Moments after more than 100 million Americans finished watching the Super Bowl, a post on President Joe Biden’s personal X account showed an image of him smiling, while his eyes emanated red beams. The Feb. 11 post read, “Just like we drew it up.”
For the uninitiated, the message seems confusing at best and scary at worst. But the picture wasn’t for them. It was designed for the online supporters and detractors of President Biden, who are already well aware of the so-called Dark Brandon meme.
Dark Brandon is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of political memes that are subtly shaping the thoughts and perceptions of millions of voters in 2024.
In practice, an internet meme is any image, phrase, video, or other electronic material that people enjoy replicating, sharing, or reinterpreting to share with others.
“If you have a very, very potent meme that ruins a politician’s reputation enough, that could potentially sway an election,” said Don Caldwell, the general manager and editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins originally coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.”
There, Mr. Dawkins said a meme is any thing or behavior humans or other animals want to copy. An influential idea, he postulated, continues to live in human minds through the power of memetic cultural transmission.
Author and video blogger Tarl Warwick said he, too, believes memes are as old as human history.
Mr. Warwick, who’s been active in internet culture since 2008 and wrote a book on memes: “Occult Memetics: Reality Manipulation.”
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The book centers on what some refer to as “meme magic,” he told The Epoch Times.
This “magic,” Mr. Warwick says, is the ability of Internet users to create, remix, and share seemingly irreverent content in a way that changes the way people think, act, or speak.
Memes are irreducible, he said. They take an abstract concept and make it easy to understand. When human society was largely illiterate, he said, people used universally understood painted or carved pictures to communicate ideas on a massive scale.
Pamela Rutledge, director of research organization Media Psychology Research Center, said memes are a potent form of communication because they are both social and visual.
Humans are inherently social animals, Ms. Rutledge told The Epoch Times, and they feel rewarded when they’re included. It’s nice to be in the know. In prehistory, it was necessary for survival.
Furthermore, pictures are processed by the brain much quicker than text, Ms. Rutledge said. When the two are juxtaposed, an image influences how viewers interpret the text.
Political memes exploit the human mind by creating a sensory rather than a critical response. Moreover, they link pieces of information together to take advantage of the so-called availability heuristic—a mental shortcut in which humans gravitate toward whatever is most accessible in their minds.
For example, a meme of President Biden tripping while climbing the stairs of Air Force One creates a lasting mental image of the executive as a doddering 81-year-old man.
President Joe Biden trips while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on March 19, 2021. (Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images)
“All of these little memes can really influence how people experience someone, whether it’s true or not,” Ms. Rutledge said. “Because these memes have created this image, and this image has now been repeated and is in our brains, it then frames the information that we receive next.”
Feels Right
The power of a meme lies in its simplicity. In politics, memes can circumvent the multimillion-dollar world of consulting and advertising.
Mr. Warwick, who’s made political memes and describes himself as a “general in the meme war,” said political candidates pay communications firms to craft a message they hope will catch on with voters. Meme makers do it in their spare time.
“The powers that be will pay a million dollars for a focus group to develop a 30-second video,” Mr. Warwick said. “Then there are those of us who open MS Paint.”
Mr. Warwick went on to say he and many others like him who work either anonymously, under a nom de guerre, or with their real names see themselves as engaged in a battle between the people and the powerful.
“We’re doing it ourselves, often not for any particular central goal or anything,” Mr. Warwick said. He said most meme-makers remain unpaid or are “paid a pittance.”
Because memes utilize mental shortcuts like the availability heuristic and confirmation bias—the tendency to believe information that reinforces existing beliefs—not every single one needs to hit home; especially as they’re relatively easy to make. Ms. Rutledge said just a handful of viral memes can go a long way toward crafting mental frames and influencing people’s political outlook.
“We are looking for something that feels right,” Ms. Rutledge said. “So memes are very powerful in the fact that they condense information so much that they can skip lines of logic.”
Mr. Caldwell said the rapid rise and spread of political memes is a sign that social media is the new town square.
“Everybody finally recognized that social media [is] now the battlefield where political wars are waged,” Mr. Caldwell said. “Memes are … one of the more sophisticated and effective weapons that can be used.”
