kamikadse161

(this is part of a series, originally by @[email protected], linked together there: https://rant.li/kamikadse161/online-far-right)

Content Warning for all kinds of fascist symbols, and fascist bigotry like explicit antisemitism, racism, misogyny, glorification of violence and so on in the provided examples

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SIGH.

Here's Trump flashing the white👌 sign today while saying some racist shit.

I guess I'm going to talk about the disingenuous irony in memetic warfare today after all.

So let's talk about the 👌 sign, y'all.

This is a continuation of a thread on coded white supremacist language, where it comes from, and how to spot it.

Consider it your nazi-to-English dictionary.

It starts here.

On the chans, the term “memetic warfare” gets used with the sort of disingenuous irony you'd expect of the far right.

For example, one of the most popular post series on 8chan's /pol/ is all about making memes that glorify the Christ Church shooter.

They're trying to be funny edgelords, but they're also very much trying to make meme content like this, that they can share and use to communicate the idea that mass shooters of Muslims are heroes.

“Memetic warfare” has its roots in old 4chan raid culture, when one 4chan forum (often the proudly racist trolls at /b/) would “raid” another board, shitposting low-quality troll content in an effort to overwhelm and freak out the target forum.

Raid culture expanded beyond 4chan and into other forum websites and even comment sections of news sites.

White supremacists co-opted raid culture, using it to spread their ideology of hate through mass shitposting and spamming.

Memetic warfare “ops” (or “missions”) have their roots in both the prank humor and raid culture of the chans.

The idea is for white supremacists to work together on social media to spread the idea that some benign phrase or symbol is racist, or vice versa.

Here's a thread I did about a failed attempt at a memetic warfare “ops” by 8channers, where they were attempting to convince the internet that the Star of David was a transphobic symbol from the far right.

Channers (known as “anons,” since all posters on these forums post under the name “anonymous”) will build and workshop these memes together, trying to craft disinformation believable enough to go viral.

The proto-campaign for these ops was a 2017 white supremacist 4chan mission to widely disseminate the phrase “it's okay to be white” as “proof of concept” that such an, ahem, “harmless” phrase would provoke backlash

Leaving aside the question of whether the phrase in and of itself is “harmless” (it isn't), “it's okay to be white” immediately became a marker of white supremacy because it was white supremacists tweeting and posting and flyering and stickering the phrase everywhere.

That didn't stop disingenuous assholes like Tucker Carlson from handwringing as though anyone objecting to the phrase was practically advocating white genocide. (Source: Wikipedia)

Neo-nazis & other more traditional hate groups eagerly adopted the phrase, cementing it in the white supremacist lexicon.

And— wouldn't you know it?— ADL did a little digging and discovered the phrase had actually been an explicit white power and Klan slogan all along.

While “it's okay to be white” was the first successful campaign explicitly rooted in memetic warfare principles, it found its inspiration in the messy origins of that symbol Trump flashed today: the “white power” incarnation of the 👌 sign.

The 👌 sign's first explicit association with whiteness came from a far right vine personality, who flashed it as an example in a video titled, “white guys be like.”

Soon he and his nazi buddy Milo were flashing it all the time at Trump events.

(Images: KnowYourMeme)

By December 2016, far right troll and distant Obama relative was flashing it in imitation of alt-right Pepe memes, possibly not knowing that Milo and his friend had popularized it as a sly reference to whiteness and white victory in the form of Trump.

By mid-February 2017, liberal media sources were reporting the 👌 sign's racist connotations in the context of Trumpworld.

The right mocked the idea, pointing to other folks who had used the sign in other contexts in the past. (Images: KYM)

At the end of February, 4chan users launched the mission that would lead to and inspire future mimetic warfare ops like “it's okay to be white,” “gender star,” and “the honkler.”

They called it Operation O-KKK.

(Image: KYM)

The idea was simple: flood social media with claims that the 👌 symbol represented “WP” for “white power.”

It was already a symbol explicitly linked to whiteness and Trump's racist agenda, so it wasn't a hard message to sell.

Not only that, but actual nazis began to make a point of using it, culiminating with batshit nazis Mike Cernovich and Cassandra Fairbanks flashing it AT A PHOTO OP AT THE WHITE HOUSE.

So 👌 as a far right symbol began as a Milo-popularized in-joke about Trump and white superiority and took off with the alt-right.

Liberal media called it racist, right wing media pretended that was absurd, and Reddit capitalized on that controversy to make it UNDENIABLY racist.

Reddit did its job: real nazis like Fairbanks and Cernovich picked it up and the violent white supremacist Proud Boys adopted it as practically a hello wave.

When the Christ Church shooter made his first public appearance post-massacre, he made sure to flash it, too.

Crypto-nazis (nazis using coded symbols to indicate their beliefs while denying their nazism) have chosen this symbol because it was once so benign, so innocuous that it would be laughable on its face to read anything sinister into it.

Even as they use it to indicate their white supremacism to other white supremacists, they'll tell you it's a troll, a joke you fell for.

Haha, they made you think it was a symbol for white supremacy, but here's Obama flashing it in 2012!

Don't you feel stupid now?

Except, it is actually a symbol for white supremacism, now.

And this disingenuous irony allows them to maintain plausible deniability, to avoid accountability. It allows right wing “journalists” to feign ignorance or disbelief.

And all the while, they're saying, “I'm a nazi” right in front of you, then either laughing in your face that you “fell for it” or laughing behind your back that you thought it was just an 👌 sign.

That's what Trump is doing with America right now, when he flashes this sign.

He knows what he's doing, making a gesture first popularized by a barely-crypto nazi who literally accepts sieg heils in place of applause at karaoke and kept popular by white supremacist thugs.

Trump knows exactly what he's doing.

He couldn't be shouting “I'M A FUCKING FASCIST” any louder unless he literally shouted “I'm a fucking fascist.

That's what he's saying.

We should listen.

(/thread for now- next segment will cover more coded nazi words originating in the chans)