Donning a Popular Face: How the Alt-Right is Winning the Meme War

Atlantic Centurion
May 28, 2016

Masks of U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are seen at Jinhua Partytime Latex Art and Crafts Factory in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China, May 25, 2016. There's no masking the facts. One Chinese factory is expecting Donald Trump to beat his likely U.S. presidential rival Hilary Clinton in the popularity stakes. At the Jinhua Partytime Latex Art and Crafts Factory, a Halloween and party supply business that produces thousands of rubber and plastic masks of everyone from Osama Bin Laden to Spiderman, masks of Donald Trump and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton faces are being churned out. Sales of the two expected presidential candidates are at about half a million each but the factory management believes  Trump will eventually run out the winner. "Even though the sales are more or less the same, I think in 2016 this mask will completely sell out," said factory manager Jacky Chen, indicating a Trump mask. REUTERS/Aly Song SEARCH "JINHUA MASK" FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH "THE WIDER IMAGE" FOR ALL STORIES. - RTX2EBDA

The alt-right position on Donald Trump has since the get-go been to use him to further our message. This policy continues to bear fruit, especially through our memes and infamous trolling of Twitter. Our shitposts, effortposts, and textbook raid tactics have successfully and successively stricken ((((journalists)))) across the political spectrum, from conservative outlets like Breitbart and National Review to the decidedly un-conservative New York Times, with Prussian precision. You can run “alt-right” as a query into Google News and get results going back months and months. Paid chattering class content creators have written about and continue to write about our memes like cuckservative, echo brackets, and rare pepes. BuzzFeed recently ran an article on the 2016 American Renaissance conference that mentions all of our interconnected ideological platforms, from Trump to White nationalism. Yes, BuzzFeed.

When Trump gets mass media coverage—which has been every day nonstop since last summer—we are prone to get mass media coverage sooner or later as well, because we are his loudest, edgiest, and most articulate supporters on social media. Social media has become a source of news in and of itself for the very lazy journalism industry over the last few years. They skim what other people find interesting, put it into 300-700 words or less of boilerplate, and boom, content. Hundreds of millions of people rely on Facebook’s trending column  or their Twitter feeds for this kind of news, and that some of that news itself is recursively drawn from those trend lists. Nothing has to even happen in the real world—though when it does it will be a huge step—for us to become newsworthy anymore. We just meme things into reality.

It is incredible to realize how far the alt-right has come in just the span of  a year, and it is really to our credit that our digital plan of action was a smashing success. We should give ourselves a round of applause. We were among the few voices who predicted that Trump was going to do well in the primary and had the potential to win it, when most pundits were dismissing him as a long-shot and a joke candidate. He now has enough delegates for an uncontested convention. When the media tried to shame Trump supporters for being too White, we said that was actually a strength. Now some polls show him beating Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton, whose support base is a mishmash of disparate and competing identity blocs. We said the future of the Republican party was populism or perish. He is the now nominee-apparent and recently said the future of the GOP was literally becoming a “worker’s party.” At that moment, we all sensed a great disturbance in the Schwartz, like six million oy veys echoing at once.

We staked legitimacy and authority on the Trump primary campaign and it paid off. We made a point of not only riding his coattails but broadcasting ourselves as we did, making it clear that he was our vehicle and our enemies were mutual. Anyone following the election actively has heard about the alt-right, especially Jews, millennials, and conservatives. I’ve had people I know send me news articles and I have to hold my tongue about how familiar I am with what’s being written about—that I know the goy being quoted, that we follow each other on Twitter, that we’re part of the same circles. It’s a great feel, a testimony to our success in the occult warfare of metapolitics.

We said Trump was a step in the right direction and the best person running for the office, but we insisted his solutions cannot be enough on their own—he is buying us the time and morale that our people so desperately need to awaken their consciousness. That Trump is doing as well as he is means it is more socially acceptable to think of America as a nation, and more importantly, to think about what people constitute that nation and its interests. The Overton window is shifting, and it is going to keep shifting.

