That really drills down to my actual problem with all this....
You don't know what anyone actually believes. You don't know if they're trolling, you don't know if they're serious, you don't know if it's both.
The memes were fun at first, ahahah let's have a laugh at some harmless but topical racism. But as time went on and the memes got more shrill and the stares of the people making them got more and more aggressive....
I've seen this happen with friends who consume a steady diet of 4chan memes. They repeat them but their tone makes it so you don't, can't, really know what they believe. You can ask, and you sometimes might get a legit answer. (Been watching a lot of Count Dankula recently who basically at the epicentre of this shit posting.)
To him it's humorous. And if you ask him to actually describe his politics, he will. But he's the exception rather than the rule. And from what I've seen among my friends.....it isn't just humor or bants. After a while, some of it starts to sink in. If they're not drinking the kool-aid outright, they're at least starting to sip at it.
And that's what's frustrating. Ok, you want to bait libtards and w/e, fine. They're asking to be baited by being unreasonable themselves, and we can have just as much of a laugh at them as we used to have at the more extreme elements of the right.
But now....now you can't get a straight answer out of anyone. The memes have gotten so meta that either people are completely divorced from reality and are laughing at their screens with rictus scream-filled faces while they consume dank memes....or they feather the line between humor and actual opinion, deliberately being evasive because it's either a) funny to them or b) a way to not actually have to say what they believe where it might actually cost them.
And holy shit am I sick of this. I sort of yearn for the older days of straight, brutal political discourse rather than this sneering game of one-upsmanship. The way discourse works today reminds me more and more of early forum posting for me in the 2000s, where I'd waste hours and hours pointlessly and sometimes disingenuously debating people simply to score points against a random stranger whose mind I wasn't going to change.