Dilley Meme Team: Pro-Trump group behind video mentioning ‘unified Reich’
www.bbc.com
The Dilley Meme Team has produced dozens of videos and images reshared by the former president.
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    A video posted on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account this week included a reference to the creation of a “unified Reich”, provoking outrage from Democrats, with the Trump campaign later deleting the post.The campaign attributed its creation to a “random account” and said the staffer who posted it did not notice the words, but its real origin was a trollish collective of online influencers called the Dilley Meme Team.They are a dedicated, mostly pseudonymous group that produces a slew of pro-Trump videos and images, many of them crude, offensive, satirical or conspiratorial – while others are more traditional and religious-themed.The Dilley Meme Team boasts of its ties to the Trump campaign, which has given it an unusual status among a host of accounts and loose organisations dedicated to online battles.Underlining the importance of the digital fight in this election campaign, the Biden campaign recently put out an advertisement for a “Content and Meme Pages Partner Manager”.

    Most of the members of the collective go by fake names, but the group’s founder and namesake Brenden Dilley, posts and hosts a podcast under his own name.Mr Dilley bills himself as an entrepreneur, life coach, self-help author and fitness expert.He frequently makes expletive-filled rants about Mr Trump’s opponents and has used anti-gay slurs on his online show and podcast.

    In 2018 he ran for Congress in a district in Arizona, and finished 11th in the Republican primary with just over 1% of the vote.There’s no indication that the Dilley Meme Team is funded by the Trump campaign – in fact, the money is flowing in the opposite direction.

    "Kayla Gogarty, research director at Media Matters for America, a left-wing organisation that monitors conservative and far-right output, said that Mr Trump began sharing videos from the Dilley Meme Team around the time of the 2022 midterm elections.“His rhetoric is particularly shocking, considering that he has strong ties with the [Trump] campaign and with mainstream Republicans,” she said.

    The group’s aggressive approach that has been celebrated by some of Mr Trump’s biggest supporters.“Thank you to the Dilley Meme Team!” exclaimed Trump loyalist Kari Lake, after one member of the team created a video highlight reel for the Arizona Republican Senate candidate.Another conservative influencer tweeted about the Biden campaign job advert: “They’re not going to be able to combat the Dilley Meme Team, because their Warlord Brenden doesn’t play games!However, other Trump supporters think that the furore over the “unified Reich” video shows the errors and drawbacks of scorched-earth meme warfare.“They exist to attack, insult, smear, and it’s all ad hominem,” said John Cardillo, a former New York Police Department officer turned conservative commentator.

    He argued that the controversy about the Reich video was overblown, but a gift to Democrats and that the Dilley Meme Team was doing “an incredible disservice” to the Trump campaign.“The blowback has been huge,” he said.

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