# Meme Wars Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg (Harvard Shorenstein Center) trace a decade of internet subculture warfare — Occupy's aftermath, [[Gamergate]], the alt-right's image-board insurgency, Pizzagate, [[QAnon]], [[Stop the Steal]] — to show how memes moved fringe ideas from anonymous forums into mainstream American politics, culminating in the [[January 6 Capitol Attack]]. ## The Argument Memes are not jokes with politics attached; they are **infrastructure for political insurgency**: cheap, deniable, evolution-tested narrative weapons that redpill recruits, bind communities, and launder extreme ideas toward the mainstream ("meme magic" as recruitment funnel). The authors document the wire-up between subculture spaces (4chan, 8kun, Discord), alternative media amplifiers, and movement entrepreneurs — and frame January 6 as the day the meme war achieved physical form. ## RWKB Relevance The field guide to the vault's memes and online-radicalization threads — methodological companion to the Media/Memes subfolder and the disinformation lexicon, with [[Gamergate]]-to-insurrection as its through-line.