Truthcast: The ‘Trash Dove Meme’ Attacks!

On this week’s Truth Squad Podcast, Jordan Winters, Mason Leib, Zachary Kreisler, faculty fellow Marc Ambinder and I discuss what unfolded after a University of Southern California vendor was discovered to be selling t-shirts and other merchandise on campus with swastika symbols on them.

Junior Ilana Spiegel noticed the symbol on her way to class and immediately asked the vendor to take it down.

“I confronted the vendor [and] I said why are you selling this?’ He said ‘this is the reclaiming of the [swastika] symbol’ and I said, ‘that is not possible, you cannot reclaim a symbol that is associated with so much death and destruction,’” Spiegel said.

Immediately following the incident, Spiegel posted her thoughts on her Facebook page.

The post has now over 2,500 comments — most from people attacking Spiegel who she does not know.

In the podcast, we continue our conversation from last week on the discussion of memes and the role they play. Many of the comments on Spiegel’s Facebook post involve a single post of a purple bird that was coined the “trash dove”.

The “trash dove” is actually just a sticker graphic on Facebook, but is clearly being used as a negative symbol on Spiegel’s post.

We discuss the use of memes as a source of information and the dangers of using them as a way to shut down an argument instead of talking and thinking critically.

So how do we, as journalists, move on from this? It’s a question that we will continue to ask, but we can agree on one thing: when people use memes as a way of argument in political discourse we will continue to dig deeper.