Cool Zone Media.
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast that is recorded. But I'm very tired. But you know who's not tired, Garrison Davis, our host for today.
No, I'm probably more tired than you.
I was up to I don't know about that.
No, I was up till nine am. Eest writing desks.
Oh geez. Yeah. I went to bed by like five or.
Six, except for three hours. I'm going right back to bed after this. Excellent, as is the grind, you know, rise and grind, that's my motto.
Yeah, I'm going to do the same thing. So all right, well, Garrison, what are we What are we talking about today? What's our episode about? What's this sewed on?
So it's it's been a while since we've done like an update on what meme politics are up to. I think that the last deep dive we did was like an I wouldn't say, like a year ago when Ron de Santis, then presidential hopeful Meatball Rod Garrison, Meatball rock me. Sorry, sorry, the mypolity is putting. Ron just embraced the fast wave like meme asthetic for his then failing and dying campaign, and that was kind of the last that we did one of these big deep dives into like how meme
politics currently operate, And it's been a long year. It's felt in some ways much longer than a year since then, and the meme lenscape has changed significantly, And that's kind of what I want to discuss today. Just go over the current state of meme politics in September twenty twenty two.
Great, it's like the State of the Union, but slightly dumber.
But for us, yeah, just for all, for the completely brain rots yeah, space of online politics, people who.
Have destroyed their minds by spending too much time on the Internet.
Yes, exactly. So now that most of these like jokes are reference and says we'll be talking about are actually really old and not actually relevant anymore and are no longer trend dig now we can talk about how they worked, if they worked, and what they can tell us about the changing landscape of mean politics in the year of Our Lord twenty twenty four and beyond. So let's start by going all the way back to July fifteenth, which was just a lifetime ago.
Yeah, that was a thousand years ago.
Yeah, this was This was the first day of the RNC vance is announced as Trump's running mate. This was before Biden dropped out of the race, but when we were pretty sure that he was probably going to hopefully.
That's interesting that you were pretty shit because I I kind of thought he was going to like make us like fucking hoist his corpse back into the White House.
I mean, we got a really good indication about five days later that his dropout was like imminent.
Yeah, yeah, you're right, and it happened.
It happened less than a week later, So it was it was really on the line. But anyway, it was.
It was. It was a very different world, very different time. Meanwhile, on the first day of the RNC, after Vance is announced as the Republican VP candidate, the Twitter user Rick ruds Calves posted this tweet quote, I can't say for sure, but he might be the first VP pick to have admitted in a New York Times bestseller to fucking an insight out Latex Glove shoved in between two couch cushions, Vance Hillbilly Elogy, pages one seventy nine to one eight one. So this is the this is the start of the
couch meme. Sure the next few days, the memes spread online with the help of liberals who were unable to detect the fictitious nature of the claim. Now un ironic spread is crucial to the success of mimetic attacks like this, and the couch fucking claims gained such widespread prominence on Twitter that on July twenty fifth, the AP decided to do an official fact check of the claim, running the headline no, JD Vans did not have sex with a couch.
Now this had two problems. By platform forming this story in the AP, the image of JD's couch coitus was propelled outside the confines of overly online and Twitter ship posters into the popular discourse. Now the topic was welcome on new shows, talk shows, and other respectable publications. The other problem is that you can't definitively say JD Vance has never had sex with a couch.
No, no, I say I would never say that.
You can say it's untrue. He wrote about sofa sex in his memoir, but not that he's one hundred percent never made love to a love seat. Yeah, so making matters worse. Hours later, the AP removed their fact check, leaving a web page that just read quote. This story did not go through our standard editing processes. And has been removed.
I gotta know, I do desperately want to know what actually happened in the background there.
It's it's quite funny. It's it's quite a big fuck up.
Now.
