Opinion – Latinoamérica21: Memetic radicalization: humor as a violent way of doing politics

In the years leading up to Trumpism’s heyday, “Pepe the Frog,” a popular internet meme, went viral among right-wing global populism. It was a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body that always said the same phrase “feels good, man”. Unexpectedly, Pepe became a mainstream internet meme when his popularity soared on Myspace, Gaia Online and 4chan in 2008. Since then, his use by Trump supporters, especially alt-right groups and white supremacists, has been so strong. that he is considered by many scholars to be one of the indispensable elements in the digital communication that propelled Trumpism to the US presidency.

Pepe the Frog soon found its way to Europe, where it was embraced by various right-wing populist groups such as the Front National (now known as the Rassemblement National), linking Pepe to Marine Le Pen. The meme continued to travel fast and represent different forms of irony and humor in Latin America, Africa and Hong Kong. The strength of this meme meant that it was added to the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hate symbols along with the swastika and cross on the Ku Klux Klan’s blood drop. The enormous power of this meme has made some scholars begin to think about the importance of humor and meme images in the processes of globalization and political radicalization.

In 2021, Fielitz and Ahmed, from Radicalization Awareness Network (RAN) published a report for the European Commission entitled “No more funny: the use of humor by right-wing extremists”. The authors defended the importance of studying these forms of violent communication and the necessary learning that could be promoted from the study of different regions of the world, such as Latin American countries. Thus, during the recent Brazilian election campaign, I was able to continue studying the political behavior of President Bolsonaro’s voters. In my current project, I study how this specific form of memetic communication contributes to understanding the normalization of violence in the Latin American extreme right.

Thousands of TikTok images and short videos flooded social media in Brazil in these months. The memes incited an unknown pleasure that was not easy to decipher. In the electoral campaign, humor violated the dignity of LGTBIQ+, racialized or left-wing collectives, but this violence was presented in a code that made it seem like it was a benign action.

Most Bolsonar supporters found the jokes about these groups funny, as they were somehow attacking a social and moral norm, what they called “political correctness”. Attacking these collectives made them laugh, as the attack on this social and moral norm was simultaneously combined with a particular code that gave a benign character to the violation of this norm.

Thus, my informants laughed when observing caricatured images of the future president Lula being tortured, turned into an animal or defamed: “it’s funny, they’re laughing at a thief”. Likewise, respondents laughed at images that showed dogs supporting Bolsonaro, as they would be devoured by hordes of hungry PT members; they also made fun of the body hair of feminist women, or the numerous reproduction of Afro-Brazilian collectives who wanted to receive social assistance, which the thousands of memes represented in their various forms.

Humor works on the extreme right as a pleasurable way of disinhibiting prejudices. The process of political radicalization assumes that there is a greater shift from the notion of malignant violence, that is, that which cannot be joked about, to benign violence, which would be the object of humor.

As racism, machismo and other forms of violence became normalized in Bolsonarist rhetoric, the attack on these groups could be made explicit more naturally. Political opponents were represented in increasingly explicitly violent ways in the electoral campaign, playing with their death, castration, amputation, humiliation through pornographic or dehumanizing montages.

In an age marked by online misinformation and increasing levels of social polarization, there is growing interest in public debate about the proper role that memetic communication should play in addressing harmful activities. The role of humor in political polarization and radicalization processes has not been sufficiently studied, although recent research shows similarities with historical fascisms: the construction of antagonists through burlesque images, specifically of the Jewish people, gypsies and the LGTBIQ+ community.

There is a fine line between laughter and humiliation, comedy and tragedy, and humor and harm. Humor becomes a fundamental code for understanding the cognitive dissonance of the extreme right, for whom humor works as a form of veiled violence. In Latin America, the postcolonial condition implies that elements of right-wing populism, such as authoritarianism, militarism and racism, are codified through particular communicative forms.

Memetic communication moves in the codes of humor and irony, where international regulations and norms are ambiguous. The internationalization of humorous culture is underway in the extreme right in Latin America, therefore, it is urgent to study forms of regulation and education on the use of these “soft” codes, which play a central role in the processes of political radicalization.