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Yeah, for some time I've wondered how the people throwing the "Left Can't Meme" thing around tend to be the sort of edgy contrarian young extremely online right-wingers who have created such a refined and self-referential meme culture it's actually fundamentally useless for anything expect getting yuks and reinforcement going on in small, extremely edgy contrarian young extremely online right-wing. At this point much of right-wing internal lingo seems about as incomprehensible to anyone outside of the bubble as anything equivalent leftist activist spaces have produced. On the other hand, the same people generally acknowledge that leftist memes (well, the ones that aren't wordy or otherwise too weird) spread around widely and have cultural cachet, ie. actually function as memes.
While this is not really a leftist meme - more like a centrist meme, in a Western context - I've been lately interested in the whole #NAFO ("North Atlantic Fellas Organization") thing. If you haven't encountered it before, it's basically an ongoing online fundraiser for the Georgian Legion, one of the foreign units fighting in the Russo-Ukrainian War on Ukrainian side. It's associated with "fellas", simplistic doge avatars that donators get after donating, and there's a lot of other memetic culture going around, basically based on recycled "NATOwave" slogans and the sort of phrases associated with doges back when doges were actually a fresh meme trend.
Of course I'm extremely online enough to find the whole thing extremely cringe, even if we don't account for the fact that the Georgian Legion might have committed war crimes. At the same time, it's obviously working; there's tons of people donating to this obscure military unit that they possibly might not have never heard of or even thought about otherwise, and it's giving a new identity to online Ukraine supporters. They've even got a clear signal that they're doing something right; the other side is making knockoffs (even when this sort of a thing is done ironically or as a parody, it always tends to strengthen the original meme, from what I've seen).
Currently NAFO is getting pumped by US congressmen and the Ukrainian government, which raises questions as to how organic it is, but it seemed to have a fair bit of organic spread even before this happened. Even if it's all some sort of an intelligence-originated OP, those still need some sort of a fertile soil online and some success in getting the memetics to work just right to get going.
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