The electric meme pdf

The January 20, rally in Richmond, Virginia was a mass protest against firearms restrictions proposed by governor Ralph Northam. It drew right-wing and pro-gun activists from around the country.

The original Patriot Wave group has since been banned, but mhtml archives captured on January 20 show that it was very active on the day, posting news, videos, and user submitted photos of the rally. Group members also responded to reporters in real time.

One member of Patriot Wave who had a fleeting brush with mainstream prominence that day was a hefty man wearing a skull mask, who appeared in several news reports. He was featured in many news stories and social media posts.

His outfit combined references to neo-Nazism with high-powered weapons and internet-poisoned irony. Armed men embracing a similar set of subcultural reference points began showing up at more public protests. These incidents set the pattern for a series of heavily armed protests throughout the first half of , many of which were combined with anti-lockdown protests which had erupted in response to social distancing measures prompted by the COVID pandemic.

As boogaloo imagery has evolved, explicitly fascist imagery and ideas have made further inroads. This kind of signaling is often missed by the mainstream media. For example, an individual at the April 15th Lansing protest was photographed by freelance photographer, Jeff Kowalsky:. Yet like most outlets, ABC News missed the significance of other men wearing Hawaiian shirts, and, in at least this case, a skull mask balaclava complete with a clown nose.

Recent reporting has touched on the fact that explicitly far-right and even neo-Nazi groups are attempting to co-opt both the anti-lockdown protests and the broader Boogaloo movement. Weeks spent inside a network of Boogaloo Facebook groups have revealed a much more complex picture. This screengrab is from the Virginia Knights Facebook group , which has 5, followers and appears to be one of the larger Boogaloo-focused groups in that state:.

Interestingly enough, that same page includes a mix of both racially inclusive and racist rhetoric. For example:.

Since , when the L. Their use of the footage foregrounds armed racial conflict — the people shot from the rooftops are assumed to be black. The comments on this post included yet more racism, in the form of a series of anti-Muslim memes all posted by the same user:.

The point here is not that the Boogaloo movement is wholly or authentically anti-racist, but that there appears to be a very active struggle within some parts of this movement as to whether or not their dreamed-of uprising will be based in bigotry.

Facebook has been extremely permissive of Boogaloo groups, on the whole. But these and other related militia groups are occasionally given short-term or permanent bans. The American Militia movement has existed for decades, and enjoyed a previous upsurge in the s, until domestic terrorism, evolving law enforcement strategies, and shifting political winds diminished its popularity. Far right groups have always sought technological solutions to their exclusion from mainstream media.

The social media era has been a two-edged sword for the movement: sites like Facebook offer an ideal organizing platform, with an unparalleled reach, but also one that can be taken away at any moment. WhoIs records show that at or around the same time he registered a number of other domains referencing the militia movement in general like militianetwork. These registrations were in keeping with his repeatedly stated intention to create a Facebook-like site for the militia.

Embrey had previously created and sold niche lifestyle sites related to trucks. He had subsequently been involved in gun trading groups on Facebook.

In , Facebook began banning these groups in one of its periodic crackdowns on problematic material. Knowing how integrated this social network was into the vast majority of peoples everyday life. It also lists dozens of gun-trading groups on the Facebook-like website, MeWe, which has been heavily promoted in recent months as a fallback for those banned from Facebook.

MyMilitia users are able to create pages for their specific militias, and a number of these groups have coordinated to attend anti-lockdown protests. The manifesto discusses the morality of declaring war on your own government and makes the case that because dictatorships always start as slippery slopes, you have to assume all gun control is the precursor to tyranny. Thus any gun control justifies violent resistance:. The point here is that whenever a government attempts to disarm its citizens, a prima facie case exists that Just Cause is satisfied.

The same logic is evident across dozens of Boogaloo-focused Facebook groups. Users regularly discuss perceived tyrannical gun control legislation and see it as an acceptable pretext to violent resistance.

MyMilitia users spend time talking about the nuts and bolts of what that resistance will look like. Posts are peppered with links to PDFs of military manuals, instructions for zeroing rifles, guides to weapons caching, as well as briefs for military public relations officers and ham radio operators.

