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POLITICS APRIL 2, 2019

“The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing

Groups Are Training the Next Generation of
Social Media Warriors
Memes helped elect Donald Trump. Now well-funded conservative groups are using them to
proselytize.
STORY BY STEPHANIE MENCIMER, VIDEO BY MARK HELENOWSKI

 How Right-Wing Memes Go Viral

Benny Johnson took to the stage at the convention center in Palm Beach, Florida,
before an audience of cheering young Trump supporters in December to lead a
session titled “How to Own the Libs.”

“I ask myself every day: How do we own the libs?” said Johnson, at the time a
reporter for the right-wing Daily Caller. “How do we do it in a way that makes a
difference? Because these people deserved to be wrecked.”

According to Johnson, the answer to that question is memes. These bits of humor
or political propaganda—generally images overlaid with a caption designed to go
viral—are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they
might have helped elect Donald Trump. Or as notorious internet troll Chuck
Johnson has
has said
said “We memed the president into existence.”
said,

Following that unexpected meme-driven success, well-funded conservative

groups are making a more organized push to train young internet-savvy right-
wingers in the art of meme-making, enlisting a growing army in what they see as
the coming meme war of 2020. Turning Point USA, the conservative campus
group that organized the conference, is merely one of these organizations seeking
to sway hearts, minds, and elections via meme trainings. And it’s clear that when
it comes to political memes, the left—which has never taken them very seriously
—is trailing the right badly, and falling even further behind.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Angelo
Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which
did a study
study of
of Facebook memes last summer. “Memes are a new front in the
Facebook memes
asymmetry. What you’re looking at here with memes is storytelling around the
bend, and what you’re seeing is the future.”

Trump’s presidential campaign keyed into

the power of memes early on, monitoring
Memes are best known
obscure meme sites and boosting pro-
for littering social media,
Trump images and videos onto mainstream
but some experts think
platforms like Facebook. Facebook’s
they might have helped algorithms favor images and videos over
elect Donald Trump more nuanced text posts or links to news
president. articles, so pro-Trump memes quickly went
viral. During the campaign, memes also
helped spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton’s health and the Pizzagate
conspiracy theory that prompted an armed North Carolina man to show up at a
DC pizza parlor to break up a nonexistent child sex ring supposedly led by
Democratic Party operatives.

Perhaps no one understood the effectiveness of memes better than former

Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who had served as executive chairman
of the far-right publication Breitbart News. In 2016, only 5 percent of Breitbart‘s
posts were of images, but those images accounted for half of the site’s most-
shared posts on Facebook.

Jeff Giesea, a consultant who has worked with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and
the Koch brothers, is a self-described “memetics” expert. During the 2016
campaign, he joined with men’s rights agitator Mike Cernovich toto organize
organize
MAGA3X
MAGA3X,
MAGA3X a grassroots army of online trolls who worked to meme Trump to the
White House. The effort produced tens of thousands of social media accounts, all
working in concert to promote Trump, with a heavy emphasis on iconography.
They even created a flash-mob meme generator to make it easy for Trump
meme generator
supporters to hook up in real life.

Giesea has long argued that memes are such a powerful tool they should be used
as cyberwarfare to combat propaganda from ISIS and other foreign threats. In
2015, he wrote
wrote in
in aa NATO journal on information warfare that “it seems obvious
NATO journal
that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling
and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal
and morale of our common enemies…Memetic warfare is about taking control of
the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space. It’s about denigrating, disrupting,
and subverting the enemy’s effort to do the same.”

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The same could be said of memes in politics. Cheap, subversive, and designed to
provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information
guerrilla warfare. Republicans have gotten Giesea’s message, while Democrats
have all but ignored it.

Johnson’s skill in this area launched him to

Washington media fame for a while, until
“Right-wing speaker
he was ousted from BuzzFeed and then the
training has been around
Independent Journal Review after being
for decades,” says Media
accused of plagiarism. He seems to have
Matters president found his calling with Turning Point USA,
Angelo Carusone. the conservative campus activist group
“Memes are a new front that sponsored the student convention in
in the asymmetry.” Palm Beach and is itself something of a
meme factory.

