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Emily Dreyfuss: Dude, they're breaking into the Capitol over there. You're missing it. You're totally missing it, you got to go.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're listening here to Emily Dreyfuss. She's a technology journalist and senior managing editor at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on media, politics, and public policy. Along with Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg, she's co-author of the new book, Meme Wars: The Untold Story of The Online Battles Up Ending Democracy in America. Now when insurrectionists attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Emily, Joan, and Brian watched online by following the live stream accounts of self-styled, meme warriors.

Emily Dreyfuss: We were watching specific influencers' live streams and things like that, and what we were seeing diverged a lot from the mainstream coverage on television, which was just watching the actual crowds and not necessarily the people online egging them on.

Speaker 1: We're storming the Capitol, it's a revolution.

Melissa Harris-Perry: From the millions of Americans watching these events unfold, the January 6 mob seemed spontaneous. It was a shocking culmination of months of angry denial of the 2020 election results, but where many of us in the general public saw unplanned violence, the Meme Wars co-authors discerned characters in the storyline they've been following for years. On that day, Emily tuned in and watched the live stream of Anthime Joseph Gionet. He's known online as Baked Alaska.

Emily Dreyfuss: He's one of the meme warriors who had been striving to become one of the leaders of what was called the Alt-Right at the time and this was his moment. He was live streaming to his fans and they were giving him money through the live-streaming app and they weren't sharing memes with him and encouraging him to say those memes out loud and they were also telling him where to go.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, more than 21 months later, it's impossible to believe, at least credibly, that the actions of the January 6 mob were spontaneously uncoordinated. Over the course of nine televised public hearings, the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol has presented damning evidence. Not only his testimony laid bare the gruesome violence of that day, it's also detailed the threats, intimidation, and pressure applied to local and federal officials from deep inside the Trump administration.

Speaker 2: I saw friends with blood all over their faces, I was slipping in people's blood.

Speaker 3: Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you?

Speaker 4: Mr. Rosen, the president asked you to cease voting machines from state governments. What was your response to that request?

Mr. Rosen: That we had seen nothing improper with regard to the voting machines.

Speaker 5: He responded very quickly and said, essentially, "That's not what I'm asking you to do. What I'm just asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressman."

Melissa Harris-Perry: After months of investigation and testimony, after presenting evidence to the American people, last week, the committee unanimously voted to support this resolution introduced by Representative Liz Cheney.

Representative Liz Cheney: To issue a subpoena for relevant documents and testimony under oath from Donald John Trump in connection with the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For Donald Trump, there may have been a direct and personal benefit to be gained from stopping certification of the 2020 presidential election, but why did so many others risk so much on that day? If you look at research done by University of Chicago researchers Bob Pape and Kevin Ruby, you'll find that "a large majority of the suspects in the Capitol riot have no connection to existing and established violent organizations." They show that, for the most part, this was a mob of middle-aged gainfully employed white Americans. Pape and Ruby described them as "CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants."

Let's go back to Baked Alaska for a moment. He's a former BuzzFeed employee who's become a right-wing internet personality, and here's what Emily Dreyfuss saw as he live-streamed his roaming the riots.

Emily Dreyfuss: We were watching as he was walking in a certain place and all of his viewers who were not there but who were egging him on, were like, "Dude, they're breaking into the Capitol over there, you're missing it. You're totally missing it, you got to go." They sent him over there, and he did then go into the building and then he has been indicted.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Nearly 900 people have been charged with crimes for participating in the mob at the Capitol. They lost jobs, face public shame, some are serving jail sentences, so what brought so many of them there?

Speaker 6: I know kung fu.

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Emily Dreyfuss: In the Matrix, there's that canonical scene where Keanu is offered the blue or the red pill, and the red pill will tell you the truth, and the blue pill will allow you to continue living in your lie.

Morpheus: You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Emily Dreyfuss: In the far-right political sphere, a red pill can be about any specific issue, so there's not a single red pill. There is an anti-black red pill, there's an anti-woman red pill, there's an anti-semitic red pill. These communities will give you some kind of maybe false statistic, or maybe it'll just be a meme that puts all of these bigoted ideas that you've had in your brain, but suddenly put it together in one place that makes it click and make sense to you. Then it's as though you absorb that idea, and once you are red-pilled about that issue, you can't unsee it, and that's a key part of the metaphor from the Matrix is that once you take it, you can't go back

Melissa Harris-Perry: For Neo, the spoon-bending liberator at the heart of the Matrix, taking the red pill as a definitive turning point for his thinking and for his action. Once he sees the truth, he must act on it. Emily explained that this is also the case for those who count themselves as part of the red-pilled right.

