Cable Street

In 2016 you were likely subjected to pepe memes - that little green frog with the shit-eating grin. It turns out he was a far-right trojan horse used to propagate far-right ideas.Memes are huge part of politics, especially on the far-right. These people who otherwise would be considered extremists, have increasingly used memes, or meme magic, or memetic warfare (the list goes on) to subversively push their far-right ideology on otherwise normal people.Memes are themselves not inherently bad. But when harnessed by harmful actors, they can be incredibly dangerous. To discuss memes and how the far-right has weaponized them, I was joined by Dr. Heather Suzanne Woods from Kansas State University and Leslie A. Hahner from Baylor University to talk about their book Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right.We talked about how memes have created a new universal way of communicating between online communities, how the far-right has weaponized memes, how people go from sharing memes to marching in white su