Founded in 2012, TPUSA got its startup funding from Foster Friess, a wealthy
Republican donor, and it has since raked in donations from the oil and gas
industry and organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers. With a budget of
more than $8 million last year, TPUSA amplifies its campus presence by churning
out endless “Big Government Sucks” memes on Instagram, Twitter, and
Facebook.

Turning Point USA

Like most memes, a few of TPUSA’s are clever and spread far, and many more
have been trashed by internet trolls, who have created a whole meme subgenre
they call “Toilet Paper USA.” Johnson was on hand in Florida to help TPUSA
members up their game.

Johnson started his tutorial with “based

based
based Lindsey Graham,” a video montage of the
South Carolina senator’s angry performance during the contentious confirmation
hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually
assaulting a woman in high school. “That is a special moment,” he explained,
noting that Kavanaugh was confirmed in spite of the allegations. “In your
lifetime, there has never been a culture war that conservatives have won except
for this.”

He proceeded to walk the audience through the evolution of Graham memes

that went viral during the hearing and may have helped change public opinion on
Kavanaugh. On the big screen, Johnson showed photos and a video he had taken
of Graham coming out of the Capitol after a day of hearings. In the video,
Graham is coolly adjusting his tie and smiling, while in the background, a police
officer restrains a hysterical-looking woman who’s screaming at him about
Kavanaugh. Johnson tweeted that he had just taken “the most thug life
@LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.”

From there, the internet took care of the rest. “Did this sucker meme?” Johnson
asked, laughing. The answer was yes. Creative internet users tweaked and
photoshopped the image, both still and video, as it spread. Johnson showed one
meme of the tie-adjusting Graham superimposed on the burning Twin Towers.
Then one featuring Joe Biden planting a kiss on the screaming woman. And
finally, one that turned Graham into a “thug life” rap video star.

“This is how you know you’ve made it in this profession,” Johnson told his
audience. “When memes take life.”

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In February, TPUSA hired Johnson to do this sort of thing full time as its chief
creative officer, a sign of just how seriously well-funded pro-Trump organizations
are taking the business of memes.

The TPUSA conference also included a second, more interactive session on

memes, hosted by two minor Instagram stars, Rogan O’Handley (Instagram
handle DC_Draino
DC_Draino and Grant Godwin (the_typical-liberal
DC_Draino) the_typical-liberal
the_typical-liberal who got into the
the_typical-liberal),
nuts and bolts of the art form—or, as Godwin explained, how to get your Pepe the
Frog memes to go viral.

Two weeks earlier, meme training got top billing at the American Priority
Conference, which billed itself as an “America First,” pro-Trump political
gathering. Speakers included Roger Stone, the longtime Trump associate who was
indicted the next month for obstruction and false statements in the special
counsel investigation, and Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted less than a week as
White House communications director. The conference featured a session on
memetics by Tom Shadilay, aa producer
producer for
for Mike Cernovich.
Cernovich (Shadilay’s name may
Mike Cernovich
itself be a meme: It’s a popular hashtag on Gab, the social media site favored by
popular hashtag
the far right, and a code word for trolls on 4chan. Shadilay is the name of a 1986
code word
Italian disco song by a band called P.E.P.E., whose album art featured a cartoon
frog that resembles Pepe the Frog. Tom Shadilay does not appear to have any
internet presence before his Twitter account was created in May 2017. He stopped
responding to my emails after I asked whether that’s really his last name.)

In January, Liberty Con, a national convention of libertarian students, offered

advice from David Gay, a libertarian activist who runs the Facebook group Liberty
Liberty
Memes
Memes which has nearly a half-million followers spreading his political message
Memes,
through memes. (Until late 2016, Giesea, the meme expert, was on the board of
Students for Liberty, which sponsored the conference.)*** Johnson has four events
scheduled this month on college campuses on “winning the meme wars.”

