It Could Happen Here - DeSantis’ Fashwave Adventure, Part 1

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Gare talks with Robert and James about the history of the alt-right’s defacto online aesthetic, dubbed Fashwave, and how it led to the disastrous “Dark MAGA.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and about what we like to call the crumbles in here. And a key aspect of the crumbles is the ongoing resurgence of fascist political parties and politicians in the United States and elsewhere. And today we're going to be talking talking about one of said fascists, a fellow you might have heard of named Ron DeSantis. Pudding Ron. Yeah, Pudding Ron, old DeSanctimonious. Now, Garrison, you've got a banger of an episode written out here.

I'm looking at your script right now. It's beautiful. Right before we get into it, I do want to give an update on a past subject if it could happen here. Lord Miles Rutledge. For those of you who may not have caught that episode, Lord Miles is a British man who went to Afghanistan to hang out and got caught up in the Taliban's, you know, victory in that war and then turned himself into a danger travel influencer visiting in dangerous place, going to war zones, going to Ukraine and like making it about him. He went back to Afghanistan because it really was better for his social media following than any of the other places he went, bragged about breaking laws, including faking his visa, and then got arrested and has been radio silent for about the last five months. Now, a lot of people have wondered, is Lord Miles dead? Did he, like, die in custody and the Taliban are trying to keep it a secret? But worry no longer, friends.

Today, his account posted, this is a friend of Lord Miles to give an update. Four months in taliban custody he's treated very well has several servants loads of movies on his laptop goes on picnics and has tea with the taliban cabinet government he still loves afghanistan and then there's a photo of him giving the thumbs up don't so he's not he's not dead guys he's in a nice taliban farm upstate he gets to run all he wants you know wide open fields he's super happy infinite tennis ball it's really funny one of his all of these people are so fucking brain point brain poisoned but like a big part of miles he was like trying to also be kind of a right wing influencer. Uh, he was doing this like anti woke, the Taliban is awesome. And like actually kind of

good guys. Cause they, they don't like believe in the woke agenda. And one of his friends, after this message got posted, like messaged his account, be like, Hey Taliban, if you're the guys that have like captured him, we really want him back. I'll pay a ransom. Like, I know this is probably just a misunderstanding. Cause you guys are on our side on the anti-woke war. Sure, yeah. I'm sure the Taliban cares about the woke culture war facing America. That's what they're all about, that shit. Good work, guys.

I'm sure they tune in to Sean Hannity every night. Oh, so funny. So funny. Anyway, that dude is dead as hell. Look, I'm not saying that to gloat. I'm funny anyway that dude dead is dead as hell look i'm not saying that to gloat i'm just saying that that motherfucker's dead as hell i'm saying it's i don't care what a prick he's dead he deserved it many many people have died in afghanistan and it's been a tragedy this one less so anyway garrison please. All right. So we're going to return to this podcast being your number one source for slightly homoerotic fascist memes. Once again.

That was how we pitched it to iHeartRadio. Yeah. Explaining the homoerotic fascist memes. A lot of people talking about fascists these days, but none of them are homoerotic. A lot of people talking about fascists these days, but none of them are homoerotic. So on the last day of Pride Month, DeSantis' campaign shared an ad that's been described as bizarre and mystifying, where he peddles a whole bunch of pretty extreme homophobia. He attacks Trump for previous statements that Trump has made regarding LGBTQ rights. And then the video kind of transitions and we see basically a version of what we're going to call a fash wave. And I'm going to explain all of these terms here in this

episode. But we're seeing kind of a resurgence of a political meme style that was popular years ago. It's kind of laid dormant the past year or so for reasons that we will very soon discuss. But a whole bunch of both conservatives and liberals are kind of not really sure how to take this ad shared by the DeSantis campaign and are ill-equipped to understand what the fuck is going on. But luckily, I am equipped because I spent my teen years in Telegram chats watching this meme style develop. Proud of you, buddy. Yeah, thanks.

In the Telegram trenches once again. All right. Yeah, thanks. In the telegram trenches once again. All right. So the first image of DeSantis, when it flashes to this other kind of weird, more like bizarre editing style, has him with like these blue or red like glowing eyes. And this is going to be something that is going to be a recurring trend that we're going to be talking about this episode these like these like glowing laser eye type things so we're going to

start with this because this is actually one of the one of the most common traits of fash wave and we've seen this be adopted by multiple politicians in the past and most people probably don't know what the fuck this is like is this like a superman thing like what what the fuck is this so laser eye memes started in the early 2010s uh originally referencing video games like mass effect 2 and other like sci-fi and superhero media people like superman or anyone with like laser eyes is also like a it's like a cultural touchstone for this sort of thing the laser eyes usually represent like a figure growing in power so when when someone has laser eyes in a meme, it's like they are gaining power, they're gaining security. The original caption for the early laser eye memes was assuming direct control, which was also just a video game reference. So again, it would have someone with like glowing laser eyes and text that says, like, assuming control or assuming direct control.

