On memes and mugs: Everyday extremism in the (digital) mainstream

Printed onto t-shirts, hoodies, aprons and tote bags, extremist slogans adorn a wide selection of merchandise sold across a range of Swedish and international websites. 

Short promotional texts provide potential customers with the broader context: 

'Are you tired of people talking shit about Sweden? Or of tradition after tradition being eliminated because it doesn't fit into the new and "exciting" Sweden? Show your resistance against our country's destruction in the hands of liberals and socialists by buying this t-shirt'.

Customers can choose from 'Don't touch my country', 'Sweden for the Swedes', 'See you in Valhalla' and many more items. 

The 'Swedish Lives Matter' t-shirt is marketed with the following sales pitch:

'Swedish lives matter is a slogan in remembrance of all the victims of imported multicultural violence. Show them that we will not forget those who have paid for the megalomania of the politicians with their life or health – and that we Swedes will no longer tolerate this!'

These anti-immigration narratives and related conspiracy theories have, over a relatively short period of time, mushroomed and mainstreamed in dramatic ways in Sweden – a country which, alongside Germany, took in large numbers of migrants and refugees during the so-called European refugee crisis of 2015-16.

In the years since, far-right actors in and beyond parliament have preyed on widespread concerns over immigration and integration, merging anti-immigration rhetoric with a hodgepodge of extremist ideas and ideology in ways that have propelled divisive, nationalist and often xenophobic discourse across the public realm.

Today, views, messages and symbols anchored in ideologies and belief systems that only a few years ago were considered 'extreme', are no longer something you have to actively seek out or sign up for, say by subscription or membership. 

You do not have to visit fringe platforms or go into the deepest corners of the dark web to find hate, bigotry or people committed to and calling for acts of violence against minorities, or against democracy, its institutions and representatives. In other words, extremism is no longer a destination which needs to be intentionally sought out (Miller-Idriss, 2020).

Instead, extremist narratives come and find you wherever you are hanging out, making exposure to and engagements with extremist ideas more fluid and frequent. In this 'new normal' (Krzyzanowski et al., 2023), extremism circulates openly and relatively unhindered. It enters people's daily feeds, via TikTok, YouTube or Instagram.

It's masked in satiric memes or promoted by online influencers mixing political propaganda techniques and conventional marketing. You will find it on mugs, t-shirts, caps and keychains, and it pops up on banners, posters and stickers around the city, or in the schoolyard.

Digital technology has dramatically changed the push and pull dynamics of how and where people come into contact with political extremism of various kinds. Seemingly unremarkable consumer goods imbued with political messaging, these mundane artefacts and ephemera, have come to epitomise the moment of political division and upheaval in Sweden. This ushers in new forms of everyday extremism in mainstream spaces and places: a phenomenon for psychologists to be aware of and seek to understand.

A turn to 'the ordinary' and 'the everyday'

Dovetailing with the larger OppAttune project – an Open University initiative to track the evolution of oppositional extreme ideologies and protectionist decision-making – the notion of everyday extremism offers a way of reflecting on the increasing presence of extremist messages and symbols in people's everyday lives, as manifested in the upsurge of various cultural artefacts and visual ephemera laced with extremist ideology that travel between offline and online spaces (Berger et al., 2020). We can understand the term everyday extremism to have two overlapping implications.

Firstly, it signals a shift in our focus from an overwhelming preoccupation with explicitly anti-democratic actors and organisations, often located in the margins of society and politics – and the kinds of media discourse they produce – to a focus on the more pervasive everyday forms of extremist narratives that ordinary citizens are increasingly confronted with as part of day to day lives and media consumption.

Secondly, the notion implies moving beyond a strict focus on messages of physical violence (against people or property) to instead spotlight symbolic and cultural violence as key dimensions of extremism.

Even if repackaged and 'silent', this has a clear and concrete impact on violence and polarisation in society. When focusing on everyday extremism we thus foreground the discursive-narrative aspects of violence that create the conditions for structural and direct violence to prevail.

Looking beyond the fringes, or the extremes of extremism, the notion of everyday extremism captures the potential, gradual development of extremist narratives, sentiments and attitudes in the general public.

This involves raising questions of the many ways in which the extreme is rendered normal, and by extension violence, is presented as banal or benign. A central mechanism in this process, and what is essentially a normalisation of extremist beliefs, is the increasing penetration of exclusionary, stigmatising and violent discourse into 'the digital mainstream' (Åkerlund, 2022).

Extremism finds an expression e.g., in conspiracy theories, hate speech and disinformation, and often makes its way into public discourse and mainstream online spaces by travelling masked in the guise of irony, 'edgy' inside jokes or otherwise coded language and visuals.

Longstanding conspiracy theories (be it of white genocide, the great replacement, or Jewish-led world order, etc.) are narrated in 'sanitised' versions in which violence is toned down or masked in language and imagery.

Taking an everyday approach thus requires us to understand extremism as a site of cultural consumption and engagement and as a producer of not only ideological and explicitly political propaganda, but also more subtle (pop)cultural expressions, symbolism, and material artefacts (Miller-Idriss, 2018, 2020).

This involves looking into new, unconventional spaces and places like e-commerce platforms or online cooking shows, fitness clubs and alternative wellness cultures, to understand where, when and how people come into everyday contact with extremist narratives tailored around anything from anti-Semitism and Islamophobia to homophobia and misogyny.

Hybrid artefacts

Existing in a hybrid space, artefacts celebrate historical fascism, peddle conspiracy theories, and call for violence in both explicit and ambiguous ways. They travel in loops across online and offline spaces. A racist or antisemitic flyer might be propagated online, then printed by activists and distributed offline.

