Politics & Frogs

2016 — 2020. Memes acquire geopolitical weight. The 2016 American presidential campaign is fought partly in image macros: MAGA hats, Pepe the Frog appropriated by /pol/ from Matt Furie's gentle stoner comic and weaponised on Twitter and Reddit, Hillary Clinton's campaign issuing a written statement explaining the frog. On 27 September 2016 the Anti-Defamation League adds Pepe to its hate-symbol database. Furie attempts to reclaim him for years; in 2017 he kills the character in his comic. Hong Kong protestors in 2019 re-reclaim Pepe as a symbol of resistance without irony. The era's other artefacts: NPC Wojak, OK Boomer, OK hand sign controversy, Boogaloo, Bernie's Mittens, Let's Go Brandon, K-pop fans flooding racist hashtags with fancams in 2020. The Russian Internet Research Agency runs meme farms at industrial scale. The Macedonian teenager who runs a Trump fan page for ad revenue becomes a recurring news cycle. The medium achieves geopolitical seriousness, mostly badly. Governments form social-media units. The Pentagon issues a memetic-warfare white paper. Memes are now a category of intelligence product.

Part of The Meme Oracle

29 moments in this segment.

  1. — Florida Man. Date: 2013 Twitter origin, January 2019 peak · Place: Florida · @_FloridaMan Twitter · Florida's public-records 'sunshine law' · Figures: Florida's Sunshine Law, the structural cause · the @_FloridaMan Twitter account (founded 2013) · uncounted Florida-resident defendants · Tags: RegionalArchetype, TabloidFeed, SunshineLaw 01. Born of Public Records Florida Man as a meme is a side-effect of Florida's Sunshine Law, which mandates near-total public release of arrest records and police reports. Other states classify equivalent records as restricted. Florida does not. The result is that every minor American absurdity that happens in Florida is searchable and quotable. The @_FloridaMan Twitter account, launched 2013, aggregates the resulting headlines: 'Florida Man Arrested For Throwing Alligator Through Wendy's Drive-Thru Window,' 'Florida Man Steals Steaks From Walmart Then Returns To Steal Air Conditioner.' 02. Birthday Challenge In January 2019 a Twitter user posts 'google Florida Man followed by your birthday and post your result.' The challenge goes viral. Hundreds of thousands of users discover that for any date of the year, Florida has reliably produced at least one news story featuring a man arrested for something inexplicable. Florida Man is treated as a punchline. He is also, structurally, evidence that a single state's transparency policy can manufacture an entire national archetype out of the consistent availability of unflattering public records. Sources • Florida Statutes Chapter 119, the Public Records Law (1909, expanded) • Caitlin Dewey, 'Florida Man is more than a meme; he's a real and tragic American figure,' Washington Post, 14 January 2019 • Know Your Meme, 'Florida Man'
  2. — The Red MAGA Hat. Date: Spring 2015 · Place: Trump Tower campaign store · later worn nationwide · Figures: Donald Trump, presidential candidate · Cali-Fame of Los Angeles, manufacturer · Christl Mahfouz, hat-shop owner who sourced early production · Tags: Garment, Campaign, Trump2016 01. A Hat That Is a Slogan In the spring of 2015 the Trump campaign begins selling a five-panel structured cap in fire-engine red, white embroidery, in caps: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Twenty-five dollars. Cali-Fame in Carson, California stitches the early runs union-made in the United States, a fact the campaign promotes. Trump wears one to a border-wall visit in Laredo, Texas on 23 July 2015. The image of the candidate in the hat, the hat on the candidate, becomes the campaign's single visual. 02. Wearable Meme The hat works because it is a meme you can wear. The acronym MAGA detaches from the phrase and circulates on Twitter, on 4chan, in headlines. Counter-campaigns adopt the form: pink hats, parodic colors, 'Make America Read Again,' 'Make Orwell Fiction Again.' By 2016 the red cap is shorthand for an entire political coalition, visible at a distance, legible in a single frame, the most efficient piece of political branding since the Obama HOPE poster. Sources • Lauren Collins, 'The Inside Story of the Trump Hat,' The New Yorker, 27 June 2016 • Trump campaign FEC filings, 2015-2016, payments to Cali-Fame of Los Angeles • Know Your Meme, 'Make America Great Again Hat'
  3. — The 2016 Meme War. Date: January-November 2016 · Place: 4chan /pol/ · Reddit r/The_Donald · Twitter · Facebook · Figures: Donald Trump, candidate · Hillary Clinton, candidate · /pol/ posters, anonymous · The_Donald moderators · Tags: Election, ImageBoard, Propaganda 01. Centaur Campaign Through 2016 the Trump campaign benefits from a parallel volunteer image-production army on 4chan's /pol/ and Reddit's r/The_Donald. The campaign does not commission this output. The output exceeds anything the campaign could commission. Daily, often hourly, anonymous users generate image macros, photoshops, edited debate clips, fake Hillary tweets, Pepe variants, and reaction GIFs. The good ones are upvoted to the top of The_Donald, screenshot, and rebroadcast to mainstream platforms. 02. Asymmetry The Clinton campaign attempts an equivalent. The output is corporate, on-message, and dead on arrival. 'Pokemon GO to the polls' is delivered from a podium in Virginia on 14 July 2016 and is mocked the same evening. The asymmetry is structural. One side runs a campaign and tries to be funny. The other runs a campaign that hosts and amplifies the funniest work of an anonymous decentralized labor force. 03. Hillary for Prison The meme war's signature artifact is not a single image but a tone: ironic, contemptuous, transgressive, fluent in the conventions of imageboard humor. 'Hillary for Prison' shirts, 'Lock her up' chants at rallies, the cartoon frog with a MAGA hat, all rhyme. On 9 November the result arrives. Election-night /pol/ threads run to thousands of replies. The board calls it 'meme magic.' The losing side calls it many things, none of which describe a counter-strategy. Sources • Whitney Phillips, 'The Oxygen of Amplification,' Data & Society, May 2018 • Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, Brian Friedberg, 'Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America' (Bloomsbury, 2022) • Andrew Marantz, 'Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation' (Viking, 2019)
