Just this year, Woods has played a crucial role in amplifying the following far-right narratives: Yet Woods has continued to use his wide reach on Twitter to regularly share smears, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and other content that can be traced back to anonymous message boards that are popular with far-right users, like 4chan’s “/pol/,” 8chan’s “/qresearch/,” “The_Donald” subreddit (a forum on Reddit for Trump fans), and to white nationalist hotspot Gab. There’s literally nothing wrong with this meme other than using it as an excuse to silence a strong conservative voice. Woods later claimed Twitter told him it would delete his offending tweet and let him back on the following month. said Woods was “a strong conservative voice,” and Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell called him “one of the top conservatives” on Twitter. When Woods was briefly suspended by Twitter in September after posting a meme from 4chan that falsely claimed Democrats were urging men not to vote in the midterm elections, the right-wing media ecosystem rushed to his defense. His tweets have been retweeted by Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Donald Trump Jr. Some right-wing outlets have even characterized Woods as a potential California gubernatorial candidate and championed him as a possible Academy Awards host. Woods, whose verified Twitter account has more than 2 million followers, is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, and his criticism of the left regularly receives positive coverage from conservative media publications. Given that the current political climate seems to make joking about sincerely held views the order of the day, don’t expect the trend to fade anytime soon.James Woods, a far-right Hollywood actor with a large Twitter following, has increasingly become a megaphone for content from the internet fever swamps, amplifying it by pushing it to his followers - a role that has been noted by journalists, social media analysts, and far-right users themselves. That’s exactly what we’re seeing with the statue meme, where Woods’s suggestion that the removal of Confederate statues throughout the US will inevitably lead to the destruction of a famous memorial honoring Marines has spawned absurd celebrations of all the ridiculous statues, monuments, marketing gimmicks, art installations, and temporary structures that maybe need a good dismantling. The “future that liberals want” meme might as well have been a template for this structure: You start with sincere outrage - with “the future that liberals want,” it was a dismissive quip about a photo of a drag queen sitting next to a woman in a niqab on the New York subway - and end up with dramatically manufactured outrage over, for example, an apple holding a sea trident. The more sober the original tweet is, the more hilariously unlikely its corresponding memeification is likely to be. But the theme that characterizes this particular meme trend seems to be the equating of conservative outrage with complete and utter absurdity. There are plenty of Twitter memes that function around recontextualizing quotes - for example, the progressive "she persisted" meme. ![]() Both of those earlier memes also originated from a single tweet that went viral more for its exaggerated outrage than for people supportively retweeting its contents.Īnd both of them, like this new statue meme, generated reactions in a specific format: the copying and pasting of the original text alongside immediately ridiculous and over-the-top images meant to reflect that exaggerated outrage. If nothing else, the meme is a fun reminder of how versatile art can be.īut it also has a lot in common with other recent Twitter memes, like the “Future that liberals want” meme or the “nothing but respect for MY president” meme. The ever-expanding collection of statues that’ve been referenced in the meme is truly, delightfully bizarre, with works ranging from the weird to the much weirder to the perverse to the hideous to the provocative to the completely WTF. KrcpJR2mtG- Naomi Irene Rohatyn August 15, 2017 Before the #liberals find a reason to deface destroy or degrade etc etc.
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