“The left can’t meme” has become a popular trope to explain that the right and alternative voices dominate political messaging on the Internet. Behind this slogan lies the psychological fact that people on the right are in a better mood. They are generally happy and content and have an urge to conserve their valuable ways of life. That’s why they are conservatives. Leftists, by contrast, are ungrateful and filled with hate. They can’t meme because they have no sense of humor.
Comic Activism
In America, the primary example of political activism through comedy is YouTube-personality Steven Crowder. He has managed to build up an audience of four million subscribers, many of whom pay for his content through membership. His shows now regularly sport more active viewers than large news channels like CNN. He has not had institutional backing, and his Louder with Crowder has not been advertised. His only growth factor is good humor that attracts new viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUDtoDAGVE8
In Europe, there aren’t commercial successes like Crowder, but notably, Generation Identity has successfully promoted their ideas through provocative gags. In Denmark, they managed to cause a ruckus by dressing up as mock Islamists and demanding gender separation in the public swimming pool.
In the United Kingdom, they dressed up as Willy Wonka and Oompa Loompas offering golden remigration tickets for Islamists, while also handing out leaflets explaining that there are 23,000 jihadis and 400 suspected ISIS warriors in the U.K.
https://twitter.com/CharlieGenID/status/1144662549985681408
The Joker Archetype
Comedy as political activism is no coincidence. It is a pattern in mythology, captured by the Joker archetype. The joker has many transgender qualities. He stands outside all existing power hierarchies. He is a fool and is therefore not taken seriously, but at the same time, he also has the power to say what other people cannot say. As such, he is simultaneously at the top and the bottom of the hierarchy.
Cloaked in a comic facade, he often delivers a serious underlying message – often offensive, but still funny. Today it is conservatives who inhabit this role in society, with great success.
Antifa: The Dark Joker
In mythology, archetypes often come in opposite pairs. Venus, the goddess of love, has an evil twin: Medusa, the terrible mother with snakes for hair that could terrify people so that they freeze into stone. Similarly, the joker has a dark counterpart. He is Cain, brother of Abel in the Bible, or Loke the conniving trickster in Norse mythology.
His mood is dark, filled with envy and hatred of the world. He feels as if the world has played a joke on him and is ready to return the favor. The best rendering of this archetype is the villain in Batman, especially as portrayed by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.
The stereotypical example of a modern real-world incarnation of the dark joker is the Columbine killers. While not yet as extreme, the best example in the political realm is Antifa. Recently, they attacked Quillette reporter Andy Ngo in Portland, milkshaked him with alkaline substances, and beat him to a brain hemorrhage with glass-fiber reinforced gloves.
Ordinary Americans would see this as mere violence, but to Antifa, this is slapstick humor. The contrast between the giddy fun of the right and the misanthropy of the left highlights the difference in mood. Conservatives are worried about the future, but they still have a positive sense of life.
The gloomy mood of radical leftists should worry us all. When they are happy, they merely want to oppress and enslave us, but when their minds are clouded by hatred, history has shown that they become genocidal. The Gulags, Mao’s slave camps, and the killing fields of Cambodia have shown us that. If we allow them to gain the levers of society, the joke will be on us.
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