  4. — Last Week Tonight Renames Trump. Date: 28 February 2016 · Place: HBO · YouTube · Figures: John Oliver, host · Donald Trump, candidate · Friedrich Drumpf, Trump's grandfather (genealogical hook) · Tags: LateNight, BrandAttack, ChromeExtension 01. Make Donald Drumpf Again On 28 February 2016 John Oliver devotes twenty-one minutes of Last Week Tonight to the Trump candidacy. The segment ends by pointing out that the candidate's ancestral surname, before a nineteenth-century anglicization, was Drumpf, and urges the audience to use the original name as a small ritual deflation. Within forty-eight hours the segment has fifteen million YouTube views. A 'Drumpfinator' Chrome extension swaps every instance of Trump on a webpage to Drumpf. The merch store sells caps reading MAKE DONALD DRUMPF AGAIN. 02. The Limit of Satirical Renaming The campaign is the high-water mark of the liberal hope that a viral mock of Trump's name would degrade him. It does not. He wins the Republican nomination in May, the presidency in November. The episode now reads as evidence that satire identifying a candidate as ridiculous mistakes ridicule for refutation, a lesson the late-night format declines to fully absorb for the next six years. "If you are thinking of voting for Donald Trump, the charismatic guy promising to make America great again, stop and take a moment." — John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, 28 February 2016 Sources • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 3 episode 3, HBO, 28 February 2016 • Megan Garber, 'Donald Drumpf and the Politics of Bullying,' The Atlantic, 29 February 2016 • Know Your Meme, 'Make Donald Drumpf Again'
  5. — Rubio Repeats Himself. Date: 6 February 2016 · Place: Saint Anselm College, Manchester, New Hampshire · ABC News Republican primary debate · Figures: Marco Rubio, U.S. Senator (Florida) · Chris Christie, Governor (New Jersey) · Tags: Debate, GOP Primary, Glitch 01. The Loop Three days before the New Hampshire primary, Marco Rubio delivers the same 25-second talking point about Barack Obama four times in eight minutes. Chris Christie, standing two podiums away, calls it live: 'There it is. The memorized 25-second speech.' Rubio repeats the line again. Christie smiles. The clip is the entire debate by morning. 02. Marcobot Within hours the nickname Marcobot is on Twitter, paired with looping six-second Vines of the same sentence. Rubio finishes fifth in New Hampshire three days later and is out of the race by 15 March. Christie endorses Trump two weeks after the debate and his own campaign never recovers either. The moment becomes shorthand for any politician caught running a script. Rubio later jokes about it on the Senate floor. Sources • Karen Tumulty, 'Rubio robotically repeats line in attack on Obama, drawing rebuke from Christie,' Washington Post, 7 February 2016 • ABC News Republican Debate transcript, 6 February 2016 • Know Your Meme, 'Marcobot'
  6. — Ted Cruz Is the Zodiac Killer. Date: February 2016 · Place: Twitter · Public Policy Polling survey, Florida · Figures: Ted Cruz, U.S. Senator (Texas) · @RedPillAmerica and others, originating accounts · Tags: Twitter, GOP Primary, Absurdist 01. The Joke A 2013 tweet by comedian Red Pill America claims Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer, the unidentified Northern California murderer active 1968 to 1969. Cruz was born in 1970. The joke is the math. It sits dormant until Cruz runs for president in 2016. The premise spreads as a recurring Twitter format: any Cruz news item gets a Zodiac reply. Cruz's wooden public manner does the rest. 02. The Poll On 18 February 2016 Public Policy Polling asks 1,118 Florida voters whether Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. 38 percent of Florida voters are not sure. 10 percent say yes. The poll result is itself meme-shaped, treated as data confirming the joke. Cruz is asked about it at a press conference on 26 February. He declines to deny. The meme outlasts the campaign. Sources • Public Policy Polling, 'Trump leads Florida; Clinton edges Sanders,' 18 February 2016 • Amy B Wang, 'Is Ted Cruz the Zodiac Killer? Maybe, say 38 percent of Florida voters,' Washington Post, 19 February 2016 • Know Your Meme, 'Ted Cruz Is the Zodiac Killer'
  7. — Lock Her Up. Date: July 2016 onward · Place: Republican National Convention, Cleveland · Trump rallies nationwide · Figures: Michael Flynn, retired general · Chris Christie, prosecutor turned surrogate · Trump rally crowds · Tags: Chant, RallyCulture, Trump2016 01. A Crowd Memes Itself On 18 July 2016 retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn addresses the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He pauses as the delegates begin to chant 'Lock her up.' He joins in. 'That's right. Lock her up.' The chant predates Flynn's speech, surfacing at smaller Trump rallies through the spring. The convention national-televises it. By August it is the rally's reliable second-act crescendo, deployed at every venue when Clinton's name is invoked. 02. The Rally as Repost The chant is a meme in the original Dawkins sense, a unit transmitted from crowd to crowd by imitation. It needs no slide, no graphic, no app. It works because each new crowd has seen the previous crowd do it on a phone screen and arrives ready to perform it. After the election the chant persists at rallies for years, sometimes redirected at successive targets, the underlying gesture intact. The form outlives the original referent. Sources • Michael Flynn, address to the Republican National Convention, Cleveland, 18 July 2016, transcript via C-SPAN • Jeremy W. Peters, 'In a Crowd of Trump Supporters, a Cry of Lock Her Up,' New York Times, 19 July 2016 • Know Your Meme, 'Lock Her Up'
