The Godzilla media franchise is one of the longest running media franchises, which means the character himself has gone through many changes throughout the years. However, in American pop culture, the characters of Godzilla is perceived as a hero, a friend of humanity and defender of Earth. This reputation comes from the Showa Era, where Godzilla often fought on the side of humanity, rather than trying to destroy them as depicted in the original Gojira. In recent years, Toho, Godzilla's corporate owners, have been steering the King of the Monsters back into the villain role. Despite this tone shift by Godzilla's owners, American Godzilla paratexts still generally depict Godzilla as a hero. These depictions of Godzilla are used to maintain his status as a family friendly heritage brand and keep a door open for parents to introduce their children to the brand. Such a strategy allows Godzilla to survive into the modern day as an international powerhouse franchise.

The Age of Trump witnessed the visible rise of intense culture wars and polarization in the United States. While culture wars are not new phenomena, the current iteration has digital media acting as new discursive structures and mediating battlegrounds for all sides of the cultural conflict. This project chronicles these online culture wars, demonstrating how within a neoliberal and postmodern socio-cultural condition, the rise of ambivalent, profit-driven digital technologies and platforms structure affect and mediate newly networked neo-reactionary populist (sub)cultural ideologies and discourses. The resulting online ecosystems afforded the digital formations of obscure reactionary subcultures (trolls, antifeminists, the alt-right, etc.) with particular personalized and affectively driven memetic communicative logics. These reactionary affective publics eventually began converging under perceived common ideological and social interests as online actions and reactionary discursive (re)formations and (re)networkings were catalyzed by (sub/cross)cultural conflicts and moments of sentimental activation. This led to the emergence of affectively charged and informally networked reactionary publics which began spilling out into the offline world alongside Trump's ascendancy to the White House. The increasing progressive reactions during the Trump Era also faced limitations in combatting reactionary politics due to structural dynamics of digital media and the larger culture war filtering of politics. …