Early this year a short clip called the “nihilistic penguin” spread widely: footage from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary showing a lone penguin leaving its colony and walking into an empty, frozen landscape. The image is odd, darkly comic and open to many readings—and it shows how a single, striking moment can escape its original context and take on a life of its own online.
Memes are no longer a fringe part of internet culture; they are woven into how political debates are conducted and perceived. In the United States, a steady flow of memetic content has affected elections and everyday political life since at least 2016. Cultural theorist Wolfgang Ullrich, author of Memokratie, finds this trend worrying. He points out that harsh, provocative, and often offensive content—memes foremost among it—frequently shapes public conversation in ways that replace argument with spectacle.
On social platforms, both sides recruit supporters with sharp, cynical images and punchy captions. Politics starts to mimic the form of memes: designed to provoke, get shared, and land a one-line victory rather than to make carefully reasoned points. Former president Donald Trump offers a clear example of this dynamic; his attention-grabbing posts reward their creators with visibility and reinforcements from followers. Devoted online backers—sometimes labeled “meme warriors”—generate AI images and other memetic material hoping for amplification by prominent figures. In mid-April, Trump briefly posted an AI-generated image that cast him in a Jesus-like pose and then removed it after conservative backlash. Ullrich argues that this spectacle-driven communication corrodes democratic discussion: when outrage and provocation dominate, meaningful exchange becomes difficult.
Context matters. The same memetic image can be satire in one hand and adulation in another. When opponents use memetic imagery to lampoon a leader, it remains rooted in critique. But when leaders or their allies deploy similar images to glorify themselves or mock opponents, they overturn the traditional role of satire and caricature—turning tools that once exposed power into instruments that reinforce it.
Memes can also trivialize weighty issues. Ullrich highlights a June 2025 US Department of Homeland Security post that showed an AI rendering of a proposed immigration detention site, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” with alligators wearing ICE caps and the caption “Coming soon!” Such treatment shifts attention toward jokes about the image and away from the human consequences, legal questions and policy debates that matter.
More worryingly, memefication offers cover: creators can retreat behind “it was only a joke” to deflect criticism. Rather than the blunt, grandiose propaganda of earlier eras, today’s political persuasion often operates through subtle, ubiquitous aesthetic signals that steer emotions and attitudes.
Ullrich urges people to learn how social media shapes perception and to watch their own responses. Recognizing how memes frame issues and trigger feelings helps resist manipulation. Raising public awareness about the memefication of politics, he says, will make it possible to insist on arguments instead of punchlines.
This article was originally written in German.