Emily Dreyfuss: Once someone online has taken that red pill, the idea is they can't unsee it, and then they become so "angry," or they become so angry because they believe that they now know a true fact that other people have been hiding from them or keeping from them. They feel that they've been lied to now that they see this "true" thing, and that motivates them to try to get other people to take the red pill.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Apparently, these red pills are everywhere, in the form of memes.

1. Khaled: Congratulations, you played yourself.

Emily Dreyfuss: The idea is that a meme encapsulates a really complex idea, and then in a dense way, communicates it to others, and so it's a really powerful tool to define a moment and define zeitgeist.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In my middle-aged mommy corner of the internet, a meme typically features a snoring dog falling off a couch or a howling poodle playing a toy piano.

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Emily Dreyfuss: That's one of the most important components of a meme is that if you're part of a mimetic community, then the memes that are created by that community you understand. If you're an extremely online person on Twitter, you understand the jokes of that day, and when you log on to Twitter, you know what everyone's talking about. Whereas if you're not extremely online, you log on and it is total nonsense. You can't figure out what the discourse is about, who's died, did someone even die, or did they win a MacArthur? It's hard to tell.

Melissa Harris-Perry: While I've become an insider expert on the hilarity of dogs of Instagram, other corners of the web, they've been engaged in far more consequential meme work. During the past decade, memes across the digital universe have been shaping our world.

Dr. Joan Donovan: We look at the definitions of memes over time and try to understand how we've arrived in this very moment where means has become such an important part of our culture, but also an important part of our politics.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Dr. Joan Donovan. Joan's a research director of the Shorenstein Center on media politics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and she's co-author of Meme Wars.

Dr. Joan Donovan: Meme Wars are about struggle or battle over the definition of a situation or the definition of what it means to be on one side of an issue. Throughout the book, we begin with Occupy Wall Street, which was an online social movement that moved from the wires to the weeds and we end with Stop The Steal and the January 6 insurrection, and we show for the last 10 years how memes have developed as a very important political tool.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Nine years ago in October 2003, Christopher Poole launched what has become one of the most influential weapons in the Meme Wars, 4Chan.

Dr. Joan Donovan: 4Chan is an anonymous message board and it has a really important history charted by Harvard scholar Gabriella Coleman in her book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy. That movement of anonymous that was so powerful and the early odds and through the Occupy movement in particular grew out of this anonymous message board culture where different kinds of hackers and geeks and weirdos figured out that you can get coordinated on this anonymous message board and you can launch what are called ops or operations. You can influence mainstream culture by deploying different tactics across other important spaces on the web.

When we saw the rise of Anonymous, many people online thought, "Maybe this is how we get free. This is how we get liberation" is going to be through these bottom-up, essentially information warfare campaigns, but we also have to temper that with the fact that 4Chan is an incredibly disgusting place. It's the repository of everything you don't want to see on the internet. 4Chan is this very strange online space that has its own outsized impact on the mainstream culture. For many years, people on 4Chan would say, "We own the internet" because of their power to coordinate so quickly and affect what was happening in the mainstream conversations.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, did you catch what Joan just said? 4Chan was demonstrating the power of the online world to shape offline realities. Even those who might think of themselves as sophisticated online users, like, for example, journalists, well, we might be unable to fully discern the meme wars happening right in front of us. Here again is Emily Dreyfuss.

Emily Dreyfuss: I'm extremely online in a much more mainstream way, and that's why I call myself a normie because to me, as a member of the mainstream media, as a mom, I don't immediately understand a lot of the transgressive and subversive political memes from either the right or the left or from a lot of these subcultures when I encounter them on my own because it's not a part of my own community. Either they will be completely inscrutable to me or I'll understand just enough to either be turned off and offended or curious.

Now the interesting thing about being a normie or the important thing about being a normie when we're talking about the meme wars is that normies are often the target for these memetic communities who are trying to define the discourse. We might see a meme, we might not understand it, but we might be a little bit curious, and then we'll Google it, and what we find when we Google the keywords or phrases or the hashtag that we are curious about is often determined by these motivated meme communities who have created content online specifically for someone like me, and especially also journalists who are often the target directly to find and find their evidence and find their opinions and find their agenda in the search results that would then frame our worldview.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, let's pause right there, but don't go anywhere because when we get back, Joan Donovan is taking us back to 2017 to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, where the Meme Wars took a deadly turn. It's The Takeaway.

Speaker 7: This is The Takeaway with Melissa Harris-Perry from WNYC and PRX in collaboration with GBH News in Boston.

Joan Donovan: Hi, I'm Joan Donovan.

Emily Dreyfuss: I'm Emily Dreyfuss and we are the co-authors of the new book Meme Wars.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now we've been talking with Emily and Joan about their new book and how it helps us to trace the origins of the January 6 attack on the capital. Joan took us back to August 2017, just shy of seven months after Donald Trump was inaugurated when white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for the Unite the Right rally.