  8. — Pizzagate. Date: October-December 2016 · Place: 4chan · Reddit · Twitter · Comet Ping Pong, Washington DC · Figures: Edgar Maddison Welch, gunman · James Alefantis, Comet Ping Pong owner · John Podesta, Clinton campaign chair (target of conspiracy) · Tags: Conspiracy, OffPlatformConsequence, Wikileaks 01. From Email to Pizzeria On 30 October 2016 a 4chan post claims to have decoded WikiLeaks-released emails from John Podesta as a pedophile ring code, with 'cheese pizza' meaning child pornography. The thread migrates to /r/pizzagate on Reddit, then to Infowars, Twitter, and Facebook. The conspiracy converges on a Washington DC pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong owned by James Alefantis, who has no ties to the Clinton campaign beyond knowing Podesta socially. The restaurant receives death threats for a month. 02. Self-Investigation On 4 December 2016 Edgar Maddison Welch drives from Salisbury, North Carolina to Washington with an AR-15. He enters Comet Ping Pong, fires three rounds, searches the building, finds no children, surrenders. He tells police he came to 'self-investigate' the conspiracy. Pizzagate is the first viral political conspiracy of the platform era to produce an armed man at a real address. It does not end the conspiracy. It demonstrates the throughput from imageboard to gun, a circuit QAnon will industrialize within ten months. Sources • Adam Goldman, 'The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter's Questions,' New York Times, 7 December 2016 • Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, Peter Hermann, 'Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in DC,' Washington Post, 6 December 2016 • Amanda Robb, 'Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,' Rolling Stone, 16 November 2017
  9. — The Veles Trump Industry. Date: Summer-November 2016 · Place: Veles, North Macedonia · Figures: Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed media editor · Lawrence Alexander, open-source analyst · approximately one hundred Macedonian teenagers, site operators · Tags: FakeNews, Adsense, ForeignFarms 01. Population 55,000 In November 2016 BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman and analyst Lawrence Alexander publish a piece identifying at least 140 pro-Trump websites traced to Veles, a small city in central Macedonia. The operators are teenagers and twenty-somethings, mostly between sixteen and twenty-five. The motive is not political. They have learned that copy-pasting sensational pro-Trump articles from American hyper-partisan sites and reposting them under domains like WorldPoliticus.com generates Facebook shares, which generate AdSense impressions, which generate dollars at Macedonian purchasing power. 02. Discovery of the Funnel One Veles operator interviewed by BuzzFeed makes sixteen thousand dollars in two months. The town's nickname becomes 'Fake News Town.' Operators report having previously tried pro-Bernie content, which did not perform; pro-Trump content does. Veles is not a Russian operation. It is a discovery, by teenagers in a post-industrial Balkan town, that the 2016 American electorate has a near-infinite appetite for one specific genre of content, and that Facebook will pay them in adjacent ad revenue to feed it. The exposé becomes the foundational case study in algorithmic-platform incentives for the next half-decade of media criticism. Sources • Craig Silverman, Lawrence Alexander, 'How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,' BuzzFeed News, 3 November 2016 • Samanth Subramanian, 'Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex,' Wired, 15 February 2017 • Emma Jane Kirby, 'The city getting rich from fake news,' BBC News, 5 December 2016
  10. — Richard Spencer Gets Punched. Date: 20 January 2017 · Place: Northwest Washington D.C. · sidewalk near Inauguration Day protests · Figures: Richard Spencer, founder of the National Policy Institute and the term 'alt-right' · unidentified masked assailant · Tags: Inauguration, Antifa, Punch 01. Mid-Sentence Two hours after Donald Trump's swearing-in, Richard Spencer is on a D.C. sidewalk doing an Australian Broadcasting Corporation interview. He is explaining the Pepe pin on his lapel. A masked figure in black runs in from off-camera, lands a right hook on Spencer's jaw, and disappears. The clip is online within the hour. By evening it is set to dozens of soundtracks: New Order's 'Blue Monday,' the Mortal Kombat theme, Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the U.S.A.' 02. The Debate The footage triggers a multi-day discourse cycle: is it okay to punch a Nazi. Op-eds run in The Nation, The Atlantic, the New York Times. The slogan 'punch a Nazi' is screen-printed on t-shirts within a week. Spencer never recovers the speaking-tour momentum he had on inauguration morning. The assailant is never identified. The clip remains a standing reference for the rest of the Trump term. Sources • Daniel Victor, 'Is It O.K. to Punch a Nazi?,' New York Times, 21 January 2017 • Natasha Lennard, 'Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer got punched, you can thank the black bloc,' The Nation, 22 January 2017 • Know Your Meme, 'Punching Nazis / Richard Spencer Punch'
  11. — OK Hand Operation. Date: February 2017, ADL listing 26 September 2019 · Place: 4chan /pol/ · ADL Center on Extremism, New York · Figures: Anonymous /pol/ posters, hoax originators · Anti-Defamation League researchers · Brenton Tarrant, Christchurch shooter (later adopter) · Tags: FalseFlag, HoaxBecomesReal, HandSign 01. Operation O-KKK In February 2017 a 4chan /pol/ thread titled 'Operation O-KKK' proposes a coordinated campaign to convince mainstream media that the OK hand sign, thumb and forefinger forming a circle, is a white-supremacist gesture. The reasoning given is that the three extended fingers form a W and the circle plus wrist form a P, spelling 'WP' for 'white power.' The operation is explicitly designed as a hoax to embarrass journalists and liberals into denouncing a common gesture. Screenshots of the planning thread circulate widely; the participants describe it as a successful troll. 02. The Hoax Adopts Itself Over the next two years the gesture is repeatedly used by genuine white nationalists, sometimes ironically, sometimes not. Brenton Tarrant flashes it in court after the Christchurch mosque attack on 15 March 2019. By that point the line between hoax and sincere use has dissolved. On 26 September 2019 the Anti-Defamation League adds the OK sign to its hate-symbols database with extensive caveats about context. The hoax has completed its arc: a fake symbol invented to mock recognition of symbols, recognized. "Particular caution must be used when evaluating this symbol, as in most contexts it is not used as a symbol of hate." — ADL Hate on Display database entry for the OK gesture, 26 September 2019 Sources • Anti-Defamation League, 'Okay Hand Gesture' entry, Hate on Display database, 26 September 2019 • Cassie Miller, 'How a self-described hoax came to be a symbol of hate,' Southern Poverty Law Center, 27 September 2019 • Know Your Meme, 'OK Hand Sign'