So this was popping off in the early 2010s. visual style featuring neon glitchy kind of 80s retro computer aesthetics mixed with traditional greco-roman sculpture for a variety of reasons which we'll touch on but uh vaporwave had influences from video games cyberpunk anime and it was it was relatively popular as a microgenre in like the 20 teens and throughout the 20 teens, both the laser eye memes were steadily growing in popularity on places like Reddit and 4chan alongside the rise of a vapor wave. And it's kind of surrealist nostalgia laden aesthetics focused on highlighting the comfort and unfulfilled promises of the internet of yesteryear.

And this, this like nostalgic surrealist aesthetic was prime bait for easy co-option into the reactionary meme variant dubbed Fashwave, which soon became kind of the de facto aesthetic of the then burgeoning alt-right. Glowing laser eyes on various fascistic political figures became a staple of Fashwave during the rise of the alt-right around 2016 to 2018. I actually kind of like Vaporwave. I think it's maybe a bit overplayed now. And it certainly is frustrating how much it was kind of taken over by reactionaries because actual Vaporwave is almost actually like anti-capitalistic in a few ways. It's kind of criticizing the disposableness of like modern consumerist culture using like forgotten 80s technology

and like software and that kind of stuff. So I'm looking at two of my little vaporwave images here in the script. And it does some of some of the little like ways that the images are broken up makes it look kind of like, like old internet pop up ads back when they had like clearly defined borders and X's and weren't just like overtaking your entire screen and you had no way to close them. But you know what does kind of overtake your entire viewing experience via an ad? It's podcast advertising, because it's going to go straight into your ears. There's no way to X out. You have to suffer through the ad unless you figured out that you can press a button that makes you go forward 30 seconds. Anyway, here is our beloved sponsors

who fund such vital research that I'm doing for this episode. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Son Sonora an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America gasoline counters with shape-shifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. After the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the alt-right went through a sort of split between the more Trumpian adherents who made up large parts of the then-dubbed alt-light, a term we don't really use it very much anymore. And then this kind of other section, which had more of the accelerationist neo-Nazis who were starting to congregate on the messaging app Telegram. And then we have groups kind of like the Proud Boys are like in between. They're kind of Trumpian. They're also also like more fashy, but they're not like really full skull mask usually. Some would adopt that aesthetic later on, but that's kind of due to this cultic milieu that's starting to develop on Telegram. So a fash wave largely followed the self-proclaimed fascists. So it too became the central visual style of the burgeoning network of militant accelerationist telegram channels, which would eventually be dubbed terrorgram, terror as in terrorist.

around 2018, 2019, including the Boogaloo Boys, which Robert has written about at length before. And it was also influenced by the Iron March forums and the Skull Mask Network with groups like Adam Woffin and The Base. The Iron March forums are like the boomers of Nazi internet people. Not quite the boomers, maybe the Gen X. The Gen X, yeah. Very much the Gen X. The Gen X, yeah. Very much the Gen X. The forum generation.

There's a generation of people who had forums before social media was a thing. It's Nazi something awful, right? We're not quite into the chans yet. Yeah, and after Iron March kind of collapsed, a whole bunch of these weird accelerationists were starting to all congregate on Telegram. And this is where we see kind of Fashwave develop

into a much more overt, apocalyptic, and a doomer focus. The hauntology-inspired, nostalgic reflections on the false promises of techno-capitalism that were already present in Vaporwave were ripe ground for the addition of, like, return-to-tradition-style reactionary fascism. Do you want to explain hauntology if people aren't familiar yeah uh hauntology is a i mean it started as a term which then developed

into a musical genre but it's it's it's similar uh to vaporwave it's about kind of looking back on the unfulfilled promises of the past that we were like promised as a culture that then never came to place but these promises still kind of follow us they kind of like haunt us um the hauntology is a big reason why liminal spaces got popular because of early 90s and uh and 2000s like aesthetics of like big office buildings that are now left empty office buildings like schools like particularly like the you know like the doors to a school or whatever you get a lot of like photos of that yeah so stuff that makes people feel uh a longing for a past that was never really real yeah and like a like a a longing for like this sense of home and the sense of like a safe

