Safe_Timber_Man wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:24 pm
He used relatively obscure memes which, unless you take some interest in internet culture and know about 4chan 8chan etc, it wouldn't mean a lot. The likes of The Sun and Daily Mail will just lump this is as "The Internet" and allowing social media to 'spread hate' (never mind their own fucking publications).
Where it gets a bit more complicated is the Alt-Right mouthpieces seem to be trying to make this guy a lot more intelligent and calculated that he is. The memes he used were not hidden messages. He wasn't attempting to use them, or mention PewDiePie (YouTuber) to further a 'culture war' in some clever and sophisticated way. He was just a typical 4chan type loser who was trying to appeal to his pretend internet friends by using memes which they know about and would laugh at.
Remember that when/if you read some bullshit essay from the likes of Paul Joseph Watson or Sargon of Akkad trying to turn this into a pity party about how The Right are being used to accelerate some ongoing culture war and the media have 'fallen for it'.
His manifesto is a right hodge podge (probably befitting the multitab browsing age), there was also mention of Anders Brevik as an inspiration and Donald Trump as a renewed icon of white masculine identity and then some musing about eco-fascism too? But I'll go over it again and make a follow up post on it.
What worries me is tabloids won't look beyond the memes as some kind of coded symbol for racism when they have a more insidious nature of discrediting the terrorist and his ideology because "they're just memes, how can you take him seriously?" but concurrently spreading the shorthand translation of ideas that memetics is. I might even stretch to call it a type of innuendo, somewhat akin to performers in the 1960s and 70s slipping smut past the censors of the day.