The swift and increasing backlash towards any and all forms of inclusion and diversity is no laughing matter.
To “celebrate” Valentine’s Day of 2025, the White House shared a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) that read “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally and we will deport you.”
Unsurprisingly, the post was met with nothing less than swift and harsh criticism from the public due it racially motivating others to be cruel to undocumented immigrants and their fears surrounding the ICE deportation raids that President Trump ordered within days of entering office.
The much darker reality is that the online Valentine’s Day post, as well as many of the offensive social media posts shared on the White House’s X page, is what many have viewed to be the penultimate climax of people not taking the rising threat of the Alt-Right political movement seriously.
The greater push to conservatism and far-right extremism is a sign that people need to stop engaging with their dangerous and threatening ideologies through jokes and memes.
Making jokes about very dangerous rhetoric surrounding marginalized and oppressed people only makes light of these issues at hand, causing the masses to take the problem far less seriously than they should. A recent example occurred during the 2024 presidential election, when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump said during one of many debates between himself and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitians were “reportedly” eating cats and dogs—a violent dog whistle that has been spouted by many hate groups about certain minorities for centuries.
Many called out Trump’s racist remarks, with one group of Haitian-Americans filing criminal charges against Trump and then vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance over their statements.
Others, specifically people on social media platforms, decided to go a different route and make jokes about the claims with one such TikTok audio remixing Trump’s remarks going viral on the app.
Despite the wave of jokes coming left and right online to mock Trump’s bigoted remarks, many still found it to be distasteful and a dangerous normalization of harmful rhetoric towards Haitian-Americans.
This leads to another serious consequence of making memes about the Alt-Right—the fact that it makes their hate appear to be far less harmful than it actually is, therefore allowing it to be pushed towards the mainstream.
Many researchers have observed that one of the Alt-Right’s strongest techniques is through the usage of online memes, jokes and humor. Being seen as far less threatening than their viewpoints, memes and other forms of online comedy are also utilized to make their direct ideologies harder to decipher and communities easier to be formed on social media platforms such as 4chan and Reddit.
This allows for their real messages to spread, culminating in real world violence and hatred.
As more news articles released by the day make it glaringly clear that people who hold far-right, aggressive and extremist viewpoints and ideologies mean business, people need to come together and show that they are also serious about combatting and silencing these violent world views.