home yeah you maybe that you never actually really had um yeah yeah because you hated being in school you just have forgotten it yeah you've kind of mythologized it. Hirsch calls it post-memory, when you re-remember things based on your current stance and standpoint. Yeah. So the sort of Doomer accelerationism of this variant of Fashwave, or this evolution of Fashwave, was also accompanied by groups like the Boogaloo Boys,

who were starting to make their memes in this style as well. I have a few examples of Fashwave was also accompanied by groups like the Boogaloo Boys, who were starting to make their memes in this style as well. I have a few examples of Fashwave here, showing to Robert and James. Son and Rads were pretty popular. It's like the Sunwheel version of the swastika, essentially. But a lot of these are like, remember tradition, embrace your race, with Nazi figures in this monochrome style uh over over like scan lines like you would see on like a like an old like arcade video game that has like that has like a horizon um but you know all like neon colors kind of kind of like glitchy type stuff there's there's

one trump one here from uh from like 2018 where he has a glowing yellow eyes, um, also in the fast wave style. So this was kind of the, the aesthetic around, around 2019 here. Um, and like fast wave was definitely still common on image boards like 4chan, 8chan and 8kun. Uh,

but the, but the ever present kind of Hitler particles and poor web design on those sites drove away. Most of the mega conservatives who might try to stumble on to 4chan or to 8chan to like watch QAnon stuff. It was just it was just the site was too hostile to them. And then circa like 2020, among waves of Twitter and Facebook suspensions, Trump supporters and high-profile far-right figures started congregating on other platforms. A few Twitter clones popped off like Parler and eventually Trump's own Truth Social, but a number of mega-conservatives also ended up on Telegram, in part due to Telegram's

largely hands-off approach to moderation. So around this 2020 and like just post 2020 time period is when Telegram began functioning as the far right's very own cultic milieu, a sort of like shared online space where various memes, ideologies, conspiracy theories, and propaganda could all intermingle with each other and spread. Now, part of this is how Telegram operates as a platform. I'm going to quote from an article about Telegram and the cultic milieu from Logically. Quote, Telegram offers features that straddle the line in between social media and messaging app. Users can create channels, which function as one-way message channels that allow someone to send a feed of messages available to all of their subscribers. Public channels and group chats are searchable by name,

allowing anyone to subscribe to a public channel or join a public group. Channels and groups are uniquely connected on Telegram. When a message is forwarded from a public channel into another channel or group, it links back to the original group, creating a chain in between different channels and groups. Another common feature is for users to advertise for channels and groups in other channels and groups, with some users creating directories of these channels and these big group chats that have extremist content, unquote. So this kind of interconnected nature that allows this chain link of being able to forward

a message, like you have a Telegram channel with like 3,000 people in it, and you post Fashwave memes. You can make some Fashwave memes in the style of like Trump. And then you can forward this message to a Trump channel that has 45,000 members in it. They see this meme. They might like it.

They click the meme. It sends them back into your 3,000 person channel. So now they're getting exposed to all of the other weird shit you have going on. So it became a really easy way to kind of make a rabbit hole and like a pipeline for people to get exposed to new aesthetics, new ideologies, and especially conspiracy theories. I think we should have an ad break now and we will return to talk about the increased Trumpian focus on Fashwave that happened as a result of this kind of telegram cross

proliferation. That's right, everybody. We're going to break for ads from our sponsors, who also sponsor Lord Miles Rutledge. So, you know, let's hear it up for these ads from the Taliban. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit. The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works

while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again,

the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs We'll be right back. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. And I don't know about you guys, taliban's making a lot of sense these days to me good picnics really good yeah i like i like their war on wokeness yeah speaking speaking of a war on wokeness yeah that leads us right back to old Ron. Old meatball Ron.

So to understand what the fuck is going on in that Ron DeSantis video, this is probably one of the most important little tidbits of knowledge that some people may be overlooking, is this brief fever dream known as Dark Mega. Oh, God. It gets worse. No, I know. I'm just glad.

