Russia is suffering a “public-relations catastrophe,” New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote recently, and there’s little question whose fault that is in fact, Manjoo wondered if this moment is “perhaps the unraveling of the myth of Putin’s mastery over global discourse. He looks like a fool.Īnd the damage that causes is no joke. That John Cena tweet about his show Peacemaker. Performing visual shenanigans with these absurd pieces of furniture makes a completely sincere point: This man is not a great leader, he is a paranoid and isolated one, out of touch and possibly nuts. You’ve seen them: the one where the Wordle is peace. īut the global peanut gallery of meme-makers have, however informally, joined this effort, conducting what amounts to grass-roots, bottom-up information warfare on their own. Top October Top September Top August Top July Top June Top May Top April Top March Top February Top January Top Dec. Sort By: Hot New Top past 7 days Top past 30 days Top past year. Make a Meme Make a GIF Make a Chart Make a Demotivational Flip Through Images. ) Official or semi-official Ukrainian information warfare has played a role, too - from propagandistic myth-making campaigns involving (dubious-to-questionable) stories of a ghostly fighter pilot or a defiant border guard, to distributing macabre images of the invasion’s human cost. While not all memes are political interventions, Gay Clown Putin is an iconic meme that is part of the international response to Russian state-directed political homophobia that emerged after the gay propaganda law was passed in 2013. Browse and add captions to putin gay fishing memes. (In real life, Ikea is one of many multinationals that has closed its Russia stores. Focusing on the case of ‘Gay Clown Putin’, this article theorizes memes as visual interventions in international politics. That’s partly because of the media savvy-and guts-of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and partly because the brute facts are so awful and impossible to contain. It’s remarkable, then, how poorly Russia has fared in this information war.