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From Irony to Ideology: The Digital Subcultures of the New Right

By Benedikt Büchsenschütz (Violence Prevention Network)

Introduction

Digital media have fundamentally reshaped how political ideas circulate and acquire meaning. Political communication today unfolds across fragmented visually oriented platforms where content spreads rapidly and emotionally, often with minimal textual explanation. These environments do not merely transmit political messages they create the emotional and cultural conditions through which politics is felt and lived (Highfield, 2017; Papacharissi, 2015). Extremist actors have adapted particularly effectively to this environment. The new right and other extremist subcultures use social media, gaming communities and imageboard platforms not simply to recruit or mobilise supporters but to shift discursive boundaries, cultivate group identities and naturalise ideological assumptions through humour, irony and a shared visual repertoire. This process has been described as the memefication of politics in which visual formats generate political alignment less through argument than through emotional resonance, mutual recognition and cultural belonging (Nooney & Portwood-Stacer, 2014; Peters & Allen, 2022).

Humour as an ideological tool

Humour plays a central role in this communicative landscape. It lowers cognitive resistance, frames ideological positions as common sense and masks extremist messaging as mere entertainment. Memes and short form videos allow racist, sexist or antisemitic tropes to appear playful or ironic while nonetheless conveying clear ideological commitments to those familiar with the codes (Massanari, 2017; Nagle, 2017). Within extremist subcultures humour is also a mechanism of social organisation. It signals belonging, rewards participation and creates a sense of insider privilege. These dynamics are reinforced in platform environments such as 4chan, 8kun or Discord servers where anonymity, rapid circulation and iterative remixing foster dense social interaction and allow norms to be collectively negotiated (Massanari, 2015; Beyer, 2014; Askanius & Keller, 2021).

Such spaces are not merely repositories of content but sites of cultural production. They generate shared symbolic repertoires, recurring jokes, coded references and ironic slogans that make ideological alignment feel like an aesthetic or social preference rather than a political decision. Importantly ironic engagement can serve as a bridge to explicit commitment. What begins as play can culminate in real world harm. The 2019 Halle attack in Germany exemplifies how online subcultural humour and ideology can translate into violent action, while harassment campaigns and coordinated hate speech demonstrate how symbolic and physical violence form a continuum; the perpetrator’s livestream, aesthetic choices, and self-referential comments drew directly on meme-based irony and gaming culture, illustrating how the memefication of violence can frame real-world attacks as performative, gamified spectacles intended for online audiences (Leuschner 40, 2023).

Empirical patterns in extremist meme cultures

Visual political communication relies on recontextualisation, repetition and amplification. Mainstream political meme culture refashions circulating images to comment on current events. Extremist communities adapt these same formats to anchor ideological narratives. Three recurrent patterns appear across platforms such as 4chan:

  • Ironic exaggeration: Opponents are caricatured, for instance as Non-Player-Characters (NPCs)[1], to delegitimise them and position dissent as irrational or irrelevant.
  • Coded symbols: Insider imagery conveys extremist messages covertly, ensuring deniability while maintaining recognisable meaning within the group.
  • Collective narratives: Memetic storylines such as Redpilling[2] or Wake up, sheeple![3] package ideological persuasion as personal revelation.

The effectiveness of these strategies lies not only in reach but in the emotional labour of repetition and shared participation (Papacharissi, 2015). Political meaning emerges from circulation, feedback loops and ongoing communal reinterpretation.

Affective socialisation and pathways to radicalisation

These dynamics are especially influential for young people for whom digital humour cultures are entwined with everyday social life. Extremist ideas can be introduced indirectly through irony, parody or layered references allowing ideology to become familiar before it is recognised as such. This gradual normalisation lowers thresholds for ideological adoption and prepares individuals for more explicit forms of mobilisation (Massanari, 2017; Papacharissi, 2015; Peters & Allen, 2022). Calls for violence, when they appear, are often embedded in stylised, symbolic or coded forms that are intelligible only to insiders (Nagle, 2017; Beyer, 2014). This produces hybrid radicalisation pathways that move from playful engagement to emotional investment and ultimately to offline action.

Conclusions and implications for research and prevention

Countering these memes presents a particular challenge. Their references are often so subtle and coded that they rarely constitute a direct violation of the liberal democratic order, making it “awful but lawful”. Even when content does cross legal boundaries, and accounts are removed, new accounts quickly appear, and the material is rapidly redistributed. For P/CVE practitioners, this creates a demanding environment: the internet operates twenty-four hours/seven days a week, and many users spend several hours each day on social media. While alternative messaging can play a role in countering extremist narratives, interventions must start early and equip individuals with media literacy and basic critical skills.

Developing the capacity to recognise and question subtle ideological cues is essential for fostering resilience against normalisation processes and supporting informed engagement in online spaces. Challenging conventional approaches using quantitative metrics of message dissemination are insufficient for understanding how belonging, identity and emotion drive political meaning making. Research must incorporate digital ethnography, participatory observation and multimodal analysis to trace how humour, visual culture and subcultural norms shape political subjectivities.

For prevention, this means engaging with the cultural infrastructures of youth digital life, recognising humour as a site of ideological negotiation and addressing the emotional and relational dimensions of radicalisation not solely its informational content. Only by attending to these processes can policymakers and civil society develop interventions that meaningfully counter the cultural normalisation of extremist ideologies.

Benedikt Büchsenschütz is a Research Fellow at Violence Prevention Network, with a focus on gender in extremism, (online) radicalisation, and hybrid ideologies. He holds a Master’s degree in Crisis and Security Management: Governance of Radicalism, Extremism and Terrorism (MSc) from Leiden University.

Literature

Askanius, T. and Keller, N. (2021) Murder fantasies in memes: fascist aesthetics of death threats and the banalization of white supremacist violence. Information, Communication & Society, 24:16, 2522-2539, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1974517

Beyer, J. L. (2014) Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Highfield, T. (2017) Social Media and Everyday Politics. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Leuschner, V. (2023). Von Columbine zu Christchurch – Demonstrative Attentate im Überlappungsbereich von Amok und Terror. In Rechter Terrorismus: international–digital–analog (pp. 25-54). Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.

Massanari, A. L. (2015) Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit. New York: Peter Lang.

Massanari, A. (2017) #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures, New Media & Society, 19(3), pp. 329–346.

Nagle, A. (2017) Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester: Zero Books.

Nooney, L. and Portwood-Stacer, L. (2014) One Does Not Simply: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Internet Memes, Journal of Visual Culture, 13(3), pp. 248–252.

Papacharissi, Z. (2015) Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roose, K. (2018) What Is NPC, the Pro-Trump Internet’s New Favorite Insult? The New York Times, 16 October. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/politics/npc-twitter-ban.html (Accessed: 10.10.2025).

[1] A term originating from video games, used in internet culture to describe a person perceived as lacking independent thought or personal agency, instead repeating conventional or mainstream views or behaviors in a seemingly scripted or automatic manner. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/politics/npc-twitter-ban.html

[2] To persuade someone to adopt an ideology, often associated with right-wing or extremist views, by convincing them they have uncovered hidden or suppressed truths.

[3] A sarcastic and derogatory phrase used to accuse people of being easily influenced, complacent, and uncritical, likening them to „sheep“ who blindly follow others. The term is a portmanteau of „sheep“ and „people“ and is often used online to express frustration with what the speaker sees as a herd mentality or unquestioning acceptance of authority or popular opinion.