The year is 2018. Long gone are 'your mum' related insults, nobody cares whether you get your chicken mild at Nandos anymore and being poor is now fashionable. The bank of insults used by middle-class white boys across the country is now almost empty. But there is a new slur, one much more deadly than the rest that the right-leaning middle class in its entirety has begun to fear: ‘politically correct.’
That is if Neil Hamilton is anything to go by. The UKIP leader for Wales tweeted a video earlier this week thanking some prominent new members of his party. These included Paul Joseph Watson, Count Dankula, and Milo Yiannopoulos. All three are Youtubers with a significant view count and right-wing loyalties, and Hamilton hopes that they will appeal to the younger members within his party. Kitted out in a suit and tie in front of a large map of the UK, he said that he was looking forward to them 'developing truly dank memes that will trigger lefty luvvies […] and their politically correct establishment chums.'
The Internet simultaneously cringed. Hamilton's problem, like many of his generation, is that he fails to understand that he himself is becoming a meme (though whether he constitutes a dank one is debatable). Millennial and Gen Z humour is notoriously misunderstood, especially by the older generations, due to its tendency to rely on absurdity and surrealism. This humour is often mixed in with political figures and events, and so Hamilton was fuel to a fire that started many months ago with the invention of the insult 'gammon’, used for out of touch and often racist white men. Within minutes, thousands of users had liked and retweeted his video, many of whom were the very ‘lefty luvvies’ he was rallying the masses against. Rumours even surfaced that Count Dankula himself had only joined UKIP as a joke. The misunderstanding of all memes as being inherently right-wing perpetuates the concept of ‘political correctness’ as something that all young people want to fight against. In reality, most young people are progressive, forward thinking and agree with political correctness. They just also like a good meme.
But amongst all this, we must remember that sometimes the line between being laughed at, and laughed with, becomes blurred. There is a certain prominent figure at the forefront of everyone's minds, someone who spent much of his political career being laughed at by the rest of the world. His speeches, his tweets, even his own 'gammon’-like appearance. What began as an international online joke has descended into thousands of migrant children being separated from their families and thrown into camps. People like Neil Hamilton are threats disguised as memes. The more we laugh at a party for its tragic attempts to relate to us, and mock its hideous fear of progress, the more we pull the wool over our eyes to what’s really going on. The reality is that hidden amongst the tirade of satirical and ironic retweets, are people who truly agree with what the party stands for. And one day, the joke will stop.