Joan Donovan: The term Alt-Right in and of itself was a rebranding, and we saw Bannon, who was the editor at Breitbart trying to make this new subculture, this new white identity politics happen. Kind of like in the Mean Girls' way of like stop trying to make fetch happen. What you saw were different, almost brand entrepreneurs, particularly Richard Spencer, begin to rise to the fore. He was charismatic, he didn't look like the white supremacist skinheads of old. Would wear a suit. He was reported on as the dapper white nationalist. He saw this growing momentum around this brand of the Alt-Right and many people didn't understand, especially journalists, how to cover it.

There's a great paper that's open access written by Whitney Phillips, who's a professor at Syracuse who writes about this and about how by giving the Alt-Right all of this oxygen, it amplified it, and in many ways, called it into being. When we were studying the online organizing behind Unite the Right, we were aghast at how big it was going to be. We were aghast at how many people were preparing to travel from across the United States to be there. We knew it was going to be very, very dangerous. This was one of the most significant and largest gatherings of white supremacists in the US in many, many decades.

The next couple of hours after that rally are so important for US politics. This becomes an important marker historically for how issues that arise in groups that find each other online show up in public and cause political violence.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Indeed, Unite the Right caused political violence and it claimed the life of Heather Heyer. The co-authors of Meme Wars contend that for those watching closely, the official response to Charlottesville also revealed a powerful connection between the memetic communities of the online right and the president of the United States

Donald Trump: We're closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In their book, The Meme Wars, Joan, Emily, and their co-author Brian Friedberg document how the bond between former President Trump and the far-right meme warriors was nurtured during his time in office through implicit signaling-

Donald Trump: All right, boys, stand back and stand by.

Melissa Harris-Perry: - and by the explicit personnel and policy choices within the administration that link the communities of the Alt-Right to the decision-makers in the White House.

Emily Dreyfuss: Meme wars are more like insurgencies.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Emily Dreyfuss.

Emily Dreyfuss: We were seeing these insurgents try to use their power, their coming together movement to overturn institutional power and the government, which is that's what an insurgency is. It comes from within and it tries to fight against the government. In a lot of ways, that's what meme wars are. They are an insurgent attack on the mainstream.

Joan Donovan: I think we're dealing with what some scholars have called fourth-generation warfare, which is a space online where you can't tell the difference between citizens and the combatants. Average everyday people get drafted into the meme wars by virtue of having a political opinion and not realizing that they're spreading dangerous disinformation or that they are pawns in a much larger political scheme.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As Emily explained, our nation's initially disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic amplified these processes drawing even more people into the memetic battles.

Emily Dreyfuss: COVID itself became a very potent red pill for a lot of people who had not succumbed to this kind of influence before, but suddenly with COVID and this rapid change, this sense that nothing was stable, they couldn't count on anything, and then with the government lockdowns, people who had had certain anti-establishment feelings or worries or fears about vaccines or medicine hesitancy, this presented to them this moment where they felt that they understood, "Wait, this doesn't seem right. I don't trust this." COVID became a red pill for them that they cannot unsee.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: From 4Chan to Charlottesville through COVID, the meme warriors perfected messaging and strategy culminating on January 6th, 2021.

Speaker 8: We can take that place

Speaker 9: That's on point

Speaker 10: Whatever it takes, I'll lay my life down if it takes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now in a somewhat ironic turn, the select committee investigating the events of January 6 is now making its case of the American people using many of the tools sharpened in the meme wars.

Emily Dreyfuss: They have brought the receipt, to use use the Gen Z lingo, in a way that is also just very savvy for media spectacle. One thing that is true of the meme wars is that if you're going to launch a meme war, it is only going to succeed if you manage to amplify it enough through the media that it becomes memorable and sticky and big and a big story.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Hearing Emily talk about this, it helped me to make sense of just how different the January 6 hearings have felt compared to typical congressional proceedings. It feels slicker, it's more highly produced, but I get it, you don't want to be the opponent who shows up to a meme fight wielding nothing but a written testimony. Still, it raises a question, if this produced more media-centered way of presenting evidence, it also disconnects us from what is really at stake here. With our most recent past president facing imminent indictment, Americans are deeply concerned about the health of our democracy.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported results of a New York Times-Siena College poll. It reveals that 71% of voters believe that American democracy is at risk, 71%. Just scroll down a little further and you'll find that only a tiny fraction think this is the biggest issue facing our country. For that, it's only 7%. Our thanks to Joan Donovan and Emily Dreyfuss, co-authors along with Brian Friedberg of Meme Wars. This is The Takeaway.

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