has been even more drowned in comforting posts than normal. ‘It’s ok’ posts are in overdrive. Would-be influencers insist, ‘It’s ok to eat chips three meals in a row,’ ‘It’s ok to do literally nothing!

Tuesday

Matthew Foldi

Harris allies lean on influencers to post about campaign

From our US edition

Ahead of the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris’s allies are leaning on social media influencers to push her campaign’s message, according to a pitch deck obtained by The Spectator. The League of Conservation Voters’s Harris DNC Organic Creator Campaign is anything but organic, it turns out. “Creators need to promote and uplift Kamala Harris’s record,” they are told. Suggested visuals lean heavily into the “brat summer” meme. “This can appear as at least one of the following: Mention Kamala Harris by name — either audio or text overlay Use Presidential imagery — e.g.

brat summer memes influencers

Friday

Cockburn

The Biden campaign is trying to hire a full-time memelord

From our US edition

In a desperate attempt to get the attention of young voters, the Biden for President campaign is looking to hire a full-time manager of meme pages for up to $85,000 a year. Job requirements include “deep expertise of the digital media landscape” and the capability to “identify internet trends and/or opportunities for content.” In other words: be good at memes. Though Cockburn wonders whether the move is more innovative or absurd. The political meme game between Biden and Trump up to this point has been both ironic and noteworthy. "Let’s Go Brandon" was countered with "Dark Brandon" — which was also a response to the "dark Trump" meme.

memes meme memelord

Monday

Cockburn

Ron DeSantis’s accidental neo-Nazi rebrand

From our US edition

Rumors began to swirl that the Ron DeSantis team was planning a major reboot last week following plummeting polls and financial woes. But the first ad to emerge from his circles since appears to suggest that the presidential hopeful is a neo-Nazi. Cockburn never would have guessed this was the campaign-saving pivot his team had planned.  On Sunday morning a staffer for the DeSantis campaign retweeted an ad from the Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter account. https://twitter.com/ltthompso/status/1683126430534598656 It features a “doomer,” a crudely drawn young man who suffers from depression and a crippling cigarette addiction, watching reports of Trump’s vaccine rollout and undelivered border wall promises.

sonnenrad neo-nazi desantis

Monday

Nicholas Clairmont

‘Mid’: the very-online’s favorite insult

From our US edition

Have you heard “mid?” The very-online no longer call something “bad” or “dumb” or “crap” or “a shit-festooned barnacle attached to the culture.” They call it “mid.” As in “middling.” In one of the nontroversies that regularly grip Twitter, TMZ reported that someone had said “Jennifer Connelly (in the Nineties) was way more attractive than Zendaya is today — and she was considered pretty mid on the hotness scale.” Legions rose to defend the obviously defensible Nineties hotness of Ms. Connelly: A stupid person is no longer a nitwit, but a “midwit”; the undiscerning eye says Jennifer Connelly’s looks are “mid.” Unlike traditional English slang, which comes from letters to Winston Churchill (“OMG!

Friday

Cockburn

REVEALED: the Pentagon’s amazingly silly anti-Russia meme

From our US edition

After 20 years, a peak of 100,000 troops and trillions spent, the American military was unable to defeat the Taliban or even stop them from running half of Afghanistan. But that isn’t the only war America has been losing. We’re also losing the Meme Wars. That’s the lesson from a truly ghastly discovery by the intrepid reporters at VICE, who obtained 23 pages of internal documents from the Pentagon about an anti-Russia meme it deployed last October. The meme (see above) in question was created by US Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force, as part of its invisible war against Russian hackers. Their goal: expose the fact that Russia has hackers (gasp!) and make them look dumb in the process.

meme

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Shame on the ‘four lads’ meme snobs

We need to talk about the ‘four lads’ meme. Specifically we need to talk about the undercurrent of prejudice, and on occasion outright class hatred, that propelled these four unsuspecting young men from Birmingham and Coventry into the internet spotlight. Anyone who has been online in the past year will know about the four lads. It’s a photograph of four young men looking hyper-preened for a night on the town. Their trousers are painfully tight, their tattooed arms are bulging out of their short-sleeved shirts. This is the fashion among the male youths of aspirant working-class communities. They take pride in their appearance. They look good, and they know they look good. The photo was taken in Birmingham city centre last year.

Monday

Geoff Shullenberger

Meme warfare on the convention stage

From our US edition

Who’s on the roster of speakers for the Republican National Convention is just as revealing as who’s not. Nowhere in sight are former GOP standard-bearers like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Included, on the other hand, are several anonymous civilians turned into internet celebrities by viral videos. Among them is Nick Sandmann, the teenager at the center of the Covington Catholic confrontation captured on film at the National Mall last year. Also featured will be Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the couple whose armed confrontation with protesters outside their St Louis home in June also circulated widely online. Their inclusion clearly signals that the party is leaning into the meme warfare strategy that helped propel Trump to victory in 2016.

meme warfare

Thursday

Nina Power

The art of the incel

Let’s say you have a diagnosis of autism, depression or anxiety. You sleep too much or too little. You masturbate too often. You play computer games and don’t open the curtains. You have no money and you are often profoundly lonely and frequently bored. From this unedifying starting point, can you, let’s say, weightlift your way out of misery? Can you trick yourself into being sociable? Can you ultimately get beyond your fantasy that a woman will save you (she won’t) and learn to live with everyday misery? Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary TFW NO GF, internet-speak for ‘that feel(ing) when no girlfriend’, is the first attempt to make cinema out of incel subculture (and perhaps thereby also signalling its end).

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

Memes, marvelous memes

From our US edition

An unexpected pleasure of lockdown so far has been the increased frequency with which I have received funny video clips, sent by friends via Whatsapp. Almost uniformly they are in appalling taste. Some are related to the crisis, but not all. I find I cannot get enough of them. Enthusiastically, I watch and pass them on in the spirit they are sent: the gift of laughter during what is otherwise quite a dull time. The standout star of these videos — indeed, he features in several thanks to what Boris Johnson refers to as the 'wizardry of modern technology' — is a nude bodybuilder who nonchalantly displays a todger that, flaccid, is about the size of a wine bottle. It’s a magnificent, unforgettable sight.

wood memes

Wednesday

Jarvis Dupont

‘OK boomer’ is the most important meme of my generation

From our US edition

‘What the fuck is that on your head?’ a repulsive white man called out to me from a shop doorway as I crossed the street towards him. He was standing with a couple of other men. All white. All of them in their thirties at least. Wishing to remain civil, I graciously replied, ‘It’s a top-knot, or semi man-bun. First implemented as a popular hairstyle in Japan during the Edo period.’ The uncultured wretches all scoffed visibly at this enlightening nugget of education I had gifted to them with no request for recompense. ‘Haha this hipster prick thinks he’s the fucking Karate Kid!’ retorted one of them as the rest mocked and jeered. I winced inwardly at his foolish statement.

boomer