Last week, a collective hivemind of localized consciousness manifested an armada of JD Vance memes to flood the timeline. It was a beautiful chaos of iterative evolution, branching out omnidirectionally with limitless possibilities. Thousands of people came together to contort the face of America's vice president into infinite forms, both plastered onto existing recognizable references and entirely new creations, some beautiful and some abominable.
As with online activity, many mainstream media publications jumped at the opportunity to cover the phenomenon. Articles varied in tone, some merely trying to grasp the trend and roughly summarize it for an unfamiliar audience. In contrast, many others ran vitriolic screeds against Vance, coated in some clumsy attempt at crystallizing the zeitgeist through misinterpretative fan fiction.
In their supreme arrogance, a number of these glorified blogposters spun wild fantasies about "leftists" creating the Vance memes as part of some paltry "resistance movement" dedicated to mockery. Despite the majority of memes being easily traceable to dissident right-wing accounts creating them out of humorous endearment for a politician they generally support, these articles failed to process this explosion of memes as a distinctly social phenomenon distanced from actual politics.
The typical "lamestream" media pundit operates on social consensus. Their entire existence is founded upon a natural selection incurred through rigorous credentialism inflicted by a short stint in mid-tier academia and water cooler office politics. Journalists covering "internet stuff" tend to be millennials, the generation exposed to the highest degree of cancel culture politics and HR tyranny. They are a species bred to polarize every aspect of daily life into a political statement. They are forced to summarize even the most abstract natural events into some form of "lesson" that furthers a preprogrammed narrative. This reflex is built by professors, checked by nagging peers, encouraged by mediocre media consumption, and enforced by the very nature of working for a news organization.
Understanding the JD Vance meme phenomenon is a paradoxically simple task dependent on a healthy gut instinct. When you've spent your entire life constantly inoculated by prescribed interpretation and narrative feeding, it can be challenging to trust instinct. To those who have periodically extinguished their conceptual gut biome, the impulse to embrace chaotic humor as a means to its end seems like heresy. Yet, this impulse is at the core of what it means to be posting online; it is the special dance that signifies you as a family member of the tribe rather than a tourist in an unknown savage wilderness.
The dissonance between Network Natives and clueless outsiders becomes apparent when you read some of these articles, such as the vapidly titled "The Surprising Reason These Wild JD Vance Memes Keep Spreading" by Monica Torres at HuffPost. Towards the end, the article attempts to conflate the memes into some larger inference of political strategy, posing such questions as: Are the memes making Vance more relatable or less powerful? How does this affect Vance's credibility?? Is this helping "us" vanquish our "enemy" or turning him into a bigger threat???
Who cares? Why was it necessary to consult multiple clueless university professors for quotes on how memes work? Why does this need to be condensed into a simplistic tug-of-war for boomers on iPads to process while sipping their morning coffee? The entire line of thinking is an artifact of 20th-century propagandistic media, an attempt at narrative building spurned on by the conceptual descendants of Edward Bernays.
Ali Breland from The Atlantic fumbles around aimlessly in his article "Wait, Who Is Posting Those Unflattering J. D. Vance Memes?" He asks, "So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes?" With this one sentence, you plainly see the confusion of institutional default thinking, specific programming built around social consensus. It's unthinkable for these people to fathom that an unfavorable depiction can be processed as an expression of endearment. This quagmire paints the inherent feminine energy of institutional media in contrast to the masculine coding of dissident online rhetoric.
The confusion over Vance memes, and memes in general for that matter, can be likened to a chiding girlfriend scrunching her face in detest over raucous banter between the boys. When you spend your entire life, as many left-leaning journalists do, adhering to the altar of appearance, the act of intentional defilement comes off as blasphemy. The sacrosanct of dignified portrayal can never be violated for any reason, a restriction that acts as a barrier to outsiders of internet culture.
The confusion and apparently graspable narrative may stem from the cited origination of these memes. Last year, Republican congressman Mike Collins from Georgia tweeted a flattering edit of JD Vance, blatantly obviously sharpening his jawline with furrowed brow and gaunt cheeks.
This picture was obviously humorous to anybody with a triple-digit IQ or at least a functional glandular system. Yet, it was immediately met with accusations of aggrandizement from hordes of Reddit-brained opposition trying to construe the post as an attempt to whitewash JD Vance's scandalous face fat into a dictatorial icon of fascistic strength.
