The far-right has an image problem. I mean, as well as the whole fascist thing, which is never a good look.
I’m talking specifically about memes. The far-right has terrible memes, and there are three reasons for this. Most importantly, because fascism is a hard sell to most people, their gene pool is smaller. There are fewer people to make memes, which means the quality of what they produce can we pretty awful. Secondly, far-right memes come from a place of anger.
Everyone knows memes are supposed to be fun. If you’re emotionally invested in a meme, there’s no way it will be funny. It’s also the case that Facebook is the social media of choice for fascists, and it so happens that Facebook compresses images to within an inch of their lives.
My theory is that some fascists struggle to save images correctly, instead opting to screenshot. So when your racist uncle posts a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot of a far-right meme, that’s why it looks like shit.
So without further ado, may I present the JOE Guide to Far-Right Memes.
Who is the minority?
I’d like to start with my personal favourite – a white genocide meme.
A good far-right meme relies on statistics to get its point across. This particular meme (source: ¯_(ツ)_/¯) uses an admirable number of contortions in an attempt to make white people a minority. You know you’ve found something special when the use of the word ‘Oriental’ isn’t the main talking point of the image. My personal highlight is the grouping together of ‘Arab + Other (Including Hispanic)’ into one racial group, as if this is some fucking Dulux colour chart.
Shut the fuck up LIBERAL
It’s a giant, fire-breathing – I dunno - tortazoid (?). What I particularly love about this one is the fiery text, which was probably created on a website called something like cool-online-graphics.com or free-text-online.net, best viewed in Netscape Navigator. The unintentional result, of course, being that LIBERAL is your new favourite metal band.
Two World Wars and one EU
Because they’re so bad at designing their own, you’ll often find ‘hijacked’ memes such as the one above. What I particularly like about this extremely ‘yer da’ example is that someone has copied the image into word and just typed their own caption using Time New Roman. The only thing missing here would be that little wavy red line indicating any spelling errors.
BREXIT: Escaping Europe
Here’s another example of a hijacked illustration. I love this one so much because the original illustration was clearly already making the pro-Brexit point, but whoever edited it was so excited to get their version out there, they had no time to change the default font and so we are once again left with this Time New Roman masterpiece.
Manly men memes
A common feature among far-right memes is the ultra-masculinisation of their political leaders. In Britain, this is usually Knights Templar themed, presumably because they’re huge Monty Python fans.
The two examples I’ve included here I have to assume were created as piss-takes, but – I swear – I have seen each of them used earnestly by far-right twitter accounts.
First, we have a portly 70-year-old property developer surfing on an own-brand tank, an eagle firing a machine gun, obviously, and one of those flags you attach to your car by winding up the window during a major football tournament...
Second, a middle-aged career politician and former banker, rendered as a Nazi soldier. Because of course...
ANGEL WARRIORS
If you were lucky enough to have internet access in 1996, this meme will feel like a blast from the past. I won’t make fun of it out of respect for the ANGEL WARRIORS and their HEDGE OF PROTECTION.
TAKE YOUR Shadow GOVERNMENT AND LEAVE
I’m only including this one because it features the only known silhouette of the George Galloway Convention.
