Reddit Occupied Government
On The Memeification of Fascism
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Nothing has been slowly eroding my will to live quite the way seeing official government accounts posting AI slop memes about their cruel inhumane policies has. It’s not enough, apparently, that we’ve been slowly — then fast — descending into hell, led by perhaps the most odious, unwashed losers on the face of the earth. Now we have to witness a slew of shit-tier epic bacon Reddit memes from the White House celebrating this descent along the way. The type of brazenly anti-human posting that used to be reserved for dark corners of the internet that most knew better than to tread, is now common fare posted by Very Serious official comms accounts. 4chan is empty and the groypers are here: the devolution of American society as evidenced by a quick glance at the DHS Twitter page. In-group signaling on the right used to be talking about “family values” and “the moral majority”, now it’s the open reveling in human suffering, “shitposting” about feeding vulnerable groups to wild animals, and making Miyazaki-style memes about crying immigrant mothers. Just as Twitter itself has become a bastion of the sort of gutter racism that would permanently exile you from polite society a decade ago, the government itself is now patient zero of this reactionary disease.
The Trump administration has declared to the masses: We can’t give you healthcare, we can’t make your rent cheaper, we can’t even lower the cost of groceries, but we can give you permission to be your worst selves, we can promise you an endless supply of lessers to feed into the orphan crushing machine. Simulacra has replaced real politics in a society where there is no space for parties or movements that want to improve lives. Capital smothers class struggle in the crib, so what remains is an eternal battle for the culture. And as much as it pains me to say it, the Reddit mods are winning. They’re living proof that you can “win” and still be an abject loser.
Trump has always been an iconoclastic figure in an environment where out of touch, buttoned-up elites rule over us with impunity and little interest in what we desire. Outsider status (despite being the very epitome of ruling class) has been his greatest strength. He was carried to victory on the hunched backs of a thousand shitposting alt-righters the first time around, and in this second term he’s abandoned ambiguous gestures at them in favor of an open embrace - hiring them for comms, adopting their media strategy. With a country promising so little to its people is it any wonder that we’ve devolved into hyperreality where spectacle has replaced substance and barbarism has replaced brotherly love?
The neoliberal world order that has dominated for a half century, paired with the sort of world-shrinking interconnectedness of the technological age, has produced this unholy child that owes its very existence to the promise of a halfway decent life being ripped away from the masses. If you hate your rulers but there is “no alternative” as Maggie Thatcher once said, what else is there to do but lean into your most base instincts and desperately signal how little you care about your fellow man in the hopes that you find solidarity in savagery? When life has made you a loser, might as well throw your lot in with the winners — the cruel beasts that are your overlords.
This is not to imply that these people are victims, they’ve chosen the side of the oppressor and are unequivocal enemies of humanity. Explanation does not mean exculpation. It is merely a lens to understand why we’re here. There is a sort of broadly adopted nihilism playing out across the political spectrum in the idea that it’s important to signal how much you don’t care about this or that group. Whether it’s “immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country” or “Texas deserved it for voting red”, it’s a toxic stew that casts people into heaven or hell, putting us at war with each other instead of with the people actually fucking up our lives. Celebration of the spectacle of cruelty has replaced any thoughtful commentary on our many deepening crises. People desperate for something to believe in, when nothing is real and everything has a price, have picked a conman as their God and prostrated themselves on the altar of his sadism. To be countercultural now is to revel in your inhumanity. To make sure there’s not even a quiet part, it’s all being done out loud. To make mockery of the suffering all around you. Maybe everything isn’t fucked after all, maybe it’s great — hilarious even. Maybe my life doesn’t suck if “my guys” are winning and the libs are officially owned. The ability to shock is a poor substitute for the ability to control your life, but we take what we can get.
In Society of the Spectacle, Marxist philosopher Guy Debord talks about how liberal capitalist society is a diffuse spectacle where social relations are mediated by images that conceal power relations and replace true connection with a mirage that promotes alienation. The purpose of the spectacle is to distract the spectator and conceal the source of their exploitation. In the memeification of fascism we are seeing perhaps the greatest living example of this theory in action. The spectator is given permission to see themselves as above the other and to revel in the obliteration of their enemies. What is being obscured is that themselves and their ostensible enemies both are victims of the same people and system. The promotion of separateness from one another - the furthering of our own alienation - through these images which at first appear to affirm their audience’s connection to something somewhere that validates their existence. “This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society”.1
As we stray further and further into the hyperreality of capitalism at this late stage, we see that nearly everything is mediated through signs and symbols. We are barely ever getting to the heart of the thing, the core of the problem, the root of our actually existing society. We are nearly never even aware of the long shadow of capitalist social relations over everything we do and are. And as material conditions devolve further and further, we see that these symbols are more crude, more overt, less concerned with appearances and more able to outright replace reality itself.
Though jarring and disorienting as it is, on some level this memified barbarism contains a seed of honesty that is confronting to witness. Maybe that’s why it shocks us. This, after all, is a country founded on genocide and enslavement, built on the backs of the colonized and oppressed, currently committing a genocide, that has left its bloody fingerprints over nearly every square inch of this earth. Why should it get to play the game of “decency” and “restoring the soul of the nation” when we know that it possesses neither? Why should a tailored suit and hollywood smile be allowed to mask the well of depravity committed in our name? Perhaps it’s time we are forced to confront the contradictions of what “America” means to the world, to us, to the future of humanity. Maybe the reason we recoil at the memes is not because they are a mirage, but because they are a mirror, reflecting all of the hideous things that were always there but we didn’t want to see. If we want to break the spectacle we will need to reveal the truth contained inside these illusions, and unveil the true face of what we are. It is only in exposing the nightmare that we can begin to wake up.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, 1967. https://inventin.lautre.net/livres/Debord-Society-of-the-Spectacle.pdf.
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You have a great talent for precise, forceful language. Thank you.
From the beginning of the Trump ascent, I have always been struck by the aesthetics of it all, an almost macabre feeling of the grotesque. It is profoundly anti-human as you capture here.
People like to think of Trump as the embodiment of the worst of America, when really I think he is the pure American. He is not America’s dark id, he is its super-ego
"Though jarring and disorienting as it is, on some level this memified barbarism contains a seed of honesty that is confronting to witness."
This is exactly why books like Blood Meridian have become so popular. It was written before the internet, has never been adapted to film, and yet the Judge has been memeified all over 4chan and Reddit for better or worse. There was a time when the "overwhelming carnage" made it difficult reading even for critics; now it just feels honest.