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Part of the Decade Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Perhaps no single cultural artifact did more heavy lifting in the 2010s than the meme. This was the decade the meme became far more than a fun piece of internet humor: Memes evolved to encompass everything from hashtags to viral videos, becoming their own language with their own communities.

The rapid rise of mobile internet use and the increasing domination of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms helped shift the overall nature of memes from edgy and esoteric to warm and wholesome. On niche forums from 4chan to closed Facebook groups, memes peddling subversive or insular humor e.g. dank memes were standard. But the memes with humor fit for the whole family, or at least for people who werent that active online but checked their feeds once in a while, were the ones that really filtered into the mainstream through social media.

With increasing frequency, memes stood in for political arguments and ideological positions. They became right-wing recruitment tools, weapons of harassment, and tools of offline political resistance movements from Washington, DC, to Hong Kong. This was the decade some online memes became tangible offline disruptors, and the decade some were taken so seriously that they ceased being online fantasies and morphed into narrowly averted tragedies. Through it all, memes became for many of us a common language, one of the few we all still could parse as we searched for meaning and commonality in an increasingly polarized era.

Below, Vox presents a list of 10 memes that captured the zeitgeist, from those that summed up entire ideological positions to others that seem, on the surface, inane but reveal a lot more than you expect about the decades cultural journey.

If you were online in 2010, there was a chance you described something not-that-intense as so intense. That came from the now-classic Double Rainbow, a video recorded just a few days into the decade, on January 8, 2010. YouTube user Paul YosemiteBear62 Vasquez filmed and streamed the genuinely impressive sight of a full double-rainbow crowning the mountaintop beyond his front yard.

Vasquezs half-tearful, half-euphoric commentary alongside the footage made Double Rainbow instant, hilarious kitsch when the video abruptly took off in July of that year. The meme later got a boost from the Double Rainbow Song, one of the first viral examples of the Gregory Brothers popular Autotune the News musical series, which launched a whole YouTube autotune subgenre and birthed the most-watched video of 2010, the Bed Intruder Song.

At first, however, the public greeted Double Rainbow with a mix of bafflement, amusement, and mockery. Looking back now, its easy to see it as an early progenitor of the wholesome meme, which would, in the latter half of the decade, become one of the things that saved many from despair and burnout over increasingly dire climate disaster and geopolitics. Thinking about the mocking cultural reception of Double Rainbow then, versus what its reception would have been in the era of Wholesomeness, gives us a picture of how the internet progressed over the decade as the sociopolitical climate worsened.

And its hard not to feel a sense of sadness, too: We didnt realize that rainbow really was that intense, all along. Look into the mirror, look into your soul! Mr. Vasquez told his YouTube audience. Wed spend the rest of the decade doing just that.

Arguably another viral video that would be slotted into the weird but wholesome category, 2011s Friday was a laughably mundane song and music video introducing the world to a gawky-but-sincere 13-year-old named Rebecca Black, and to YouTubes utterly baffling video production wormhole. Vanity songwriting had been around for years, and so had amateur YouTube performances. But never had the two converged quite like this.

Friday, with its hypnotically bizarre music video of regular teenager Black and friends partying, partying, yeah! was a bouncy trainwreck. But as badly as it was made, Friday and its bargain-basement production studio, Ark Factory, contained the kernels of algorithmic virality throughout the decade: The entire company was about manufacturing influencers. As we all learned shortly after the baffling video became famous, Ark Factory put out scores of these prewritten, keyword-friendly songs and manufactured videos, all engineered to provide normal kids a simulation of celebrity at a low, low cost. (Friday took about $2,000 to make and produce, paid for by Rebecca Blacks family.)

Additionally, the company hoped to identify teens who had the talent or charisma to become social media successes, if not actual pop stars. The scheme sounds sketchy, but this was more or less the approach major companies took to viral marketing, and the influencer industry continued to take through the 2010s, seeking out low-level social media personalities and offering them money and exposure in exchange for endorsements.

Friday also typified the strange experience of the non-celebrity going viral overnight. By the end of the decade, wed see this happen frequently, from Ken Bone, to Gary from Chicago, to Plane Bae. Like many of them, Black hadnt been looking for viral fame or mainstream success of any kind; she wasnt even a vlogger. Her overnight fame brought some success but cost her friendships, a year of school, and, for a long time, her dignity. That she survived, grew up into someone pretty cool, and now makes music thats actually good is a testament to how much Rebecca Black still had to learn, and how much time she had to grow, when the internet found her and perhaps a sign that social media had yet to learn how to weaponize its cruelty.

The myriad problems with Kony 2012, a 20-minute-long YouTube documentary produced by a California-based activist group called Invisible Children, should have been apparent from the outset. While the videos outrage over the plight of abducted Ugandan children was contagious, its goal was nebulous.

Invisible Children urged the public, through donations and viral noise, to somehow invoke the wrath of the US government upon the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), the militant extremist group responsible for the abductions especially its leader, Joseph Kony. The video racked up nearly 30 million views within days of its March release, and for a while, the #stopKony and #Kony2012 hashtags were everywhere.

Except Kony wasnt actually in Uganda, and hadnt been for years; hes rumored to move around a lot, and to lie low throughout South Sudan. Plus, the entire glossy production seemed designed to funnel funds to, and essentially glorify, the three young white men whose films about Kony comprised much of Invisible Childrens efforts.