  12. — The Mooch's Eleven Days. Date: 21 July to 31 July 2017 · Place: White House West Wing · The New Yorker interview by phone · Figures: Anthony Scaramucci, White House Communications Director · Ryan Lizza, New Yorker reporter · Reince Priebus, Chief of Staff · Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist · Tags: White House, Unit of Time, Profanity 01. On the Record Anthony Scaramucci, a Long Island financier, is sworn in as White House Communications Director on 21 July 2017. Six days later he calls Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, on the record, and describes Reince Priebus as a 'paranoid schizophrenic' and Steve Bannon in an unprintable anatomical position. The piece publishes on 27 July. Priebus resigns the next day. New Chief of Staff John Kelly fires Scaramucci on 31 July. Total tenure: ten days. 02. The Scaramucci The unit of time enters the language. A Scaramucci is eleven days. Headlines measure subsequent White House staff departures in Mooches. The Atlantic, Politico, and the BBC all use the unit straight. Scaramucci himself leans in, hosts a podcast called The Mooch, and remains a media presence. The administration he served runs through four Chiefs of Staff in four years. Sources • Ryan Lizza, 'Anthony Scaramucci called me to unload about White House leakers,' The New Yorker, 27 July 2017 • Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, 'Scaramucci is out as White House Communications Director,' New York Times, 31 July 2017 • BBC News, 'Anthony Scaramucci sacked: How long is a Scaramucci?,' 1 August 2017
  13. — Unite the Right Tiki Torches. Date: 11 August 2017 · Place: University of Virginia campus, Charlottesville · Figures: Jason Kessler, rally organizer · Richard Spencer, speaker · Tiki Brand, citronella-torch manufacturer (involuntary) · Tags: Iconography, Procession, Brand-Hijack 01. Citronella as Costume On the night of 11 August 2017, several hundred white nationalists march across the University of Virginia campus carrying lit Tiki-brand bamboo garden torches, chanting 'Jews will not replace us' and 'blood and soil.' The torches are bought at hardware stores; they are normally used to keep mosquitoes off suburban patios. The image, photographed and broadcast by every wire service that night, becomes one of the defining American photographs of the decade. The visual choice is meme-fluent: garden citronella torches as Klan-procession cosplay, ironic distance and sincere intent fused. 02. Brand Disavowal Tiki Brand issues a statement two days later distancing the product from the event. The next morning Heather Heyer is killed when a marcher drives a car into a crowd of counter-protesters. Trump's 'very fine people on both sides' press conference follows on 15 August. The episode marks the moment the imageboard alt-right takes corporeal form on a public street and discovers that the cosplay aesthetic is illegible at the scale of physical violence. Within two years most attendees of the march have been doxxed by name; many have lost jobs, families, futures. Sources • Hawes Spencer, 'White Nationalists March on University of Virginia,' New York Times, 11 August 2017 • Tiki Brand, official statement, 12 August 2017 • Vegas Tenold, 'Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America' (Nation Books, 2018)
  14. — Q Drops Begin. Date: 28 October 2017 first post · Place: 4chan /pol/ · later 8chan · later 8kun · Figures: 'Q,' anonymous poster · Tracy Diaz, early YouTube popularizer · Coleman Rogers and Christina Urso, /CBTS_Stream/ moderators · Ron and Jim Watkins, 8chan operators · Tags: Conspiracy, Larp, MovementBuilding 01. The First Drop On 28 October 2017 an anonymous user posts to 4chan /pol/ claiming to be a high-clearance government official with Q-level security access. The poster, soon called Q, predicts the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton. Nothing happens. Q keeps posting anyway. Three moderators of a /pol/ research thread named 'Calm Before The Storm' rip Q's posts off the board nightly and reformat them as YouTube videos with portentous voiceovers. The audience compounds. Within months Q has tens of thousands of decoders parsing every post for hidden meaning. 02. Trust the Plan The architecture of QAnon is meme-native. Every Q drop generates derivative images, infographics, decoded screenshots, prophetic threads. The slogans 'where we go one we go all,' 'trust the plan,' and 'the storm is coming' become Twitter signatures, license plates, T-shirts. By 2020 QAnon is a global movement with believers elected to Congress, with adherents at Trump rallies in QAnon shirts, with the FBI classifying it a domestic terrorism threat. It is the first conspiracy whose entire structure, including its prophet, is a 4chan greentext thread that never stopped. Sources • Mike Rothschild, 'The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything' (Melville House, 2021) • Cullen Hoback (director), 'Q: Into the Storm' (HBO, 2021) • Reed Berkowitz, 'A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon,' Medium, 30 September 2020