Boston University professor Gianluca Stringhini studies memes for a living. When
I told him that well-funded right-wing organizations were specifically training
activists for the next great meme war, he was surprised. Typically, he says, memes
are seen as organic, emerging from the dark corners of the internet, not
propaganda directed by people in politics. “Memes are tools for information
warfare,” he says. “Probably this is a new way of doing politics. A new weapon that
campaigns can use.”

It’s not clear exactly whether memes do, in fact, change public opinion, but
conservative groups working to train grassroots troops seem to think so. So do the
Russians. In the
the 2018 report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee
2018 report
to investigate the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that meddled in
the 2016 presidential election, researchers discovered that the IRA was especially
fond of memes put out by TPUSA. Using accounts that it created to look like
ordinary Americans and spread misinformation and propaganda, the IRA gave
TPUSA memes a boost across multiple social media platforms. But the researchers
couldn’t determine exactly what the impact of all those memes was.

Last year, Stringhini and six colleagues published

published aa study
study on the origins of memes,
analyzing more than 2 billion social media posts on Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, and
Gab, to figure out where the most popular memes get their start. Stringhini says
the most trafficked memes start on right-wing internet forums, places like
4chan’s politically incorrect /pol/ channel and Reddit’s /r/the_Donald/
/r/the_Donald/ subreddit.
From there, the far right has been extremely successful in getting its stuff to take
off on mainstream platforms. Stringhini notes that after the 2016 presidential
election, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, tweeted her thanks
to 4chan and Reddit users for making it all happen, putting a sharp point on how
much people on the right believe that memes are influencing public opinion.

As a result, conservative groups seem to be incorporating memes into their

training arsenal for grassroots activists in a way that has no parallel on the left. In
fact, “the left can’t meme” is itself a subgenre of memes, reflecting an idea
accepted on both ends of the political spectrum that progressive activists are
really bad at this form of political warfare.

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One potential exception is long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew

Yang, who has recently catapulted to fame thanks to memes. But those memes
are coming from the same sources, on Reddit and 4chan, that promoted Trump,
not from liberal groups, creating a bizarre movement of Yang fans among white
nationalists.

Media Matters’ Carusone says people on the left are more concerned with
nuanced facts and gray areas that can’t always be boiled down accurately into a
photo with a caption. On the left, he says, “every meme has to have a million
qualifiers, so that it’s no longer a meme. It’s a Medium post.” Conservatives, on
the other hand, tend to communicate their ideas “in ways that are very
reductionist. They’re also much more comfortable lying, and their audiences are
much more likely to accept it.”

Benny Johnson has his own take on what makes a good political meme. The first
step for successful lib ownership, he told the students assembled in Palm Beach, is
to “challenge the culture,” as Graham did during the Kavanaugh hearings.
Second, “join the conversation” by creating an interaction, but be sure it will
“demonstrate the superiority of conservative ideas.”

As an example, he played a goofy video he made with Federal Communications

Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. In the video, Pai is dressed like Santa Claus,
wielding a light saber, and he defends his plan for “internet freedom” in response
to criticism of the Trump administration’s move to end net neutrality. “We were
trolling the internet,” Johnson said. And it worked.

He flashed through a host of viral memes that took off after the video was posted.
In the video, there’s a shot of Pai in front of a screen eating popcorn and watching
a movie. Meme-makers have swapped in clips to make it look like Pai is watching
Hitler rallies or the burning Twin Towers. Even Luke Skywalker weighed in:

The third step in successful lib ownership, Johnson instructed the crowd, was
critical: “Have more fun than the left.” He played a video he had made in 2015 of
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz cooking bacon on a machine gun. “Can you think of three
thing libs hate more?” he exclaimed with a laugh. “Ted Cruz, bacon, guns.” All the
ingredients for a good meme.

Finally, Johnson concluded: “Smile. You’re on the winning side.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of Giesea’s tenure on
the board.

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