This led people to reasonably conclude that if the fact check was taken down, that really only leads us to believe one thing is that this is a true claim, which at this point many people knew that it's not. I think interestingly, JD. Vance has refused to comment on this claim, which is probably smart, but his continued refusal to even deny the claim adds a bit to the
humorous nature. So the retraction of this fact check became a news story itself and gave a whole new life to a meme that had kind of been reaching the end of its cycle. People created doctored pages of Vance's book He'll Billy Elegy, where he reflected on tales of his youth in Ohio, where it was commonplace for young boys rejected by girls to turn to couch cushions for
sexual pleasure. The fake pages were framed as a limited first edition of the book before per Teal found it and revised the book for a secondary, wide released copy. The next week, the meme continued to proliferate, having completely broken out of the Twitter ship posting bubble it was birthed in, but the peak of the meme was still to come. On August sixth, Kamala Harris announced at Minnesota Governor Tim Walls as her running mate, and the two
appeared together at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During Walls's first speech, he made a very safe kind of dad joke style reference to his vice presidential opponent's viral sticky sofa situation.
Like all regular people I grew up with in the Heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best seller trashing that community.
Come on, that's not what Middle America is.
And I gotta tell you, I can't wait to debate the guy.
That is, if he's willing.
To get off the couch and show up, you'll see.
What I did there.
So, due to the references kind of like explicit sexual context, this was a bit of an unexpected move.
Yeah you could say that.
But for those already familiar with the meme, the bit served as a humorous, yet tame in joke, and for those unfamiliar, the huge crowd reaction prompted others to inquire about the context for the whole jd vance couch thing,
once again boosting its popularity as a trend. Now, I think this was a bit of a gamble from Walls, definitely, as acknowledging a viral meme often leads to its impending death, where recognition and participation of viral trends from the mainstream establishment signal that something is no longer cool and is now instead cringe.
Now.
Part of the long lasting presence of the coconut tree meme is the Harris campaign's wise unwillingness to make continuing coconut Tree references or capitalize on its imagery. The White House going all in on Dark Brandon using the imagery form, and Biden increasingly making references to the meme and interviews and speeches.
Oh, I've just killed it dead nuked.
It exactly, ultimately led to this meme's death long before the death of the Biden campaign itself. But this could be like a delicate balance. Before Biden made a Dark Brandon one of the early chorsnic images associated with his twenty twenty four reelection campaign. The first few Dark Brandon references from the White House actually increased the memes spread, and I think this is where Walls's joke was able
to succeed. The couch reference was vague enough and disconnected from the more explicit aspects of the meme, and paired with Walls's goofy facial expressions and his kind of dad joke refrain of see what I did there, it made what could have been a cringe and or crude moment into a charismatic and endearing one. I think the other thing that makes me lean towards Walls's invocation of the couch helping more than herting is that the meme had
already begun to be legitimate the establishment. When it's the subject of an article in every major publication and Stephen Colbert is making couch jokes on TV, then it is already broken containment and hit the mainstream.
Yeah. I would also add, I think there's a degree to which, like the Dark Brandon stuff was cringy so fast, because it was very clearly the Biden campaign jumping onto a meme that Biden himself certainly didn't understand. Absolutely not, Whereas I think Wall's got a little bit of the kind of energy Trump used to get, in part because it was it was like such a I can't believe this is happening in American politics. The VP candidate for the DIMS just accused the Republican VP candidate having sex
with the couch Like it was such a wow. This is like the breaking of a seal kind of moment which normally the Republicans have kind of had to themselves these like yes line crossing moments, And I think that does get attention and energy to you. It was it was interesting to see them do it and have it as actually work.
Yeah.
Well, we'll talk about that a little bit later. How this sort of tactic has been almost entirely monopolized by the right to the past decade, and just now we're starting to see someone that's change. I think Tim Wall's making a single couched reference, I believe did very little to hurt the inevitable trajectory of the JD Vance couch meme.
In the days after the speech, searches for JD Vance Couch reached an all time high, and as is the nature for peaks, was followed by a gradual fall off during the month of August, but crucially, the spirit of
the meme never really fully went away. I think one aspect that separates the couch meme from Dark Branded and even Coconut Tree to some degree is that it's not based on trying to prop up a political figure like Positively, but is instead attacking a widely disliked figure with slanderous disinformation. And though the couch meme is well past its peak, there's been no shortage of ways to make fun of
jd Vance. The overall momentum against him specifically has continued on utilizing memes with a true, untrue, and semi true basis, whether that be his inability to order donuts or his legitimately possible interest in dolphin sex as evidenced by his Twitter searches. Do you know who also likes dolphin sex?
