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The Official Voice of the US Government Is Cruel, Gross, and Weird. What Is That Doing to Us?
Joking memes about imprisonment, deportation, and death by alligator are designed to radicalize and desensitize.
This is, at the moment, the official voice of the U.S. government: a rancid mixture of trolling, cruelty, propaganda, and crass jokes about the human suffering they’re creating, an effort, as Wired’ s Tess Owen recently put it, to turn actions like mass deportation into “one big joke.” On Instagram and Twitter (their largest audience), government entities including the White House, ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security attempt to surf viral trends to expanded public attention: they twist memes and sounds popular on TikTok, repurpose South Park ’s parodies for their own self-promotion, and blend it all with images that draw on or directly reproduce classical art and Americana paintings that are designed to stir nostalgia for an imagined past. Stanley says that it’s part of the overall structure of what his colleague Timothy Snyder calls “ sadopopulism “: putting policies into place that inflict real pain and harm on the U.S. populace, while also encouraging scapegoating and xenophobia against stigmatized groups. Supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ past president, helped popularized his brutal and deadly drug war through what Buzzfeed News called “ a never-ending meme-driven propaganda campaign.” Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that Russian milbloggers—ultranationalist and often explicitly pro-war accounts—hugely increased the number of propagandistic, and often manipulated, images they were posting on Telegram in the two weeks leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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