One group in Sweden used the term as its members posed while burning a LGBTQ pride flag while far-right entertainer, Nick Fuentes, has adopted the phrase for his summer road trip - which garnered major headlines this week after claims, since denied, it would include an event with a serving US congressman.
WHITE BOY CAMP ARTCLIP OFFLINE
Images posted in far-right Telegram channels also appear to show extremists bringing the phrase into the offline world, tagging graffiti with the term in public places and seeking to arrange White Boy Summer themed events. Since April, WBS memes have formed an increasingly significant part of this media ecosystem.
Other journalists have noted that neo-Nazis have started coding their language to recruit and radicalise more of this new blood. Telegram has long hosted a growing community of white supremacists, but mass deplatforming in the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection brought millions of new users to the app. In 2019, shootings in El Paso, Texas, Poway, California and Halle, Germany were all birthed from this community. The more extreme White Boy Summer, or WBS, memes often include the same sort of radical imagery first seen in 8chan posts and videos geared towards inspiring terrorist attacks in imitation of the Christchurch shooting. The fact these two types of content can be found in the same spaces suggests the term has the potential to draw in more moderate right-wing users who can then be exposed to radical and extremist propaganda. On Instagram, a number of White Boy Summer memes featuring Nazi motifs were observed coexisting next to more general White Boy Summer content depicting conservative political commentators and other popular figures who have a more mainstream profile. Versions of the far-right’s dark subversion of the meme have jumped across from the fever swamps of the imageboard 4chan and encrypted messaging service Telegram, to more popular social media apps like TikTok where Bellingcat found one video featuring Nazi iconography that had been viewed more than 10,000 times. In a matter of weeks, the term “White Boy Summer” has gone from a seemingly innocent, mainstream internet fad to a viral meme among neo-Nazis and white supremacists. This video had just over 1,000 views on Bitchute, a YouTube-analogue popular with the far-right, before being removed for containing “incitement to hatred.” Although its reach and influence was small while it was online, it represents just one piece of content in a growing collection of White Boy Summer videos and memes posted by far-right extremists attempting inspire acts of terrorism. At this point, the voice of the actor and rapper Chet Hanks cuts in over the music and states: The footage of Smith fades into footage from a security camera, of a young man walking towards a staircase and loading a 12 gauge shotgun.
Smith wounded nine Orthodox Jews in drive-by shootings, murdered a black man in front of two of his children and then gunned down a Korean-American graduate student over two days in July 1999 before taking his own life after a high speed chase. “If they violate our constitutional rights and say we can’t put out our literature, we have no choice but to resort to acts of violence and really to plunge this country into a terrorist war they’ve never seen before,″ Video plays of a 1999 interview with a white supremacist named Benjamin Smith. Before long, however, the mood significantly darkens. The video opens with a tranquil scene of calm lapping waves, accompanied by the song Venice Venture by Big Wild.
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