We Hunted The Mammoth
Donald Trump’s comments about women are often so retrograde they could have come from Mad Men-era America. This gave a Syrian artist who calls himself Saint Hoax an idea: why not pair some of Trump’s more odious pronouncements with sexist ads from half a century ago?
It’s not news to anyone that some of the most popular antifeminist “arguments” are in fact logical fallacies.
One thing we’ve learned over the past year is that memes can actually influence politics. Alas, we learned this lesson from the rise of the meme-obsessed neo-Nazi alt-right.
Memeday has returned! Today’s installment consists of a one-question POP QUIZ.
Question: Where did I find the meme at the top of this post?
I’ll give you the answer after this weirdly filtered picture of my cat Sweetie Pie Jonus:
This lovely meme, found in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, pretty unreadable even at full resolution. But it’s not too hard to see what point the meme-maker was trying to get across.
So I made some propaganda posters. Well, technically speaking, I took some old propaganda posters and turned them into anti-Trump, anti-alt right posters. Yes, they’re a bit silly, but (to very loosely paraphrase the terrible Barry Goldwater) silliness in defense of liberty is no vice; humorlessness in pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Can ponies be white supremacists? I’m going to assume they can, at least for the sake of today’s Alt-Right Pony meme, a variation on the classic I Wish I Could Talk to Ponies meme.
Here are a couple more I came up with, based on some actual super-catchy Alt-Right slogans, and a template in case any of you want to make your own.
The Trump transition continues to be an embarrassing mess. Today, Trump is holding his first meeting with a foreign leader since being elected. And he’s going into it completely unprepared. The Washington Post reports:
So I took a look at the Donald Trump Pepe blog today, for the first time in a long time, and the memes on display there seem to be getting darker and cruder and more violent as election day draws closer.
So the Alt-Right and its fellow travelers have a brilliant new strategy to defeat Hillary Clinton — a hashtag (and assorted hashtag-related memes) intended to trick voters, especially women, into thinking that Hillary intends to draft women for an inevitable war with Russia.
