Last week, Shia LaBeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” live-stream was shuttered by Queens’ Museum of the Moving Image, who cited the “serious and ongoing safety hazard” associated with so many people, of all political stripes, furiously wanking in a single area. Since it was conceived by the team of LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö, and Luke Turner as a response to the inauguration of Donald Trump, the performance art piece had become a target for 4chan trolls and maybe-ironic white nationalists who were eager for a new medium to shout their memes into as a way of drowning out the ever-present void, creating a tense, generally irritating atmosphere that led to a 24/7 police presence, numerous arrests (including LaBeouf himself), and eventually, the whole thing being shut down. But before it was over, it gave the world a lasting, poignant image of America’s newest political force: a bunch of shirtless, bellowing, internet outlaws chugging milk while joking about racism.
Yes, milk, long beloved of babies, is now associated with attention-seeking, sort-of-kidding white supremacists, who have adopted it—like New Balance shoes and Wendy’s before it—as a winking symbol of their own racial superiority. As with every aspect of the “alt-right” culture, of course, understanding how this happened requires digging through multiple layers of internet irony and eye-stabbing 4chan threads: Essentially, somebody once posted a scientific study on higher instances of lactose intolerance among certain populations; some of 4chan’s legion of “shitposters”—who were just being edgy!—used this a springboard to joke about how the ability to drink milk is a mark of white purity. The meme then entered our bleary-eyed waking world when Internet-famous rapper Paperboy Prince told 4chan personality “/pol/blart,” live on Shia LaBeouf’s stream, that drinking milk is “hate speech,” thus giving their trolling the transformative power of someone actually caring.