Most importantly, people who make memes have fun doing it.
(Top) Supporters of former President Donald Trump have their photo taken in front of a poster of his mugshot and a photo of former President Ronald Reagan, outside a rally in Las Vegas on Jan. 27, 2024. (Bottom) An editor looks at a monitor showing different memes. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images, Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images)
“If they’re entertained or they believe, erroneously or truthfully, that … they’re changing something within socio-politics, that’s an incentive,” Mr. Warwick said.
“If you can get people to do work, but they’re being entertained at the same time … it’s not work at all.”
That Escalated Quickly
The history of a political meme predates the Internet, according to Mr. Caldwell. He defines political memes as any viral cultural phenomenon that touches on the world of politics.
Know Your Meme is the world’s largest online database of memes, and includes their origins as well as most popular iterations. It is part of Literally Media Ltd., which owns humor sites like Cracked and eBaum’s World.
In American history, Mr. Caldwell said political cartoons were the first kind of political meme. Everything began to change with the arrival of the Internet and the smartphone.
Mr. Caldwell, who’s been immersed in the meme world for at least 13 years, told The Epoch Times digital political memes started as funny viral moments. However, they turned more mean-spirited and are now targeted at putting down one group or person while lifting up another.
The first big modern political meme was the so-called Dean Scream. It began when Democratic Party presidential candidate Howard Dean enthusiastically yelled at his supporters after coming up short in the party’s 2004 Iowa Caucus. That moment effectively ended the former Vermont governor’s political career.
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean reenacts his Iowa Caucus
When smartphones emerged and more Americans got on social media sites like Facebook and X, the spread of memes increased rapidly. Mr. Caldwell recalled the #ThanksObama trend in which people blamed anything and everything on former President Barack Obama.
Mr. Caldwell said President Obama was able to successfully spin an insult into a plaudit. The reversal was evidence of the left-leaning nature of the online world before 2016.
Everything changed when Donald Trump stepped onto the scene. Mr. Caldwell repeated the oft-used line that the New York businessman was “memed into the White House.”
Mr. Caldwell described 2016 as a perfect storm in the meme world. The internet and social media were mature. Smartphones were ubiquitous. People were beginning to realize the power memes had in shaping opinions.
For meme makers, Mr. Trump was the perfect embodiment of their frustration with what they saw as a decaying political system, Mr. Warwick said. His foibles, quips, and nicknames were ideal grist for the meme mill.
The ascension of memes also coincides with the prolonged decline of confidence in the American news industry. Mr. Caldwell said a graph comparing the use of memes with trust in media would show two diagonal lines crossing.
For young people, in particular, social media is the leading space for finding at least some news. In 2023, 69 percent of adults aged 18 to 29 said they get at least some news from social sources. Thirty percent of young Americans said they prefer to get news from social media.
The Left Can’t Meme?
Mr. Caldwell said a meme cannot be forced. In his mind, the most well-known memes are organic and user-created rather than cooked up by an organization. To be successful, whatever is being shared has to be attention-grabbing content.
The most shared political memes, according to Mr. Caldwell, are those that make their party or ideals look good while making others look foolish or pathetic.
Mr. Warwick said he believes memes tilting to the right can be attributed to both the power of President Trump and the nature of the political ideologies.
(Top) A Trump supporter holds a flag depicting the president as Rambo during a protest outside the ballot counting building in Atlanta on Nov. 5, 2020. (Bottom) A poster of President-elect Barack Obama as Superman is on display in Los Angeles on Nov. 5, 2008. (Tami Chappell/AFP via Getty Images, Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images)
The individualism of right-wing thought, rather than the collectivism of left-wing thought, naturally leads more conservatives to make more memes. Mr. Warwick said he thinks meme makers on the left struggle to create viral content because they want to include too many facts, figures, and arguments. A good meme is short and simple, not detailed and elaborate.
Politically, memes can make use of cultural touch points from movies, television, and other media to send a coded message that could be politically incorrect, or downright offensive, from one group to another.
