From Pepe to White Power:
The Internet Memes and Self-Actualizing Citizenship of the Alt-Right

What follows is the introduction of the 80-page thesis I authored in the Honors Program at Emerson College in 2019. It isn’t my first thesis about memes. Freshman year, I started writing about internet memes as a meme itself. In my first semester of Freshman year, I wrote a comparative analysis of 9/11 memes with the post-WWi Dada art movement. 

 

Since then, I saw the best admins of my generation destroyed by brainrot, gooning hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the schizo newsfeed/timeline/FYP/explore page at dawn looking for a Substack author, clouted hipsters burning for the tradcath heavenly connection to the auto-Tumblrificaton of the downtown scene. None of these memes are in the Bible.