Why are internet memes always rightwing?
Has political correctness killed comedy? Is the left too insufferably sanctimonious? Are NPCs not programmed to do anything more than run around calling each other racist? Seems like it.
Years ago long before Trump and Pepe, I used to spend a lot of time browsing the internet and it always seemed strangely Libertarian, much more free and open than real life. You would see the N word literally everywhere. Everyone was a 9/11 truther. The social justice phenomenon was there too, but it was limited to safe spaces like Tumblr. Liberals, powerless to combat free expression, would always dismiss the internet as not reflecting reality. In 2008 they said if the internet was reality, Ron Paul would be president. And in reality he couldn't have been further away from it. But what I was seeing on the internet had to reflect something.
It was confusing at the time but it's become more clear as the internet gets more censored. In 2014 or so, there was a collective effort by all the major networks to eliminate comment sections on their news articles. They did it together, not one by one. Even networks supposedly operated in the public interest like PBS and NPR, they led the charge in doing the most anti-democratic thing you can do. Journalists were finally being held accountable, and they couldn't handle it. You couldn't get away with making up lies about Iraq having WMDs and not being challenged anymore. They had to do something. So they shut it down.
Censorship has gone into overdrive since Trump. Google literally moved into the old German secret police headquarters. It seems like this is the way a lot of people always wanted it. There were two internets. The marketplace of ideas internet, long banished from universities with their speech codes, and there was the corporate internet, just a marketing extension for every facet of the existing power structure. Social justice icon Colin Kaepernick sells slave labor Nike jerseys at 10,000% markup. A unified vision for the global shopping mall. The military's original vision.
But this internet laid dormant and unseen for some time. It was an internet that could only be enforced against the open internet by the corporate power that has now taken hold. Little by little liberals whittled away at freedom of speech. Liberals who once cherished the concept of the internet as a means to communicate and spread the gospel of democracy now lamented having ever given the unwashed masses so much power. We used the freedom of the internet to spread heresy, and so the high priests took it away, an exodus onto ghettoized platforms like moviechat.org.
The left can't meme. The left doesn't understand the right. The left doesn't understand what resonates with people in general. They aren't even curious about the human condition. They're into biblical morality, harsh punishments for minor transgressions, microagressions. Hollywood doesn't give out awards to the movies that sell the most tickets or that have the most artistic value. They give awards to the most trite morality plays, the most slavishly worshipful of orthodox opinion. Virtue signaling. They're actively pushing people away to the other side. A lot of people on the right are formerly on the left, and they're the ones capturing them so well in memes.
A similar but longer-standing question is why is talk radio so rightwing. The normal news media depends on this 24 hour news cycle. Anything that happened more than 24 hours ago is forgotten. They weave narratives, but the narratives depend on slick productions and bad memories. Radio shows usually have a point of view to start with, a character, and they try to weave in the day's events to fit the long running narrative. America used to be 90% white. It didn't become 60% white overnight. So each day, the news gets to dismiss fears of immigration as baseless. But talk radio can look to the past and make inferences. They might be wrong, but they examine a spectrum of factors like motivation and context. Is the world a series of random unconnected events? Or are there patterns to be seen?
Pattern recognition is a proxy for intelligence. If you don't have it, you might find yourself with a first class ticket to becoming the butt of ironic jokes. Your first instinct upon seeing a cartoon frog might be to tattle to the courts and sue for copyright infringement. Hey that sounds like a meme: "Hates capitalism, wants multinational corporations to protect him".