#34 - Don't Share That Meme w/ Leslie Hahner and Heather Woods

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In 2016 you were likely subjected to pepe memes - that little green frog with the shit-eating grin. It turns out he was a far-right trojan horse used to propagate far-right ideas.Memes are huge part of politics, especially on the far-right. These people who otherwise would be considered extremists, have increasingly used memes, or meme magic, or memetic warfare (the list goes on) to subversively push their far-right ideology on otherwise normal people.Memes are themselves not inherently bad. But when harnessed by harmful actors, they can be incredibly dangerous. To discuss memes and how the far-right has weaponized them, I was joined by Dr. Heather Suzanne Woods from Kansas State University and Leslie A. Hahner from Baylor University to talk about their book Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right.We talked about how memes have created a new universal way of communicating between online communities, how the far-right has weaponized memes, how people go from sharing memes to marching in white supremacist rallies and whether the left can hope to match this new way of communicatingShow NotesMake America Meme Again - ebookHow mainstream media helps weaponize far-right conspiracy theories - The ConversationDr. Heather Suzanne Woods - TwitterLeslie Hahner - Twitter