  15. — Internet Research Agency Indictment. Date: 16 February 2018 · Place: United States v. Internet Research Agency LLC · Saint Petersburg, Russia (Savushkina 55) · Figures: Robert Mueller, special counsel · Yevgeny Prigozhin, IRA financier · Mikhail Bystrov, IRA general director · thirteen named Russian nationals · Tags: ForeignFarms, Indictment, Astroturf 01. Thirteen Names On 16 February 2018 Special Counsel Robert Mueller unseals an indictment of thirteen Russian nationals and three companies including the Internet Research Agency, a Saint Petersburg operation funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin. The indictment details a multimillion-dollar operation to inflame American political discourse on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube from 2014 onward. The IRA had run American personas, organized real-world rallies in Texas and Florida from a building on Savushkina Street, bought ads in rubles, and operated meme pages on both political sides. 'Blacktivist,' 'Heart of Texas,' 'Being Patriotic,' all IRA. Some pages had hundreds of thousands of American followers. 02. The Memes Were Real The indictment includes screenshots of actual memes published by the IRA: Bernie Sanders captioned next to a coloring-book Hillary, Jesus arm-wrestling Satan over the 2016 election, Black Lives Matter graphics paired with anti-Clinton slogans. The work is competent. Some images are indistinguishable from organic American partisan memes of the same period. Prigozhin will eventually be indicted, sanctioned, ignore the case, fund the Wagner Group, and die in a plane crash in August 2023. The case is dismissed by the Justice Department in 2020 with the trial having never begun. The indictment remains the most detailed government accounting of a state-funded memetic operation against another democracy. Sources • United States v. Internet Research Agency LLC et al., D.D.C., indictment filed 16 February 2018 • Renee DiResta et al., 'The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,' New Knowledge report for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, December 2018 • Adrian Chen, 'The Agency,' New York Times Magazine, 2 June 2015
  16. — Sir, This Is a Wendy's. Date: March 2018 · Place: 4chan greentext · Twitter · Wendy's drive-thru as conceit · Figures: Anonymous 4chan greentext author · Wendy's Corporation (unwitting beneficiary) · Tags: Greentext, Format, DiscourseShutdown 01. The Greentext In March 2018 a 4chan post recounts, in greentext, ordering at a Wendy's drive-thru while in the middle of an emotional monologue. The cashier responds: 'sir, this is a Wendy's.' The post screenshot reaches Twitter within days. The phrase detaches from the greentext immediately. By summer 2018 it is the default Twitter reply to any post where the author has launched into an unprompted philosophical, political, or sexual confession in an inappropriate venue. 02. Discourse Brake The format is precise. It accepts that the speaker's words exist; it refuses the premise that the current location is the right place for them. The line works against op-ed columnists in the comments of weather updates, against earnest replies to brand tweets, against any monologue that has wandered. Wendy's Corporation does not coin the phrase and does not officially adopt it. It does not need to. The chain becomes shorthand for any place where intense personal disclosure is socially inappropriate, which is to say almost everywhere on the internet. Sources • Know Your Meme, 'Sir, This Is a Wendy's' • Brian Feldman, 'Why "Sir, This Is a Wendy's" Is the Perfect Response,' New York magazine Intelligencer, 18 July 2018 • Reddit r/4chan archives, March 2018 thread captures
  17. — BBQ Becky. Date: 29 April 2018 · Place: Lake Merritt, Oakland, California · Figures: Jennifer Schulte, white woman who called 911 · Onsayo Abram and family, Black picnickers · Michelle Snider, bystander who filmed · Tags: Karen Subspecies, 911, Viral Video 01. Charcoal Grill On 29 April 2018 Jennifer Schulte calls the Oakland Police Department twice to report a Black family using a charcoal grill at Lake Merritt, a section of the park where only non-charcoal grills are permitted. She stays at the scene for over two hours waiting for officers. Bystander Michelle Snider films twenty-five minutes of the encounter. The footage shows Schulte crying, calling police, refusing to leave, then claiming she is being harassed. 02. Subspecies Canon The clip uploads to YouTube on 9 May and crosses one million views in a week. Black Twitter names her BBQ Becky. The naming convention spreads through the summer: Permit Patty over a girl selling water in San Francisco on 22 June, Coupon Carl over a coupon dispute in Chicago on 1 July, Pool Patrol Paula in South Carolina on 24 June. Each name follows the same alliterative pattern, each video the same arc of a white adult calling police on Black people doing nothing. Lake Merritt holds an annual BBQin' While Black cookout starting in 2018. Schulte never gives an interview. Sources • Lisa Fernandez, '911 call about black men barbecuing resolved with peace, love and cookout in Oakland,' KTVU, 21 May 2018 • P.R. Lockhart, 'Living while black and the criminalization of blackness,' Vox, 1 August 2018 • Know Your Meme, 'BBQ Becky'
  18. — I Like Beer. Date: 27 September 2018 · Place: Hart Senate Office Building, Washington D.C. · Senate Judiciary Committee hearing · Figures: Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court nominee · Sheldon Whitehouse, Senator (Rhode Island) · Christine Blasey Ford, accuser who testified that morning · Tags: SCOTUS, Hearing, Beer 01. The Phrase Brett Kavanaugh, nominated to the Supreme Court, testifies the same afternoon Christine Blasey Ford has accused him of a 1982 sexual assault. Under questioning about high-school drinking, Kavanaugh repeats the phrase 'I like beer' six times in roughly two minutes. He volunteers it. He returns to it. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asks if he ever drank to the point of memory loss. Kavanaugh asks back: 'Have you?' 02. Brewing Calendar Within hours the clip is supercut and looped. SNL opens that Saturday with Matt Damon as Kavanaugh, scowling, slamming a beer. Bars in D.C. and Brooklyn put 'I Like Beer' on chalkboards. The line outlives the hearing. Kavanaugh is confirmed on 6 October 2018 by a 50-48 Senate vote. The phrase remains a permanent search-result for his name. "I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. I liked beer. I still like beer." — Brett Kavanaugh, sworn testimony, 27 September 2018 Sources • Senate Judiciary Committee hearing transcript, 27 September 2018 • Sheryl Gay Stolberg, 'Kavanaugh defiant, denies allegation in Senate testimony,' New York Times, 27 September 2018 • Know Your Meme, 'I Like Beer'