Robert?
I mean, I could be convinced, but I guess let's check out these ads anyway.
All right, we are so back. So the right did not take kindly to Walls's acknowledgment of the whole Sopha spectacle.
We were so pissed.
They're really pissed, And it's funny. It's like as if their main guy has not spent the last ten years making up wild and spewing all sorts of like offensive lies about his opponents.
Yeah, yeah, that's why they're pissed. Yeah, we're supposed to be the ones doing so.
In response, the online right's finest posters cooked up a memetic counter attack against Tim Walls, and what they decided on is that Tim Walls once had to get his stomach pumped from drinking a gallon of horse seamen with this meme originating from a fake screenshot of an AP fact check posted by the Twitter account National Conservatism.
See.
Uh, I'm sure you're going to get into it, but there's so many reasons why this was always destined not to work.
Yeah. Absolutely, Almost immediately this was seen as like a massive misfire.
Yeah yeah, it made it immediately clear. Oh, you guys don't understand why what you used to do, like what you were doing was working. Yeah, like you never actually understood the principles behind what you were playing around with.
And I think crucially, most of the attacks from these like weird online figures never actually caught that much traction. The only ones that succeeded were ones that were just pairting stuff that Trump was talking about, because I think Trump actually understands this line of attack much better than most of these like right wing posters do. But yeah, it was very clear that this was this was a failure.
Some of the first horse Seamen posts got immediately ratioed by replies and quote tweets, deeming the meme a manufactured and desperate attempt to respond to the natural growth of the couch hooks from a random twitter ship post to the Democratic vice presidential candidate's opening speech.
With a guy like Walls, you don't go with horse com you do something like you you start spreading a rumor that like he uh cooked a bunch of well done t bone steaks at a barbecue or totally like that, totally like something that really hits to the center of his dad core thing.
It has to it has to line up with his vibe.
Right right right, and his vibe is like you know that nice Midwestern dad who's a dog shit cook, right like.
Yeah, which is something that Walls has actually been able to like utilize himself with his like white guy tacos the stuff right like right exactly.
He's leaded into it very smartly.
He lead into it and then it becomes a strength that then the right also gets upset about accusing him of quote unquote anti white racism.
That was quite a moment for American political history.
The other thing with like this horse semen thing is like you simply just can't force these things to happen. Like a crucial part of the success of a political meme like this is that it must have a degree of un ironic spread by people who genuinely believe it
to be true. Now, the horse semen meme was also intended to counter the Republicans or weird talking point that picked up steam this summer, and for some reason they chose to go about this by making an escalatory and just grossly bizarre claim about Tim Wall's guzzling animal semen masterful gambitzer not a weird thing to say at all. No, in doing this, the Right displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of
why the JD. Van's couch story was successful. The reason why it caught on the easily verifiable fact that Jadvance did not write about pleasuring himself with the couch as a teenager is that JD. Vance seems like the kind of guy to have used a couch to masturbait as a teenager in rural Ohio.
Yeah, you know that adolescence was awkward as shit.
Absolutely, like it wasn't successful just because it was like a weird sex story. It evoked a genuine feeling of something a sort of like white trash young guy might do. On the other hand, swallowing a gallon of horse seamen, it's such an outlandish jump into fantasy by comparison.
Yeah, nobody has done that, right.
Well, well, Tim Walls is no mister Hans. The vibes simply do not match.
And to be clear, Garre said, mister Hans wasn't swallowing it. That was part of the problem. That is true.
