Meme Warfare

The Central Intelligence of America define memes as “cultural bits of information replicated and transmitted from mind to mind”. Memes in particular internet based memes have become a very popularieds and mainstream method of communication in the 21st century being not only used to influence, affect, generate and altar ideas of a mass audience in not only everyday life but global politics and warfare. Due to memes being so simplistic, relatable and easy to mass produce they are one of the fastest ways to put an idea into somebody’s head and in do this memes have been heavily adopted by important individuals to push their agenda and goals as can be seen in the 2016 presidential elections in 2017 between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a outstanding example of using memes to wage warfare and gain a large following that eventually winning the presidential election becoming one of the most powerful men in the world. Donald trump utilized two types of memes one being defensive and the other offensive. Firstly with the offensive being “We have to build the wall,” (between US and Mexico) Because of this very extreme statement by Donald trump he gained a large media/news presence gaining milsons of dollars in free marketing for his campaign. Because of how simple this statement was it was able to be turned into a meme and gain major popularity for trump pushing him into the spotlight. One the other hand Trumps defensive meme was “make america great again” this is a very simple meme and it helped secure trumps position in the front running of the election. Because of its simplicity trump was able to create merchandise and spread this meme across the nation gaining major support and media coverage. Because of how well trump was able to win over the nation and earned his position of president of the United States of America.