The King of Troll has won. That’s it. Trolling clearly went from horse-shit to an art form in a matter of years. And now : it’s a powerful political tool to become the commander in chief.
For some people, it has become religion : trolling is a way of life and Memes… are prayers.
And yes, I’m talking about 4chan.
I don’t know if you know that, but the Politically incorrect chan has been one of the many to pledge itself for the Donald. For month, it’s been acting to make him win against Sanders. And to destroy their arch-enemy : You-Know-Who-Clinton. Hand in hand with The_Donald subreddit and others groups, they’ve been part of the infamous “Trump army” to defend him by creating memes, that Donald Trump sometimes used, harassing in the footstep of Milo Yiannopoulos and going as far as hacking democrat phone lines.
I’m not going to dwell on what 4chan is or isn’t, but the /Pol/ channel is probably one of its most active place, and the one that received the most criticism — to say the least. The medias wrongfully summarize their political stance as Alt Right or white nationalist, whereas its a place that is far more diverse than you think. And far more chaotic : some people come here for intense trolling of the ones they want to get revenge from. Others because they have a real politic agenda. It’s a place where free spirits and vengeful dropouts gather to take on a trolling crusade on whoever they want.
Disclaimer : don’t take all this too seriously because 4chan is so deep into trolling that nothing is one-sided : all I’m about to tell you is partly shitposting but it’s also perfectly serious at the very same time.
Did you know the name they gave their champion ? They call him… the God-Emperor.
And now that the Emperor defeated all his enemies and was elected emperor in chief… they’re rejoicing !
Here you can see them enjoying “Your Tears” :
I’m not here to drink yours, but to bring your attention on a very serious matter. Precisely, on this type of discussion, hidden in plain sight in the 4chan feed. There’s so much mystery and internet folklore in this thread, that it’s going to blow your mind.
The Birth of Meme Magic
Did you know internet memes had super power ? That’s obviously what is at stake here: “Trump was memed into the white house”, they say, meaning that memes were powerful enough to have a tremendous effect on reality. Is it magic ? For its creator, Richard Dawkins, who coined the work in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, it was just a way to explain how cultural information spreads. His definition of an internet meme, was close to the Darwinian concept of genes, but for ideas : just like a gene, a meme is an idea that spread by random changes and accurate replication.
However, it’s not the survival of the fittest anymore, but the survival of the funniest.
Memes has become a gigantic trend the past ten years, and message board, where they are created and shared, are generally not considered influential. But did you know they even managed to use their memetic power… to order a Russian bombing in Syria ? Just look at this thread on /pol/ Syria General.
This. Is. Crazy.
I don’t have confirmation that the strike was, indeed, carried out. But for those guys, it was proofs that they hold power that went beyond harassment and mundane trolling.
They could troll reality.
And then Trump came. The King of Trolls inspired them. Moreover, they shared with him many views of the worlds, such as his will to change the American foreign policy, to get closer to Russia, to side with Assad. Inspired by Alex Jones (Infowars) and the likes, they considered Clinton to be a crooked murderer at best. A Bilderberg Illuminati lizard at worst.
When Trump appeared, things really change for them.
And things changed… for Pepe. Pepe the Frog.
The Rise Of Lord Kek
Pepe the Frog was just a meme like many other. In the beginning, it was a character of a comic series called Boy’s Club, created by Matt Furie in 2005. It’s an humanoid frod that mostly smile and say “Feels good man”, except in its variation, such as Sad Frog, Smug Frog or Angry Pepe.
He started appearing on 4chan in 2010 and soon become the unofficial mascot of the Politically Incorrect channel on 4chan.
When Trump appeared, the guys back at /Pol/ just mixed all their icons together, in a typical mash-up fashion, and here was the result :
And then weird stuff started to happen. Internet magic.
To understand them fully, they are two other things that you need to know.
Dubs
I didn’t knew about Dubs before that guy explained it to me : “Every post on 4chan and similar venues comes with an 8-digit numerical stamp. This number represents that post’s entry position in the entire posting lineage of the imageboard”.
With the amazing amount of messages 4chan gets, the last numbers are, for the most part, totally random. So for 4channers, it’s basically like rolling a dice, and it soon became a game : “When a poster gets repeated digits, its called “dubs”, “trips”, “quads”, and so on”.
Therefore, users started placing bet as to what number they were going to get :
When you win, it’s called a “GET”.
Kek
At the same time, in another corner of the web called World of Warcraft, the term “KEK” was born. The online meme dictionary, Know Your Meme, explains it better than me :
In the online multiplayer role-playing game WoW, released on November 23rd, 2004, players can choose to play on either the Alliance or Horde factions, which are considered enemies within the game’s universe. Players of separate factions are unable to communicate with one-another, as their typed text is run through an in-game translator. For players of the Horde faction, typing the letters “LOL” results in members of the Alliance faction reading “KEK”.
Internet magic
All those elements came together and things happened :
- Pepe the Frog was mixed with Donald Trump as mascots of 4chan.
- 4chan users started noticing that discussion associated with Trump contained more “GETS” than others.
- “KEK” kept appearing in the messages, notably because of the amounts of “GETS” but also to celebrate the a new trolling by Donald Trump.
…and then 4chan started believing : something was really happening. Something was telling them one thing : TRUMP WILL WIN. Below, you can see how a user managed, on June 19th 2016, to obtain the ultimate GET with the most sacred of number : the 77777777.
But that’s just the beginning. It gets weirder and weirder.
On November 27th, 2015, a 4chan user submitted a post about the Egyptian deity to the /his/ (History) board on 4chan, featuring a depiction of the god as a frog-headed man.
It was a real Egyptian deity.
It had the head of a frog.