And like, meanwhile, Vance has the exact vibe of like a gross little teen gremlin who fucked it inside out rubber gloves shoved between two couch cushions. So the horse even meme failed to reach outside the confines of the niche right wing Twitter, but conservatives had another meme up
their sleeve. Chronically online far right influencers cat turn to chaiai Check aka Limbs of TikTok, and Ian Miles Chung led the charge in branding Tim Walls as tampon Tim in reference to a bill Walls assigned requiring menstrual products be provided in schools. Oh the horror the Babylon b wrote JD. Vance is weird, says guy who signed bill to put tampons in boys' school bathroom unquote. So similar
to the horse thing. This attempt to frame Tim Walls is Weird just didn't work that the meme never caught on beyond its initial posts. I think part of the reason why the overly online right is so focused on painting Walls is Weird is not just revenge for the couch joke, but because Tim Walls is often credited with popularizing the quote Republicans are just plain weird line of attack. Something that's really caught on this past summer. Now, the oldest clip I can find if Tim Walls pause this
message comes from December of twenty twenty three. I'll include that clip here.
And you said, basically, there's no such thing as a generic Republican.
These guys are weird.
Once they start running, their weirdness shows up.
What do you mean, Well, that's weird?
Stand by that.
Well, look just the strange things they become obsessed with demonizing our children, becoming obsessed with people's personal lives in their bedrooms, restricting freedoms.
I'm surrounded by states.
Who are spending their time figuring out how to ban Charlotte's Web in their schools. Why we're banishing hunger from ours with free breakfast and launch. That's what the public's looking for, That's what they're trying to get to, and they will weirdly obsess with everything to be mean and cruel and small in their ideas. And I didn't hear anything last night that did anything different to that, so I'll stand by that.
I just think Americans know this is just weird stuff to be focused on now.
We on nickod appen here and behind the Bastards have similarly been advocating for the type of framing for the new Right for quite a long while, Like Robert, I know you've been like really pushing for this as a tactic like for years now.
Yeah. Yeah, if they'd made me the vice presidential candidate three years ago, I really could have made some progress on this, but I had to see what they've got up.
Like we decided on the name for Molly's new show like very early this year, Like this was way way before, like the weird attacks went viral.
It's really the only name we ever considered was weird little guys.
Yeah, because that's how we like internally refer to these freaks. Because these are all unhinged, anti social freaks, and many of them revel in being this antagonistic force. I think part of their self image is the idea that liberals find them dangerous. And the weird attack is very disempowering for these people. It reframes them from this like scary existential threat to being more akin to your just off putting,
creepy uncle. Here's a clip of Wals himself kind of explaining the methodology behind this attack.
You've gotten some attention this week for calling Trump advance and Republicans in general weird. And I think that you're the one that set this tone, and there's this shift the Harris campaign seems to be following your lead, echoing this language. Why do you think weird is a more effective attack line against Trump than what Democrats have been done previously, which is argue that he's an existential threat to democracy?
Yeah, And it's an observation on this and you, being a school teacher, I see a lot of things.
But my point on this was is people.
Kept talking about, look, donald Trump is going to put women's lives at risk. That's one hundred percent true. Donald Trump is potentially going to end constitutional liberties that we have, end voting. I do believe all those things are a real possibility, but it.
Gives him way too much power. Listen to the guy.
He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind, and I thought, we just give him way too much credit. I think one of the things is is when you just ratchet down some of the the scariness or whatever and just name it what it is. I got to tell you my observation on this is, have you ever seen the guy laugh? That seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye. If he has left it's
at someone, not with someone. That is weird behavior. And I don't think you call it anything else. It is simply what we're observing.
Now.
An interesting side effect of the weird framing is that it's left these ultra conservatives utterly incapable of effectively combating this line of attack. They've been so used to being on the offense that they never really prepared for the position that they're now stuck in over a decade of they go low, we go high, conditioned to the rights to be completely unable to cope with being put on
mimetic defense. Now, my favorite retort of the weird claim is from conservative pundent Helen Andrew, who wrote, quote, calling people weird is such feminine behavior. Text book sex difference. Men engage in open conflict, women police conformity. It's honestly disorienting to hear male politicians use the line.
I love too that we're talking about how men are naturally drawn to open, honorable conflict when talking about a bunch of people who never log off, like everything you do is find the keyboard, motherfucker.
It's amazing that they're combating this by saying the weirdest things imaginable.
