January 6 fused legacy Confederate symbols with internet-native meme aesthetics

Evidence

By 2:13 p.m., rioters breached the Capitol. Confederate flags mingled with online-right symbols: Pepe the Frog T-shirts, Kekistan and thin blue line flags. Jacob Chansley, the self-styled “QAnon Shaman,” was shirtless, wore red, white, and blue face paint and a fur hat with horns, and carried an American flag on a spear. Amid the chaos, QAnon follower Ashli Babbitt was killed. Despite frantic phone calls from politicians begging Trump to intervene, he refused. Two full hours later, he finally released a video urging his supporters to go home, but not before praising them: “We love you. You’re very special.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 618

Categorization

• XREF: The QAnon Shaman’s costume is the omnivore monoculture turned political: every subcultural symbol scraped together in one outfit, echoing the flattening thesis across the whole book.
• QUESTION: Worth pinpointing exactly what the internet does to political symbolism that older media could not — meme circulation collapses distinct symbol-systems into interchangeable ornament.