Photographs of these flyers, glued on, say, a lamppost or street sign, are then posted online to further amplify the messages and inspire further drop (see Berger et al., 2020). In a similar intertextual fashion, popular memes find their way into slogans printed on t-shirts. Here, we consider a few examples of such hybrid artefacts of everyday extremism.

One of the most recent additions to the repertoire of far-right products on sale in Sweden include t-shirts with the slogan 'Helg Seger' – a 'Swedified' reappropriation of the Nazi salute 'Sieg Heil'. While this has long been used by neo-Nazi groups in their propaganda, banners and merchandise, its popularity grew when the slogan was exclaimed by a candidate for the Sweden Democrats in an interview with the far-right news site Samnytt on the night of the 2022 national elections.

Her outburst – which she later withdrew, corrected, and then claimed had been misinterpreted – was widely interpreted as a 'dog whistle' and celebrated by actors across the far right in the country as a coded nod to far-right alliance meant to only be 'heard' by those familiar with the meaning and use of the term (Åkerlund, 2022).

Today, variants of 'Helg Seger' garments are for sale in a variety of places online, including a large and well-established Swedish retailer and one of the biggest providers of fascist fashion items and other merchandise that promotes neo-Nazi ideology and white supremacy.

Another series of merchandise gaining some traction and popularity in Sweden contains implicit and explicit references to 'Finspång' – a longstanding campaign of what are essentially death threats propelled by neo-Nazis and other actors across the far-right in the country, which playfully engage with a fantasy of executing politicians, journalists, researchers and other members of the perceived Swedish 'elite' in the small industrial Swedish town of Finspång.

This revenge fantasy, reproduced in memes, texts, and artefacts, recounts a fictional/future tribunal to take place after a fascist take-over, in which 'traitors of the people' (i.e. politicians, journalists, researchers, feminists and women in relationships with non-white men etc.) will be held accountable for their betrayal against the nation and hanged from lampposts and cranes across the town.

Once 'justice has been served', Finspång will be turned into a 'white sanctuary' to protect the population's 'biological exceptionalism' from the dangers of the alleged ongoing Muslim invasion and the collapse of society under the burdens of multiculturalism more generally (see Askanius & Keller 2021).

Today, this far-right memetic fantasy lives on in merchandise sold on social commerce sites such as Spreadshop, Teespring and Redbubble, in which a hangman's noose is casually jutted onto various attires and accessories including baby clothes and bibs. 
The 'No. Out.' slogan first appeared in a series of visual ephemera that can be traced back to the now defunct ethnonationalist group 'Nordic Alt-Right' in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 border crisis.

Two simple words tell a narrative of 'protecting Sweden from multiculturalism' and 'keeping Sweden clean'. The slogan has spread onto wearables but is also disseminated as stickers in public spaces, e.g. put onto election posters of the liberal party in cities across the country.

This continuous two-way flow of narratives, symbols and actions epitomises the intertwined nature of online spaces and local places in how extremist narratives are produced and reproduced.

Under the radar

These artefacts are all designed to carry a certain playful ambiguity around the multiplicity of potential interpretations. There is a gameplaying aspect, skirting the lines of what is socially acceptable, on the border of the legality of hate speech or what is, or has been, classified as 'extremist'. Designs, expressions and symbols generally do not make explicit references to violence, allowing them to go under the radar.

This development goes hand in hand with a larger shift in how extremist messages are increasingly cloaked in entertainment-oriented, humorous and ironic modes of communicating and creating in-group communities online.

Tapping explicitly into the rich pool of coded language and symbolism of the global far right, stickers and other merch draw on well-known analogy to 'being pilled' (whitepilled, redpilled, blackpilled etc.), Pepe the Frog, the 'free helicopter ride' meme, and various other symbols, styles and aesthetics which have come to be associated with far-right extremism internationally.

They are explicitly marketed to those in the know; those in on the joke and thus part of the community. Only rarely do these include an official logo or name, making it obvious who is selling the product.

As such, these hybrid artefacts of everyday extremism dovetail with contemporary forms of online extremism more generally, which tend to disguise intent and 'authorship', to avoid overtly violent discourse or hate speech and instead draw on popular culture, irony and innuendo to cloak extremism and carry harmful ideas and images into the digital mainstream.

Tina Askanius is a professor in media and communication studies at Malmö University, Sweden.

Jullietta Stoencheva is a PhD candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University, Sweden, assessing how extremist narratives are popularised and normalised in Sweden and Bulgaria through the interplay between online and offline mediated activities.

Image: Normalisation of extremist beliefs… the increasing penetration of exclusionary, stigmatising and violent discourse into 'the digital mainstream'.

Key sources

Åkerlund, M. (2022). Dog whistling far-right code words: the case of 'culture enricher' on the Swedish web. Information, Communication & Society, 25(12), 1808-1825. 
Askanius, T. & Keller, N. (2021). Murder fantasies in memes: fascist aesthetics of death threats and the banalization of white supremacist violence, Information, Communication & Society, 24(16), 2522-2539.
Berger, J.M., Aryaeinejad K. & Looney S. (2020). There and Back Again: How White Nationalist Ephemera Travels Between Online and Offline Spaces, The RUSI Journal, 165(1), 114-129. 
Krzyżanowski, M., Wodak, R., Bradby, H. et al. (2023). Discourses and practices of the 'New Normal'. Journal of Language and Politics, 22(4), 415-437. 
Miller-Idriss, C. (2018). The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
Miller-Idriss, C. (2020). Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. Princeton University Press.