#Fashwave and #Trumpwave - Memes as "Metapolitical" Tools of the Alt Right

Online communication today is hardly conceivable without visual memes. They compress complex information into an image that deliberately leaves room for the viewer's interpretation. However, memes are not only a popular form of everyday communication, but also of the exchange of political content in social networks. They are often based on a humorous combination of striking image and text elements that are transformed and shared by users. They appear in the form of static images combined with text, but also as GIFs, short videos or hashtags and have the function of expressing and also establishing belonging to (value based) communities by conveying messages in a specific form. Memes are particularly suitable for political propaganda because imagery works associatively and requires relatively short attention spans. In addition, memes enable low-level access to political content. The Alt Right has exploited this potential since the use of memes in the 2016 US presidential election campaign at the latest, in order to transport ethno-nationalist, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist and conspiracy theory messages and ideologies. Against this background, the paper analyzes how the Alt Right currently uses memes as part of its "metapolitical" strategy. The paper is methodologically grounded in the tradition of interpretative analysis which focuses on forms of communication and the construction of meaning. A mix of qualitative content analysis, discourse analysis and visual methods is used to reconstruct which topics appear prominently in the memes posted by members of the transnational right-wing extremist scene and how right-wing extremist content is disseminated in a relatively subtle way while using the meme format. The contribution further investigates how group membership and demarcation from "others" are negotiated by creating new meme trends or reversing already existing ones. Special attention is paid to those memes that have a very specific 1980s retro aesthetics and circulate under the hashtags #Fashwave and its sub-genre #Trumpwave.