The Pandemic as “Joke”: Meme Culture, the Alt-Right, and Steve Bannon’s “War Room”

Abstract

This text plots the analogical and memetic conveyances of the COVID-19 pandemic by the so-called alt-right. Arguing that the pandemic stages a complex transgression situated at the borders of Chinese global expansion, Traditionalist philosophy and online meme culture, and taking as instance Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic, we follow “the joke” that informs and deforms the claims of community, sovereignty and truth.