Yeah, I'm glad this one didn't work out the way they'd hoped. No, it did not work out. The opposite of the way they hoped. Yeah. So because of this kind of telegram cross-proliferation, the far-right's memetic aesthetic went through a sort of coagulation after 2020, which eventually resulted in the upsetting, albeit short-lived, Dark Mega, also known as Ultra Mega, both of which are horrible names.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I remember Ultra Mega being big and people putting their Twitter handles along with an eagle and a flag. Yeah. So the Dark Mega trend started around a year after the January 6th Capitol attack and steadily grew in popularity for the next few months during the lead up to the 2022 midterm elections. After two years of right wing influencers and politicians operating in Telegram's cultic milieu, the influence of militant accelerationist propaganda is immediately apparent in this new stylistic iteration, which is basically downstream from Fashwave. Dark Mega promoted a form of dystopian-inspired overt authoritarianism, with the assumed direct-control laser eyes front and center and emphasizing militaristic domestic connotations.

center, and for emphasizing militaristic domestic connotations. Dimly lit images were usually edited in red or blue monochrome. Dramatic images of Trump are fairly prominent, as is the presence of weapons and the occasional Nazi symbol. I have two examples of Fashwave here for the gallery. James, what do you think of this? Of these two pictures? First of all, they look like somebody used MS Paint. It's kind of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the tier of work we're looking at here.

None of these are well edited. No, they're not. It's like 90s horror. Yeah, it is. Plus laser eyes. The one on the left, he looks like he's like, he looks like he's in like the eighth movie in like a Jason or Freddy type series, right? Yes.

Where it's like straight to DVD. Like they're moving that shit right into the red box and they just paid a guy $45 to mock up a cover. Yes, absolutely. It is a 2B direct to digital remake. I do, he's like, It looks like it's being developed in a dark room. It's like red and black. It's like all red and black.

His eyes are glowing blue. He has a musket. It appears to be like a Springfield long rifle or something like that. I couldn't tell you the exact type. But that does, I am now thinking about like, so if you've ever loaded black powder, you tend to like have, you know, like a wrapped, you know, cartridge that's got the ball in the powder and you rip it in half in your mouth and you pour the powder and then you like spit the, anyway, Trump is such a germaphobe. I just desperately want to see him try to like manage a black powder rifle.

I would, I would really deeply enjoy that. It's as good as Tucker Carlson shooting the select fire rifle was a very funny moment in Guys Who Pretend to Like Guns. And then the other more horror-inspired one has text at the bottom that says, it's time to just kill them with Trump and red laser eyes. I was upset to find out that the original person like the original like nazi who coined the term dark mega which which which kind of started this

trend uh followed me on twitter which wasn't wasn't great oh no oh no yeah yeah um so that was that was a fun thing i discovered over the course of researching this episode. So one pro-Trump neo-Nazi described Dark Mega as such, quote, Dark Mega is the aesthetic demand that Trump embrace a harder and more focused approach in the role only he can fill. He was too kind hearted, too forgiving. Dark Mega demands he learn from his mistakes another another dark mega proponent just described uh described the intentionality behind the movement of being quote if you want to win if you don't want to repeat the past you have to get mean you have to almost embrace the villain role that they're bringing you with. So that's fun. But Dark Mega's ambitions were to be more than just a meme,

but instead kind of be the first real attempt at a coherent post-alt-right aesthetic that was being pushed by mainstream political actors. And included in this push was kind of a pressuring back toward militant posturing after the failed pseudo coup on January 6th. Because in those first few months after J6, everyone was like, oh, you know, we probably shouldn't be doing super overt, like violent propaganda if we're like on the right.

And then over time, and I think Darkmega was part of this, was the right realizing that maybe they should just keep going and go back to that much more militant posturing that they were doing beforehand. I have a few other Dark Mega images here. One with Trump in a skull mask and pit vipers holding a Bible in front of a son and dad. Pit vipers are a type of ski sunglasses

that have a very distinctive look. There's nothing wrong with them. The company is actually anti-Nazi. Whenever people post their pit vipers pictures, they will donate the price of that pair of pit vipers to the ADL or something. They've become a signifier

for nazis for reasons that we probably don't need to explain it no uh but you can read an article by me and robert and bellingcat about white boy summer if you want to if you want you really need that right now if you really want to hear more about pit vipers yeah we can explain this shit at length bro and then and then i have these two other images of trump in front of these american flags and one of them's edited in a glitchy style with him holding a uh it looks like some type of like machine gun or something but a tommy gun tommy gun yeah it might be a tommy i can't really tell it's too small to see oh no no that that's got to be some sort of like either ar or nine 9mm carbine with a suppressor on it is what it looks like, at least to me.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's generic. Yeah. It's kind of Wolfenstein style almost, that one. Yeah, all of these guys are obsessed with Wolfenstein. Yes. Oh, yeah.

Very good, James. You figured it out. There's a longer conversation to be had. Because Wolfenstein, the most recent game, not a pro-Nazi game. No, they're all anti-Nazi, but... You know, it's a game where the Nazis won the war and you're fighting them, yada, yada, yada.