The project was widely criticized as being a prime example of colonialist white savior rhetoric, designed to commercially appeal to Westerners who would then go buy the organizations branded T-shirts, and not actually aid or facilitate action from Ugandans. (Amid the backlash, video creator Jason Russell had a full-frontal nude meltdown in the streets, prompting one deadpan TMZ reporter to observe, Rebecca Black didnt do that.) Ultimately, although Invisible Children did generate ongoing aid to Central African communities impacted by violence, it also nearly went bankrupt and while the US government got involved with the hunt for Kony, it ended fruitlessly in 2017.

Kony 2012 highlighted the pitfalls of viral charity, as well as problems with Western media coverage that characterized a decade of reporting on issues like detention camps and the Syrian refugee crisis. It also predicted similar online mass social movements, from the obsession with raiding Area 51 to the Ice Bucket Challenge. Most importantly, Kony 2012 gave other movements a template for what not to do. When the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag appeared in support of locating abducted Nigerian children two years later, the emphasis was where it should have been along: on supporting and sustaining developing nations and their already extant social justice movements.

Its no secret that the internet used to belong to cats but now belongs to dogs. During the Aughts, i.e. the LOLCat years, most memes were formed from captioned images. The sharpest humor relied on childlike linguistic permutations like spelling the as teh and declaring I can has cheezburger? in the original lolcat meme and upon twisting the familiar into something quirky and unexpected, like the lolcat concept itself. Cats as cultural phenoms flourished during a weirder, less homogenized, and less mainstream period of internet culture the time before social media became our dominant way of interacting and spreading ideas, and internet culture increasingly just became culture.

Thus, the insular, sarcasm-infused internet humor represented by cats and lolcat speak evolved into more universalized, easily accessible humor, represented by dogs and doggo lingo, i.e. a language of love. And the moment this paradigm shift occurred was roughly around 2013, when a sweet Shiba Inu named Kabosu, a rescued shelter puppy, became the adorable face of Doge, an image macro-turned-linguistic meme whose effects were manifold.

Popularized on Tumblr, Doge took the cat memes to new, absurdist heights, an early hallmark of neo-Dadaist millennial humor. The doge meme brought dogs into internet fashion and made doge-speak into its own standalone thing. This gave us a few years of such adjective, very noun language as a result. As doge endured, this quirky language became associated with dogs at large, just as it already is IRL; after all, we tend to use very simplified speech with our pets.

So doge is weird, but comfy and cozy; it tipped the realm of edgy memes toward the new era of the wholesome meme, before this divide had really become cultural. Doge appeared two years before the We Rate Dogs Twitter made good doggos into a thing in 2015, but without doge, its likely we would have had neither. Such accomplish! Very wow.

The images were instantly terrifying, yet felt as if theyd always been among us: The impossible height, the disproportionate gangliness, the not-quite-there face, the nebulous number of arms, and the grim expressions on the faces of children allegedly forever lost in the arms of the Slender Man.

Slender Man was an instant urban legend but one with a definitive origin. In 2009, a guy named Eric Knudsen wrote an eight-sentence story on the internet cultural hub Something Awful under the name Victor Surge. Knudsen posted his piece to a thread for photoshopped versions of creepypasta, short, scary stories meant to be easily passed around forums, blogs, and other social networks as urban internet legends.

Slender Man spawned a following unique among creepypasta villains: he was one of the most popular memes of the decade, routinely topping most-searched-for terms on meme and creepypasta websites. The Slender Man Mythos burgeoned into an internet subculture of fans dedicated to remixing and expanding the original story.

Slendys popularity spawned the rise of home-grown internet folklore over the decade. The webseries Marble Hornets dramatized Slender Man to great success, while users of the subreddit No Sleep filled the board with thousands of other first-person horror stories attempting to deliver similarly viral dread. SyFys Channel Zero dramatized several classic examples of creepypasta; one No Sleep story, The Spire in the Woods, is currently being developed into a feature film by Steven Spielberg. And the Slender Man story itself inspired everything from video games to fanart to a bizarrely late 2018 horror film.

But there was also an uglier, offline side to the online horror stories. In 2014, the story of Slender Man inspired two preteen girls to attempt to murder a third friend as a sacrifice to the creature, whom they believed to be real. The victim survived a brutal stabbing and Slender Man became part of the disturbing trend of online memes inspiring serious real-world action, particularly internet urban legends. Slender Man preceded the Blue Whale challenge in 2017, which led to several actual deaths before it thankfully faded, and the Momo challenge from earlier this year, which didnt lead to real-life self-harm, but understandably scared people into fearing it might.

Theres an eerie commonality between the online cult of Slender Man and the wave of internet conspiracies that grew and flourished during the 2010s from strange fandom shipping conspiracies to Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that began as an ironic 4chan meme before it circulated as fake news and cultivated true believers. In 2014, it was hard to believe that two 12-year-olds could fall so heavily into this alternate reality that theyd take their obsession offline. By the time Pizzagate had provoked one zealot to terrorize a DC pizza joint two years later, the delusion fostered by 12-year-olds seemed to be just another part of a larger, internet-fueled alternate universe.

This meme originated in 2013 as part of a six-panel installment of cartoonist K.C. Greens webcomic Gunshow. In the comic, a dog sits and drink his coffee during a house fire, insisting that everything is fine as he slowly melts away. The comic was originally titled On Fire, but after a truncated two-panel version started to spread through Reddit a year later, it became known as This Is Fine, in honor of the dogs ironic final line and the perfect way to describe everything being the opposite of fine.

In its various comic and animated incarnations, This Is Fine became the epitome of our reaction to the increasingly distorted, disaster-laden world. To the growing ideological divide, the worsening geopolitical climate; the rise of Gamergate, the alt-right, and their even more extreme brethren; the fact of social media and tech culture unwittingly undermining democracy; school shootings and mass gun violence with no end in sight; and, of course, to climate change, when things are frequently literally on fire, the millennial generation murmured, This is fine.

