The Atlantic Thinks Memes Are To Blame For January 6th

If I didn’t know this was actually published in The Atlantic, I would be SURE it was satire. I mean, this is hilarious. Just listen to these lines. The title is, “How Memes Led to an Insurrection.” Seriously, they’re blaming memes. Then the subtitle says, “A president who understood the power of memes was able to send thousands of people into battle against democracy itself.”

A ‘memesurrection,’ if you will. HAHAHA. I crack myself up.

Here’s the thing– the left can’t meme. It’s simply a fact. I’ve talked about it before when I posted about an incredible video mashup of Biden having no idea what’s going on, as well as when I posted about these insanely creative songs about the Mar-a-Lago FBI raid. Go watch all of those videos if you haven’t, because they’re incredible.

But because the left can’t meme, they haven’t been able to harness the power of the meme. And because they haven’t been able to harness it, they’ve decided it’s a bad and dangerous thing, and therefore a thing that should be banned. And how better to get the thing banned than to blame the thing for the events of January 6th. If January 6th is as bad as 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, as so many have claimed recently, and memes are responsible for January 6th, then memes must really be dangerous. The next logical step is obviously to call on Big Tech to censor memes.

Of course, this won’t affect the left because the left can’t meme anyway. But it’s true that memes are a powerful tool for the right, as the right is VERY good at them. Memes have a special ability to thwart censorship algorithms because, unlike typed words, a new algorithm must essentially be written to filter every single meme, and even the tiniest change requires a new algorithm as it technically becomes a new image or video, and therefore isn’t filtered with the original algorithm. They convey powerful messages with just the right amount of comedy or irony, which often reaches a different crowd than regular television or written content. They’re effective at calling out hypocrisy, often with easily recognized side-by-side representation. They’re concise, creative, versatile.

The Atlantic explains that memes are “a resonant, authorless idea that spreads through culture, evolving with every hand that touches it.” They further state that “these are a specific type, known as an image-macro meme, but memes can also be phrases (“Trump Nation”), slogans (“Stop the Steal”), gestures (“the dab”), numbers, hashtags—the list goes on.”

“Meme wars are culture wars that have been accelerated and intensified by the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flattens the experience of the world, eliminating patience, kindness, and understanding. They are launched online by people with an agenda, and when one is successful, it captures the attention of a lot of other people who feel that the meme lines up with who they are, what they stand for, and whom or what they are against.”

Basically, The Atlantic is saying that a meme is pretty much just anything that the right effectively utilizes in the culture war or in a political context. So theoretically, if they could justify censorship of memes by arguing that they are dangerous, using January 6th as the basis of their argument, then their allies in Big Tech could censor pretty much anything that gets some momentum for the right. Any hashtag, any slogan, any term, any photo, any video, any GIF… ANYTHING at all that gets traction with the right in a concise and powerful way could be censored as dangerous. That’s where they’re going with this.

I decided to include the pages of my favorite meme accounts, just to spite The Atlantic, who wants to censor memes. So check them out because there is some incredible content.