patrick.net

February 3, 2023

Harvard University has asked its anti-Donald Trump meme expert to leave the university, according to the student newspaper.

“Harvard Kennedy School Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf is forcing out online misinformation expert Joan M. Donovan from her role at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy,” the student newspaper reported. ...

Donovan (pictured) has claimed that Trump and conservatives were victorious in 2016 because they were better at making memes.

“Hillary Clinton was not memeable nor was she meme savvy and even when she launched memetic campaigns online, even with her branding, as my class knows, it’s been hijacked by the right,” Donovan said at a September 2022 panel, nearly six years after the presidential election of 2016.

“So when she came out and said things like the alt-right or basket of deplorables or wrote about Pepe [a cartoon frog] on her website it was just like anything online that had to do with Hillary Clinton was incredibly corrosive,” Donovan said.

Spangler grounds his humor in pattern recognition. He watches the construction and repetition of official narratives, tracking the subtle manipulations that shape mass perception. These patterns do not appear in a vacuum—they take root in the cultural soil of news, government statements, and viral events. Spangler’s comedic lens sharpens on moments when institutional messaging veers into the absurd or the self-contradictory. ...

When a news agency inflates a threat or a political leader deploys language that doubles back on itself, Spangler isolates the twist. He then amplifies it, pushing the logic to its breaking point. The satirical article becomes an experiment: How far can official logic be extended before it collapses under its own weight?

Comedy, in Spangler’s view, generates cognitive dissonance by forcing a collision between lived experience and received narrative. Laughter arises when expectation ruptures. The mind, momentarily unmoored from habit, resets. Spangler and Duke probe this break in conditioned thought. They agree: the act of laughing punctures rote mental habits, opening a fleeting gap for critical reflection.

In exchange for giving up centralized message discipline, the Trump campaign gained some powerful advantages. First was economic: where the Democrats had to spend millions of dollars developing and disseminating campaign copy, memes poured fourth at no cost to the campaign’s war chest and went viral for free. Second was efficacy: freed of the constraints of the focus group and the committee, and subjected instead to the ruthless Darwinism of the attention economy, memes could be punchier, funnier, and more truthful, and thus achieve much higher levels of virality. Third was agility: the Democrats could spend weeks carefully honing an ad campaign, only for the frog tribes of the fiber optic steppe to disassemble it, repackage it, and subvert it within moments of its release, using the Democratic Party’s own expensive ads against them; meanwhile, sudden developments in the news cycle could catch the Democrats flat-footed, scrambling to put their message together, whereas the anon horde would have its memes blasting out across the social networks within minutes. Meme warfare is cheaper, faster, and funnier than committee-driven public relations, and these advantages were well worth ceding a certain amount of control.