Yeah.
Now, I think this one's only one upped by a reply to this very post by the author of the self published Kingmaker trilogy named Airy Mendelssohn Christ, who posted a meme featuring a crowd of NPC wojacks all saying the word weird, which which I find actually be a very powerful image depicting all the masses having agreed upon that Republicans are weird. But Mendelssohn wrote, quote, it's both feminine behavior and heard behavior. We all started calling them
weird at once. It was obviously planned, cooked up by a sophisticated wordsmith, and then distributed by their network.
Yes, only only the most sophisticated of wordsmiths knows the word weird.
It's amazing.
You've got to dig deep into the dictionary to hit that one.
Truly, truly, truly, this must be the work of a sophisticated word smith. It's phenomenal.
That's fucking funny.
So, in trying to combat the weird accusation, the right has mostly opted for either responding with escalation, like in the case of the horse seamen meme, which only makes them seem kind of more off putting, or just going for the classic Uno reverso right, I'm not weird, you're weird. This is the ultimate sign of desperation and impending defeat. I am rubber, you are glue. Whatever you say bounces
off me and sticks to you. On top of being a strategy that often signals one has already lost wing this tactic, you make the very basic error of repeating the enemy's claim against you, thus continuing to amplify and spread the original attack. Here's a clip from Trump.
There's something weird with that guy. He's a weird guy. JD is not weird. He's a solid rock. I happen to be a very solid rock. We're not weird. We're other things, perhaps, but we're not weird.
But he is a weird guy.
He walks on the stage.
There's something wrong with that guy, and he called me weird. And then the frank news media picks it up. That was the word of the day. Weird, weird, weird. They're all go now.
Similarly, I found a Megan Kelly video titled Tucker Carlson explains why JD. Vance is actually normal?
Great should Tucker notes the most normal man alive.
And Trump supporters have brought signs to his rallies that read Donald Trump is not weird. My I Am not weird shirt. As people asking a lot of questions are already answered by my shirt. It's it's a very basic mistake. Now, there has been some pushback among certain swasp people on the left who have historically associated themselves as like societal outcasts and have found comfort in embracing words like weird
and freak. And on a certain level, I understand this, but I think this point of view is making the same fundamental error as the conservative right when they try to flip around the weird accusation onto Democrats, progressives, and people on the left by primarily using homophobia and transphobia. We're using the same word to refer to two very different things. Do they call drag Queen's weird for being transgressive? Meanwhile, Trump Advance and the far right are weird because they
are oddly reactionary. They're trying to resurrect a long dead world by forming an authoritary movement behind a reality TV star who sounds like you're rambling conspiracy theorist uncle. It's a battle over the terrain of normalcy as a shifting category, and while I sympathize with some's hostile to the hegemony of normalcy, how I often follow outside of that category. I believe it's also paramount that we sabotage reactionary efforts
to gain any territory. So that's kind of the cycle of weird And we will be back to talk about this kind of final new stage of meme politics. After this break, okay, we are once again, so back now, I believe this election will truly be characterized by the complete pliferation of meme style politics. Now, even without like the use of a meme image, I think politics, especially this year, has itself functioned and spread like a meme.
Now.
This is something that's been happening for the past like eight years, certainly, but the way it's happened this summer I think has been slightly unique. The weird attack is, you know, the ideal example of this. But even if you just look back a few months ago, we were in a very different position. It was a very different story, and I'll let Stephen Colbert demonstrate that.
So the Biden campaign wants to build on the new viral trend of handground pa the phone, because reportedly they're looking for a meme page manager. So look forward to some hot new Biden social content like Irmager, Trumper's hurtler I can't has youth votes, and of course for the very online skibbitty Biden.
Gvd Biden ged git Biden.