The meme works if you want to articulate your own inability to process how overwhelming all of this change is. And it also works if you want to sardonically call out someone elses perceived indifference to an urgent issue, whether tiny or huge.

The peaceable irony of This Is Fine was the spiritual opposite of the much more noxious Pepe the Frog meme. Both memes were based on webcomics, and both emerged as politically charged icons roughly around the same time. Pepe was an amphibian stoner, originally created in 2005 as a webcomic character by artist Matt Furie. Since the Aughts, he had been a dank meme and mascot used by online troll types; in the mid 2010s, however, the frog became an alt-right symbol, used as an enormous dog whistle for white supremacy. It wasnt until the 2019 Hong Kong protests that Pepe received his political reclamation at the hands of democratic student protesters.

But where Pepe (a crude cartoon frog) gained a very specific contextual use that got even more specific and localized over time, This Is Fine (a crude cartoon dog) was much more easily universalized, applicable to nearly everything, and increasingly relevant to more and more people as it grew in popularity. If this cute little hound couldnt figure things out, clearly the rest of us were all screwed.

The phrase on fleek a saucy shorthand for aesthetic excellence was invented in 2014 by a 16-year-old Vine user named Kayla Lewis, a.k.a. Peaches Monroee, to describe her perfectly waxed eyebrows. In the six-second loop that was standard for all Vine videos, she prepped for a night out with a litany of slang catchphrases, all well-known except for that soon-to-be-immortal one.

On fleek could be seen as just one of the decades many classic Vines, like why you always lying, oh my god, they were roommates, its Wednesday, my dudes, vroom vroom, back at it again at Krispy Kreme, and of course, do it for the Vine, et cetera, into infinity. Like all of the above, on fleek was instantly viral across all social media, and the video showcased both the hilarity of the Vine platform and the way catchphrases born from its six-second clips could easily find their way into collective cultural jargon.

But on another level, the trajectory of the phrase, which immediately traveled across the internet to be capitalized upon elsewhere by pop stars, major brands, and assorted corporations, captured a pivotal undercurrent of pop culture in the 2010s: a growing awareness of cultural appropriation.

Vine, which shut down in 2016, was a rich hub of black internet culture, and its memes were constantly finding their way onto other internet platforms and into common usage, often divorced from their original context. Vine was thus a microcosmic example of the way, throughout the decade, black culture was spread and watered down as it reached the mainstream.

The birth of on fleek was frequently ignored as it mutated into a contextless slogan, and critiques of its cultural erasure gained traction. Soon, the internet became more aware of the damage done by majority cultures borrowing elements of minority cultures, brands exploiting marginalized consumers, and even more lighthearted forms of making jokes out of cultural difference. And Lewis was frequently cited as one of the touchstone examples of this trend, perhaps because she was vocal about how quickly her words had been appropriated from her.

By drawing attention to the way her words were being lifted and repurposed without her consent, insisting on credit while allowing the meme to flourish, Lewis set the tone for years of discussion, and embodied the spirit of being on fleek herself.

Few memes more hilariously summed up and parodied a whole decade of social media overreaction as this 2015 Tumblr post about, as it says on the tin, feeling attacked for no apparent reason. Originally made by a user named chardonnaymami who subsequently deleted their account, the post brilliantly combined internet humor with the flavor of gin-soaked reality TV drama. In fact, the public fascination with melodramatically feeling very attacked arose nearly simultaneously thanks to a heated moment from Drag Race.

The post spawned numerous imitators, and the language of feeling attacked has entered common parlance. That means that this meme is still pretty much everywhere to this day hell, by this point most people have probably forgotten this idea even started out as a meme at all. You can be attacked for everything from feeling hilariously called out, like so:

Or for having deep passionate feelings about things at unexpected moments, like so:

All this is classic Tumblr humor in its purest form. When you say, I feel so attacked, youre using intentionally hyperbolic language to express ironic enjoyment of your own dramatic emotions. Tumblr users led the rest of the internet in the expression of wry hyperbolic passion, in everything from feels and I cant even to I am trash and I love this garbage [thing].

Although the so attacked meme neatly encapsulates the wit and humor of Tumblr, it instantly spread to other platforms, and subsequently was rarely correctly attributed to the Tumblr user who first wrote it. And that fact all by itself sums up the cultural underestimation of Tumblrs vital role in internet culture throughout the decade.

Tumblr has always punched far above its cultural weight, whether through its symbiotic relationship with 2010s media outlets like Mic and BuzzFeed, or its magical ability to have all its memes rediscovered and recycled by Twitter users five to seven years after they were de rigueur on the much looser blogging platform.

After all the quality content it gave us, Tumblr still was perpetually written off by mainstream culture as a silly teen site, though it continues to thrive even as the rest of the world continues to assume the blue hellsite (thats the internets nickname for Tumblr) is perpetually stumbling toward obsolescence. Really, guys? We Tumblr users just came out to have a good time, and honestly.

The best queer memes of the decade (be gay, do crimes, the gay babadook, lesbian boba fett, etc.) all play into the traditional association of gay with whimsy, and this one is perhaps the most whimsical of all. They also abide by the classic cultural association of queerness with deviance and subversion and what could be more subversive than springing an illicit, passionate 1950s love affair between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara upon an unsuspecting old couple?