“It allows those kinds of ideas to flow through in ways that you could not do otherwise,” Ms. Rutledge said. “People … will enjoy those memes, they will like those memes, [and] they will share those memes further amplifying their effect.”
So Much Influence
Both Mr. Warwick and Mr. Caldwell say that 2024 is the year of the political meme. They point to existing trends in social media usage as well as the increasing desire of both parties to embrace viral moments and social media.
The Super Bowl post is one example. The post itself was a combination of some exceedingly odd concepts many Americans are clued into.
One part is the online theory asserting the Biden administration wanted the Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl so megastar Taylor Swift would tell people to vote for President Biden.
The “dark” part, according to Know Your Meme, comes from memes supporting President Trump called “Dark MAGA,” which gave President Trump glowing eyes, an eye patch, and other tough-guy affectations.
The Biden campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times about its use of the Dark Brandon meme.
Cutouts of the ‘Dark Brandon’ internet meme are displayed in Miami on Nov. 8, 2023. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Mr. Caldwell speculates that the Biden campaign is embracing the Dark Brandon meme because they like how it portrays him. Biden for President sells merchandise with the meme and uses it elsewhere on its website because it makes President Biden look strong, he said.
President Biden is dogged by issues about his mental fitness and age. In February, he held a heated press conference contesting an assessment by a Department of Justice special counsel which said he is mentally unfit to stand trial.
“I think that this is kind of a way to fight against that,” Mr. Caldwell said. “[Dark Brandon is] ultra-powerful like a superhero.”
Already in the 2024 race, Mr. Caldwell saw campaigns “memed to oblivion.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, once considered a leader in the GOP’s presidential field, was weighed down by a number of awkward moments that went viral and were used against him. The most poisonous ones suggested the candidate wore concealed lifts in his shoes to make him look taller.
True or not, the message hit its mark by bringing down the candidate without addressing any of his policy stances or political achievements. Mr. Caldwell said memes can be just as explosive as any other political attack.
Ms. Rutledge considers the meme to be one part of the broader weaponization of information and media. Weaponized media, she said, exists to drive up emotions, foment tribalism, and dehumanize the opposition, not unlike wartime propaganda.
“It pulls out sort of the worst of our nature because it makes us very instinctive,” Ms. Rutledge said. “It makes us fight.”
“When you’re in fight-or-flight … there’s very little actually powering your cognitive capacity.”
Galaxy Brain
The next, and arguably most dangerous, weapon in the ever-escalating meme war is an image-, audio-, and video-generating artificial intelligence. In 2023, a number of prominent technology companies, inspired by the success of OpenAI’s DALL-E, rolled out AI platforms that create pictures from user prompts.
A photo illustration shows a video created by Open AI’s newly released text-to-video ‘Sora’ tool on a monitor in Washington on Feb. 16, 2024. (Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images)
In 2024, OpenAI debuted a new program called Sora, which builds on DALL-E to make videos from user prompts. While the promotional materials are innocent clips of animals and cityscapes, the technology will doubtlessly be used to create so-called deepfake videos.
Deepfakes, which have been around long before DALL-E, are videos that put a face and sometimes a voice, often of a public figure, over that of an actor. This creates an authentic-looking but fabricated video.
Deepfakers used to need to stitch together audio to make up a staccato, phony soundbite, but AI-powered technology and thousands of hours of tape from public figures speaking are already leading to much more realistic clips.
Mr. Warwick pointed out how AI-generated audio was used in robocalls recently. In New Hampshire, voters got calls from “President Biden” urging them not to vote in the January presidential preference primary. An old dirty trick, Mr. Warwick said, will get a new spin in 2024.
Both Mr. Warwick and Mr. Caldwell said people are already making gallows humor memes about how AI-generated video will be used in the future to create ultra-high definition videos of people doing things they never did and saying things they never said, leading to false prosecution or worse.
Ms. Rutledge worries that highly sophisticated AI-generated videos will fool people because the human brain relies on sight and sound as its most important senses for establishing reality.
Seeing may no longer be believing.
“You have to check, and you have to triangulate information sources. You can’t just ask your friend,” Ms. Rutledge said.
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