Okay, I I really want to play more of that, Cliff, but I'm afraid I already included a little too much. What a dire situation that is, that is that that is the peak of the liberals, mimetic attacks just truly episcopal. Oh my god, I've become obsessed with skibbety Biden just because it demonstrates such like an inevitable like self defeat that that was like the best thing these people had, like cooking. As it's kind of obvious by the clip. This led towards the death of the Biden campaign. They
really had nothing in the tank. Biden was a shambling old man. And then like two months later, Kamala kicked off her campaign by embracing the Kamala is Brat Summer, which he has to may have killed Bratt Summer, but it did help secure the vibe shift, skyrocketing her popularity.
Quite frankly, I was ready for Bratt Summer to.
Death, yes, sure, but I think her weaponization of that term, endorsed by Charlie XCX, I think did help skyrocket her early popularity and showed an early embrace of online culture. And I believe the Harris campaign actually owes a lot more to memes. In a ironic twist of fate, there is a compelling argument to be made that Kamala Harris's rise to the top of the presidential ticket can at least be in part tracked back to Republican attacks which
spawned memes. Last year. The account RNC Research ran by the GOP posted multiple clips and edits attacking Kamala Harris for what they saw as odd phrases and awkward moments. Earlier this year, some of those videos from RNC research went viral outside of right wing Twitter, which led to an ironic or post ironic embrace of Kamala Harris among liberal and leftist posters. Now the biggest one was the Coconut Tree video, which spawned memes that started to pick
up steam in January and didn't peak until July. Another one of RNZ Research's videos, a four minute compilation of Kamala Harris saying what can be unburdened by what has been, provided the inspiration for the title of a document that spread around political circles, postulating Kamala Harris as the best successor to Biden if you were to drop out of the race instead of a messy last minute primary or
open convention. And I think these memes did a lot to increase Kamala's favorability in the first half of this year. Kamala prior to this was a relatively kind of disliked figure nationally. She was one of the first drop out of the twenty twenty presidential race.
Yeah, she wasn't I wouldn't even say disliked as much as like not a figure like the big The number one thing people said about her is that she's been a non entity as a vice president.
Yeah. Yeah, And she certainly wasn't popular.
Yes, definitely not popular.
So although the GFP may have inadvertently helped to improve the public profile of Kamala Harris and have failed to effectively combat the weird attacks, they have not totally failed on the me medic warfare front. The past two months, the right has landed on a somewhat effective memes style politics by utilizing a combination of disinformation and AI images to create fake news stories that rile up their base on certain key issues so far, mainly trans people and immigration.
Now.
A few months ago, I did an episode on how the right's been using memes to create this fake epidemic of transgender mass shooters, and then in July, a new anti trans syop went super viral. False claims that the Algerian Olympic boxer Iman Khalif is transgender or in some kind of unverified way quote unquote biologically male spread around online with the help of British newspapers and went just completely viral for a whole week, with the disinformation subsequently
becoming a new story itself. This fake story caught traction after an Italian boxer quit a match forty five seconds into a fight after receiving a single hard blow to the face. Anti trans memes are a well worn part of this type of disinfo ecosystem, and there was no shortage of trans sports memes now using Khalif. I'm going
to quote from Ruby Hammad in Al Jazeera quote. Khalif's subsequent match was against Hungarian Anna Hamari, who in the lead up posted and deleted an image that I believe to be among the most significant of the entire affair because of how it lays the subtext bear. In this AI generated image that Hamari sourced from Instagram, Khalif was not merely represented as a man towering over a dainty, vulnerable white woman, but was denied humanity altogether and drawn
as a supernatural mythical beast unquote. Many other AI images of Khalif spread throughout this viral trend, some with just Khalif having like a stereotypical like male body that were AA generated and others with this like similar like like kind of like monster ish look. And I think beyond the actual use of these like AI memes and kind of anti trans memes using Khalif, I think the way the actual story spread was like a meme. I think that's how I was able to gain such like a
viral traction in just like a few days. I think the next version of this is the eating Cat's story, which started with a post to a Springfield crime watch a Facebook group from someone who shared a fourth hand account based on a rumor from a neighbor who claims to have heard the story from a friend who heard
the story from an unnamed source. Now NewsGuard attracted down the woman who told the Facebook poster about the story, and she told them quote, I'm not sure I'm the most credible source because I don't actually know the person who lost the cat. I don't have any proof.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in they're eating the cats, they're eating they're eating the pets of the people that live there.