As summer arrives and the Cleveland convention dawns on the horizon, we are going to have even more Trump news to work with and turn to our benefit, whether it’s the vile serpents of the GOP bending the knee to their conqueror, or the human detritus that will be rioting outside. And they will riot all the way to November. All of this confirms our narrative, all of it legitimizes our paradigms, and all of it will make our movement grow. And all we had to do was meme magick.
May 28, 2016

Masks of U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are seen at Jinhua Partytime Latex Art and Crafts Factory in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China, May 25, 2016. There's no masking the facts. One Chinese factory is expecting Donald Trump to beat his likely U.S. presidential rival Hilary Clinton in the popularity stakes. At the Jinhua Partytime Latex Art and Crafts Factory, a Halloween and party supply business that produces thousands of rubber and plastic masks of everyone from Osama Bin Laden to Spiderman, masks of Donald Trump and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton faces are being churned out. Sales of the two expected presidential candidates are at about half a million each but the factory management believes  Trump will eventually run out the winner. "Even though the sales are more or less the same, I think in 2016 this mask will completely sell out," said factory manager Jacky Chen, indicating a Trump mask. REUTERS/Aly Song SEARCH "JINHUA MASK" FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH "THE WIDER IMAGE" FOR ALL STORIES. - RTX2EBDA

 

The alt-right position on Donald Trump has since the get-go been to use him to further our message. This policy continues to bear fruit, especially through our memes and infamous trolling of Twitter. Our shitposts, effortposts, and textbook raid tactics have successfully and successively stricken ((((journalists)))) across the political spectrum, from conservative outlets like Breitbart and National Review to the decidedly un-conservative New York Times, with Prussian precision. You can run “alt-right” as a query into Google News and get results going back months and months. Paid chattering class content creators have written about and continue to write about our memes like cuckservative, echo brackets, and rare pepes. BuzzFeed recently ran an article on the 2016 American Renaissance conference that mentions all of our interconnected ideological platforms, from Trump to White nationalism. Yes, BuzzFeed.

When Trump gets mass media coverage—which has been every day nonstop since last summer—we are prone to get mass media coverage sooner or later as well, because we are his loudest, edgiest, and most articulate supporters on social media. Social media has become a source of news in and of itself for the very lazy journalism industry over the last few years. They skim what other people find interesting, put it into 300-700 words or less of boilerplate, and boom, content. Hundreds of millions of people rely on Facebook’s trending column  or their Twitter feeds for this kind of news, and that some of that news itself is recursively drawn from those trend lists. Nothing has to even happen in the real world—though when it does it will be a huge step—for us to become newsworthy anymore. We just meme things into reality.

It is incredible to realize how far the alt-right has come in just the span of  a year, and it is really to our credit that our digital plan of action was a smashing success. We should give ourselves a round of applause. We were among the few voices who predicted that Trump was going to do well in the primary and had the potential to win it, when most pundits were dismissing him as a long-shot and a joke candidate. He now has enough delegates for an uncontested convention. When the media tried to shame Trump supporters for being too White, we said that was actually a strength. Now some polls show him beating Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton, whose support base is a mishmash of disparate and competing identity blocs. We said the future of the Republican party was populism or perish. He is the now nominee-apparent and recently said the future of the GOP was literally becoming a “worker’s party.” At that moment, we all sensed a great disturbance in the Schwartz, like six million oy veys echoing at once.

We staked legitimacy and authority on the Trump primary campaign and it paid off. We made a point of not only riding his coattails but broadcasting ourselves as we did, making it clear that he was our vehicle and our enemies were mutual. Anyone following the election actively has heard about the alt-right, especially Jews, millennials, and conservatives. I’ve had people I know send me news articles and I have to hold my tongue about how familiar I am with what’s being written about—that I know the goy being quoted, that we follow each other on Twitter, that we’re part of the same circles. It’s a great feel, a testimony to our success in the occult warfare of metapolitics.

We said Trump was a step in the right direction and the best person running for the office, but we insisted his solutions cannot be enough on their own—he is buying us the time and morale that our people so desperately need to awaken their consciousness. That Trump is doing as well as he is means it is more socially acceptable to think of America as a nation, and more importantly, to think about what people constitute that nation and its interests. The Overton window is shifting, and it is going to keep shifting.

As summer arrives and the Cleveland convention dawns on the horizon, we are going to have even more Trump news to work with and turn to our benefit, whether it’s the vile serpents of the GOP bending the knee to their conqueror, or the human detritus that will be rioting outside. And they will riot all the way to November. All of this confirms our narrative, all of it legitimizes our paradigms, and all of it will make our movement grow. And all we had to do was meme magick.