For all its saucy impudence, Theyre lesbians, Harold also manages to be somehow wholesome. The 2015 Tumblr post that spawned it was originally about Carol, one of the most beloved movies of the decade. But the phrase more generally captures those priceless moments when straight culture abruptly comes face to face with queer culture. The best queer culture is celebratory, open, and, well, proud, and Theyre lesbians, Harold works because of whats on the other side of the meme: queer identity, existing and thriving throughout history, despite the best efforts of straight culture to whitewash it or pretend it doesnt exist.

Theyre lesbians, Harold also falls within the realm of another kind of meme that emerged in the latter half of the decade, the variant of meme that mocks a hilariously out-of-touch older person especially a straight white person whos trying to figure out whats going on with kids these days. Perhaps theyre voicing their indignation at an aspect of progressive or diverse culture they dont understand. Perhaps, like the baffled elderly couple in this meme, theyre merely startled.

Even though Harold originally referred to a specific Harold, weve understood certain names as codes for universalized archetypes ever since Beyonc brought us Becky with the good hair with 2016s Lemonade. As part of that code, youll often see basic Anglican names universalized to represent the defensiveness that many white people deploy when faced with performative expressions of queer identity or other marginalized identities. (Sorry if that gets your hackles up, Tammy.)

Theyre lesbians, Harold predicted later memes like 2017s mocking Spongebob and 2019s OK boomer, while still embracing impudence and sassy irreverence for your scandalized straight feelings. Crucially, though, we never know if the initial recognition of the womens sexuality sparks horror or outrage in the original couple; theyre forever on the brink of either rejection or acceptance, which makes the meme itself forever hopeful: mocking, yes but with plenty of affection and optimism in the mix.

So much has been said already about Harambe including by Vox that we may admittedly feel exhausted by the thought of saying it again. But that exhaustion was built into the meme all the way back in 2016, and its part of what made Harambe such a weird and bizarre phenomenon, unique among memes even three years later.

The Harambe meme erupted across the internet after the 2016 killing of a Cincinnati Zoo gorilla, a beloved zoo resident whod just celebrated his 17th birthday the day before. Harambe died after he approached a small boy who had climbed into his pen. While many onlookers believed the gorilla was trying to protect the boy, he was deemed to be dangerous and was immediately shot by zoo officials.

The public outcry over Harambes death was massive, one of the bigger controversies of 2016 which, you might recall, had plenty of human controversies. The uproar was politically and racially charged, particularly directed at the boys mother, and lasted for months. The meme largely fueled the conversation, in which Harambe was both sincerely mourned and sarcastically milked for all his worth to become a weird spectacle of grief, bizarreness, and outrage.

The Harambe meme was basically an intense online wake for a gorilla that exemplified the way dank meme culture can borrow weirdness and spawn more of it. Plenty of people seemed to be sincerely grieving Harambe, while others were just deeply committed to the gag, as a way of ironically expressing their bafflement over the whole scandal. Either way, the meme kept the emotions high for ages; it simply did not quit.

The outrage over Harambes death summoned debate about everything from animal cruelty to gun violence to race and sexism. It was a deeply layered meme, serving a range of different ideological ends. That might explain why Harambe is still never far from the internets collective mind.

Its very recent, but its hard to deny that Baby Yoda the adorable puppet character who steals the show in the Disney+ streaming Star Wars series The Mandalorian is one of the last great memes of the decade.

In the latter half of the 2010s, in inverse proportion to all the aforementioned calamity, weve attained an era of peak wholesome culture, from hygge to hopepunk all spurred on by the rise of the wholesome meme, with its emphasis on cute, cuddly, and healing aesthetics. And clearly, with this cute, cuddly lifelike baby puppet, the wholesome meme trend is sending us off on a high note.

And if Baby Yoda turns out to be evil well, it will still be right in keeping with the thwarted hopes, disrupted belief systems, and unexpected chaos of the 2010s.

Heres to the 2020s, and may the Force be with us all. Well need it.

Aja Romano is an internet culture reporter for Vox. They last wrote about Cats and the rise of Andrew Lloyd Webber for the Highlight.

Correction: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the United States involvement in the hunt for Kony.

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The memes that defined the 2010s - Vox.com

Behind Nick Fuentes, the host of America First, follows a new group of far-right conservatives. They call themselves the Groypers. And theyve launched a war against the Republican party.

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, and Donald Trump Jr. do not seem like likely targets for a rising right-wing faction. But much to their surprise recently, the Groyper army chose events hosted by Kirk and Trump to descend upon.

Groypers attended a Turning Point USA conference at Ohio State University to heckle speakers with loaded questions. Turning Point is a conservative nonprofit that mobilizes Republican students on college campuses.

Trump, meanwhile, was booed off the stage at a free speech event at the University of California Los Angeles. The Groypers are claiming these two events, along with seven others, as victories against the mainstream Republican party, which they now consider to be fake conservatism.

A Groyper is a member of Fuentes movement of his brand of alt-right white nationalism. The alt-right is a loose collection of conservatives that harbor white nationalists. Fuentes is currently one of its most public faces.

As their chosen mascot, Groypers took hold of an exploitable illustration of Pepe the Frog. While iterations of Pepe are commonly used within the far-right, this version is of Pepe resting a conspicuous face against his two hands.

The meme appears in different forms on Groypers Twitter pages to show their allegiance.

pic.twitter.com/waW5rgrJ40

Fuentes Twitter bio declares himself as the Groyper leader. His image header illustrates Pepe soldiers holding up a flag that states Groyper War, Total Victory!

The header also has the names of the events, primarily on college campuses, and dates of when the Groypers heckled conservative events, all claiming victory.