The picture was humorously met with edits fattening Vance's face beyond its normal appearance and a slew of other interpretations. Even before this incident, Vance was heavily memeable. The earliest iterations I can recall last year were Emo Vance, a meme inspired by the vice president's naturally dark eye line and lashes in contrast to light blue eyes giving the appearance of a 2000s sadboy scene kid or perhaps the stageplay makeup for a moustache twirling Vaudeville villain in a Silent Era movie, tying damsels to train tracks and cackling.
Until the recent infamous Zelensky-White House visit in late February, these memes numbered in the few dozen, a handful of easily recognizable established edits wafting through the timeline with little fanfare beyond mild amusement. However, Vance's controversial soundbite asking the Ukrainian President whether he even thanked the US for its financial support opened the floodgates for thousands of memes to spawn, stemmed from baby-faced edits of JD Vance speaking like a petulant toddler conveying a need to say Pweese and Tank Yew.
The relentless torrential downpour of memes that followed would forever canonize JD Vance as part of a digital pantheon of constantly evolving symbolic figures, far divorced from their original form and sentenced to an eternity of perpetual transmogrification. Such a pantheon contains well-recognized characters such as Wojak and Pepe, the melancholy white-faced "feels guy," and the mischievous infamous internet frog.
There's a strange connotation of dissident right-wing politics attached to Wojak and Pepe. Each meme existed as a product of imageboard culture for over a decade, yet was specifically canonized as symbols of the Far Right during an era of politicized memetic warfare that reached its peak during Donald Trump's first campaign in 2016.
Wojak would evolve into a number of characters satirizing "soy" culture or becoming the incel icon "chudjak," while Pepe's animal symbolism attached itself to an ancient Egyptian frog deity named Kek, disturbing synchronicity with the "kek" phrase used as an onliner's expression of laughter years prior.
This hyperevolution of memetic symbolism takes on a new connotation when applied to a living human being. Many people have experienced the same bodily dysphoric treatment as JD Vance throughout the years, Donald Trump being one of the prominent and iconic examples. The online left's derisive interpretation of the Vance memes may even stem from the corollary of such treatment being inflicted on Trump by swathes of cartoonists, SNL actors, imitators, satirists, and media illustrators rather than a decentralized horde of posters.
However, the Vance meme trend is not the result of some mandate of mockery trickling downstream from the handful of corporations controlling all of Western mainstream media. It is an example of pure organic expansion, a precursor to the rapidly approaching Post-Verification society in which AI-assisted content generation, filter apps, and accessibility of editing software allow even the incompetent layman to transform their imagination into reality.
At this time of writing, the most persistent Vance meme seems to be a particularly chubby interpretation: widened eyes, hair turned into flowing unkempt locks, and a face elongated into a cartoonish visage, all juxtaposed against a stark blue background to emphasize singular focus on something less human and more primordial.
This particular composition is striking; it reveals the mythology-building that occurs through steady iteration. Here, Vance resembles Bacchus peering through the grapevine foliage, an uncanny collage of facial features which each would individually convey childlike harmlessness, friendly pudgy neoteny that becomes horrifying and dangerous when paired with pale, piercing eyes. This particular dread-inducing visual context, one touched upon by Cormac McCarthy when drafting up the character of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, generates a perfect tension-release formula when applied to the reality of its falsehood and thus is extremely funny.
Of course, humor is the ultimate "purpose" behind why any of this happened. There must not be a political motive behind the onslaught of filtered faces and edited memes. You have only seen the first of hundreds of such incidents, figures of notoriety immortalized by the warm flow of millions of people, all processing contemporary events through a lens of chaotic, undefinable social phenomenon.
It starkly contrasts the few centuries of written history where the crucibles of posterity freeze the human condition into a handful of coldly delivered paragraphs plainly stating who, what, when, where, and how. This form of thinking will be usurped and subsumed by the future, one where the logistics of Apollonian reality converge seamlessly with the ebb and flow of Dionysian mirthful interpretation.
This is a reality your children will or may already comfortably navigate. It is a reality where no institution holds sway over the fulcrums of opinion. It is a reality where the world's encyclopedic bubble of centralized universal narrative crumbles to reveal the tremendous undiscovered expanse of dark wilderness that is the Network. Within this jungle's foliage lies unknown horror and great treasure waiting to be found.
Michael Dragovic is Chief of Staff at Remilia Corporation and goes by Scorched Earth Policy on Twitter (@scearpo). When he's not working, you can find him hovering above the Pacific Ocean as a 750-mile wide metal cube rotating and oscillating at Mach 5.
