This past year, official social media accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies have adopted a distinct voice online. The posts look like memes, utilizing dramatic AI-generated art, general patriotic slogans, and cinematic language about “defending the homeland” and shaping America’s future.
But if you look closer, a pattern emerges.
Many of these phrases, images, and attached media aren’t just regular social media content. They repurpose language, symbolism, and cultural references with direct connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It’s content that experts say is instantly recognizable to those who are in the white supremacist know, but can be largely invisible to everyone else.
There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.
They did mix a lot of different symbology into it, but you are right that people ‘incorrectly’* interpret the meaning.
*There’s something to be said that art is subjective and your interpretation is just as valid of as what the creator intended, but I’m specifically referring to the intended meanings stated by the writers/directors.
I hate that the alt-right claimed the red/blue pill memes.
The symbolism here is describing the process of breaking free of the illusions that you’re suffering under.
The partisan’s who do things like tying this symbolism to a specific meaning (like ‘anti-/woke means anti/pro-LGBTQ’) is twisting the symbol, intentionally and with intent in some cases, to push a message.
The underlying symbol of red-pill/woke/not illusioned/out of the matrix is simply describing the subjective experience of realizing that you were wrong about reality.
At the current time in history, I think we need a lot of people to understand and internalize this idea and the idea that reality is harder than a comforting fantasy, but worth fighting for.
Exactly. People talk about “simulation theory,” but the truth is that we don’t have to be avatars in a computer in order for consensus reality to be contrived and dictated from the top down.
It’s only a simulation inasmuch as “work hard and achieve the american dream” is a fabrication intended to keep us pacified. Streaming services social media feeds, drinking culture, all of that has replaced religion as the new “opiate of the masses.” Those are the circuses to go with your bread.
But none of that implies we’re just chips in a circuit board. That’s called “losing the meaning in the symbol.”
And besides, “life is just a computer simulation” is just the cyberpunk/transhumanist rendition of the “life is just a dream” that’s been floating around for as long as humans have been thinking about the nature of reality, whether you ask Zhuang Zhou, Patanjali, or Terence McKenna.
You’re just as likely to be a disembodied spirit floating in the void as you are to be a computer chip, but all of that is beside the point that consensus reality is being curated for you by states and corporate interests.
Well said