1. Two days after a close associate of theirs was arrested at the Coutts blockade and gear featuring their logo was seized, members of the Diagolon network are on the defensive, with some claiming the movement is nothing more than a joke. Good time for a 🧵 on irony poisoning!
2. First, some context. Diagolon is a fictional country first envisioned by a group of antisemitic streamers, which spans across North America from Alaska to Florida in a more or less diagonal line. It’s meant to represent jurisdictions with fewer COVID restrictions.
3. The de facto leader of the Diagolon network is Jeremy Mackenzie, a podcaster and self-described ‘sit down comedian’, though his body work could hardly be described as comedy, as @antihateca’s reporting can attest. antihate.ca/jeremy_mackenz…
4. Since the Coutts arrests, Mackenzie has been adamant that he is being unfairly depicted, that his network his nothing more than an online community built around a silly meme, and that those who take his jokes about a fake country at face value are fools.
5. There’s no denying that Diagolon is a silly, tongue-in-cheek concept, which originated from a joke on a far-livestream. That much is true.
This doesn’t mean, however, that the network that was built around the ‘meme’ of Diagolon is any less real.
7. Since its inception, members of the Diagolon network have formed dozens of smaller local groups across Canada. They organize meetups, which as this photo would indicate, goes beyond simple networking.
8. The masks worn by many of the people in this picture, the skull mask, has been described as ‘the face of 21st century fascism’ by members of defunct neo-Nazi forum Iron March. No big deal, right?
splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017…
9. Far from being unique, Mackenzie’s defense of his movement as nothing more than a joke/meme that people take too seriously is in line with an increasingly popular tactic in far-right circles known as ‘irony poisoning’.
10. Urban Dictionary gives a surprisingly excellent definition of irony poisoning as what happens when ‘one’s worldview is so dominated by irony and detachment-based comedy that the joke becomes real and they start to do things that are immoral or wrong’.
11. In the context of far-right politics, we often encounter irony poisoning in the context of humor, often in the form of memes/inside jokes, being used as a shield from allegations of hatefulness.
Essentially, using the cover of ‘it’s just a joke’ when people call out racism.
12. The most famous example of this is Pepe the frog, a meme character which gradually became the most recognizable symbol of the alt-right.
Anti-hate researchers who first picked up on its use as a hate meme were routinely laughed at for ‘making a frog into a hate symbol’.
13. Another example is this clip of Nick Fuentes, leader of the ‘Groyper’ movement, reiterating some very serious (and often used) Holocaust denialist arguments under the guise of a joke.
14. In both of these cases, the ‘it’s just a joke’ tactic was successful in fooling some people into believing that the alt-right and the Groyper movements were just edgy kids on the Internet, and not highly organized hate groups using the Internet to recruit supporters.
15. These tactics are also often successful in making people encountering hateful content let their guards down, which makes them more receptive to the worldviews to which they are being exposed.
16. TL;DR - don’t take far-right actors claiming that their elaborate diatribes about fictional countries are ‘just jokes’, and listen to anti-hate activists when they tell you someone’s a racist.
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