The Meme-ification of Hate: How Far-Right Political Memes and AI Are Quietly Reshaping the Minds Of Everyday Americans
- Christelle Philemon
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
Over half of far-right memes use humor, but the most effective ones hide extremist ideas behind it. And from algorithms that subtly show you these memes to ones with universal experiences that are rooted in Conservative beliefs, it's a slipperier slope to exposure than many understand.
By: Christelle Philemon, MMM Editorial Team
By: MMM Editorial Team
Memes have long been part of internet culture. From early rage comics to today’s GIFs and reaction images, memes combine visuals and text into messages that are instantly recognizable and easy to share.
Now, memes are increasingly entering the political sphere.
Not as jokes, but as strategy. Unlike traditional news, which generally aims for neutrality, memes are designed to provoke.
Political persuasion no longer looks like hour-long speeches aired on ABC or fireside chats played on the radio, formal press conferences, or campaign ads. It looks like a meme in your group chat– made by a random account (usually verified) online and shared by your family member. Or you happen to like one tweet about enjoying being a parent and now you're seeing tradwife content.
As memes move from internet humor into official political communication, they are reshaping how ideology spreads — not through debate, but through culture, emotion, and repetition.
The Far Right’s Meme Strategy
This strategic mainstreaming is evident in the far-right party. The far right is increasingly relying on visual communication to disseminate far-right ideologies, making its online content more appealing to a broad audience through the visual and humorous nature of memes.
This shift matters because memes bypass the signals people rely on to recognize persuasion.
They don’t look like political messaging — they look like entertainment. That makes them more shareable, less questioned, and more capable of shaping perception at scale.
Far-right political memes are attention-grabbing and can also easily obscure hateful content, such as hate symbols, making them difficult to recognize at first glance. It's also incredibly popular for conservatives to create low-quality memes, which means pumping them out is easier than ever before. A study analyzing far-right political memes on Telegram found that over half relied on humor. The highest engagement came from content that hid extremist messaging rather than presenting it outright: highlighting how visual humor can act as a gateway to more harmful ideas.
And Trump has made this one of his main forms of communication– harrowingly effective in a nation with growing illiteracy rates. The Trump administration uses AI and memes on social media to generate attention and traction for its policies, such as his immigration policy, and to reach targeted audiences, like Gen Z voters.
“Gen Z is very different from older generations, and they also seem to have a greater appetite for that kind of commentary, that kind of visual commentary,” says Cayce Myers, a professor of communication at Virginia Tech in Time.
Recently, the official White House account has repeatedly announced that the United States is seizing Greenland while using popular meme formats of the day and, in the last year, there have also been several controversies around the administration using AI-generated images to attack opponents.
By reducing the work to images, the Trump campaign ensures a more controlled narrative from the White House, which compounds the emotional impact. It's a way to disarm those unfamiliar with the harmful messaging in these memes by softening and masking the messaging and playing up the relatability of these issues for the individual.
This shift in political communication is in efforts to make political content more palatable and tolerable rather than distasteful. So when you have an administration packaging a very harmful message that is easily adopted, especially for a nation where half of its people read at a level lower than 6th grade, it allows everyday Americans, many of whom are not watching the news or reading books, to be funneled into this form of thinking. When extremist or authoritarian ideas are introduced through humor and familiar formats, they encounter less resistance. Over time, repetition turns shock into normalization — and normalization into acceptance.
The Future of Political Messaging
This shift in political messaging has significant consequences for both media and politics.
Political messaging becomes less about policy depth and more about attention and virality. When harmful or extreme ideas are packaged as humor, they are more easily normalized, often without being recognized as political persuasion. It also overly centers the voter and their individual experience, not making space for the real collective.
Looking ahead, the future of political media will likely be defined by visuals and emotions rather than substance, and understanding how memes are used as a powerful media tool is essential to understanding where politics and public opinion are headed next. Particularly for any candidate who wants to not only win but shape their constituency as well. As political communication continues to shift toward visuals, humor, and emotion, the ability to recognize how culture shapes belief may become one of the most important media literacy skills of the next decade.
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