The far-right use online jokes to launder right wing ideology, and mainstream comedians are helping them do it A man posted a video on YouTube in which he repeatedly said “gas the Jews,” but claimed it was a […]

A man posted a video on YouTube in which he repeatedly said “gas the Jews,” but claimed it was a joke, as he was only saying it to make a pug dog do a Nazi salute. This video inspired hundreds of people to bombard the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities with abusive comments, and left Jewish people in Scotland feeling threatened.

As a result, Mark Meechan, also known by his YouTube persona as Count Dankula, was convicted of hate crime charges in a Scottish court. The judge ruled the clip, which was watched online by 3 million people, was “anti-semitic and racist in nature”.

Comedians defended the joke

Many prominent comedians defended Meechan, though often uncomfortably. Tom Walker, in character as Jonathan Pie, made a video claiming the judge didn’t understand the joke and Meechan was actually mocking Nazis. His video received almost ten thousand retweets.

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Stephen Fry, Romesh Ranganathan, and Shappi Khorsandi all gave varying degrees of support for free speech, and therefore Meechan’s freedom to make the joke. Other comedians, including Omid Djalili, Robert Webb and Dara O’Briain dissented to an extent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fTnuqbxxW4

Ricky Gervais and David Baddiel defended the joke, pointing to a short video they made at an earlier point during the trial discussing it. They defended it on a few different points, but broadly made the case Meechan was mocking Nazis, and that people needed to be aware of the full context the joke rested on – that Meechan was trying to be offensive in order to make the joke work, and was open in the video about that.

The problem here is that while some comedians thought the judge’s ruling was missing context, the comedians are actually missing the real context, and as a result they’re also missing the joke.

The far-right use jokes in a new way

The context is the internet culture Meechan comes out of, and so who the audience for his “joke” becomes. At the time of publishing the video, he had a negligible following, as few as eight subscribers. But as evidenced by his videos, both before and after, he is steeped in the irony-filled, meme-heavy culture of the parts of the internet the alt-right grew out of.

He negatively talks about Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu, the primary targets of the toxic and misogynist internet movement known as Gamergate, which itself contributed to the development of the alt-right.

The comedians defending the “joke” don’t necessarily appreciate the actual joke isn’t making fun of Nazis. A lot of people, maybe even most of the people, who shared and watched the video likely found it funny because of the reasons Gervais and Baddiel stated.

But in the context of the internet, there are large groups that find the idea of hiding their truly held far-right ideas in plain sight funny – that’s the joke. They’re laughing at the people who think they understand it’s an ironic joke, when they’re unknowingly just spreading propaganda from the alt-right.

This has been explicitly stated by many on the far-right – last year, The Huffington Post published the style guide for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. It said: “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not… I usually think of this as self-deprecating humour – I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously… This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas [jews].”

Many with right-wing ideology know how to use irony

This version of the joke comes from the racists being self-aware – in large part because they are much younger and native to the internet. A similar thing has occurred with fake EDL accounts on Twitter. Teenagers, who are often right-wing themselves, run accounts with stolen avatars to make fun of stereotypes of EDL-style racists, smuggling themselves and their views into wider online culture by adopting a posture of mocking right-wing views, while often actually supporting them, at least in part.

Just last week an account known as Barry Stanton was removed from Twitter after reporting from the New Statesman as it used a profile picture stolen from a Labour councillor from the north of England, who later received large amounts of abuse as a result of his image being used without his knowledge.

The account, which made jokes in character as a stereotype of a fictional Brexiteer, was retweeted by liberals and the far-right alike. The liberals found it funny because it played into their stereotypes of Brexiteers, the right-wing found it funny because it was mocking those liberals for holding such absurd stereotypes of people with pro-Brexit, right-wing views.

By muddying the lines between jokes and serious beliefs, it can become hard to figure out what is genuine, what is trolling, and what falls somewhere in between.

Ironic ‘jokes’ can gain the support of people who sincerely believe what’s being said

Meechan has apologised for the video, and has said he does not hold Nazi views. His other videos, which repeat a lot of right wing talking points, including criticisms of both Islam and political correctness, are not explicitly Nazi, and he has also publicly disagreed with alt-right figures repeatedly. But during the original video, he did also say that he understood what he was doing was offensive.

When a video blows up online, which Meechan says he didn’t expect to happen to the extent that it did, it finds those people who see the underlying joke as well – not just the one that can be easily explained by conventional comedic structures.

What they therefore understand as hate speech inspires them to attack the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities. It might look like a joke, but to a significant group of people it is inspiring hate speech, with no material difference to a neo-Nazi preaching fascism at a rally.

Racism has found a fertile ground between old school Nazis and online trolls

David Baddiel, who has expressed discomfort with the closeness of Meechan to members of the far right, said after the trial on Twitter: “There are LOADS of fucking proper anti-Semites out there, seriously promoting Holocaust Denial and global conspiracy bollocks,” which is both true and incomplete. The overlap between the two is significant.

The Charlottesville rally in 2017, which resulted in a left-wing counter-protester being run over, is a demonstration of how the far-right and online alt-right intersect. Some of those protesters were the “proper anti-Semites” Baddiel is likely referring to – there were swastikas, Nordic symbols and Confederate flags.

But other protesters were there because of the internet, having been radicalised to go on a white supremacist rally through alt-right spaces online, many of which heavily use jokes and memes. They brought things such as Kekistan flags, a ‘joke’ created on the messageboards of 4Chan to mock the look and feel of a Nazi flag – just in green, not red. A distancing joke, essentially, so they can fly the Nazi flag while protecting themselves by claiming irony.

‘An odious criminal act … dressed up to look like a joke’

Meechan can claim he was making a joke, but those symbols associated with the far-right regularly appear in what he produces online – he appears with the Kekistan flag, and Pepes, the frog cartoon that became a symbol of the alt-right. A self-described “shitposter”, Meechan is very aware of what those symbols mean.

He is a participant in the internet culture around the alt-right, and to claim his video repeatedly stating “gas the Jews” is a joke and should be protected as such is to fundamentally misunderstand what jokes can mean in 2018. It should be treated as its audience treats it – a serious incitement to hatred.