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Flat White

The left can’t meme

4 August 2017

12:08 PM

4 August 2017

12:08 PM

Having grown up in the 1980s and 1990s I remember a time when popular culture mocked the right wing stiff.

Think of the school principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or the snobs in Caddyshack. Since the 1960s humour has been on the side of the left and liberal values.

In more recent years that has changed. The left aren’t funny anymore.

They have become the stiffs and worst of all the left can’t meme.

For me, the turning point in the culture wars was last year when the Simpsons mocked the student activists at Yale. This was following an incident at Yale where students abused a professor over an email where the professor suggested the students needed to relax about cultural appropriation from Halloween costumes. For years South Park had been mocking PC culture, but South Park is fringe and generally considered obscene by people who don’t watch it. The Simpsons are as mainstream as it comes, if the Simpsons are mocking Yale students, then America is mocking Yale students.


Another example of mainstream society rejecting left wing nonsense was Amy Schumer’s Netflix Special. Not only did Schumer prove Christopher Hitchens right, in that women aren’t funny, but she also got slammed by Netflix rating system, so much so that the producer of the show, ‘Dear White People’ shut down its own rating system to protect Schumer from ‘alt-right’ trolls. Apparently, you’re an alt-right troll if you don’t like jokes about Schumer’s vagina. In the twisted minds of the leftists, Schumer is courageous and brave, but they clearly forgot comedians are meant to be funny.

Generally speaking to be considered funny one can’t take themselves too serious. They need the ability to laugh at themselves and see irony in situations. In the past it was the conservative right that struggled with this; today it’s the left that has a puritanical streak. It’s hard to get humour when you’ve built an entire identity and social structure around being offended by everything.

The Meme Wars have been mocking the left obsession with identity politics and obsession with being offended by everything. It has always been the case in societies with limited free speech humour has been a tool for the common person to vent their frustration. The Soviet Union was famous for the jokes of its citizens. Now in the West people are venting their frustration with identity politics, unconscious bias courses and political correctness through memes. Even going as far as creating the Kekistani fictitious ethnic identity mocking the left’s obsession with identity.

Just to prove that the left can’t meme, here is a left meme brought in from the wild:

As the Josh Frydenberg meme shows the left’s main trick is to state a ‘“fact” unsupported by evidence or using shock-value “evidence” and then tell themselves how they ‘nailed it’. Then they all laugh. Spectator regular Arthur Chrenkoff wrote an article, Nailing it with prize tool Waleed Aly nailing this trend. Outside of Twitter and Buzzfeed no one else is convinced of their arguments or finds their nailing ability impressive.

The left are losing the culture war. They’re in their Buzzfeed-Huffington Post bunker nailing it, while the united forces of libertarians, the alt-right, liberals and non regressive lefties are waging a meme war against them. It might still be many years into the future, but eventually the regressive left will lose and they will be forced out of the institutions they currently dominate. When that day happens the Kekistani flag will fly over Harvard Square.

Justin Campbell is the general manager of LibertyWorks, Inc.

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