  19. — Beto Skateboards Whataburger. Date: 14 March 2019 · Place: Whataburger parking lot, Bowling Green, Kentucky · presidential announcement tour · Figures: Beto O'Rourke, former Congressman (Texas) and Democratic presidential candidate · Tags: Democratic Primary, Cringe, Skateboard 01. The Launch On 14 March 2019 Beto O'Rourke announces his presidential campaign. The same day, a Vanity Fair cover story by Joe Hagan publishes with photography by Annie Leibovitz. A separate clip surfaces from days earlier of O'Rourke skateboarding through a Whataburger parking lot in Kentucky. He is 46 years old. The video runs on local news in El Paso. He kickflips, badly. He calls Whataburger 'the best place in America.' 02. Born Alongside The Internet The Vanity Fair piece quotes O'Rourke saying 'I'm just born to be in it.' The skateboard clip and the quote combine into a single image: white male overpromise, no policy attached. Twitter calls him a Vampire Weekend song. The campaign never recovers the magazine-cover momentum. He drops out on 1 November 2019, before the Iowa caucus. The skateboard clip outlives the candidacy by years, recirculated whenever any politician attempts youth-coded performance. Sources • Joe Hagan, 'Beto O'Rourke: Man on wire,' Vanity Fair, April 2019 issue (online 14 March 2019) • Christopher Mele, 'Beto O'Rourke, on tour, skateboards through Whataburger lot,' New York Times, 16 March 2019 • Know Your Meme, 'Beto Skateboarding'
  20. — Hong Kong Pepe Reclaim. Date: June 2019 onward · Place: Hong Kong streets · LIHKG forum · Connect HKG mesh network · Figures: Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters · LIHKG users · Matt Furie (publicly supportive) · Tags: Reclamation, Protest, Frog 01. The Frog Without Context In June 2019 anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong fill the streets. Pepe the Frog begins appearing on protest posters, in spray-paint, in mesh-network sticker packs. The Hong Kong users adopting him have no exposure to the American alt-right's appropriation. To them Pepe is simply a sad-cute internet frog used to express resistance and grief. When New York Times reporter Daniel Victor explains the American context to LIHKG users, the response is largely a shrug. The frog they have is theirs. It is wearing protective goggles and a hard hat and is being used to mourn a protester named Marco Leung. 02. Furie Endorses Matt Furie issues a public statement supporting the Hong Kong use. After years of watching his character serve as a hate symbol, he sees it being used by protesters facing rubber bullets, water cannons, and arrest. He calls it Pepe's redemption arc. The Hong Kong reclaim is the rarest event in meme history: a symbol successfully detached from one political appropriation and reattached, with the author's blessing, to a different and incompatible one. The reattachment does not undo the prior. Both Pepes now coexist. Sources • Daniel Victor, 'Hong Kong Protesters Love Pepe the Frog. No, They're Not Alt-Right,' New York Times, 19 August 2019 • Matt Furie, statement to The Atlantic, August 2019 • Hong Kong Free Press, archived LIHKG mesh-network sticker collections, 2019-2020
  21. — Greta vs Trump. Date: 23 September 2019 · Place: United Nations Climate Action Summit, New York · Twitter · Figures: Greta Thunberg, 16, climate activist · Donald Trump, 45th president · the photographer who caught Thunberg's glare · Tags: Photograph, ReactionImage, Climate 01. How Dare You On 23 September 2019 Greta Thunberg delivers a speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. The line 'how dare you' is repeated four times. A separate camera catches her in a hallway watching Trump pass with what is variously described as a glare, a stare, a glower. Trump tweets in response that Thunberg 'seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.' Thunberg adopts the line as her Twitter bio that evening. 02. Subtweet at Sixteen The exchange is the first major-meme treatment of a teenage activist as a political equal of a sitting US president. The format Thunberg pioneers, taking each presidential tweet and using it as her own next bio, is replicated by activists for the rest of the term. The glare image becomes a reaction GIF used worldwide for any moment of contained, ethical contempt for a more powerful man. Thunberg, who has Asperger's and is plain about it, has become, against her stated wishes, a meme. Sources • Greta Thunberg, address to UN Climate Action Summit, 23 September 2019, transcript via United Nations • Somini Sengupta, 'Greta Thunberg, After Pointed UN Speech, Faces Attacks From Trump,' New York Times, 24 September 2019 • Know Your Meme, 'How Dare You'
  22. — We Live in a Society. Date: October 2019 · Place: Twitter · Reddit r/JokerFans and r/dankmemes · adjacent to Joker theatrical release 4 October 2019 · Figures: Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck · Todd Phillips, director · the assembled posters of the Joker meme cycle · Tags: Film Tie-In, Ironic, Doomer Adjacent 01. Society Todd Phillips' Joker opens on 4 October 2019. Within a week the line 'we live in a society' is everywhere, attributed to the Joker, although the phrase does not appear in the film. It originates from a 2016 4chan post mocking edgelord Batman villain monologues. The 2019 movie supplies the visual: Joaquin Phoenix dancing on the stairs, full clown makeup. The meme is the older phrase laid over the new image, weaponized against itself. 02. Gentlemen The format spreads in two directions. The sincere version: 'gentlemen, we live in a society,' deployed as cope for any cultural complaint. The ironic version: the same phrase deployed against people deploying it sincerely. By November the meme is consuming itself. Concurrent with this, the Joker stair-dance becomes a stand-alone format. The film grosses one billion dollars worldwide. Phillips disowns the meme cycle in interviews. It does not slow down. "We live in a society where honour is a distant memory." — Original 4chan post, 2016, predating the film by three years Sources • Brian Feldman, 'The Joker is the most-memed movie of the year,' New York Magazine Intelligencer, 7 October 2019 • Aja Romano, 'How Joker became the most-discussed movie of 2019,' Vox, 7 October 2019 • Know Your Meme, 'We Live in a Society'
