In the twenty-first century, memes have become a defining aspect of online communication. Memes often incorporate images, myths, and themes from Greco-Roman antiquity, with the word "meme" itself derived from an ancient Greek root for "imitation." While meme culture can be fun and ubiquitous, it is not always benign. The familiarity and prestige of Greco-Roman antiquity make it an attractive source of symbols and ideas, sometimes exploited to promote racist politics.
Memes have been a strategic tool for the white nationalist movement, particularly during the 2016 United States Presidential race. This is due to the ease with which memes can be spread online and their ability to defy definitive interpretation. The ambiguity of memes allows those who spread them to defend themselves from accusations of racism by claiming satire.
Methodological Note: Following the recommendations in Whitney Phillips’ “Oxygen of Amplification” about the ethical handling of memes that promote violence and hatred, the most hateful memes are not included in the post (from which they can easily be dragged and distributed) but are provided only in an attached document that is less visible to search engines and less easily distributed as a meme.
The Virgin vs. Chad Meme
The basic form of the “Virgin vs. Chad” meme compares two subjects. The “Chad” is depicted as a muscular, flamboyantly posed figure, representing everything desirable: confidence, composure, and self-assurance. In contrast, the “Virgin” is portrayed as a hunched figure with downcast eyes, embodying the opposite: undesirability, inferiority, and shame.
Captions within the meme highlight the differences between the two figures. The humor often stems from surprising or provocative details of a familiar comparison. An example with classical content is “Virgin Roman vs. Chad Mayan,” where a Roman figure is described as someone who "frequently got outflanked and killed by cavalry" and "can’t afford pants," while the Mayan figure is praised for their civilization's advanced astronomers.
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This meme illustrates how mimetic forms can simultaneously promote progressive and regressive politics. While it questions colonialist ideologies that portray indigenous cultures as primitive, it also uses the concept of the “Chad,” which originated in hateful Incel communities as a symbol of toxic masculinity. These mixed political messages are inherent in a medium that relies on a hierarchy of "superior" vs. "inferior" elements.
Sometimes these ideals are presented obliquely, such as in a meme entitled “Virgin Modernism vs. Chad Classicism.” The contrast between a “strong and powerful” Classical temple with a “bent and weak” parody of modernist architecture “designed by a bunch of architects circle jerking over Corbusier” echoes some of the assumptions of the Trump-era executive order prescribing Classical architecture for federal buildings.
This format can also promote more explicit racism, as in a meme that criticizes the European Union by comparing the “Virgin Unionist” to the “Chad Republican,” who, clothed in a toga with an SPQR sash, is clearly meant to evoke the Roman Empire.
Some of the elements strike a humorous note, such as the comparison between the “generic dark suit” and lack of facial hair of the Unionist with the “appealing light-colored robe” and “mighty beard” of the Roman. These jokey elements, however, are textbook examples of the way internet-savvy white nationalists use humor and irony to make racist messages palatable.
A meme comparing the “Virgin Minoans” with the “Chad Dorians” elevates the Dorian identity to special status and thus indulges in the myth of the Dorian invasion that white nationalists have long used to racialize the ancient Greeks as white. A meme comparing “Virgin Greeks” to “Chad Illyrians” perpetuates the belief that the Persian wars represented a racial conflict by calling the Greeks “racially ambiguous Persian rape babies;” this is a belief that lurks behind the claims of many of those who believe the modern “West” continues to be engaged in a neverending “Clash of Civilizations” with the rest of the world.
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Meme-style is marked by endless variation and recombination, resulting in some comparisons that may on first glance be surprising but that ultimately tend to reinforce white nationalist ideas. One example is a comparison between the Chad “Mediterraneans” - represented by a bearded figure wearing a laurel-wreath - and the virgin “Nordcuck,” a pock-marked figure with pale skin, an overbite, and stringy blonde hair whose name combines “Nordic” with one of the distinctive slurs of online misogynists.
The irony that characterizes memes means that their politics are often self-contradictory. A single meme can criticize the “Virgin Spartans” for enslaving helots while admiring how the “Chad Roman” “own slaves and he knows it.” A comparison of the “Virgin Spartans” and the “Chad Macedonians” can condemn the islamophobia of the film 300 and celebrate the multicultural population of Alexander’s empire even as it ignores the violence that attended the creation of that empire.
Annotated versions of the hateful “Virgin vs. Chad” memes are available for review to understand their context and impact.
The Soy vs. Chad Meme
A later evolution of the “Virgin vs. Chad” meme is the “Soy vs. Chad” comparison. In this form, a figure drawn amateurishly in black and white, known as a “Soyjack,” is shown face to face with a figure, usually in profile and portrayed in a more polished style with a calm expression, known as a “Yes Chad.” This “Chad” differs visually from the “Chad” in the “Virgin vs. Chad” memes but corresponds to it conceptually because it articulates a point of view that is at least implicitly praised or accepted.
By contrast, the “Soy,” who often grimaces or weeps, articulates a point of view that the meme as a whole mocks or dismisses. The humor of the meme derives from the way that the Chad deflates the outrage of the soy by affirming what the soy has criticized.
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An example of this format that includes Classical material recreates the story, reported in several sources, that Diogenes remained calm when a man whom he had enslaved, named Manes, escaped. In the meme a bearded, weeping Soy shouts at Diogenes that he “should be angry” that his slave has escaped. Such a meme seems to disparaage the largely unquestioned practice of enslavement in ancient Greece.