I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.
All I've seen people on telligence.
Let me just say, this is.
The people on television saying my dog was taken and used for food.
So maybe he said that, and.
Maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.
I'm not taking this from television.
I'm telling you was eaten by the people that went there.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Division of Wildlife told TMZ that the main photo of an alleged Haitian immigrant carrying a debt goose, presumably on the way to eat it, was in fact a random black man removing roadkill from a street in Columbus, Ohio, with no evidence to suggest he is from Haiti, he is an immigrant, or was intending to eat said goose. Still, jd Vance particularly spent a lot of work boosting this fake news story.
Also, if he was what's wrong with eating a.
Goose, Yes, exactly, like there's there's so many, so many problems with the Haitians are eating at pets and wildlife meme, and we don't we don't have time to like fully get into it. It's just kind of one anecdote in this kind of series of mimetic attacks. And I think one of the guys who was spearheading this was jd Vance, who spent a lot of effort trying to push the story into the national spotlight, either the day of or
before the posential debate of ants tweeted quote. In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who have said their neighbor's pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It's possible, of course, that all these rumors will turn out to
be false. Do you know what's confirmed that a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here unquote, And now I think the last thing that he's referring to was an unfortunate car accident, and the Haitian man was a legal immigrant, not an illegal immigrant, and the father of the child who died has been advocating that people stop using his child's death as this like racist ammunition in this weird culture war debate.
God, it's bleak.
Which is really hard to see a man pleading that these like unhinged racists stop using the death of his son. Yeah, to further like they're just extreme, gross and like transparent agenda.
Yeah, it's one of the more disgusting things that's happened.
Part of the spread of the eating of pets story has been the use of AI images, particularly of black men kidnapping and eating pets, as well as images of Trump rescuing cats from what I would describe as a horde of immigrants, which is what I would assume the
AA prompt would be. Now, these images aren't necessarily meant to like be passed off as real, but in the absence of actual evidence, they serve an important purpose of providing a visual justice stick in people's minds, And I think that that's crucially what's going on with all of these AI images, whether they be of Trump like saving cats or holding cats, or they just be like very racist depictions of like black men trying to like eat
or kidnap people's pets. Earlier this year at the RNC, I know Me and Robert went to this panel produced in part by Microsoft, talking about the use of like AI images in politics and how they're advocating to like yeah, not be using ai AI depictions of candidates, which is something that Trump has consistently been doing, posting or retruthing AI videos of Kamala Harris of people like Taylor Swift endorsing him, which then led to Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris,
which seemingly upset Trump greatly. Now to me, if you look at the trans Olympics debacle as well as the Springfield incident, it feels like this endless series of new dis info trends is designed so that individual confrontations just don't matter that much. Like Yeah, pointing out the whole trans Olympics thing is fake just doesn't matter, because then they're going to move on to Haitian immigrants or killing
people's pets. Each individual lie is so flimsy, but the constant sequence of them built a structure that has a degree of stability for conservatives, And this is a project that they've been like working towards for a long long time time. I know, Robert, we've talked about this.
Yeah, this, I mean I saw the start of this as like a kid, right, like this is kind of what guys like Limbaugh were always doing on sort of the ground floor level, you know, you can look at.
I think one of the first big like cleavage points in our realities was the whole Clinton death count thing, which, if you're unaware, is this list conservative started spreading in like nineteen ninety three or four of all of the people that Bill and Hillary had supposedly had murdered, right, and it was like guys like Vince Foster who'd killed himself, who worked for them and whatnot, Like it was all bullshit,
but it was kind of the start of this. Like, when you get enough of these things, it doesn't matter that each of them take seconds to debunk. They form a sort of like like a cushion. If you exist within that reality, you can kind of slide along without touching the ground.
Definitely now, Yeah, it forms like a like a mesh like net structure, yeah, where each individual piece is very weak, but together it provides an actually like pretty pretty resilient like resting place for these people's alternate version of reality.
Yeah.
