>Among the white nationalists on Sup Forums’s “politically incorrect,” or Sup Forums board and on “alt-right” Twitter — or anywhere you might run into a picture ofPepe the Frog— there is a cryptic but popular saying: “Praise Kek.” Kek is howWorld of Warcrafttranslates “lol” when it’s revealed to members of opposing alliances, but it is also, conveniently, a name for a serpent-headed Egyptian chaos god.
>Among shitposters, these two identities have been conflated to make Kek a kind of ironicized divinity invoked to account for “meme magic” — when something espoused and affirmed in the digital realm also becomes true beyond it. Memes about Hillary Clinton being sick, for example, “came true” when she collapsed of pneumonia this past September 11. And Fidel Castro’s death — occurring on the capitalist holiday of Black Friday — has been making the Twitter rounds with the same “praise Kek” tag.
>Most of the people posting about Kek don’t actuallybelievethat Pepe the Frog is an avatar of an ancient Egyptian chaos god, or that the numerology of Sup Forums “gets” —when posts are assigned a fortuitous ID number — somehow predicted Donald Trump’s presidential victory. (Theodor K. Ferrol goes into more detail about that claimhere.) It’s a joke, of course — but also not a joke. As one self-identified active member of the alt-right told me, “I don’t believe in God. But I say ‘Praise Kek’more than I’ve ever said anything about God."
>The alt-righter doesn’t need a nation to be a white nationalist. When they praise Kek or joke about participation in the “meme wars of 2016,” they are taking part in a collective narrative that is no less powerful than, say, the primal patriotism ofpopulist celebrity-statesman Gabriele D’Annunzio’sirredentist march to take the city of Fiume from Allied forces in 1919
Thomas Cooper
>There’s a theory — the “lipstick effect” — that claims that spending on minor luxuries increases during economic downturns. Being able to tell stories about ourselves rates high on the modern list of necessities. We may be broke, but we can at least like what we see in the mirror. It speaks to the centrality of identity as a human need, to feel like we matter even in the apocalypse. Praising Kek, in such a world, is more than a shibboleth, or even a battle cry. It’s an affirmation of the self. If meme magic is real, it means the self is a little bit magic too.
>To promulgate meme magic is to claim for oneself a higher code, a deeper freedom that derives from seeing the world as constructed, and constructable, rather than given. From this perspective, the “real” world — with its rules, its restrictions on what you can and cannot say, what you can and cannot do in public — is secular, in the sense that it lacks meaning. It is an un-sacred space, and thus nothing there can or should be treated with respect. In the world of Kek, affecting the world with racist lies and memes — all with an ironic smirk — returns the possibility of free, meaningful action to believers, and makes them heroes. The freedom to not really mean anything you say becomes the only way to have meaning in life. Irony is the greatest freedom of all.
>The cult of Kek fuses a pretense of freedom with the rhetoric of unbridled masculinity to try to make ironic disengagement seem sexy and heroic. It’s an aestheticization of a religious need: a mock-heroic packaging of the desire of white men tobe men. Meme magic allows them to see themselves as exercising an intoxicatingly masculine vision of ironic freedom while doing that requires little in the way of courage, physical strength, or personal sacrifice.
Lincoln Hernandez
>The narrative of the Lone Ranger, conducted like a drone strike from behind a keyboard, thus becomes both cause and effect of the alt-right’s mythos. They participate in the “meme wars” in search of a narrative of self-determination that the incorporeality of their chosen battlefield will always deny them. But in the meantime, their mythologizedwar on conventionality inflicts concretecollateral damage. The battlefield of the meme wars may be largely incorporeal. But the Trump presidency is no less real.
>Tara Isabella Burtonhas written on religion and culture forNational Geographic,theWall Street Journal,theAtlantic,theAmerican Interest, and more. She is finishing a doctorate in theology and literature as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford.
Noah Stewart
So I guess we got some PhD theologist to write about Kek and meme magic. Good job, I guess, Sup Forums. Love y'all.
Cameron Hall
Bump
John Morales
...
Jonathan Thomas
>aSixwFaN >A six fan
nice id, 7/10
Isaac Sanchez
>Raping a crocodile for what end?
Adam Price
I heard that they believe having sex makes their dick longer, so they resort to animals when they can't get female poon.
Or something like that.
Isaac Russell
>open page >blank >needs javascript to load >open in links2 >works fine in pure html
Fucking hell I hate what retarded "web" "developers" have done to the internet.
Colton Green
Tara plz go
Brody Baker
Yeah, well check them.
PRAISE KEK
Grayson Phillips
"no"
Jack Lewis
>they wrote an article on Kek
Kek and I thought the MSM talking about Pepe le ebil Nazi frog was something. We are reaching levels of Memetics that shouldn't even be possible.
Logan Perez
What the fuck is this bitch talking about? I just say praise kek because it's funnier when more people do it.
> The battlefield of the meme wars may be largely incorporeal. But the Trump presidency is no less real.
So what you're saying is, meme magic did get Trump elected.
Thomas Green
>capitalist holiday of Black Friday
Jordan Edwards
>religion of nihilism
Hunter Gomez
>serpent-headed Egyptian chaos god.
Aren't serpents snakes?
Cooper Anderson
>still pushing the wow meme Dude must be canadian or something.
Jason Turner
>From this perspective, it doesn’t matter whether Kek is “really” a chaos god. Sociologically speaking, he might as well be.