  23. — Yang Gang. Date: Mid 2019 · Place: Twitter · Reddit r/YangForPresidentHQ · 4chan /pol/ · Figures: Andrew Yang, entrepreneur and Democratic presidential candidate · the Yang Gang, online supporter coalition · Tags: Democratic Primary, UBI, Crossover 01. The Math Andrew Yang, a former tech-sector entrepreneur, announces a Democratic presidential campaign on a single policy: a one-thousand-dollar monthly Universal Basic Income he calls the Freedom Dividend. He wears a 'MATH' pin on the debate stage. His campaign hashtag is #YangGang. The supporter coalition is unusual: progressive Democrats, libertarians, and a measurable population of 4chan /pol/ posters who endorse him as the only candidate willing to write white working-class men a check. 02. Vaporwave Edits Yang Gang fan edits run on a single aesthetic: vaporwave, palm trees, pink and teal sunsets, the candidate's head pasted over synthwave grids. The visual language is borrowed from the same /pol/ accounts that made Trump Wave in 2016. Yang himself never disowns the crossover support, only the racist subset of it. He drops out on 11 February 2020 after a low New Hampshire finish. He later runs for New York City mayor in 2021, finishes fourth in the Democratic primary, and starts a third party. The Yang Gang aesthetic outlasts the candidacy. Sources • Kevin Roose, 'His 2020 campaign message: The robots are coming,' New York Times Magazine, 10 February 2019 • Aja Romano, 'Why some of Andrew Yang's online fans are alt-right trolls,' Vox, 30 July 2019 • Know Your Meme, 'Yang Gang'
  24. — Blackout Tuesday. Date: 2 June 2020 · Place: Instagram · the music industry · the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter · Figures: Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, music-industry executives behind the initial #TheShowMustBePaused call · millions of Instagram users · the entire #BLM information feed (collateral damage) · Tags: Hashtag, Solidarity, WellMeaningBackfire 01. A Day Of Pause After George Floyd's killing on 25 May 2020, music-industry executives Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang call for #TheShowMustBePaused, a 2 June industry pause day. Atlantic Records, Sony, Warner all sign on. The call ports to Instagram as Blackout Tuesday: post a single black square, withhold business as usual. Within hours an estimated 28 million black squares are posted to Instagram. Brands, athletes, celebrities, friends, all participate. The action is a sincere gesture of mass solidarity, the largest single coordinated image post in Instagram's history. 02. The Tag Collapses Most posters tag the black square #BlackLivesMatter. Within the day, the hashtag, which has been the central information artery for protest coordination, bail funds, footage of police violence, and mutual aid since 2014, is buried under millions of blank squares. Organizers urgently beg participants to remove or retag the posts. Blackout Tuesday becomes the era's signature case study in well-meaning corporate solidarity overrunning the actual infrastructure of the movement it intends to support. The performance was the post; the cost was the channel. Sources • Ben Sisario, '#TheShowMustBePaused: A Pause Day in the Music Industry,' New York Times, 2 June 2020 • Rachel Kraus, 'Blackout Tuesday hurt Black Lives Matter,' Mashable, 2 June 2020 • Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, original #TheShowMustBePaused statement, 30 May 2020
  25. — K-pop Stans Empty Tulsa. Date: 20 June 2020 · Place: BOK Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma · TikTok · K-pop fandom Twitter · Figures: Mary Jo Laupp, TikTok-using 51-year-old who issued the initial call · Brad Parscale, Trump campaign manager · K-pop fan armies (BTS ARMY etc.) · Tags: Coordination, TikTok, Sabotage 01. Reserve and Don't Show On 12 June 2020 Mary Jo Laupp, a grandmother in Iowa, posts a TikTok urging viewers to reserve free tickets to Trump's upcoming Tulsa rally and then not attend, to give the campaign a falsified sense of demand. The video catches K-pop stan Twitter, which industrializes the call across BTS, EXO, and BLACKPINK fan armies. Hundreds of thousands of free reservations come in over the next eight days. Brad Parscale boasts publicly on 15 June of over a million ticket requests. The campaign sets up overflow stages outside the BOK Center anticipating a crush. 02. Six Thousand Seats Filled On 20 June Trump arrives in Tulsa to a BOK Center with vast empty sections. Fire-marshal attendance count is approximately 6,200 in a 19,000-seat arena. The overflow stages are dismantled before he speaks. Parscale is removed as campaign manager three weeks later. The episode is the first major proof-of-concept that the same coordinated-fandom labor that flooded streaming counts for Korean comeback releases could be redirected at American electoral logistics in real time. It is the highest-profile example of K-pop stans entering American politics as a coordinated force. Sources • Taylor Lorenz, Kellen Browning, Sheera Frenkel, 'TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally,' New York Times, 21 June 2020 • Brian Stelter, 'Inside the Failed Tulsa Rally,' CNN Reliable Sources, 21 June 2020 • Mary Jo Laupp, original TikTok video, 12 June 2020
