Memes Against America | The American Spectator

We have it on excellent authority, namely our own Scott McKay, that Americans are somewhat skeptical of our campaign to — at long last — destroy the theocratic monstrosity that has ruled Iran for 47 years. An early Reuters/Ipsos poll put support for “Trump’s attack on Iran” at only 27 percent, with 43 percent disapproving and 30 percent in the ever-popular “I don’t know” column. Of course, the question’s phrasing sets this up, but we’ve long known that the supposedly “professional” and “independent” polling business is in fact a morass of tendentious argument masquerading as objective data collection. These days, the only remotely trustworthy polling is that conducted privately on behalf of customers who genuinely need accurate insight into public opinion.

We know all this, and political analysts and policymakers have learned to discount polling results accordingly. But there is another and far more insidious thumb on the scale of public opinion, one that pretends objectivity while in fact propagandizing for the various leftist causes of the day. This takes the form of social media “questions” that pretend to be objective while hiding — and at the same time promoting — the leftist messaging of the day.

This trickery is everywhere and literally unavoidable across the universe of social media. A few examples, however, selected at random, tell the larger tale. Take one that attacks ICE. The picture, quite obviously AI-generated, shows a masked ICE agent in full tactical gear. Only the eyes and lower forehead are visible, along with some strands of blond hair and, tellingly, blue eyes (oddly, the carefully shaped eyebrows suggest that the base image is a woman, perhaps stolen from another prominent category of AI imagery). The caption reads, “How do you feel about masked ICE agents waiting outside of courts to grab immigrants?”

One can challenge this on evidentiary grounds. How common is it for ICE to wait outside of courts, and, when it does take place, is it not legitimate when what’s taking place inside is the indictment or trial of an illegal immigrant on criminal charges? Even critics of deportation find it hard to argue that it shouldn’t be applied to criminals, particularly violent ones. Waiting for criminals outside of courts enables precisely targeted immigration enforcement rather than sweeping illegals up off the streets, which increases the danger to both ICE agents and the likelihood of confrontation.

But never mind reasoned discussion, what’s going on in this image is all about emotion, not logical argument. Grab “immigrants,” the caption asks, rather than more accurately saying “illegal immigrants.” The phrasing gives away the real motive, which is to suggest that ICE agents are engaged in a witch hunt, vacuuming up legal immigrants (and the occasional native born citizen). By omitting a single keyword, the caption shoves the entire image in the direction of the left’s narrative about ICE.

Worse, and more insidiously subtle, depicting a blond-haired, blue-eyed ICE agent contributes to the narrative that immigration enforcement is racist “whites” against “people of color,” with even a hint of the egregious Nazi trope, the “blue-eyed blond” SS man. Moreover, this messaging appears repeatedly. In just a single morning’s social media scan, I discovered dozens of similar images.

An alert conservative reader — the typical American Spectator reader — will quite readily pick up on all this. Most consumers of social media political messaging are not so sensitive to nuance and are much more vulnerable to falling into the anti-ICE trap. Not so long ago, the clear majority of Americans strongly supported energetic immigration enforcement, but now that support has softened.

While conservatives have learned to challenge the messaging from the legacy media on this issue, social media messages slip beneath our radar to a disturbing extent. One sees this in the freshly emboldened Democrat efforts to shackle or even defund ICE, and the correspondingly lame response on the part of many congressional Republicans. If we want to maintain support for immigration enforcement, we need to counteract these messages.

Crucially, a similarly deceptive messaging process now plays a role in shaping our military efforts to, finally, neutralize the threat from Iran. Once again, a brief scan of social media reveals almost endless variations on a theme of “Trump’s war,” or “Trump attacks Iran.” The drumbeat of such themes, and the accompanying images of destruction, presented without context, conflates pre-existing anti-Trump sentiment — the pervasive “Orange man bad” theme — with the suggestion that, if it’s all about Trump, then it can’t be a good thing.

Or one simply sees images that highlight the supposed “chaos” that’s been created. Then there are the ones that ignore the depredations of the IRGC against the long-suffering Iranian populace, or the ones that promote the notion that this is a “war of choice,” without reference to the fact that the mullahs have made war against us for decades. Worst of all, there are those memes that play on an anti-Israel theme, some of which verge on classic hatred for Jews in general. The Jews “got us into this,” they say, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly.

If these memes only appeared occasionally, one could perhaps ignore them. If they were only the product of the Democrats’ opposition to anything associated with Trump, one could perhaps discount them. But their massive presence hints at something deeper, more malign, more frightening.

For a long time, in both my American Spectator essays and my thrillers, I’ve contended that China wants to undermine the U.S., destroy our position in the world, and replace our Western civilization as the culture the world aligns itself with. Chairman Xi and his minions have been on a roll for a very long time, but now, in just a matter of months, things have shifted decisively against them on the geopolitical stage, in Venezuela and Cuba, and now in Iran. Arguably, they have become desperate to regain some of this lost initiative.

We know that China’s influence operations are well-developed. We’ve recently seen significant documentation, for example, of how American billionaire Neville Roy Singham, now an honored guest of Xi in Shanghai, has used his own funds to support anti-American influence operations. One suspects that these funds have been further subsidized by the Chinese government. And across the entire spectrum of leftist enterprises, one sees similar activity.

We can’t know how many of the current anti-U.S., anti-Trump memes are funded directly or indirectly by China, but to suggest otherwise is to ignore a well-established pattern of political behavior. Counteracting these pervasive influence operations won’t be easy, particularly since they align so neatly with the Democrats’ domestic political interests.

In a political environment shaped by “useful idiots” and the easily duped, a righteous effort to eliminate a decades-long threat from Iran can be easily undermined — we’ve seen this happen over and over again with past efforts. A successful and, hopefully, brief campaign in Iran will be the ultimate difference maker, but we can’t win the fight for American “hearts and minds” if we simply sit back and allow the lies to go unchallenged. Every present and future sacrifice by our troops will come to naught if the American people are seduced into turning their backs and walking away.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

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James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed Venezuelan terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.