Memes compress and transmit political conspiracy theories faster than argument does.

Evidence

Geert Lovink and Marc Tuters (2018) argue that memes can be seen “as a kind of vernacular cultural compression technique, a means by to ‘decode’ and ‘encode’ the operative dynamics of dominant hegemony.” The fabricated quote of Boumédiène along with his portrait has been composed into a meme able to travel and be understood easily and swiftly. The meme comprises the core idea of the replacement thesis and offers itself to be consumed in an instant. — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”, 698

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to media-theory work on vernacular compression and to the reader’s interest in how replacement rhetoric moves online.
• SEED: Angle: a short essay on the fabricated quote as the load-bearing unit of the replacement narrative — how a single apocryphal line outlives its debunking.