At the start of the year a clip dubbed the “nihilistic penguin” went viral: footage from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary showing a penguin leave its colony and waddle alone into a vast frozen wasteland. The bizarre, tragicomic scene invites multiple interpretations and illustrates how a brief, striking image can travel far beyond its original context.
Memes are now a permanent part of online culture and increasingly shape political conversation and perception. In the United States, an expanding torrent of memes has influenced elections and seeped into daily political life since at least 2016. Cultural scientist Wolfgang Ullrich, author of Memokratie, calls this development alarming.
“Extreme, aggressive, often offensive social media content, especially memes,” he says, frequently affects political discourse and reduces genuine argument. Each side mobilizes followers with biting, cynical images and quips; politics begin to resemble memes themselves, tailored to provoke and land punchlines rather than to present reasoned argument.
US president Donald Trump exemplifies a figure attuned to social-media dynamics, where provocative posts earn attention. His supporters—often called “meme warriors”—produce AI-generated images and memes to amplify his agenda, hoping for reposts from the figure they idolize. In one mid-April instance, Trump briefly posted an AI-generated image casting himself in a Jesus-like pose and then deleted it after conservative backlash. Ullrich argues that such polarizing, spectacle-driven communication undermines democracy by making meaningful debate impossible: when discussions are dominated by provocation and outrage, reasoned exchange collapses.
Context matters. An image of Trump sanctified could be a satirical caricature by an opponent, its meaning grounded in critique. But when the leader or his allies use memetic imagery to ridicule opponents or glorify themselves, it subverts the traditional role of satire. “That’s an exact perversion of everything satire and caricatures traditionally stand for,” Ullrich says.
Memes also risk trivializing serious issues. Ullrich cites a June 2025 post by the US Department of Homeland Security showing an AI-generated image of a proposed immigration detention site nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” with alligators wearing ICE caps and the caption “Coming soon!” Such posts distract from the human realities and legal questions involved: debates over whether the depiction is acceptable draw attention away from the people affected and the substantive policy concerns.
More broadly, memification plays into authoritarian tendencies by creating plausible deniability: creators can claim “it was just a joke” to blunt criticism. The aestheticization of politics through small, seemingly harmless images is manipulative, populist, and suggestive, Ullrich warns. It functions differently from the grand, intimidating propaganda of the past; its subtlety and ubiquity make it a potent tool for shaping emotional responses.
To counter this influence, Ullrich urges understanding how social media works and monitoring our own reactions. Recognizing how memes frame issues and trigger emotions helps prevent manipulation. He advocates raising public awareness about the memefication of politics so that citizens can demand arguments, not merely punchlines.
This article was originally written in German.