He Will Not Divide Us

2017livestream eventclassic

He Will Not Divide Us (HWNDU) was a 24-hour livestream art project launched by actor Shia LaBeouf and artists Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner on January 20, 2017, during Donald Trump's inauguration. Meant to run the full four years of Trump's first term, the stream instead became a running battle with 4chan's /pol/ board, which repeatedly disrupted, stole, and tracked down the installation across multiple continents.

Overview

He Will Not Divide Us, often shortened to HWNDU, started as an anti-Trump performance art project and turned into one of the internet's strangest games of hide and seek. The setup was blunt: a wall-mounted camera, an open invitation for anyone to step up and repeat the phrase 'he will not divide us' into the lens, and a livestream broadcasting the results around the clock1.

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Everything shifted the moment 4chan's /pol/ board treated the installation as a live target. Users showed up in person to chant counter-slogans, hold Pepe the Frog signs, and blast 'Shadilay' at the wall, while the artists scrambled to keep the stream alive by moving it to new cities and eventually just a flag in the sky4. The trolling was so effective that each relocation drew its own news cycle about how 4chan had found the camera this time.

How It Spread

Within days, threads on 4chan's /pol/ board coordinated in-person visits where users held Pepe signs, played 'Shadilay,' and scrawled 'KEK' on the museum wall while praising Trump into the microphone4. In the early hours of January 26, 2017, LaBeouf himself was arrested on stream after a scuffle with a 25-year-old man; NYPD said he grabbed the man's scarf and scratched his face during the confrontation, and he was charged with assault and harassment before being released the same day2.

The Museum of the Moving Image pulled the plug on February 10, 2017, citing 'numerous arrests,' round-the-clock police patrols, and neighbor complaints about visitors urinating and smoking marijuana on nearby porches at all hours. The museum publicly called the installation a 'flashpoint for violence' in its shutdown statement3. The team relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico on February 18, 2017, mounting the camera outside the El Rey Theater; that setup lasted five days before someone spray-painted the lens on February 21, and the stream closed on February 23 after gunshots were reported in the local area4.

On March 8, 2017, the artists shrank the project down to a single flag against the sky at an undisclosed location. /pol/ users tracked it down within about 24 hours using plane flight paths visible in the frame, honking cars picked up by the microphone, and star maps compared against Google Maps. The flag was pulled down and replaced with a Make America Great Again hat and a Pepe the Frog T-shirt. Later relocations to Liverpool, London, and Nantes each ended the same way, with 4chan users finding and disrupting the stream within days4.

How to Use This Meme

HWNDU is not really a reusable template, it is a specific 2017 event, but the phrase 'he will not divide us' itself became a rally-and-mock line online. Supporters chanted it earnestly at the camera, while /pol/ users flooded the same stream to say it ironically over Pepe imagery and pro-Trump signs. Modern references typically point back to the livestream saga rather than proposing the slogan as a serious rallying cry.

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