Frogmen do it for the Keks
Tags: Memes, Alt Right, Hillary Clinton, Pepe, Politics

Caveats: I’m not Alt Right, Kekistani, Proud Boy, or Three Percenter. I’m a dirty Centrist Libertarian.

Buckle up, it’s internet crash course time.

Let’s be bad guys:

The internet is a weird place where symbolism, chaos, vitriol, humor, and hatred all blend and vie for attention. Explaining Right Wing internet culture is the purpose of this piece, so let’s not dally.

White guys are bad, we got it!

In modern culture, white guys are the bad guys. If there’s a movie with terrorism in it, they are right wing nut jobs. In video games, if you’re fighting people of color, oops, turns out the whole conflict was the conspiracy of a middle aged white man. Every activist-warrior and woke celebrity is obsessed with dismantling “whiteness,” and progressive college professors and journalists are joking about the extinction of the white race. In the face of such hostility, some Right Wingers, especially the younger ones, said, “Okay,

“

And Right Wing internet culture was born. The history of Right Wing internet culture is hard to nail down, and difficult to verify, so I will just give you the popularized skinny as I understand it.

Memes:

Memes, defined and popularized by the atheist intellectual Richard Dawkins, are the most simplified version of ideas that can pass through society. It is best conceptualized as a thought virus. Good memes are boiled down to the simplest truth or political perspective, turned into a picture with a few words on it, and then transmitted onward.

Richard Dawkins, the father of the meme

This creates a cascading landscape in which new pictures and ideas are created, replicated, varied, and then die. Most memes come and go in a matter of days, if not weeks. The more powerful the meme, the longer it lasts.

Great memes of times past

There is no God but Kek, and Pepe is his messenger:

An original Pepe the Frog

Pepe and Kek, at present, are the longest lasting memes in internet culture. Pepe is a frog cartoon character, whose depressed gaze was turned into all of the characters of the world. There are Jihadi Pepes, Feminist Pepes, Libertarian Pepes, Fascist Pepes, Nazi Pepes, and Crusader Pepes. Just like the rule that if something exists, there is pornography of it, if something exists, there is a Pepe of it.

An Assortment of Pepes

Because dedicated forums like Reddit and 4chan are populated by young males, a lot of them are tech savvy, and a lot of them are brutal, Pepe took on a Right Wing tinge.

This is where synchronicity steps in. It was pointed out by internet Right Wingers that Kek was the Egyptian god of chaos, frequently symbolized as a frog. Since Right Wing internet trolls often saw themselves as mischievous agents of chaos, Kek became the patron God of the Right Wing internet.

Kek, the Egyptian Frog God of Chaos

Kekistan:

As cries in popular culture came out for Black only safe spaces, Latinx only safe spaces, LGBTQ only safe spaces, the internet Right Wing appropriated the same arguments for the nation of Kekistan. As an imaginary land for right wing trolls, it provides safe haven from a world in which white, heterosexual, cis-gendered males are evil, masculinity is toxic, gender is fluid, family is stupid, mass immigration has no negative consequences, and socialism is the only just economic system.

What’s funny about these safe spaces is there is ideological and racial diversity. Traditional conservatives (Tradcons), Anarcho-Capitalists (Ancaps), Libertarians, Alt Light (Enlightenment based right wing), Proud Boys (Western Chauvinists), Alt Right (ethnonationalists/supremacists), Pinochetian Fascists, and anti-semitic Nazis all pass through the same spaces, fighting, arguing and clawing about who has the right formula to run a successful society.

Different forums feature different factions, with smatterings of the others. There’s disaffected Liberals and Anarchist Libertarians. There’s young Zionists and anti-semites. There’s military veterans and 9/11 truthers. There’s Enlightenment based civic nationalists and ethno-Fascists. The Grand Old Party concept of the Right Wing has never been truer than on the internet, where the only thing uniting the Right, is hatred of the authoritarian Left. These Right wing internet forums, as Kekistani provinces, serve as bases of operations from which to launch counterattacks.

The Republic of Kekistan

Tangling with giants:

One of the funniest, and most validating things to the Right Wing internet was Hillary Clinton’s acknowledgment of it. To HRC, she was acknowledging the amorphous, chaotic, troll mob that had harried her campaign and its followers. She highlighted the disgusting, abhorrent, and beyond the pale comments and articles fueling this internet mob. She likely thought it would rally her base, but all it did was rally the internet Right Wing.

One of HRC’s many mistakes

In Hillary Clinton’s speech, and in the mainstream media’s acknowledgment of the internet right, they created a Quixotic monster comprised of Neo-Nazis. To pretend this isn’t a contingent of the Right is a lie, but to pretend that the vast majority of the internet Right Wing isn’t just a bunch of guys who grew up cussing each other out playing Call of Duty is ridiculous.

The collapse of the Old Guard

When established media sources like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC spend an iota of effort attempting to criticize, lambaste, and disparage the Right Wing as a whole, and internet trolls in particular, it’s like an adult admonishing kids, while just not getting the joke. The fact that you’re mad is the point of the joke. The fact that you’re paying attention to it at all, makes you a joke.

All social media censorship sees is a bunch of stooges who can’t think for themselves

Similarly, when Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and other social media sites go out of their way to shut down Right Wing groups, and then make no distinction between White Supremacists and Libertarians, this also fuels the mischievous game. Soldiers in the culture war make cartoon avatars, fake profiles, and satirical Leftist accounts, to pull the tail of the Silicon Tiger.

The Left is crying out that they are the victims of a mob of oppressors, despite being led by Silicon Valley, the mainstream media, every vocal celebrity, and the leadership of a major party. Losing the culture war to a bunch of basement dwelling deplorables using cartoons for political organization is farcical.

The Left lost the Culture War to this guy

Kek:

To show you how stupid, shallow, and silly the internet Right Wing is, let us look at another synchronicity. Most young people are gamers. Gaming is a part of youth culture. The real time strategy game Starcraft does not support the Korean language. Korean players, as an onomatopoeia of their textual laughter, would type in “kek.” So in summary, “kek” is the Korean “lol.” Adopted by the Right Wing internet as just another synchronicity, kek became the in group “lol.”

The truth is, this article is late. Just by virtue of its creation, it signals that the internet Right Wing has moved onto something else. In my time on the internet, I have seen the rise and fall of dozens of memes, and while Pepe and the Cult of Kek will loom large in meme history, it has already lost much of its prominence.

So the next time you you feel the urge to tweet an anti-white hate thread, don’t be surprised when the Frog men show up with some mocking memes, followed by a chorus of “keks.”