The Groypers galvanize around the idea that the current Republican party is fake conservatism. Basically, they try to push each conservative position farther to the right by supporting a white, male, heterosexual America. They embrace white nationalism in support of policies that, although they have foundations in conservatism, even some Republicans find too far.

The group is extreme on immigration restrictionism, often calling for a total shutdown of immigrants into America, and pushes anti-LGTBQ propaganda to continue to fight a culture wore they believe the right gave in on.

Support of Israel is one major difference between the Groypers and what they call the traditional Conservative Inc. While the Republican party remains firm in supporting its Israeli ally, the Groypers extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism pushes them outside the bounds of normal right-wing discourse.

America is NOT a propositional nation. We have NO ALLEGIANCE to Israel, Fuentes posted on his Telegram according to Vox. We are CHRISTIANS and we dont promote degeneracy. Demographic replacement is REAL and it will be CATASTROPHIC.

Fuentes is also known for casting doubt on the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust, using crude analogies relating to cookies and baking.

He described the above cookie comparison as his hilarious and epic Holocaust joke on his Telegram channel.

The Groypers are loyal to Fuentes and share this anti-Semitic perspective. For example, one Groyper page posted a tweet with a photo of a blimp that says jews rape kids.

your uber driver has arrived, @ayyyetone tweeted with the photo.

Fuentes, an extremely online pundit, thinks he can shape youth conservatism because hes better at catering to the internet culture that many Gen Z or Zoomer college students are inclined to consume.

I think the generational style is so important, Fuentes posted on Telegram. Idk if its post modern or post ironic but the style and tone is very native to Zoomers which is i think why ppl like Shapiro or Kirk imagine theyre check mating me with some of these controversies but in reality its just turning young ppl onto my content.

Fuentes and the Groypers primarily target the bulk of the Republican party.

In the past, they have heckled speakers like right-wing talk show host Ben Shapiro, as well as Trump Jr. and Kirk.

Their goal is to expose high-profile Republicans by asking loaded questions, often about Israel and homosexuality, to prove their distance from the extreme or true right.

There were a number of trolls who sabotaged the Q&A portion of tonights @tpusa event, Turning Points Benny Johnson tweeted following an event at Ohio State University. Many of the questions were abhorrent and were not asked in good faith.

Fuentes responded to Johnson by calling out Turning Points moderate stance. Turning Point has been scrutinized in the past for its own racist biases.

Turning Point is now making a concerted effort to slander all critics of their bullshit fake conservatism as extremist trolls,' @NickJFuentes tweeted. We are America First and you are being exposed for the sellout frauds you are.

Fuentes has been promoting the Groypers next event on Dec. 20. White nationalists Patrick Casey and Jacob Lloyd will join Fuentes in West Palm Beach for the Groyper Leadership Summit. The Groypers will also be mobilizing against Republicans again, as the event is set to overlap with another Turning Point conference.

The GLS will feature speeches by myself, Patrick Casey, and Jacob Lloydwe invite all Groypers to join us for a celebration of our Total Victory over Charlie Kirk in the Groyper Wars! Fuentes posted on his Telegram board.

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What are Groypers? - The Daily Dot

Believe it or not, the first emoji was created in 1999 by a Japanese artist, Shigetaka Kurita, who wanted to create a simple, quick, and attractive way of conveying information. At that time, Kurita was working as a developer for i-mode, an internet platform owned by Japans main mobile carrier, DOCOMO. Fast-forward almost 20 years and these small, yellow, emotive characters now represent a lot more than at first sight.

Emoji has been referred to as a lingua franca a bridging language that allows us to bypass spoken language barriers and cultural differences. But emoji arent just as level ground for communicating, or as an innocent outlet to sext, theyve become an accessible symbol of activism and politics over this past decade.

Emoji has become a summary of our society and has increasingly intertwined with our conversations, even when were talking about politics, Lilian Stolk, an emoji expert told TNW. Not only do we use emoji for politics, but the process of adding new emoji is also a political game. Big tech companies use emoji to show that they represent diversity such as Apple with itsdisabilities emoji and Google with its gender neutral emoji.

A few months back, when people first started talking about US President s potential impeachment on Twitter, the peach emoji which was once a harmless sexting reference became the latest protest symbol against , and more specifically, his potential impeachment get it?

This emoji seemingly became a homonym having the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings after Lizzo, an American singer-songwriter, tweeted a message which gained almost 120,000 likes. Lizzos IMpeachMENT tweet was likely in celebration of House Speaker Nancy Pelosis decision to launch an impeachment inquiry against Trump.

Emoji are used in their literal sense to spread political messaging, especially in countries were censorship restricts free speech. For example, in China, #MeToo is censored, so people who want to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault instead use the cooked rice and rabbit emoji because rice bunny in China is pronounced similarly to me too.

Throughout the recent general election campaign in the UK, the red rose emoji was used as a symbol for the Labour party.

But just as emoji is used to spread positive political messaging, its also used to represent the opposite. For example, several emoji including the frog (in reference to Pepe The Frog), the milk glass, and the ok sign are used to symbolize white power.

The most political thing about emoji that surprised me is that Apple is not displaying the Taiwanese flag on phones in China, and recently they also blocked it on devices in Hong Kong and Macau. This shows that Apple wants to keep the Chinese market a friend, Stolk added.

With the more controversial political opinions, I think its safer to use an emoji, or a meme, instead of making a message more concrete with words, Stolk added. If you bring your political opinion with a layer of irony, you can hide behind the irony. If you post a pepe meme or use the frog emoji people can deny a real connection to extreme right-wing ideas, because its just funny. But at the same time, it still connects to these ideas.

