This Online Page Shares Memes To Send To Your Friends To Radicalize Them, And Here Are 50 Of The Most Eye-Opening Ones
Interview
Seeing the injustice and unfairness that surrounds you in your daily life can lead to an explosive cocktail of emotions: anger, anxiety, and even despair. Too much of anything can be incredibly bad for society as a whole. And some people feel that the root of pretty much all of the evil to be found on Planet Earth is capitalism—or rather the bottomless greed and inhumanity it propagates. All for the sake of profit.
These people fight in the hope of changing the way that society, business, and politics are all structured. Their goal? A more fair and equal society for everyone. Where workers are compensated well. Where everyone has access to affordable housing. And where everyone has enough free time to follow their passions instead of grinding overtime just to keep a roof over their heads. One way to fight for change is via memetic warfare: witty but accurate social commentary with the help of memes.
‘Memes to Radicalize Your Friends’ is a popular Facebook page that shares “short-form anti-capitalist and leftist content” to share with “the uninitiated.” We’ve collected some of their most powerful posts to share with you today, Pandas (all with a heavy dose of irony and laughing through tears).
Bored Panda reached out to the founder of ‘Memes to Radicalize Your Friends,’ Heather, who calls themselves "a centrist among leftists" and "a curator of content." They shared that their main mission is to share the same kind of content that helped move them from centrism to leftism. They were kind enough to answer our questions about the roots of the project itself, how they choose what content to share with their audience, as well as what issue with capitalism ought to be tackled first, realistically. Read on for the full in-depth interview, Pandas.
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Heather, from the US, opened up to Bored Panda about how their political views changed over time and everything that led to them creating ‘Memes to Radicalize Your Friends.’ "I grew up fairly privileged, white, Jewish, with 2 white collar parents in a higher income area of a blue state. I didn’t pay much attention to politics and would call myself a centrist or moderate." However, that soon changed with the election of Donald Trump.
"When Donald Trump was elected, it became apparent that I could no longer ignore politics. Several factors came together to educate me about the experiences of folks with less privilege. Content on Facebook led me to more political groups and the beliefs that resonated as the most aligned with my personal values were anti-capitalist. It didn’t take me long to accept that many of the problems with the world today are rooted in capitalism and America’s adherence to it. I learned that the American party system was between right-wing centrists (Democrats) and further right conservatives (Republicans)," Heather explained.
"As hate crimes against Jews rose, I started my first page, a centrist page, to make sure people knew what was going on. I quickly retired that one though as it took only a few months for me to completely abandon centrism and move hard left. I joined 'leftbook' groups, places on Facebook where anti-capitalist beliefs were shared. I was growing more and more radicalized by the content I was seeing and I liked who I was becoming. I started to explore my gender and became involved in queer spaces as well. I got an unjust ticket and in using my privilege to take off work and have a lawyer to fight it, I appreciated how few others were simply being screwed by the system without the privilege."
It was around the same time that Heather was experimenting with another meme page over on Facebook. They were learning a lot about how to grow a page into a successful social media project.
"When Covid hit in 2020, I started 'Revolutionary Memes for Rona-Ridden Quaranteens,' a play on a few other pages and groups who had names with similar rhyming schemes. I was sharing content about quarantining and the need for us to worry less about the economy and more about the well-being of fellow man," Heather told Bored Panda about the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"When George Floyd was murdered and protests began, I focused on content that supported the Black Lives Matter movement and how the destruction of property is a valid form of protest against injustices such as those faced by people of color at the hands of the police," they said. "My goal was to share the same kinds of content that had helped radicalize me from centrist to leftist. The page grew fast but I wanted to make it clearer what it was for." That's when they changed the name of the page to 'Memes to Radicalize Your Friends.'
"I was targeting fellow leftists primarily. I wanted people who agreed with me to share the content. I wanted people who saw the content to be curious about it and explore more. The page was growing but Facebook’s algorithms were more strict. After January 6th [the Capitol riots], it was hard to share political content without getting violations. I suffered many violations for content most people would agree was benign. Even after the violations expired, I saw my page reach was savaged by the Facebook algorithm," Heather explained that it became more and more difficult to express their political thoughts online at this time.