This includes information such as his announcement about a radio training session for members of his militia:. Wilkes feels secure enough on MeWe to cheekily suggest how his militia members might jam police and emergency radio frequencies:. Yet posts on MeWe get only a fraction of the engagement as posts on Facebook. Alexa traffic rankings suggest that Facebook is the fifth most trafficked site on the World Wide Web, while as at May 26th, MeWe was ranked th.

MyMilitia, meanwhile, was ranked ,nd and falling. That being said, individuals and organizations that are most influential in emerging far right movements do appear to travel between platforms regularly.

Josh Ellis, who now runs MyMilitia. Such cross-platform influence can only be translated into a mass movement with the acquiescence of Facebook. To see how, we can look at the legacy of the most prominent MyMilitia user, the late Duncan Lemp. He was suspected of owning firearms that he was not allowed to legally possess due to a juvenile criminal record.

What happened during that early morning raid remains bitterly contested, and is beyond the scope of this article. What is undeniable is that Duncan Lemp has become the pre-eminent martyr of the nascent Boogaloo movement. His name and face are constantly referenced, as in this post from the Virginia Knights Facebook group, which claims him as a former member:. Boogaloo bois regularly compare Lemp with black Americans who were shot dead by police officers.

This meme is commonly shared:. Naturally, this sentiment is not universally held within the far right Boogaloo movement. Another complains:. Do they care that most black murder victims are murdered by blacks? A willingness to view Duncan Lemp as a victim along the same lines as men like Eric Garner is one of the fissures that runs through the boogaloo community. In this thread, admin Corey Wilkes is furious that members of another group compared Duncan Lemp to Sean Reed , who was recently killed by Indianapolis Police while streaming on Facebook Live:.

Regardless of how Boogaloo movement members feel about non-white victims of police violence, Duncan Lemp seems to be universally regarded as a martyr. There are also constant exhortations to violence against police:.

The exact same runes have been used as the symbols for the National Alliance a defunct U. On May 13, a year-old Schleicher County, Texas man named Donny Leeks started putting out a series of increasingly unhinged Facebook live videos. Precisely what happened is unclear, but prior to filming these rants Leeks appears to have fired his rifle at his neighbors , which prompted the police to encircle his rural home and begin a standoff. During this, Mr.

Leeks continued to post Facebook live videos , complaining about a recent Congressional vote to extend the powers of the Patriot Act.

At one point, Leeks even fired at what he said was a drone. No one came to his aid, and Donny Leeks was killed after firing at officers on May 14th. Clips from his now removed Facebook live videos have circulated among various Boogaloo groups ever since. Neptune is typical of the anti-state, Libertarian wing of the Boogaloo movement. He states that he is anti-communist and fears a power grab from the government as a result of the coronavirus lockdown.

But then, we do lots of things that don't seem to help genes replicate. We decide not to have children, we waste our time doing dangerous things like mountain climbing, or boring things like reading, or stupid things like smoking that don't seem to help genes get copied into the next generation.

We do all sorts of cultural things for reasons that don't seem to have anything to do with genes. Fashions in sports, books, clothes, ideas, politics, lifestyles come and go and give our lives meaning, so how can we be gene robots?

Dawkins recognized that something else was going on. We communicate with one another and we get ideas, and these ideas seem to have a life of their own. Maybe there was something called memes that were like thought genes.

Maybe our bodies were gene robots and our minds were meme robots. That would mean that what we think is not the result of our own creativity, but rather the result of the evolutionary flow of memes as they wash through us. What is the biological reality of an idea with a life of its own?

What is a thought gene? It's a meme. And no one before Robert Aunger has established what it physically must be. This elegant, paradigm-shifting analysis identifies how memes replicate in our brains, how they evolved, and how they use artifacts like books and photographs and advertisements to get from one brain to another. Destined to inflame arguments about free will, open doors to new ways of sharing our thoughts, and provide a revolutionary explanation of consciousness, The Electric Meme will change the way each of us thinks about our minds, our cultures, and our daily choices.

Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love. Sign up and get a free ebook! Trade Paperback eBook. About The Book. About The Author. Robert Aunger. Product Details.

Resources and Downloads. Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! By clicking 'Sign me up' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the privacy policy and terms of use.