January 6 felt like a punctuation mark. The entire event was a shock to the system of our consciousness, a spectacle made for many media. The capitol rioters were armed with Livestream devices, many cosplaying in internet-formed-militia prepper-wear or donning cultish outfits or actualizing meme references.

To help us look back, the Atlantic Council’s Jared Holt published “After the insurrection: How domestic extremists adapted and evolved after the January 6 US Capitol attack,” an eye-opening report about how the far-right has evolved since the insurrection. The report is filled with timelines of what the far-right has been up to after the insurrection and during the first year of the Biden presidency. In sum, immediately after the absence of Trump and post riot, supporters seemed to have disappeared from view on mainstream media and social media feeds due to paranoia and exposure, but over the course of the year, have reemerged in more extreme ways.

Two days before the capitol riot, I posted a piece about the abundance of “copium” memes that the far-right had deployed to encourage Trump loyalists to take action on the 6th. These memes were, by design, both creative and dangerous. An expression of grief and loss and a call to action — one that played out on live television and all of our feeds.

It’s no longer an era of copium and loss and grief for the far-right. According to the report, the group is now in a period of “rehabilitation, rebranding and revisionism.” The far-right have found new ways of offline activity, decentralizing and embracing local civic action like running for school boards. Online, the far-right has rebooted some of their alternative platforms, leaning into a stance against “culture wars” and outrage bait.

For a few moments after the attack, it seemed as though we’d reached the end of something, not the beginning. A moment of clarity where we’d see how this all happened, recognize the danger, and find strategies to contain the movements moving further to fringes.

But virtually overnight, that thought was upended — bad actors, some of which happen to be elected representatives of the United States, spread conspiracy theories and invented completely bogus motivations, hoping to rebrand and revise a terrible moment in American history.

Further, as a result of the deplatforming of Trump and dozens of other meme creators on several platforms, the collective meme magic of Trump began to dissipate. That was, until the late summer when the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme appeared, one that was timed with a period of entrenched historical revisionism and a growth of anti-democracy chatter on alternative social media platforms like Gab or Telegram.

As the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme ends up in mainstream discourse, the more it grows as a cultural cancer. Basically, it’s a meme made for a grift. A slogan for the same people that get angry at pronouns but feel proud about learning coded language. A stand-in meme, it’s a 1:1 replacement: no depth, no nuance, just really low-level trolling.

However, it is a problem. It’s a troll that teaches civic action. By coding out a curse word and the subject, it enables people to join in on the game, adds insults into public spaces and makes participants feel like they have power.

“Let’s Go Brandon” is not a coping meme, it’s a distraction.

There is an ongoing normalization of outright media fascism in the United States. In the background, we aren’t focusing on things like like Kyle Rittenhouse’s appearance at the TPUSA Conference or Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor-Green joining the far-right Gab social media platform or Gavin McGinnis riling up the Proud Boys.

Regardless of how you feel about Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal outcome, venerating a teenager with a theme song with huge chyrons displaying “Kenosha on Camera” while hundreds of attendees record the event on their phone like they’re at a concert is disturbing. It wasn’t just pure spectacle, it’s one of the clearest signs of the success of media martyrdom and growing media fascism.

In the vacuum that followed Trump’s deplatforming, the leaderless party now is concretizing into a fascist stance, one that requires the media to play off as if it’s another side of the political coin. However, reporters can no longer “both sides” this dangerous trend. There’s far too much at stake.

Can we still call what’s going on extremism if it’s becoming mainstream? We need to remain vigilant and recognize how these movements are evolving. If it keeps going in this manner of rebranding and entrenchment into the mainstream and nothing counters the movement, it cannot be undone.