  26. — Trump Bunker and the Bible Photo. Date: 1 June 2020 · Place: White House Underground PEOC · St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square, Washington D.C. · Figures: Donald Trump, U.S. President · Mark Esper, Defense Secretary · Mark Milley, Joint Chiefs Chairman · William Barr, Attorney General · Tags: George Floyd Protests, Photo Op, Tear Gas 01. The Bunker On the evening of 29 May 2020, with protests over the murder of George Floyd reaching the White House perimeter, Secret Service moves Donald Trump to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center for roughly an hour. The New York Times reports it on 31 May. Trump denies it was for safety, claims he went for an inspection. By morning the hashtag #BunkerBoy is trending. The denial becomes the meme. 02. The Bible Two days later, on 1 June 2020, federal officers clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square with tear gas and rubber bullets. Trump walks across the cleared square with Esper, Milley, and Barr. He stops in front of St. John's Episcopal Church, holds up a Bible upside-down, and poses for cameras. He does not enter the church or read from the book. The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, denounces the photo within hours. General Milley publicly apologizes eleven days later for appearing in uniform. The Bible photo becomes the single defining image of the administration's response to the protests. Sources • Katie Rogers, 'Protesters dispersed with tear gas so Trump could pose at church,' New York Times, 1 June 2020 • Maggie Haberman, 'Trump moved to underground bunker as protests raged,' New York Times, 31 May 2020 • Mark Milley, address to National Defense University commencement, 11 June 2020
  27. — The Pence Fly. Date: 7 October 2020 · Place: Kingsbury Hall, University of Utah, Salt Lake City · CBS News Vice Presidential debate · Figures: Mike Pence, Vice President of the United States · Kamala Harris, Senator (California) and Democratic VP nominee · unnamed Musca domestica, common house fly · Tags: VP Debate, Hair, Insect 01. Touchdown Roughly thirty-five minutes into the only Vice Presidential debate of the 2020 cycle, a house fly lands on Mike Pence's white hair. It remains there for approximately two minutes and three seconds. The Vice President does not appear to notice. The fly does not move. Pence is mid-answer on the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19. Twitter notices in real time. Within the two minutes the fly is online before it has left Pence's head. 02. The Swatter The Biden campaign launches a 'Truth Over Flies' fly-swatter merchandise drop the next morning at five dollars apiece. They raise approximately one hundred thousand dollars in the first hour. A separate Twitter account, @MikePenceFly, gains over six hundred thousand followers in twenty-four hours. Pence wins or loses the debate by the metrics of the existing partisan consensus, but the only memorable visual is the insect. The single image consumes the night. Sources • Astead W. Herndon, 'A fly on Pence's head steals the show,' New York Times, 8 October 2020 • Biden for President, 'Truth Over Flies' fundraising email, 8 October 2020 • Know Your Meme, 'Mike Pence Fly'
  28. — Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Date: 7 November 2020 · Place: 7339 State Road, Northeast Philadelphia · between Fantasy Island Adult Bookstore and Delaware Valley Cremation Center · Figures: Rudy Giuliani, Trump campaign attorney · Marie Siravo, owner of Four Seasons Total Landscaping · the Trump campaign press scheduler, never publicly named · Tags: Election Aftermath, Misbooking, Philadelphia 01. The Booking The morning of 7 November 2020, the Associated Press calls the presidential race for Joe Biden. Within minutes, the Trump campaign tweets that Rudy Giuliani will hold a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. The tweet is deleted, replaced: 'Four Seasons Total Landscaping.' The location is not the hotel. It is a landscaping company in Northeast Philadelphia, in an industrial strip flanked by an adult bookstore and a crematorium. Giuliani holds the press conference there anyway. 02. Concession by Geography Giuliani stands in front of the garage doors and alleges voter fraud for forty-five minutes. The visual is the punchline: every news network frames the shot wide to include the bookstore signage. Four Seasons Total Landscaping sells t-shirts within twenty-four hours, raises money for charity, becomes a tourist stop. The misbooking is treated by most subsequent coverage as the moment the second Trump presidency campaign was conceded by accident, in the parking lot of a small business that happened to share a name. Sources • Lisa Lerer and Annie Karni, 'A Giuliani news conference in a Philadelphia landscaping lot,' New York Times, 7 November 2020 • Allyson Chiu, 'Four Seasons Total Landscaping speaks: We had no idea,' Washington Post, 8 November 2020 • Know Your Meme, 'Four Seasons Total Landscaping'
  29. — Bernie's Mittens. Date: 20 January 2021 · Place: United States Capitol West Front · global Photoshop · Figures: Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont · Brendan Smialowski, AFP photographer · Jen Ellis, Vermont schoolteacher and mitten-maker · Tags: Photograph, Photoshop, GreenScreen 01. Folding Chair, Wool Mittens At the inauguration of Joe Biden on 20 January 2021, AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski catches Bernie Sanders seated in a folding chair, arms folded across his Burton parka, a manila envelope on his lap, wearing brown patterned wool mittens that look unmistakably homemade. The mittens are by Jen Ellis, a Vermont schoolteacher, made from a recycled wool sweater and lined with fleece from plastic bottles. Sanders has dressed for the weather. Every other dignitary on the West Front has dressed for the cameras. The contrast is total. The image is online within minutes. 02. Insert Bernie Anywhere Within hours Bernie has been Photoshopped onto Grant Wood's American Gothic, into the bar in Star Wars, onto Forrest Gump's bench, onto the moon, into Wes Anderson stills, into ancient Roman frescoes. A web tool launches that lets users place Bernie at any Google Street View address. The Sanders campaign reissues the mitten image on a sweatshirt, immediately sells out, and donates over $1.8 million to Vermont charities within five days. Jen Ellis, who has made the mittens by hand and given them to Sanders years earlier, has to publicly explain that she cannot make more. The closing image of the politics-and-frogs era is a senator in a folding chair, dressed correctly. Sources • Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty inauguration photographs, 20 January 2021 • Maggie Astor, 'Bernie Sanders Becomes a Meme. Again,' New York Times, 21 January 2021 • Jen Ellis, interview with Slate, 22 January 2021
L
O
R
E
L
I
N
E
6DU0VGFO
MOMENTS0000
VIEWS0000
LIKES0000
TIME0000
Search moments...