Know Your Liberal Memes

danjoseph | July 26, 2012
DONATE
Font Size

Hello and welcome to the first edition of "Know Your Liberal Memes" where we will explore the deception and downright ignorance that goes into creating liberal propaganda in this new social media genre.

Internet "memes" (pronounced 'meem') are a phenomenon.  Memes typically come in the form of a  picture with a caption attached to it.  The genesis of the Internet meme is unknown, but it's a safe bet that it involved cats. Here's one of the most famous early memes:

Memes have been around for a long time, but only recently have memes become a popular way to make a political statement. Both sides have been creating and posting them at an alarming rate in the lead up to the presidential election.

Recently, my Facebook newsfeed has been inundated with memes created and posted by liberals. Like this one:

Pretty obnoxious, I know.

As a conservative who doesn't hide or unfriend Liberals on his Facebook feed when they start discussing politics--liberals block conservatives far more frequently--I've been coming across a lot of these progressive memes as of late.

With more and more people getting their political news through social networking sites, political memes have become a powerful way to convey support or opposition for a candidate or policy.

For example, last week, after Barack Obama made his, now infamous, "You didn't build that" gaffe, conservatives went to work and created dozens of memes mocking the presidents hit on small business owners.  Here are a few of them:

Hey Wright brothers, you think you’re so smart, saying, “I made this.” You didn’t build that. Someone else made that happen.

Not surprisingly, most of the mainstream media ignored Obama's ludicrous assertion.  But meme savvy conservatives ran with it and the memes spread like wildfire.  So obviously, conservatives can play this game as well.  Typically, however, it's the Left that has dominated the meme race.  This is to be expected, since liberalism is much easier to break down into a few sentences and since liberals got so much practice photo shopping and captioning pictures of Obama in 2008.

 On this blog, I'm going to bring you some of the popular progressive memes that I come across each week and break them down.  As an emerging form of new media, it's important that conservatives see and understand how Obama supporters--and Romney's detractors--are spreading their message. 

Let's start with one of my all time favorite liberal memes.  You seriously have to see this to believe it:

I stumbled across this masterpiece when it was posted by a Facebook acquaintance who found it on a page called "The Pragmatic Progressive."  Insert your own joke here:  (I'm going to set up a site called the Romantic Subway Groper.)

Anywho, as you can see, this meme is supposed to be a pro-Obama list of the president's first term "accomplishments."  But it almost immediately becomes laughable when it claims that he achieved "smaller government" in his first term.  It then goes on to tell us that Obama actually REDUCED the debt by $2 Trillion. 

Ok. So, apparently THIS Barack Obama is president of an America in a totally different dimension.  To be honest, this Bizzaro America doesn't sound all that bad compared to what we've got right now.  But the meme gets better.

In crazy Obama opposite world, Obama has "Unified the World Against Iran." This is true. If by "Unified the World" you mean 'Went out and ate some ice cream' and by "against Iran" you mean 'with George Clooney,'  then yes.  He did that.

Apparently Obama also "Saved the world from financial collapse."  But for all intents and purposes the worst of the financial crisis was over by the time Obama took office.  So unless the very IDEA of having Obama as President was enough to stabilize the world markets, he really didn't have anything to do with it.

The most absurd, however, has to be the assertion that Obama "Has the Arab league watching Syria."  Yeah.  Bang up job on that one big guy.  That's like saying that you have a homeless dude looking after your infant child and then STILL listing it as an accomplishment even AFTER he sells your kid for vodka money.

For pure hilarity and the likelihood that it was created by Jay Carney himself, on my Wasserman-Schultz Deceptive-Meme Rating Scale, this meme receives 4 out of 5 Wassermans.

 

 Here's a particularly misleading meme:

Use of quotes are popular in memes and in this one we have a quote from deceased liberal author Kurt Vonnegut, in which he's bashing the wealthy.  Pretty typical liberal fare.  To emphasize the point he's making, the meme's creator has placed the quote next to a picture of some dirty, sad looking children. Dirt and sadness being things that are typically associated with poverty. These two things are also typically associated with the singer Ke$ha, but she's not pictured here.  So, I'm guessing it's poverty.

The dirty kids are supposed to represent what Vonnegut calls "The undignified poor" in the United States.  

First, keep in mind that the kids pictured here might not even live in this country.  This could have been taken in some Guatemalan shanty-town for all we, know.  The grey sweater that the child in the middle is wearing looks like it was used to disinfect a Thai massage parlor.  If you look at the bottom you'll see what looks like a couple of loaves of bread.

Bread.  Just layin' around. 

In all likelihood, this picture was not taken in America.   This is third world poverty.  We really don't have people living in that kind of squalor in this country.  Even the poorest citizens of the United States tend to enjoy a high enough standard of living that they can store their food, instead of just randomly throwing it on some dirty sheets and hoping the kids notice it before the raccoons do.

But at one time we did have this kind of poverty.  As recently as the 60's and 70's America still had a class of "undignified poor."  So the Vonnegut quote actually makes sense, since the book it was taken from was written in 1969!

Whoever created this meme wanted to convey the basic leftist principle that modern America is fundamentally unfair. But he used a 40 year old quote from a dead guy and a picture that was probably taken in the day care center of a Venezuelan women's prison.

For it's deceptive nature and the fact that it's completely irrelevant to anything currently going on in this country, I give this meme 3 Wassermans.

For this weeks final meme, we're going to take a look at a one that attempts--and fails--to play the race-card:

The man pictured is James Holmes, the nut bar who shot up the Aurora movie theater last week. 

The assumption here is that the man is being  labeled as "crazy" by the media because he is white. Not because he was dressed up as The Joker, set up bombs in his apartment and massacred a theater full of innocent people for no apparent reason.

The primary problem with this meme is that the creator clearly doesn't really understand what "terrorism" is.  A lot of people think that "terrorism" is any violent act in which several people are hurt or killed.  But, to be defined as actual "terrorism"  a political or religious agenda typically has to be the motivation for the crime.  So if Holmes had yelled "Allahu Akbar" before opening fire, it would have been assumed that he was a terrorist, whether he was an Arab or not.  

The definition of a "thug" is typically someone who is involved in some other type of criminal activity.  Many criminals actually view the term as a badge of honor.  But even if Holmes had been black, his behavior was not thugish.  Thugs typically have some clear motivation behind their crimes and typically being a "thug" is a career choice.  It's how you make your living.  As far as we know, Holmes didn't have any history of dealing drugs, armed robbery or orthodontia that included a diamond studded grill.

This meme gets 2 Wassermans and 1 Al Sharpton for its poor use of the race card.

 

So there you have just few examples of the kind of garbage that the left is pushing around the Internet this week.  But remember.  Just because something it ridiculous and factually inaccurate does not mean that there aren't people out there who are taking it seriously.  Some of those people even vote.

I'll be back next week with more of the left's most vicious and laughably ignorant attempts at social media persuasion. 

-Dan Joseph

donate