Because they're trying to do future Nazi troopers and it's like a video game where you want to make the bad guys look cool. Same thing as making the demons look cool in Doom. And that, you know, it's kind of hard for Nazis to not like that. Very selectively edited clips of Wolfenstein cut scenes and music appears in Fashwave propaganda fairly often. It appears in Schizo wave propaganda, which is kind of another downstream iteration of Fashwave, which I am not going to cover on this episode.

And I guess the one other meme style we have here is red and dark blue monochrome with trump with these blue laser eyes and this is kind of the this is like the main dark mega aesthetic here is is this one that's just like red with with with with like a dark dark blue as like the accent and then these little laser eye things um So DarkMega had the goal of serving as both a rebrand and an attempt to reunify the various disparate factions of the online right into using attention-grabbing authoritarian propaganda to push Trump and his supporters even further into the extreme,

while holding on the legitimacy that is lacking in the contemporary sketchiness of like the Proud Boy groups or like Patriot Front, which especially after J6, the Proud Boys legitimacy took a big hit and all of these fucking dark mega guys think that Patriot Front's like a fed op. So it's a way to kind of like push a new version of the alt-right that still relies on the legitimacy of Trump.

To quote the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, quote, The secondary aim of Dark Maga is to launder more extreme narratives and aesthetics into the mainstream Trumpist movement and attempt to introduce mainstream conservatives to more extreme parts of the right through melding Trump memes with these different aesthetics. So like we kind of mentioned before, the previous attempt at this was the white boy summer trend from 2021, which I and Robert have already wrote about before. And white boy summer was influenced by very similar kind of fast wave telegram aesthetics. But it was only really successful in leaking through to one or two Republican politicians, namely Paul Gosar. Paul Gosar, you can look him up if you want.

He's one of the Republicans who had a degree of mainstream legitimacy and was also super tight with, like, just straight up, we want to set off bombs places Nazis. Yeah. But Dark Mega, on the other other hand was picked up by a large handful of conservative politicians as well as like the usual suspects made up of right-wing influencers and content creators among the dark mega proponents were republican candidates like

tim swain a former strategist now blaze tv employee, Logan Hall. Andrew McCarthy. Far-right propagandist, Jack Sobiek. Now former congressman, Madison Cawthorn. And former White House lawyer, Andrew Kloster. And was even boosted by the father of accelerationism, Nick Land. Was a brief dark mega proponent himself. Famously, Marjorie Taylor Greene joined in on the action in May of 2022 under the hashtag Ultramega,

but with the same red monochrome images with the big glowing eyes. Probably the most upsetting bit of dark mega lore was a post that madison cawthorn wrote on instagram he he he had this post full of like here is the list of of america first conservatives look how small the list actually is the people who are truly america first and to attach to this little image of this list uh he wrote an extremely unhinged dark mega post. This was also in May of 2022. Quote,

The time for genteel politics as usual has come to an end. It's time for the rise of the new right. It's time for dark mega to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered. We are coming, unquote. So this rhetoric did not secure Madison Cawthorn continued employment in the House of Representatives. Yeah, turns out most people in national politics are not entirely telegram-brained.

Like, have not just had their skulls melted by that shit. So, yeah. To quote an analysis from the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, quote, Dark Mega is an embodiment of the revenge precedent birthed from the far-right's urge to reclaim what they crave and have lost, power. Proponents seek to punish their political enemies without attending to political correctness dark mega is an appeal to accept the true desires of the most uh dissident trump supporters and mainstream their feelings through the medium of memes which played a crucial role in 2016 election so dark mega peaked as an online search topic back in may of 2022 and it may have reached like peak popularity in actual like spread of memes as early as march of 2022

i think it i think it peaked in may because there was a few news articles about it so more kind of normies were like googling what it was but it the actual peak was only in march of 2022 it only lasted like three months um you can you can still find some dark mega bubbling under the surface but only by like random nazis and like that doesn't that does that that's not signifying any kind of like political movement um and the reason why dark mega kind of stopped being effective in between between march and may of 2022 is that there was there was there was something that happened that summer and that spring that effectively killed Dark Mega while also dealing a pretty big body blow to Fashwave in general.

And we will learn more about Brandon's special secret operation in part two. That's right, this is going to be a surprise two-parter because I wrote too many words. Yeah. Yeah, because this took an hour and a half to record of dense, dense information. So now it's two days. You guys get to enjoy this for two days. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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