Understand your trolls better with this glossary of far-right terms
To be online is to engage in a never-ending death march to the bottom of irony, where sardonic memes turn into real-world problems and then jokes about those problems turn into sardonic memes. The loose assemblage of bickering, sarcastic racists known as the “alt-right” revels in this disarray, using its vagaries as a means for ever-more convoluted in-jokes and secret handshakes. The disdain expressed for “normies” among this set is actually just for people who aren’t up on the layers of meaning and non-meaning appended to each meme, meaning that glib 4chan nihilists have, finally, become a scene like any other and run rampant with elitists, cliques, and in-fighting.
And so BuzzFeed’s “Glossary Of Far-Right Terms & Memes” is helpful in multiple ways—first, it demystifies just what the fuck the various screaming anime figures trolling female celebrities on Twitter are talking about, and second, by casting a light on it, it destabilizes their power structure of in-jokes. Of course, the way this works is that new in-jokes and memes immediately emerge to replace them—figures like Trash Dove and Bernard The Polar Bear were actually invented as false memes—meaning that the work of a glossary like this is never finished, and, in some ways, self-defeating.
Still, for people not regularly donning a hazmat suit to patrol Reddit and 4chan, it’ll fill in the gaps on straightforward memes like Pepe The Frog and Redpilling as well as slightly deeper cuts like Moon Man, Feelsman, and the sarcastic appropriation of the Bogdanoff brothers. Seen a bunch of Banes around? That’s just this:
A convoluted meme about Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. In the opening scene, Bane is brought onto an airplane by a CIA officer played by the guy who plays Littlefinger in Game Of Thrones. While Bane, the anarchy-loving villain, seems like an obvious idol for 4chan, they became weirdly enamored with the CIA agent, partly over an awkwardly homoerotic piece of dialogue (CIA: “You’re a big guy.” Bane: “…for you.”) While Baneposting isn’t explicitly alt-right, it’s bled over.