It's a fundamental problem of sustained supply. If you have 100 apples, 50 go to investors, 40 to owners, and 10 to the workers, but you need to grow next year to expand the share for investors and owners... only the growing isn't ever fast enough. So next year 110 apples but 55 for management 45 for owners and nothing more for you until an apple costs a 2 apples to buy and you're being told you need to stop demanding more apples because the old employees made due with that many apples. ..
"I attempted to run a new page, Memes to Radicalize Your Friends 2.0. It performed a bit better but the growth of the page didn’t compare to the early days. A year later, I retired this page, it having grown at about a quarter of the rate of the 1.0 version. I resumed running content only on the original page. The reach appeared to be repaired but I resigned myself to not seeing the growth I had originally. In 2020, the page would get 1-200 likes a day. Now it gets a fraction of that. But the content is still seen by millions of people. Facebook is not interested in political content being shared. But I’m still interested in using Facebook to share it."
Heather explained to Bored Panda that it would be more accurate to call them a curator than a creator of content. They source posts from all over the net, but they're very selective in what they post.
"I don’t share anything I don’t personally agree with and I don’t share about subjects I’m not well-informed on. The content that performs best is short and sweet, timely, pithy, lightly humorous…" However, it's impossible to know what exactly will perform well or not. There's a bit of luck involved in what content will resonate with the audience. Unfortunately, some posts get quite a bit of hate, and Heather is forced to delete some comments.
"I usually find a piece of content I like then preschedule it. The content that is most interesting is when I share trans-positive pieces, They’re pretty benign but TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] and transphobes like to flood the comments with hate. It continues to be appalling to me that Facebook will punish me for a jocular post about punching nazis Captain America style while allowing such horrific transphobic content calling for people to kill themselves. Facebook’s moderation quality has definitely declined since Covid. People are very full of hate," she pointed out that the quality of Facebook as a social ecosystem seems to have only declined throughout the pandemic.
"I think of myself as a propagandist. This is my praxis, putting theories into practice. I believe that people are swayed by what they are exposed to. My personal beliefs most closely align with eco-socialism. I am neither a militant communist nor a staunch anarchist. I am a centrist among leftists," Heather shared.
The founder of ‘Memes to Radicalize Your Friends' told Bored Panda that, in their opinion, the biggest problem with capitalism is income inequality, and how this affects one's ability to own property. Many of you, dear Readers, might agree if you happen to live in the US. "The minimum wage is atrociously low and hasn’t been raised in decades. Meanwhile, the tax rates on the wealthy have been a joke since Reagan’s era," they said.
"I’m most excited about the 'anti-work' movement and the prospect of improved labor rights for the working class. I continue to be privileged with a high-paying and rewarding job in technology but even with my income, I yearn for my own house. Far too many millennials are living in apartments and renting rather than owning and as housing prices climb, they remain out of reach for anyone but the wealthy who buy housing and then rent it back to those who cannot afford it."
But you are using arcane magical sigils and numbers to make numbers dance ;o)
At the time of writing, the page had nearly 71k followers on Facebook, as well as a further 852 fans over on Twitter. ‘Memes to Radicalize Your Friends’ is all about calling out the hypocrisy of the current capitalistic way things are structured. In short, the goal is to show people that, hey, there might be a better way of doing things that doesn’t leave people exhausted and exasperated.
Predatory student loans and landlords, unfair minimum compensation for work in the service industry, a lack of paid time off, an absence of federally mandated parental leave, and a very inefficient healthcare system—these are just some of the things that some internet users believe are wrong with life in the United States in 2022. They feel that these things desperately need to change in order for people to live their best lives.
There’s a deep sense of disillusionment that you get while reading the posts shared and curated by ‘Memes to Radicalize Your Friends.’ You realize that things are pretty darn bad in certain areas. That’s not to say that all aspects of life are horrible (they’re not—it’s essential to make the best of bad situations), but it’s more of a call to action to not be indifferent.
Speaking up at work, fighting for change in small ways, being actively engaged in bettering your local community—that’s what ends up making your life better, alongside that of your loved ones, coworkers, and neighbors.
They've already moved most manufacturing jobs to countries with few or no laws on child labour anyway so the proof is right there. They're doing it as we speak.
