By David Futrelle
That /pol/ campaign to smear the anti-fascist left with fake memes suggesting AntiFas support domestic violence against women, children, and the elderly? The one that I and others exposed yesterday as nothing more than a political dirty trick?
Racist fantasy author and all-around terrible person Theodore “Vox Day” Beale thinks it was a smashing success — and something to be proud of.
In a post today, Beale hails the supposed “brilliance” of the fake-meme Tweeters — despite their meme campaign being so transparently dishonest it was recognized as a fraud almost instantly. In Beale’s mind, this is “rhetorical meme magic” at work.
“Remember,” he writes,
the most effective rhetoric communicates truth without necessarily being literally truthful in the details. It persuades through emotion, not reason … .
This from someone who wrote an entire book complaining that “SJWs always lie.”
To those on his side who worry that all this constant lying might backfire, destroying the credibility of the alt-right and its fellow travelers, Beale has nothing but contempt, denouncing what he calls “dialectic-speaking spergs” for “cling[ing] to the belief that ‘credibility’ is the key to successful persuasion.”
Beale, who evidently isn’t much worried about his own credibility, has done his part to push the fake memes, urging his followers to spread the memes around and even posting several on Twitter himself, alongside such comments as “[t]here is no place for the violence and savagery of the #AltLeft in civilized society.”
Never mind that the particular “savagery” he is denouncing here — AntiFa’s supposed support of domestic violence — is something his 4chan pals have simply made up.
Naturally, Beale’s followers are enthusiastic about this particular form of “persuasion.”
“These meme wars are, from a sales perspective, BRILLIANT,” declares someone called dc.sunsets.
They’re the poster child of how Madison Avenue does product packaging in order to manipulate people into buying landfill-filling crap they don’t need.
Huh. What does that say about the ideology they’re trying to sell?
In a followup comment , dc.sunsets adds that
literal truth, veracity or “evidence” doesn’t matter. All it takes is a grain of truth, even a seed of plausibility, to leverage POWERFUL, emotion-level, irresistible re-framing.
Re-framing. That’s my word of the month, possibly year, and perhaps decade.
Reaching into people’s subconscious and turning them like pancakes. (heh, heh, heh.)
A commenter called Cail Corishev, meanwhile, has some advice for those wanting to make their own fake memes. “[I]f there’s a man’s fist in the image,” he writes, “try to make it a fat or wimpy, liberal-looking fist, not a real man’s.”
Ah yes, the good old “liberal-looking fist” ploy. Sixty percent of the time, it persuades every time!
Totally off topic, but:
I finally got my confirmation yesterday! My surgery will be one month from today! I just need to figure out the travel arrangements.
It’s kind of amazing just how much a person can look forward to being knocked out and cut in various ways.
@Jesalin
That’s great news, congratulations 😀 !
Congratulations, Jesalin. Your news is much more preferable than the dreck these guys call memes. May you have an uneventful surgery and swift recovery.
Ah, the classic Teddy Beale method. Whatever happens, whoever gets hurt, declare “Victory!!1!” afterwards. He’s never met a loss he can’t claim as a win.
This appears to be a common alt-reich delusion, that everything can be seen as a win from a certain point of view, and the other views don’t matter at all.
Hell yeah, Jesalin!
Your victory is imminent <3 I'm so happy for you!
Fucking hell what a complete and total nazi. I would not spare vox a punch that’s for sure. He sounds just like hitler.
So, Teddy is admitting that the manosphere, the alt-right, and the white male dudebros they see as persuadable are emotional, irrational and easily swayed. Not the uber rational masters of STEM that they make themselves out to be.
Good to know.
:O
@Jesalin! I’m so happy for you! I hope you can get the travel arrangements sorted! One week, that’s so fast! Go get’em!
So…bragging about being a liar, pretty much.
Fucking amazing.
So VD is no admitting that he is lying.
This from someone who proclaimed before that he “never lies on the internet”. (somewhere on File 770)
The sad thing is. People are following this guy and spend their money to hurt his imaginary enemys.
Congrats, Jesalin!
Aheh. White dudes overinflate their intelligence and consider everyone else gullible, story at 11.
The channers seem to think they’re movers and shakers because of Trump, as if their meme magic were responsible for the election. Nevermind that the actual win was due to for-profit actual-fake-news campaigns that were doing it to pursue ad dollars and donations, a la Rebel Media and Breitbart. Similar strategy, but the chanlords are far to disorganized and, frankly, dumb. They know how to lie, but they’re terrible at doing it convincingly.
Which is how we get Vox Day bragging about the lies on the public never-forgets-anything internet, with a campaign of stupid hate from some wannabe social engineers who think that chubby-fingered-fists and bruised women make a compelling argument for fascism. They’re just free-riding on the success of actual organized misinformation campaigns.
I’m basically calling them parasites, yes.
We have a problem with lies and misinformation right now, but it ain’t the chanlords that are the cause. They wish they were the cause.
Dude, just photoshop the antifa logo on the back of the palm, like a tattoo. That’s easier and sends a clearer message. Or better yet, put a text label like in rightwing political cartoons.
@David, was there something malformed or wrong in my recent post on the Old Man Yells at Crowd post? It no posto :C
@ Jesalin
Adding to the best wishes!
Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus…
(Look up “Ur-Fascism.”)
I read a little of this shithead’s SJWs Always Lie. Reading between the lines, it stemmed entirely from his being thrown out of the Science Fiction Writers of America. It went on and on about how if you offend someone you’ll get campaigns dedicated to getting you fired. Naturally he didn’t say how being an openly racist misogynist tends to get one ostracized, and recommends doubling down on being an asshole. He claims he’s now working on SJWs Always Double Down, and the projection just gets funnier.
So happy to hear that, Jesalin!
Excellent post, but I believe that Vox Day isn’t in the eighth circle of hell, but rather the fifth, a swamp pit for the wrathful and sullen.
Yay Jes! 😀
*sigh* And then on to the awful….
Congratulations, you’ve just described all that Gamergate ever was.
Minor quibble, but the Mad Men haven’t really been a huge thing for decades. Any large corporation that woulda gone to them back then now has multimillion dollar, in house marketing and sales departments. Continuing from a previous thread, very few of these guys were born before or during the 60s. Neither was I, not even close. But I don’t think Mad Men is nonfiction, let alone contemporary. This is how these people know the past, from escapist TV shows. Just deify the mayuns, hate wank over the women, and assume that’s how anything works or should work. I shudder to think of these guys’ relationship with Walking Dead…
@Jesalin
http://pa1.narvii.com/5766/fa6428978742aa4ade7c5386877fc3841fe32096_hq.gif
Congrats, Jesalin!
The irony is, these guys are the epitome of the easily-visually-manipulated. They’re born Madison Avenue fodder, unable to think in terms any more complex than a crude, primitive meme. Over and over again, I see them arguing that whichever side has the better optics will win the war of ideas – fashier haircuts, sexier women, manlier fists. All it takes to persuade them is an image. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter (though they do get outraged when women “lie” with makeup).
And speaking of landfill-filling crap, these same guys are marching with Home Depot citronella torches and $400 worth of body armor and $2000 guns and all manner of other prepper shit, and spending who knows how much on plane tickets to fly to MAGA rallies and white supremacist marches, and buying obnoxious T shirts and hats, and spending $6000 to modify their Ford F-350s for coal-rolling. But they’re totally not susceptible to emotion-driven advertising, these brave independent thinkers who don’t need “stuff”. (And sooo oppressed…it takes a lot of money to fund all this)
I’m going to join in the Jesalin celebration. Vox Day can go suck a lemon.
Bingo.
These guys have been gushing about how cool the Nazis were for years. Like, I used to draw art on commission, and got more than a few “My character, but put them in an SS uniform – what do you mean you don’t want to do that? it’s just a character/It’s just for fun/It’s just a joke.”
It was never just for fun, was never just a joke. It was a way for them to express something that wasn’t socially acceptable. Now they think it’s acceptable because something-something-Trump, so they’re being sincere all of a sudden.
Zombie shows/video games? Fightin’ off the immigrants and the POCs, bein’ the lone hero. They frame it as “not conforming to globalist society”, as if that weren’t dog-whistl’y enough, but it’s really just about dehumanizing people they don’t like. Self-indoctrinating SS brigades.
Very sorry. I’m sorta twiggy about this today! Border control assholes are using a natural disaster to snare fleeing immigrants at the Mexican border, making them choose to risk their lives with the storm or risk deportation and separation of their families. Twitter egg asked how CBE could possibly do such a thing, and I replied that that’s just the sort of person who applied to work in CBE is. Ruining the lives of immigrants is the job description.
More entertaining news on the home front, though. The local Alberta United Conservative Party, after having shed the last vestiges of progressivism in a merger with the far-right Wild Rose Party, has been hammering away at the NDP (moderate left) government for wasteful spending and bloating the government with huge numbers of public jobs. Not only have the statistics shown these to be lies (of course), but … just today it was announced that they’re a quarter-million over their own party budget! and it’s due to … having too many staff! They’ve got more staff than the actual government!
I have had nothing but giggles over that since I found out this morning. Made even better by the fact that their former Finance guy was found to be skimming money and sub-letting government offices, then pocketing the rent for himself. Resigned in shame!
AND – they’ve been hammering the NDP for their carbon tax – while their own policies have a nearly identical carbon tax! It hasn’t been so bad up here, I guess.
And they think they can handle governing! My big fear (and it is big) is that their fear-mongering and Rebel Media support will actually propel them into power next election, based solely on Trump-style nativism. We have a lot of nazi assholes in this province and I can’t really deal with it. I’ll tell you what, though – I’ll be volunteering to keep the NDP in power when the election shows up.
That’s my story! I hope you are all well.
I prefer to refer to Theodore Beale as “voxman “, being that it was granted to him by the much more talented and socially aware (not to mention two-time Hugo Award nominee!) author Dr. Chuck Tingle.
@Scildfreja
I remember seeing a video on Majority Report I think it was where one of those dillholes with the “Kekistan” flags showed up at a Trump/white nationalist rally with a bunch of Pepe placards and was immediately tossed out for not taking their white supremacy seriously enough.
“But these are good memes, man!” the poor dope protested.