And — OH MY GOD — HIS NAME REALLY HIS “KEK”.
I’m sorry I freaked out but you have to admit that’s a pretty big coincidence. Then we head right into synchromysticism, an internet practices that consist in “drawing connections in modern culture and finding connections that could be coming from the “collective unconscious mind”; and finding connections between occult knowledge (i.e. esoteric fraternities, cults and secret rituals), politics and mass media.”
But that’s not it yet.
The /Pol/ channel greeted the news with praise and a bit of awe : how could this be real, and what did it meant ? What was even more fascinating was the description of that Egyptian God :
Kek (Kuk, Keku) means darkness. He was the god of the darkness of chaos, the darkness before time began. He was the god of obscurity, hidden in the darkness. The Egyptians saw the night time, the time without the light of the sun, as a reflection of this chaotic darkness.
As a god of the night, Kek was also related to the day — he was called the “bringer-in of the light”. This seems to mean that he was responsible for the time of night that came just before sunrise. The god of the hours before day dawned over the land of Egypt. This was the twilight which gave birth to the sun.
The “bringer of the light” sounded awfully like the Donald to them.
The proof kept piling up : this statue of Kek appeared on the message board. However fake it may be, the hieroglyphic name of Kek literally blew 4chan’s mind:
You can now even buy it online on Amazon.
At that point, a “Kek worship general” thread was created on the /trash/ (off-topic) board on 4chan. On June 25th, an anonymous 4chan user submitted a post to the /r9k/ (Robot 9000) board asking if viewers had “accepted lord Kek, ancient Egyptian god of darkness, into their lives?”.
At that point, the Cult of KEK was born — and Meme magic seemed more real than ever. As far as 4chan is concerned, it was as official as it could be, and it had a precise theology, centered around “Memetic Magic, the manipulation of the Root, social matrix and the fabric of reality” :
Of course, by that time, Trump had started using those unexpected allies, and winking at them on social medias.
Can you imagine that ? Underdog troll of society getting the attention of the (future) President of the United States ?
It happened… and more than once :
And along the long campaign they led on social media, they started to notice how they managed to succeed in destabilizing their opponents. They started to feel their power of disturbance, and the power of “Kekism” and “Memetic warfare”.
It became so strong… it got to Clinton.
September 11th : Pepe the Frog rises
On the 10th, Donald Trump JR posted this on his Facebook page :
The day after was a historic date in Kekism.
First, Clinton famously fainted. For all of 4chan, it was a sign that the forces they had conjured were answering the call.
Second, Hillary Clinton campaign team posted an article against… Pepe the Frog, making him more real and more powerful than ever, describing him as a “cartoon frog who began his internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike” :
But in recent months, Pepe’s been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the “alt-right.” They’ve decided to take back Pepe by adding swastikas and other symbols of anti-semitism and white supremacy.
Then all forces of memetic magic were unleashed.
Strongly ingrained in conspiracy theories, and with Alex Jones on their side, the Trump Army viewed the struggle as a real fight against Satan. The number of the Beast was considered a bad signs on message board as Hillary Clinton became an embodiment of the evil God Moloch himself, as part of a Luciferian globalist conspiracy and all New World Order Illuminati theories:
They were very involved in the Spirit Cooking hysteria, where the contemporary artist Marina Abramovic (seen above) was accused of holding satanic pedophile rituals for the global elites, arguing that some Wikileaks leaked emails were proof that John Podesta partook in some of them. Wikileaks encouraged such interpretations and 4chan spread the worlds with carefully crafted memes:
Of course, the Clintons are accused to be part of most Satanic orgies in the world, and that Bill would never miss a Bohemian Grove party, another elitist all male secret society that have polarized the attention of a lot of conspiracy theorist:
Wether they believed it or not, they used the American public belief in conspiracy theories to discredit their enemies. That’s smart, isn’t it ?
But they like to play with magic too, and how it’s supposed to works is deeply rooted in internet folklore and the tradition of… chaos magick.
From Chaos Magick to Meme Magic
It has been at the root of a lot of internet phenomenon for years. To sum it up, Chaos Magick emphasizes the paranormal power of thoughts, ideas and beliefs to influence the minds. It’s NOT magic per se, of course.
One its most famous practice is the creation of Sigils, on which a chaos magician is going to gather and focus his will.
This way, Sigils are believed to allow one’s project to enter the realm of reality. But as years passed, a question appeared : what about memes ? As collective entities, created by the will of thousands around a single thought, repeated and refined, it was the utmost sigil.
And “hypersigil” some said.
The case of Slenderman is considered to be an example of that, when a message board created a monster that would later inspired a real life attempted murder by a 12 year old girl.
Well… the cult of Kek is exactly that : an hypersigil created by 4chan, using several tenets of chaos magick such as the creation of a tulpa, a magic monster created by one’s mind to exist in our dimension.
As the memetic warfare went on, all the rage and hopes of the Trump army created those powerful tools of collective will, making them circulate on the web, gathering attention and the wrath of millions.
And clearly : it worked.
One user posted this just before the results :
We are witnessing what will go down as the most important event in the 21st century. Historians will read through archived image boards trying to reconstruct what happened. An entire field of study will be dedicated to “meme magic” and its influence on the 21st century. People will literally specialize in identifying memes, their origins, and meanings.
Looking back, the Kekist are proud and gathering for the fights to come. Do they really believe in it ? Yes and no, it’s always part-true and part-troll, as a 4channer explains here:
One thing is certain : for them, it was not a mere election, it was a war that allowed them to show strength and valor, and to make reality fit their goal. As opposed to almost half of the American population who didn’t vote, Trump Army fought, and fought hard.
And now that the war had ended, they can proudly keep trolling on:
“Meme magic is real, you guys !”