The only problem with the above is if you can’t afford a Porsche you don’t forgo buying a car. You buy a used clunker and deal with its level of competencies for what you paid. (e.g. seeking “cheap labor” is the result of the above analogy) What remains: get businesses to not hire cheap labor (under the table) or within the law.
‘Memes to Radicalize Your Friends’ is far from the only anti-capitalist page to be found (somewhat ironically) on social media. It’s actually a very popular topic. For instance, a while back, Bored Panda spoke to Angel, the founder of ‘Humans of Capitalism,’ who had a lot to say about the “absurdism of the current capitalistic society and its flaws.”
They believe that capitalism has changed into corporatism. "We often see many small businesses collapsing because they are not able to fight with the current trend or to combat with the giant competitors. So they have two options, close the business or sell it," they told us during an interview.
"We have many companies that have been bought by enormous giants that I do not want to mention and they won't stop there, they are trying to get their hands on any business category. Is there a solution for it? I believe that there can be some solutions, but capitalists will work and find a way to bypass those solutions and continue with the destruction of the system while being totally ignorant about it," Angel, from ‘Humans of Capitalism,’ told Bored Panda earlier.
"If we go back in time where socialism or communism were at their prime, we can see that the top of the head of the system was corrupted and that resulted with the fall of the system," Angel noted that these two systems are not viable alternatives to capitalism. Any system can be corrupted, and it’s essential to look at history realistically instead of through an overly romantic lens.
This! They convinced us we needed university to get a decent job, and turned out around and said, well, no, you magically need decades of experience too if you want more than minimum wage. But here’s a bill for those thousands in student loans.
You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor.
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I remember the fuss when 21-year-old Kylie Jenner was dubbed the youngest self-made billionaire (apparently she's only worth about $900 million these days, poor kid /s). Self-made. Hilarious.
i always laugh in the face of the elonmusk fans LOL he has such good Pr and some people are just stupid
To be fair, Bill Gates has never called himself "self made." He has always stated this in many interviews: I am not a self-made man. My parents started me off in life with every possible advantage. https://www.facebook.com/BillGates/posts/i-am-not-a-self-made-man-my-parents-started-me-off-in-life-with-every-possible-a/10154574152591961/
The only one that even gets close to defendable is bezos. There is no denying that it takes a lot of money to start a business, and at the time it was a gamble. But after that, there’s a reason why people say power corrupts. The rest, well, gates supposedly is actually trying to do some good with his money, warren buffet is a tight a*s and musk is quite frankly a dingleberry. I’m gonna throw this out there, no knee jerk reactions please. If Black Lives Matter, if people want some justice done for the indefensible crime of human slavery - Elon musk is the son of a slave owner. He is the poster child for the evil that people want answers for. And here in the USA he is celebrated. There is no excuse for this. He is the image of a rich man being carried on the backs of the oppressed. The politicians, the police, they’re just legacies of a system that was supposed to have died out almost 200 years ago. Musk IS the system.
Warren Buffet has a plan to give away 99% of his wealth before or at his death. He's actually doing some good, so don't call him a tight a*s please. Source: https://givingpledge.org/pledger?pledgerId=177
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I had a lot of fun writing from the point of view of an insanely rich media mogul character, who mentally bitches about how actually he works really hard and he started out with nothing but a position at his father's company and his father had nothing but a paint and tile company and a bunch of property in Florida to his name, so really he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, etc. And then someone breaks in and drowns him in his own hot tub.
Self-made billionaires: Elon Musk "Dad owned a emerald minefield in South Africa."
Yeah, the bullsh*t about these guys starting up in their garages on a shoestring budget makes me absolutely sick. Warren Buffet seems to be the only one who isn't a complete douchebag.
Putin started with nothing but being kgb snitch as a university student. Now he has more money than Elon and Jeff together.
The future doesn’t look all that optimistic, according to them. They see a future that is fully automated, where machines produce, deliver, and take care of the food supply, clothing, and health. In this particular case, who controls the distribution system will be the people in power.
Another issue with mass automation is that many people will be left without a job. “The idea of getting free food, water, health, clothing, is nice and, in reality, if we take a closer look at the current system we can see that more people are let off and replaced by machines. For example, we can see that McDonald's workers are fired and they have been replaced with machines that work on touch or by sound and they take orders, forward orders to the employees, etc."
