Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 1)

[Uncle]

this just in: the left doesn't understand how the right is capable of having fun

https://archive.is/19881

Wait, Who Is Posting Those Unflattering J. D. Vance Memes?

The online right is trolling one of its own.

By Ali Breland

J. D. Vance doesn’t look like himself. In recent days, memes have spread across social media in which the vice president’s face has been Photoshopped to give him cartoonishly chubby cheeks. He looks like a bearded baby or Humpty Dumpty. Sometimes, he is holding a lollipop and wearing a child’s baseball cap with a propeller affixed to the top. One meme takes his edited baby face and adds lusciously curly locks, while another changes his skin tone to a gentle purple hue, making him look like a Willy Wonka–inspired human blueberry. In every image, Vance has been reanimated as an utter doofus.

Of course, people love making memes that portray their political adversaries as hapless and incompetent. That’s not exactly what’s happening with these images of Vance. The memes are going viral on the left-wing internet. But they are equally, if not more, popular on the right. Explicitly pro-Trump accounts on X that otherwise spend their time bashing liberals are posting embarrassing memes of their party’s second in command.

No, the right doesn’t appear to be posting unflattering memes of Vance because it has turned on him. As I wrote when Vance joined the Republican ticket, he uniquely appeals to various factions across the party. The online right, in particular, has long appreciated Vance’s recognition of it (he follows some of its most prominent accounts on X, such as Bronze Age Pervert).

So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes? One user on X who goes by the name Aelfred the Great and frequently shares right-wing memes has been posting and reposting the unflattering viral images of the vice president. “They’re just funny,” he told me when I asked him about them. For what it’s worth, Vance seems to agree, or at least says he does. On Thursday, he told a reporter for The Blaze that he thinks the memes are “funny.” Others on the right swear that by posting images of Vance as a man-baby, they’re actually helping him. “The right is having so much fun roasting Vance’s baby fat that it’s just completely neutered the left’s capacity to make fun of him,” one right-wing account, @martianwyrdlord, wrote in a post that garnered about 22,000 likes on X. “This feels like a precursor to Vance’s inevitable presidency,” Auron MacIntyre, a prominent MAGA influencer, posted. “He will have been so thoroughly memed that he becomes immune to the effect before ever entering office.”

Both the Biden and Harris memes eventually made their way to Democrats, who tried to lean in to the jokes. [...] In both instances, it felt like Democrats could take a joke and even spin it around to their favor. In the end, this tactic did not work out. Biden’s age caught up with him, and Harris’s folksy awkwardness didn’t seem to charm voters.

The Vance memes might work against the vice president even more. There is no silver lining to looking like a doofus.

"nooooo you can't have fun laughing and meming!! don't you see you're hurting yourselves?! you need to stop because you're hurting yourselves! why won't you stop?!"