Covering meme culture without training is like sending a reporter into battle without a map. As media analyst Oliver Darcy observed after the Charlie Kirk shooting, newsrooms would never send a general reporter into a war zone yet they often do exactly that online. The media response to the Kirk shooting has showed this gap.
Some outlets misread the shooter’s online symbols, others treated Discord as if it were a cult and the search for a manifesto has dominated headlines. But in today’s fragmented digital culture, coherence rarely arrives in a single document. Instead, it’s scattered across memes, aesthetics, shitposts and digital rituals – forms that may look absurd, but reveal how politics, grievance and even despair are expressed.
To take these meme cultures seriously does not mean legitimising their conclusions. It means recognising the grievances – loneliness, resentment, disconnection – that draw people in, while also confronting how those emotions are twisted into hostility or fantasies of civil war and collapse.
Far from disposable entertainment, memes now function as ideological tools. They package complex ideas in formats that circulate faster than manifestos or speeches. And once memes spread, their influence is difficult to undo.
Memeification as ideology
In these spaces, memeification is the ideology and politics is compressed into seconds – visceral, repetitive, sharp-edged and cloaked in irony
For example, characters like Pepe the Frog or Wojak may look like inside jokes, but they serve as emotional shorthand. Pepe often signals irony and trolling, while Wojak (the crudely drawn “Feels Guy” with a downcast face) captures despair, resentment and often hostility toward women. Together they operate as symbols of cynicism toward democracy, rage at cultural change, misogyny or mockery of outsiders, whether authority figures, ‘normies’ or marginalised groups.
Groups like the Groypers (a youth subculture that first emerged in the late 2010s by trolling conservative events and flooding social media with memes) treat this digital style as their political weapon of choice. While rooted in hard-right activism, their methods reflect a broader meme logic that now spills across ideological lines.
This emphasis on style and method matters. Early radicalisation studies often assumed ideology came first. Yet in many cases, it is grievance that drives people into these spaces, and memes provide the language of belonging or world-building before any explicit ideology takes hold.
For policymakers, this means interventions cannot just target ideology, but they must address the social grievances and digital cultures where those grievances are amplified.
So memes don’t just carry messages; they create a sense of activism and in-group belonging. To “get” the reference is to prove membership. Additionally, much of the culture revolves around performative toughness – posting the edgiest meme, the cruelest joke or the most ironic take to build clout among peers.
For instance, the Kirk shooter reportedly engraved bullet casings with commands from games like Helldivers 2 and lines from the song ‘Bella Ciao’ – absurd in isolation but together an emotive performance of being ‘very online’ with real-world consequences. For a small minority, the logic of ‘letting the world burn’ is taken literally, or violently acted out for recognition.
Aesthetics of nihilism and the loneliness problem
The visual language of these cultures reflects their mood: cartoon frogs, glitch art, doomer memes, consumer parody and millenarian gloom. Nothing matters, everything’s a joke. Nihilism becomes the punchline.
Some call this the “Black Pill”, a term borrowed from The Matrix. While the red pill implies awakening to hidden truths, the black pill means accepting a bleaker reality: that the world is beyond saving. It surfaces across incel forums, accelerationist spaces and nihilistic corners of TikTok. What unites them is a posture of hopelessness that is sometimes weaponised into cruelty, such as harassment or doxing, and sometimes expressed as passive indifference, where harm is dismissed with a shrug of apathy.
For outsiders, this world can feel impenetrable. Its heavy irony, layered references and constant remixing are alien to those raised on speeches rather than shitposts. Yet dismissing it as incomprehensible misses the point: for young people grappling with disconnection and loss of faith in institutions, this style offers both belonging as well as a form of plausible deniability. If challenged, one retreats into “just joking”.
Many of these meme subcultures are disproportionately male. The aesthetics of the Black Pill in particular speak to the thwarted cultural expectations felt by many young men. But the appeal of nihilism is not confined to one gender. Women appear in adjacent spaces, and while the problem is often male-coded, its reach is broader.
Beyond left and right: the collapse of political language
At the same time, the traditional language categories of “left” and “right” increasingly fail to capture the dynamics of these meme cultures. Ideological positions dissolve into aesthetics, vibes and tribal affect.
Pepe or Wojak memes can swing between mocking liberalism, hustle culture, or climate activism, depending on the moment. The targets change, but the point is the same – emotional resonance and often just trolling for its own sake.
This post-ideological terrain somewhat mirrors earlier youth subcultures such as punk, where rebellion was expressed more through style and attitude than policy. But what is new is the nihilistic edge: a culture where nothing matters and everything is a joke. Unlike many past movements, today’s meme culture is algorithmically amplified and globally networked. Bots and recommendation systems can make fringe content look like mass sentiment, while news outlets often end up amplifying this noise without context.
At its heart, meme culture reflects not a left–right divide but a nihilistic politics: a drive to tear down institutions and norms without offering a vision of what should replace them. This overlaps with more deliberate ideologies, such as the accelerationist theories promoted by white nationalists, which also see collapse as the only path forward. Where accelerationism insists on hastening destruction to clear the way for a new order, meme culture often supplies the ambience and indifference to consequences.
The new age of “memefestos”
Memes are not a sideshow. They are how ideology is packaged and circulated in online tribes. Groypers are only one example. The wider culture of militarised nihilism thrives wherever irony, loneliness and anger intersect.
Most who swim in these meme streams will never kill. But enough do, and many more applaud them, that it cannot be dismissed as harmless absurdity. And for others, the same hopelessness can turn inward, feeding self-harm.
When incidents like the Kirk shooting occur, legacy media still looks for a manifesto – a written tract that sets out the attacker’s beliefs. Yet these documents are often contradictory, derivative or designed to mislead. Increasingly, the real manifesto is scattered across memes and are recurring fragments that spread faster and shape communities more deeply than any single tract.
The Kirk shooting revealed this dynamic. While journalists hunted for a coherent manifesto, they missed how the attack itself could be read as a form of performative toughness – the translation of meme logic into real-world cruelty, staged for notoriety and in-group validation.
This coverage showed how poorly equipped traditional journalism is to interpret this terrain. Until experts, policymakers and newsrooms learn to read the memefestos, and treat memes not as jokes but as ciphers of nihilism, they will miss the evolving landscape on which radicalisation now unfolds. Understanding irony and nihilism online is no longer optional. It is essential to grasping the niche digital politics of the present, where cruelty and despair substitute for ideology.
And for governments and international organisations, this is not just a media literacy issue but a security one as nihilistic meme cultures ignore borders even as their consequences continue to spill across them.
Associate Professor Daniel Baldino is discipline head of the Politics and International Relations program at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in Australian foreign, defence and security policy including counter-terrorism, intelligence studies and government and politics of the Indo-Pacific. He has been a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress, the East-West Center in Hawaii, and The Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies, and has provided education and professional development programs at the University of Fiji. His edited book “Controversies in Australian Foreign Policy: the core debates”, published by Oxford University Press, was the winner of the Australian Institute of International Affairs’ inaugural publication grant.
This article is published under a Creative Commons license and may be republished with attribution.