While pretty much everyone is feeling their wallets getting lighter this year, things probably aren’t at their worst yet. The (economic) worst, unfortunately, is still to come. CNN notes in its Business Nightcap newsletter that the US is technically not in a recession… the keyword here being technically.
Well, housing and access to signficant mental healthcare and addiction counselling. But sloped seats don't help with that either.
“Economists look to several indicators—GDP growth, employment, bond yields, wages, etc—to determine the answer,” writes Allison Morrow. “Of course, there are other, less scientific but more fun ways to gauge economic health. Famously, there's the Lipstick Index, which suggests lipstick sales surge in lean times because it's an inexpensive indulgence that makes people happy. Alan Greenspan put forward the Men's Underwear Index, demonstrating that sales of boxers and briefs plummeted from 2007 to 2009, during the Great Recession, before picking back up as the economy recovered. One other, deeply unscientific, indicator: The Powerball.”
It’s weird, but I’ve noticed that the more money someone has, the more they expect things to be free or severely discounted for them.
According to CNN, the Powerball lottery jackpot is expected to grow to a jaw-dropping $1.9 billion ahead of the drawing. It is the largest lottery prize ever in the history of the United States. The chances of winning this huge sum (before taxes, of course) is around 1 in 292 million. “You're more likely to be eaten by a shark. Or be struck by lightning twice,” Morrow writes.
At the time of publishing, the Powerball jackpot grew to $2.04 billion, and the winning ticket was drawn in California. CNBC notes that the winner can hope to get roughly a quarter of that money after all the bureaucracy.
But why all of this talk about the Powerball? Well, you see, during the last recession, US state lotteries noted that there were huge declines in ticket sales, as people were pinching pennies and cutting out all unnecessary expenses.
In other words, the idea is that people still being able to spend a couple of bucks to buy a lottery ticket may be seen as a soft indicator that things haven’t gotten truly awful yet, savings-wise. It’s when people stop buying tickets altogether that you can be pretty certain—things are around their worst.
There's still a pervasive delusion that one can "pull up their bootstraps", work hard, and realize the "American Dream". A bunch of hogwash propaganda that has no bearing on today's economic climate. Minimum wage has not been adjusted for inflation in the US since the 1960's, meanwhile corporate CEOs are enjoying massive bonuses. The wealth divide is horrendous, and is killing the middle class, not to mention those poor souls who fall even below that. At this point, the US needs a legitimate miracle.
It’s the classic strategy, make the workers fight among themselves rather than challenging what the boss gets. It looks like we’re slowly waking up to it, and I’m praying to a god I don’t believe in the awakening spreads. We really can be like the proverbial red and black ants in a jar, and the top 1% is just shaking that thing.
Be kind to people on the way up - you'll meet them again on your way down.
Excellent point. They say we don’t have caste systems in the west, but homeless people are on the bottom everywhere.
Why are we paying over and over to live on the same piece of land anyway?
I still don’t get why wages don’t seem to be affected by inflation. Everything else is.
I genuinely don’t get the mortgage thing. I mean, if you can show you’ve been paying in rent roughly the amount you’d be paying towards a mortgage instead, what’s the problem?
Sharing, to them, is giving them your money, time, and life for very little in return.
Why do the very wealthiest people get their loans forgiven, even when those loans are in the sum of millions of dollars? And, they get to continue to take out more loans. I have two close friends who lost their homes to foreclosure after many, many years of paying their mortgage. No one gave them a break.
They are not pro life just because their marketing experts call them that. They are anti-abortion, pro power over women, because mother and child can drop dead -and all too often do- before or once the baby is born. Nobody is pro abortion, but pro choice, pro women's choice. If you don't want an abortion don't have one, it's that simple.
This phrase "quiet quiting" is so not intuitive. Everybody needs an explanation. For first time I heard it I tought that means when worker ghost his job, just to not show up, or leave without telling anyone. No quiet quiting is when you work as much as you agreed by concract. If you dont allow them to exploit you, you are quiet quiter, not a honest worker. What the...
While the insurance companies refuse to pay for the health care that your health care professionals say you need.
Might as well call it prostitution. Or coercion/bribery, because "if you don't do this: bye, but play our game and you might get rewarded". (btw technically you're only renting out your body, so technically at least it's not slavery)
As much as I hate Limp Bizkit I still hope this person's first submitted project was a design for that tattoo
Hey Kids! Can you say, "Revolution"? Rev... O... Loo... shun! That's great! Now try saying "guillotine"?