Although it may seem like Emoji just magically appear on our phones once a year, this isnt exactly how deployment works. The Unicode Consortium, the official body that manage emoji, accept or reject emotive characters submitted by users, designers, and activists.

Over the past couple of years, the Unicode Consortium has faced some backlash over its decisions. Earlier this year, they approved the release of a blood drop emoji in what was widely considered to be a first step in ending period shame and sparking conversations about menstruation.

This is all thanks to a girls-focused development charity, Plan International UK and Plan Australia who in 2017, launched a campaign to create a period emoji in an attempt to reduce the taboo surrounding period and menstrual health.

To make the process of adding emoji to our phones more democratic Stolk created, Emoji Voter, a web-based app where people can vote for which emoji should appear on our keyboards.

Similarly to Tinder, Emoji Voter works by swiping through various emoji proposals which have been officially received by the Unicode Consortium. By swiping an emoji left, youre rejecting the design and its meaning, but by swiping right, you agree that this emoji should be included in the next round of updates.

Once the results are in, theyre sent straight to Unicode who then decide if theyll appear on our phones one day.

A handful of people from The Unicode Consortium decide which emoji we can communicate with. Imagine if just a few people would decide what words we can use? Its very weird that we as users dont have a voice in this. This is what I want to change with Emoji Voter, Stolk said.

The emoji proposals include harmless, fun examples like a rock to depict Earths foundation. But also include more inclusive and political emotive characters like a beaver thats a playful subcultural symbol among the LGBTQ+ society and afro hair which would help diversify cultural representation and its currently the only hair-type missing from the emoji catalog.

As gatekeepers of the language that we all use online, Unicode and their voting members are not consistent in their choices. They state that a new emoji should not be too specific and have the potential to become popular, Stolk explained. Then why is there a red-haired emoji and no afro emoji, while there are many more people with an afro worldwide? Why was a period emoji too specific, but there will soon be 70 symbols for people with disabilities? If we continue in this way, within eight years well be scrolling through 5000 emoji. Do we want that? We should think about this better.

According to Stolk, the most voted emoji will be the hugging and lip biting emoji. Both are a form of non-verbal communication, and thats how we use emoji most often, Stolk said.

Although the voting process is far from perfect, its reassuring to see that diversity and inclusivity are increasingly becoming part of the debate. While an emoji may not spark real change in society, it does encourage a conversation and acts as an accessible form of communication between various cultures and languages it could be argued that emoji speak louder than words.

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From sexting to politics: How emoji evolved this decade - The Next Web

Gas mask: check. Eye mask: check. Helmet: check. A press ID and reflective vest that spells out PRESS across the chest: check.

As I packed my black-and-white polka-dot designer backpackthe only backpack I ownearlier this month to prepare myself for the December 8 rally that marked the six-month anniversary of the Hong Kong protests, a feeling of uneasiness and doubt weighed heavy inside my chest. Since when did such protective gear become a must-have when I head out to cover a demonstration? And since when did writing about arts and culture involve putting myself on the front lines, where tear gas and rubber bullets face off against bricks and Molotov cocktails?

I might not have been able to imagine it six months ago, but this is now a somewhat regular day on assignment for me.

It didnt have to be this way. As a journalist who covers art and culture, I have the option to look away. Footage depicting the violent clashes between the police and black-clad protesters may have been making international headlines over the past six months, but for Hong Kongs art world, things seemed to be business as usual. I could have chosen to attend an art opening with a stylish clutch under my arm, sipping champagne while keeping my antenna up for news and gossip. The fall art auctions took place on schedule amid the shooting of tear gas, and I could have chosen to stay in the comfort of the auction room, taking in the frenetic bidding over the work of Yoshitomo Nara and Sanyu.

Riot police outside the Hong Kong Museum of Art after tear gas was fired nearby. Photo: Vivienne Chow.

But as Hong Kong descends into an unthinkable state, what seems to be the normality of the art world has suddenly become a detached reality might as well exist in a parallel universe. Protesters and unarmed civilians have been hit with more than 16,000 rounds of tear gas, nearly 14,000 rounds of so-called non-lethal weapons from rubber bullets to sponge grenades, and two live rounds. One student protester fell to death during a clash in a residential area, and more than 6,000 arrests have been made over the past six months, including of a child as young as 11. How can one still keep her head buried in the sand, thinking that the city is operating normally?

At the height of some of the most violent clashes, like the siege of university campuses in mid-November, Hong Kong was, quite literally, a war zone. None of this is normal. Had I chosen to stay in the art bubble and not witness at least some of what might be the worst events of terror my hometown has ever seen, I would have regretted it for the rest of my lifeas a human being, a Hongkonger, and as a journalist.

Am I scared? Im terrified. Covering art and culture has rarely involved encountering squads of armed riot police or hearing shots of tear gas fired at crowds in the heart of Central, the citys core business district where international galleries like Gagosian, Lehmann Maupin, Simon Lee, and Pearl Lam are located. Nor does it typically involve getting jostled by crowds of protesters running across Salisbury Garden in Tsim Sha Tsui, where tear gas canisters were fired outside the newly reopened Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Sure, I had the experience of covering the Umbrella Movement on the frontline occasionally as a culture news reporter in 2014. I have also recently taken a safety workshop for journalists given by a former member of the Australian military. But this kind of reporting was never something I could get used to. And as news continues to surface about journalists becoming targets of riot police, many getting shot with rubber bullets or sponge grenades,and one even losing an eye, I have had to decide in a split second on the ground: should I stay or should I go? Should I continue to take pictures or filming?