Memes with Classical elements can similarly mock the way neofascists claim Greeks and Romans as racial ancestors or project modern racial categories onto the ancient world. But just like with the “Virgin vs. Chad” form, the inherently hierarchical nature of the “Soy vs. Chad” form can easily be turned to hateful purposes.
This is the case in a meme contrasting two soys arguing about whether Julius Caesar was “bad” with two Yes Chads calmly discussing, and admiring, the the Roman general’s enslavement and mass murder of the Germans and Gauls. The same idealization of imperial violence can be found in a meme in which a “withered wojak,” representing hopelessness, apologizes for the history of colonialism to an “Art Hoe” wojack, which represents a parody of progressive political views.
In a different panel, an “Art Hoe” who is weeping like a conventional Soy, describes the Roman empire as a “genocidal and pro-slavery society” to which a “Gigachad” wearing a classizing tunic responds by defending Roman imperialism as a civilizing force. The “gigachad,” which appeared in a transphobic campaign advertisement that Pharos documented, represents the supposed pinnacle of masculinity.
Lurking behind the “Yes Chad” meme is the figure’s original, racially coded identity as a “Nordic Gamer.” This dimension of the figure’s identity is explicitly embraced in a meme that promotes the white nationalist idea that the collapse of Roman political power can be attributed to a loss of racial purity among the Romans themselves.
It illustrates this supposedly racial decline with a gallery of Roman emperors in which those from Augustus to Commodus are represented by the blonde Yes Chad, those from Pertinax to Decius by the dark-haired “Mediterranean Yes Chad,” and those following Decius by increasingly grotesque profiles, culminating with several incorporating racist stereotypes of Africans.
A similar meme represents all the emperors as Soys except for Augustus, who appears as a blonde-haired Yes Chad. Don’t be deceived by the meme’s playful representation of many emperors, such as its choice of a “teenage trad wife” wojack for the queer icon Elagabalus.
Memes such as these are not racist abuses of the form but an inevitable result of the proliferation of a form of comparison that, like the virgin vs. chad format, is inherently hierarchical. This is true even without needing to reproduce the biased interpretations of outdated scholarship: one soy vs. chad meme is structured around a quotation from the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomics that describes dark-skinned and excessively pale-skinned people as cowardly.
It’s a text and a set of ideas that are foundational to scientific racism. The meme’s quotation of the text reestablishes the credibility of this idea by informing viewers of its Classical origins alongside unflattering and stereotyped Wojacks representing the groups that the ancient text named: Egyptians for the dark skinned people and the “Nordcuck” for the pale-skinned women.
Much more explicitly racist examples of this meme can be found, such as one in which an antisemitic caricature of a soy accuses a gallery of various chads of being “transpobic, antifeminist, anti-immigration, and angtigay.” This gallery several ancient-themed chads, including the “Greek King Chad” and a “Chad Roman” along with various others representing Celts, Vikings, and Spanish conquistadores.
Besides perpetuating the canard that Jewish people are racial aliens in Europe, this example illustrates how the structure of the “Yes, Chad” meme lends itself to hateful politics. The “Yes, Chad” format derives its humor from its the Chad’s blasé affirmation of something the Soy believes is shameful or insulting for the Chad.
The meme thus provides the same perverse thrill that commentators argue explains the appeal of the increasingly explicit nativism of conservative politics in the United States. In the example above, the “Yes Chads” positively embrace transphobia, antisemitism, and the like. The “Yes Chad” glorifies those who continue to insist that such hatred is justified. It invites those who see it to be one of those people.
In one sense, this post was obsolete before it was published. The “visual language” of memes is continually evolving as it combines and modifies components into new forms in a neverending quest to go viral. According to KnowYourMeme.com search interest in Virgin vs. Chad peaked in 2019, and interest in Yes Chads peaked in 2020.
The power of memes to shape one’s worldview is, in fact, a popular theme for meme-makers. One that is particularly relevant to our analysis of white nationalism in Classical memes uses a template in which Wrestling Promoter Vince McMahon shows increasing levels of excitement from panel to panel.
The message of memes is: what you learn in school won’t be interesting. What you find online will blow your mind. It is tempting to dismiss the world of memes as ephemeral, superficial, or trivial.
This is all the more true when they deal in crudely racist stereotypes and interpretations of ancient material that professional scholars have long since abandoned. But they deserve the attention of anyone concerned with the entanglement of Greco-Roman antiquity in white nationalist politics.
This is the message that many people have encountered before they even set foot in a history class. What you learn there won’t be interesting; it’s what you find online in memes that will really blow your mind. And when one turns to memes to learn history, even if the memes don’t explicitly promote racism, are a set of idealizing tropes about the ancient world that make it a model for contemporary white supremacy: that the Roman empire “civilized” the “barbarians;” that Europe is “white” because the ancient Greeks were “white;” that immigration caused the fall of the Classical world.
It’s bad enough that these ideas can be found even in modern textbooks. But our students have already learned them online before we ever see them.
Here's a table summarizing the key differences between the "Virgin" and "Chad" archetypes in memes:
| Characteristic | Virgin | Chad |
|---|---|---|
| Physical Appearance | Hunched, downcast eyes | Muscular, flamboyantly posed |
| Qualities | Undesirable, inferior, ashamed | Confident, unbothered, secure |
| Origin | Often portrayed negatively | Often idealized or admired |
| Use in Memes | Represents weakness or inadequacy | Represents strength and desirability |
Virgin vs. Chad - Episode 1 💪【SERIES】
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