I have doubts about this statement. We just retired. Moved to a less expensive city and bought a 1951 built house that need a lot of repairs. Due to the cutback in world production from COVID we have been waiting months for the materials needed to fix our house. Slowdown in the world's production of everything can still have negative impact on the human condition.
Hell's demons would stare at corporate America for a minute, then fall to their knees and cry "Teach me, master!"
What is the point of interest anyway? Just pay back what we took, for Jesus' sake!
If you look, you'll see people on the right trying to get the attention of the man on the left to let him know he's going the wrong way. And he isn't paying attention or listening, so I actually think this perfectly sums up the US.
The company I worked for was one of them. Small company, lied about the number of employees. Got just shy of a million in PPP loans (public records). Then didn't give employees raises or a bonus because COVID "hit them so hard". It was the type of company that was not significantly impacted by COVID as far as profits went.
Then: We've hunted and gathered this place barren, now it's time to move. Then: Now we've settled with farms and herds. When do we relax? Nope, if you are not working you better be praying that you have enough to last you until you can work again. Now we can call our time our own and not the master's or the priest's.
Getting on disability is the best thing that ever happened to me mentally and emotionally. Sucks being trapped in a decaying body but honestly it's a small price to pay for being out of the rat race.
Interesting how few of these we're seeing talking about how awful home ownership is...
One thing that also comes to my mind, when I read these kind of postings: When people with money advise you and say: you need to invest! Make your money work YOU! And I’m always like: Dude, money doesn’t work. People work!
That's the big lie. They like to pretend that the returns they get for their investments come despite the workers wanting pay and conveniently forget that they need those workers to generate the money they then take from them to pretend it's nice that they pay you at all while their contribution of money is more important than a workers contributions of time and effort. A dollar is a dollar. It does nothing except existing. You need workers to generate value.
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The American dream is only a nightmare. Wish I had been born decades earlier. My parents and grandparents had a better work-life balance many years ago. All without cellphones and computers, imagine that!
Decades earlier, there were barely any rights for the disabled and people of color. Go back a few more decades and you're looking at women not even being able to vote and Asians not being able to enter the country. Not to mention the horrors the US inflicted on Native Americans. The "glory age" is a lie. Poverty always existed- in fact, the system was designed to facilitate it, right down to the age of chattel slavery and indentured servitude.
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As long as we Americans continue to believe the lies told by the rich & powerful, we are lost. Why should they share their riches & amenities with us if they don't have to. We slave away for scraps & they laugh because they know it's only this way because we choose to let it continue.
Because if you rise up like your great grandparents did, you aren't working for workers rights and fair wages - you're a communist. Amazing how the rich have twisted the narrative to suit themselves very well.
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One thing that also comes to my mind, when I read these kind of postings: When people with money advise you and say: you need to invest! Make your money work YOU! And I’m always like: Dude, money doesn’t work. People work!
That's the big lie. They like to pretend that the returns they get for their investments come despite the workers wanting pay and conveniently forget that they need those workers to generate the money they then take from them to pretend it's nice that they pay you at all while their contribution of money is more important than a workers contributions of time and effort. A dollar is a dollar. It does nothing except existing. You need workers to generate value.
Load More Replies... The American dream is only a nightmare. Wish I had been born decades earlier. My parents and grandparents had a better work-life balance many years ago. All without cellphones and computers, imagine that!
Decades earlier, there were barely any rights for the disabled and people of color. Go back a few more decades and you're looking at women not even being able to vote and Asians not being able to enter the country. Not to mention the horrors the US inflicted on Native Americans. The "glory age" is a lie. Poverty always existed- in fact, the system was designed to facilitate it, right down to the age of chattel slavery and indentured servitude.
Load More Replies... As long as we Americans continue to believe the lies told by the rich & powerful, we are lost. Why should they share their riches & amenities with us if they don't have to. We slave away for scraps & they laugh because they know it's only this way because we choose to let it continue.
Because if you rise up like your great grandparents did, you aren't working for workers rights and fair wages - you're a communist. Amazing how the rich have twisted the narrative to suit themselves very well.
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