The installation Beyond by Hong Kong artist Rosanna Li Wei-han on show at Hong Kong Museum of Art. Photo: Vivienne Chow.

As an art journalist, it may seem unnecessary for me to put myself in danger like many of my colleagues who have been on the frontline on a day-to-day basis, and for whom I have the utmost respect. But these traumatic experiences have opened my eyes to humanity in a new and deeper way, which has inevitably informed the way I cover my own beat and helped me to reflect on the true meaning of art.

The words of Abby Chen, the head of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, constantly ring in my ears. During our conversation back in July, Chen told me that she believed the greatest art will be produced in Hong Kong in the wake of this uprising. This is about being human, and the kind of resistance and resilience that we are seeing Hong Kong artists are at the forefront in terms of thinking about their global identity in this rapidly shifting world, she said. Artists are part of this light.

Protesters mini Stonehenge rockblock in Hong Kong. Photo: Vivienne Chow.

Five months later, Chen has been proven right. Her understanding of art, and more importantly, her understanding of humanity, has led me to realize that the most meaningful and relevant creative expressions are living on the streets, rather than inside perfect white cubes insulated from the real world.

Often made anonymously by groups of Hong Kong people who are determined to fight an impossible fight, these creative expressionsgraffiti, songs, protest signs, memes, Stonehenge-looking roadblocks, and even performative protestsrepresent the demands, dreams, hopes, and fears of the people of this former British colony as they struggle to retain its freedoms and systems under the rule of the Peoples Republic of China before the 50 years unchanged promise expires in 2047.

Graffiti that reads Hongkongers, revenge. Photo: Vivienne Chow.

The protests sparked by the now-withdrawn extradition bill have morphed into a much larger scale pro-democracy movement, and the symbolism has expanded, too. These creative outputs have not only transformed public spaces into a living gallery of visual culture, but have also played an important role in keeping the movement vital and engaging. It is no coincidence that a record number of artists ran for public office during the most recent Hong Kong electionsand won.

When I walk pass a Lennon Wall and look at the post-its, graffiti, and posters spelling out protest slogans such as Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times or Five Demands, Not One Less,I often ask myself: Is it art? But what is art, anyway? A banana duck-taped on the wall sold for $120,000? Or an object of desire made with impeccable craftsmanship?

Art, to me, is an honest statement, and what I see in the streets and in images circulating in cyberspace are expressions that require both artistic skillbe it drawing, design, or street calligraphyand sincerity. They are the product of hybrid cultural influences inherited from Chinese tradition, Japanese pop culture, the Western world, as well as Hong Kongs cinema heritage, Canto-pop, street humor, and cynicism.

Christmas card from Hong Kong protesters.

These creative outputs embody a unique Hong Kong cultural identity, but can also resonate with a global audience. They borrow icons and memes from other cultures and reinvent a new identity for them, such as Pepe the Frog, which was reimagined as an irreverent symbol of Hong Kongs resistance and resilience rather than the symbol of hate co-opted by the alt-right in the United States. And more importantly, these visual expressions are the vessels of the pain and trauma Hong Kong people have experienced over the past six monthspeople whose voices have been muted by a government that fails to respond to their demands. Some have resorted to violence out of desperation, but many have also turned to art and creativity as their weapon of choice. Their creations might not be perfect, but they are genuine. They are peoples art.

Protesters in fiberglass masks of Pepe the Frog and LIHKG Pig at the December 8 protest. Photo: Vivienne Chow.

What will be interesting to see next is how artists distill all this to express themselves with their own artistic language. Some have already begun, but there will be more to come in the next decade or so. And as the movement is still ongoing, so is the pain and traumabut I have absolute faith in the future of Hong Kong art. That, now more than ever, is what makes this city one of the most interesting places to write about art.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz began writing when he was over the age of 40. Being in such a rapidly changing Hong Kong at age 41, I feel that my career has only just begun. I am looking at the world around me, and at art, with fresh eyes.

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Ive Been Reporting From the Front Lines of the Hong Kong Protests. Heres What It Taught Me About the Power of Art - artnet News

A new far-right group stepped out in the United States this fall and its driving pro-Trump right-wingers crazy. The groypers are potential successors to the alt-right, but their aim is not to bolster Trumpism so much as to replace it with an even more radical and openly anti-Semitic form of white nationalism.

Turning Point USA, a popular student group headed by Charlie Kirk that supports U.S. President Donald Trump, came under attack this fall as Kirks Culture War college tour was treated to a series of high-profile disruptions by the groypers.

Led by 21-year-old YouTuber Nicholas Fuentes, an associate of infamous white nationalist (and self-described racial identitarian) Richard Spencer, the groypers made national headlines this month for heckling Donald Trump Jr. at an event at UCLA. That resulted in Trump Jr. and former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle leaving the stage after attempting to shout down the crowd.

Weeks before the event, the Zionist Organization of America called on Twitter to ban Fuentes for using the analogy of Cookie Monster baking batches of cookies to attempt to deny the horrific murder of 6 million innocent Jews during the Holocaust during a podcast he hosts.

Fuentes group, apparently named for a cartoon frog similar to alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog, has harassed pro-Trump speakers from popular conservative commentator and Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro to Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw to David Rubin, a host for the conservative pay television network BlazeTV.

At the events they disrupt, the groypers ask speakers leading questions about Israel, gay rights and immigration to force them to defend universal rights thereby revealing them as fake conservatives.

Kirk, like Crenshaw and other speakers targeted by the groypers, are staunch defenders of Trump and often push the same kind of rhetoric as the president. Crenshaw and Kirk both regularly attack the so-called deep state and the impeachment hoax, but denounce the overt racism of the groypers.