Now, Vance is kind of somewhat admitted in some ways to having manufactured this media story.
This was interesting to me.
Yeah, And I'm going to put that clip here, and I'm going to include a bit of a longer clip than what's usually used in soundbites, just because during this interview, just Vance's behavior and his like pauses are very odd. So there's gonna be a few seconds of like dead space. But that is like in the actual interview.
American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I start talking about cat memes.
If I have to.
Create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm gonna do, Dana, because.
Public policy.
Sorry, you just said that you're creating the story.
Is that data?
Yeah, you just said that this is a story that you've created.
So so then the eating dog.
We we are creating, we are, Dana.
It comes from first hand accounts from my constituents. I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it.
Now Vance has subsequently you know, said that no, no, no, I'm getting this information from first hand accounts from my constituents. When I say that I'm creating stories, I'm creating a media story. But it's hard not to see this as a little bit of like a tactical slip on his part. Right now, this has all created a very odd situation for the Republican Party. As we've kind of talked about
the past few months. Journalists and researcher Jared Holt wrote, quote, the Trump campaign seems to be doing the same failed dance as the Dessantus one at the moment, pander heavily to terminally online weirdos and get mad when the general public goes, uh, what the fuck? Un Yeah, and this is the thing when you have someone on stage talking about eating pets, that is a turnoff for many normal people because they immediately clock this as being probably complete bullshit.
Yeah.
And we're in a very interesting moment in the Republican Party. Considering the right wings electoral losses in twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, and twenty twenty two, and possibly going into twenty twenty four, this kind of weird culture war grievance, anti wilk strategy just might not be electorally viable. When matched against a
more normal alternative, and I think making matters worse. The Trump team and the Republican National Committee have spent the past four years handing over a lot of their comms and outreach to just certifiable freaks like Laura Lumer, Ian Miles Chung and limbs of TikTok, people who are very disconnected from what regular people care about, people that are only liked by other really online freaks, and.
People who have no crossover appeal.
Right.
Joe Rogan is such a powerful card in their hand because he has a lot of like normal dude appeal, right, and so when he starts parroting a talking point, he can actually push it to people. Laura Lumer does not write, like like, if you show a normal person Laura Lumer, they're like, what the fuck is wrong with that lady's face?
And they're a very double edged sword because although they are very off putting and that in some ways can like damaged, can damage Trump, they also carry a degree of like very real harm.
Oh yeah.
Whenever all these people hop onto a trend, a very consistent thing that has followed is bomb threats being called into whatever their target is. I love doing that, whether that be hospitals providing trans healthcare, abortion clinics, or in this case, just schools in Springfield, Ohio, which have now
received multiple bomb threats. And again, like it is a very double edged sword because obviously that's like very real harm being done, and you could argue that, you know, that makes the situation worse for the Trump campaign, the fact that they're attacks that spreading are resulting in like bomb threats being called into schools, but it also creates a degree of actual harm for like kids and many of the legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield that are now
seeing a very unprecedented as of recent wave of like extremely racist attacks. There's a good article by Jared Holt in MSNBC that kind of goes into this topic specifically that I'll link in the sources below. So yeah, that kind of rounds up my update on the current state of meme politics, all of its various forms that's taken these past few months, from couch fucking jokes to bomb
threats in Springfield, and it's a very dominant form. Like I don't remember memes being this front and center at least in the twenty twenty election.
Yeah, and I mean they twenty sixteen. They kind of were, but it was it was like a much rougher and ruder attempt this. There's like so much more buy in by like large organism stations.
And Democrats have finally jumped on board to this.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
They have long rejected this line of attack as an illegitimate form of politics, and they are not taking that stance anymore.
Yeah, they picked the gun up off the table, fucking finally.
Well, that at least doesn't for me. Yeah, you're at It could happen here. I will leave us with one closing soundbit from JD.
Vans something that Governor Walls has called you and Donald Trump, and that is weird. Sure, and it has taken off the New York Times reports. Then when Donald Trump was asked about it, he said, not me, They're talking about JD.
Well, certainly they've levied that charge against me more than anybody else.
It could happen.
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