Memes and History Lessons: Templar Symbolism and the Banalization of Extremist Discourse in the Spanish Online Far Right Milieu

As one immerses themselves within the online far-right milieu, an unexpected figure seems to make recurring appearances. In medieval chainmail, a white robe, and a red cross on its chest, the image of the Templar Knight becomes quite familiar to the Internet users who populate such online spaces. Protagonist of the medieval Crusades, the knight is portrayed as a fighter, protector of the Catholic homeland against a Muslim invasion. Focusing on this figure, the paper will explore how the far right seeks to mobilise young audiences using identity-laden discourse distilled into the memefied depiction of a historical character. It will analyse how the Spanish far-right online milieu makes use of historical symbolism in order to both convey ideological discourse and disseminate its ideas, exploiting the ambiguous and seemingly banal nature of social media content. By analysing the ways in which the Templar Knight symbol is present on social media spaces populated by far-right speech as well as how social media users relate to it, this paper will seek to understand how the Spanish far-right constructs and instrumentalises identity through content catered to young audiences. This will be done through a critical discourse analysis of digital media collected through an online ethnographic process conducted on several Instagram accounts which belong to the Spanish far-right milieu. Such analysis aims to explore how identity is interwoven into the politics of the far-right in the highly symbolic and unfiltered context of social media, reproducing the (re)appropriation of history that the far-right has been documented in deploying (Miller-Idriss, 2017; Zuckerberg, 2018; Kølvraa, 2019; MacLellan, 2019; Kingdon, 2024). Focusing on the use of templar symbolism in the communication environment of social media, I aim to highlight how identity is constructed, communicated, and performed in the far-right’s cultural expression. Far from the curated discourses of organisations and parties, the informal and largely unorganised social media milieu provides us with a space where we can better understand how individuals interact with ideological symbols and incorporate them into the collective imaginary, eased by the banal appearance of communication on social media. Therefore, as part of the aforementioned online ethnography, not only posts themselves will be taken into consideration, but also user interaction with such posts. Owing to the gendered dynamics of both far-right support and online culture, the paper will pay special attention to the way masculinity operates in the identity performances of far-right online community members. It will be argued that the Templar Knight embodies a fantasy and a mythical past while tapping into the identity traits of the mostly young male audience that consumes far-right content on social media, unifying masculinity and nativism in a single ideal figure. Consequently, the paper will argue that deeply rooted in online masculinity cultures, the Templar symbol allows masculinity to become a conduit for nativist extremist discourse in a subtle and concise manner, fully adapted to the norms and style that characterise online communication, facilitating the banalisation of far-right ideas.