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Voxs Jane Coaston, one of the preeminent journalists covering the American right today, notes that thegroyper army is simply the alt-right of 2016 and 2017, warmed over, reenergized and using new terminology aimed at disassociating itself from the optics problem of the deadly August 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally which, not coincidentally, Fuentes attended.

The alt-right a far-right, white nationalist movement in the United States that grabbed attention early in Trumps presidency has lost steam in recent years as many of its leaders have been largely discredited and exiled from the American right wing. From Spencer to Milo Yiannopoulos to Gavin McInnes of the men-only, misogynist organization Proud Boys, the movements most vocal proponents are now rarely given media platforms.

The size and scope of the groyper army is not well documented, nor is its online reach. However, it has disrupted events from Tennessee to Los Angeles and appears to be gaining steam ahead of the 2020 presidential election campaign.

The groypers also ask questions using a variety of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to elicit reactions from the speakers they target. These questions include asking about Israeli domestic surveillance equipment at the White House and the dancing Israelis conspiracy theory, which claims that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks as evidenced by five Israeli nationals dancing in celebration as the Twin Towers burned.

Another common question asked by group members is about the USS Liberty, a U.S. spy ship that Israel sank in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967 after it misidentified it as an Egyptian vessel, killing 34 American sailors. The incident has become an anti-Semitic dog whistle used by the groypers to ask how support for Israel puts America First and to raise doubt over the U.S.-Israel alliance. When a groyper posed this question to Kirk when he was onstage with Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle at UCLA, Kirk denounced the conspiracy theory which alleges Israel deliberately targeted the U.S. vessel and ended up launching into a vehement defense of Israel.

VoxsCoaston quotes the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer websiteas urging the groypers: When you get pulled out [by security], yell GOOGLE THE USS LIBERTY or GOOGLE DANCING ISRAELIS or AMERICA FIRST NOT ISRAEL FIRST or just NICK FUENTES.

While still very much on the fringe of the American right, Fuentes has found some mainstream support in well-known conservative pundit Michelle Malkin.

Malkin spent a decade churning out New York Times best-sellers, had a nationally syndicated newspaper column and is a regular on cable news. Shewas fired from the Young America's Foundation last week for supporting the groyper leader.

Her former employer is a conservative youth group whose events were also targeted by the groypers.

After YAF issued a statement upon her termination, saying that There is no room in mainstream conservatism or at YAF for Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, street brawlers, or racists, Malkin who has praised Fuentes as a New Right leader doubled down on Twitter in response to YAF. The Keepers of the Gate have spoken. #AmericaFirst is not mainstream. My defense of unjustly prosecuted Proud Boys, patriotic young nationalists/groypers & demographic truth-tellers must not be tolerated. SPLC is cheering, she wrote, referring to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Malkins tweet echoes the groypers sentiment that they and not the mainstream are the true voice of Trumps America First agenda.

In mid-November, the groyper army targeted TPUSA events featuringrising GOP star Crenshaw at Arizona State and the University of Texas at Austin. The latter event saw groypers being escorted out of the auditorium after Crenshaw declared that he sections off any anger about anti-whiteness and was shouted down by an audience member who said: We are mad because Israel, its prime minister, said 9/11 was good for Israel.

Crenshaw has since slammed the groypers, repeatedly calling them the alt-right 2.0.

After conservative Daily Wire writer Matt Walsh tussled with a groyper at LA'S California State University in early November, Crenshaw came to his defense. The groyper had asked Walsh how he justified working for a non-Christian meaning Shapiro, the Daily Wires editor-in-chief. Wait, youre telling me that my Jewish boss doesnt believe that Jesus is the son of God? Walsh asked sarcastically. My god, Im scandalized by this! I had no idea.

In response to the incident, Crenshaw tweeted: Matt is correct. They use slogans like America first to get conservatives to sympathize with them. But after personally dealing with them, its pretty obvious they are vehement racists, anti-semites & ethnic-nationalists. Conservatives need to know the difference. Malkin then blocked Crenshaw on Twitter.

Walsh had responded to Malkin in a tweet, writing, Hi @michellemalkin. Fuentes called me a race traitor and f*ggot because I work for Jews. He also said that black people who complained about segregation needed to grow up. How do you feel about these statements? And in what way are they America First?

Many of the conservative speakers the groypers have targeted are Jewish including Shapiro, Rubin and Jonah Goldberg, a former editor for the National Review. Fuentes had previously personally targeted Rubin on his YouTube channel: You want to talk to Jewy Jewstein? Fuentes said. Im David Rubin and this is the gay Jewish show. Today weve got a Jew.

At a speech at Stanford University last week, Shapiro ripped into Fuentes, calling him a garbage human being and obviously white supremacist garbage.

Some call themselves America First to hijack President Trumps slogans to give themselves a patina of credibility youre seeing them adopt the beliefs of some of these other movements in order to find cover for their own vile belief system, Shapiro said.

While Shapiro has been a vocal critic of this new movement and of the alt-right, he has also given credence to many of the arguments that bolster the far right in the United States. Shapiro recently argued in response to an Atlantic cover story on how to avoid another American Civil War that Democrats are using demographic change to force an ideological change in the United States a notion similar to the white genocide conspiracy popular with the far right.

One thing the groypers and the alt-right movement have in common is that both have made Shapiro their worst enemy. A study by the Anti-Defamation League found that Shapiro was the number one target of the alt-right in 2016 and it seems he will be for the groypers in 2020.

More:
Trump, Israel and anti-Semitism: How white nationalists are rattling the American right - Haaretz