Meaning
What does Silence, Liberal mean?
Silence, Liberal is a catchphrase mainly used by conservatives and leftists online to mock liberals.
Most often than not, the meme is created as an image macro, which are pictures with short catch phrases on them.
Usually, “Silence, liberal” images feature some kind of character or an object with glowing eyes, from which it fires laser beams.
The most popular one shows a huge crab firing the lasers onto a smaller one.
Origin
What's the origin of Silence, Liberal?
The earliest known “silence, liberal” meme was shared on a 4chan image board, known as /pol/ on December 10th, 2016.
The post was an edited image of Daiei Film’s turtle monster, Gamera, blowing fire out of its mouth with the caption “STFU, liberal”.
However, some people consider the crab image the original one, hence its popularity. It first appeared on a Facebook page, ShitpostBot 5000, on August 27th, 2017.
Spread & Usage
How did Silence, Liberal spread?
The format of glowing eyes and lasers shooting from them spread more and more over the years, especially on 4chan, Reddit and also on Twitter.
The meme is very versatile, meaning there are many of them with different characters and catchphrases.
Over the course of the meme getting popular, it was used mainly by far-left communities. Great example was a tweet in response to a CNN post about a woman leading the US Army, posted by the user ohbermuda.
External resources
- Know Your Meme – Silence, Liberal