patrick.net

February 3, 2023

Harvard University has asked its anti-Donald Trump meme expert to leave the university, according to the student newspaper.

“Harvard Kennedy School Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf is forcing out online misinformation expert Joan M. Donovan from her role at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy,” the student newspaper reported. ...

Donovan (pictured) has claimed that Trump and conservatives were victorious in 2016 because they were better at making memes.

“Hillary Clinton was not memeable nor was she meme savvy and even when she launched memetic campaigns online, even with her branding, as my class knows, it’s been hijacked by the right,” Donovan said at a September 2022 panel, nearly six years after the presidential election of 2016.

“So when she came out and said things like the alt-right or basket of deplorables or wrote about Pepe [a cartoon frog] on her website it was just like anything online that had to do with Hillary Clinton was incredibly corrosive,” Donovan said.

Spangler grounds his humor in pattern recognition. He watches the construction and repetition of official narratives, tracking the subtle manipulations that shape mass perception. These patterns do not appear in a vacuum—they take root in the cultural soil of news, government statements, and viral events. Spangler’s comedic lens sharpens on moments when institutional messaging veers into the absurd or the self-contradictory. ...

When a news agency inflates a threat or a political leader deploys language that doubles back on itself, Spangler isolates the twist. He then amplifies it, pushing the logic to its breaking point. The satirical article becomes an experiment: How far can official logic be extended before it collapses under its own weight?

Comedy, in Spangler’s view, generates cognitive dissonance by forcing a collision between lived experience and received narrative. Laughter arises when expectation ruptures. The mind, momentarily unmoored from habit, resets. Spangler and Duke probe this break in conditioned thought. They agree: the act of laughing punctures rote mental habits, opening a fleeting gap for critical reflection.

In exchange for giving up centralized message discipline, the Trump campaign gained some powerful advantages. First was economic: where the Democrats had to spend millions of dollars developing and disseminating campaign copy, memes poured fourth at no cost to the campaign’s war chest and went viral for free. Second was efficacy: freed of the constraints of the focus group and the committee, and subjected instead to the ruthless Darwinism of the attention economy, memes could be punchier, funnier, and more truthful, and thus achieve much higher levels of virality. Third was agility: the Democrats could spend weeks carefully honing an ad campaign, only for the frog tribes of the fiber optic steppe to disassemble it, repackage it, and subvert it within moments of its release, using the Democratic Party’s own expensive ads against them; meanwhile, sudden developments in the news cycle could catch the Democrats flat-footed, scrambling to put their message together, whereas the anon horde would have its memes blasting out across the social networks within minutes. Meme warfare is cheaper, faster, and funnier than committee-driven public relations, and these advantages were well worth ceding a certain amount of control.

Each of the entries below is more than just a funny little saying. They tell you something about what the New Right actually believes. We did one of these for 2023 and 2024, and we’ll have another one coming up next month to cover 2025.

But this list is the one to rule them all. The all-time most supreme memes of the New Right. ...

35. Hicklib

It’s simple: Guy who looks like a hick has surprisingly lib opinions. This tactic allows Hollywood to inject ideology into their content without threatening their conservative audience. Now righties use it to call the trope out, as well as the broader phenomenon of bitter libtards who, instead of escaping to the coasts, stayed in the heartland to annoy everyone around them, and pretend their Carhartt jackets allow them to speak for normal Americans.

34. Empathy Heatmap




Did you know that conservatives love their families and liberals love “plants, trees, and inert entities such as rocks”? Rob Henderson popularized this image from a 2019 study, which has become a shorthand way to dismiss libs who seem altruistically devoted to “The Other,” to a pathological degree. Something to cite the next time someone tells you to have some heckin’ empathy. ...

30. Boomer Truth Regime / Post-WWII Consensus

The prevailing historical narrative shaped by the Boomer generation refers to a collection of myths that portray a triumphant end of history characterized by individual liberty, free-market capitalism, consumerism, and global democracy. The Holocaust remains the ultimate evil, and all ongoing conflict reflects a Hollywood war of good liberals against evil Nazis. It’s a silly worldview that New Right thinkers are aiming to slam dunk in the dustbin of history. ...

24. Cool Wine Aunt

Millennial women grew up watching Sex and the City. They moved to a tier-one city, got a Powerpoint job, and spent all that disposable income on brunch. Now they’re going gray, and the mimosas and gossip aren’t hitting like they used to. How to fill the void? Fighting the patriarchy, of course. A once aspirational archetype turned sour.

23. Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit

Quip machine Michael Malice has coined a number of aphorisms, but this one serves as good a single mantra for the New Right as any. Because establishment conservatives don’t do a great job of conserving anything, and because the society they wish to preserve is simply that which already lost to progressivism ten years ago. Conservatism positions itself as the antagonist to progressivism, but it’s sitting in the backseat of the same car, meekly asking the driver to slow down a little. ...

19. Bioleninism

Ever been to a DMV? “There’s a reason why there’s so many evil fat women in government,” says Spandrell in his 2017 essay introducing Bioleninism. “The party gives them all they have, the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow.”

The theory of biological Leninism observes that the Left maintains power by cheaply recruiting misshapen masses of underperforming groups by promising them higher status, resulting in “a coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run.” ...

14. Fake and Gay

Yet another borrowed 4chan-ism. In 2025, you might not be able to drop the g-word at the office, but along with “retarded,” we are enjoying a renaissance of referring to try-hard, astroturfed, or otherwise inauthentic things “gay.” To call something fake and gay is to say it’s bullshit that doesn’t comport with reality, but also that it’s cringe and uncool. We live in a fake and gay world run by fake and gay people and institutions. It’s illegal to speak the plain truth, and the only place to escape the fake-and-gayness of it all is by hanging out online with your frens. ...

11. Heritage American

What kind of American are you? Even speaking the words “heritage American” aloud marks you as a racist freak, but the New Right is working to change that. America is not a propositional nation, and one need not resort to “blood and soil” fearmongering to make the argument that people who’ve lived in and contributed to a place for a very long time are owed certain privileges that newcomers can’t reasonably expect to demand. And moreover, that newcomers are obligated to assimilate and show a little gratitude while they’re at it. ...

9. Midwit

Modern liberalism in the West is a tyranny of midwits, smug people smart enough to think they’ve evolved beyond the need for instinct and superstition, but not smart enough to understand that instinctual behavior and superstition are often correct, and there for a good reason. Maybe Grug on the left isn’t able to intelligently articulate his beliefs, but relying on one’s gut is often a better heuristic than the appeals to institutional consensus (“uh, source?”) that characterize the midwit’s worldview. Me and you? We’re the wizard/monk on the right, of course, who understands that gut-level instinct and higher-level reasoning usually result in the same conclusions.

8. Longhouse

Bronze Age Pervert first observed that under primitive matriarchal rule, human life devolves into “yeast-like” conditions. Lomez’s longhouse essay picked up where BAP’s description left off, creating an immortal meme about our feminized, oversocialized world. When your wife nags you to put the toilet seat down, you’ve been longhoused. When your girlboss supervisor reminds you to add your pronouns to your Slack profile, you’ve been longhoused. The government, your church, your school — longhouses all. Even women seem miserable in the longhouse, yearning for their men to step up and take charge.