THE ATLANTIC TRIES – AND FAILS – TO ASK THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS: Wait, Who Is Posting Those Unflattering J. D. Vance Memes?
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.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that politicos have tried something like this. The “Dark Brandon” memes of Joe Biden and the coconut-pilled memes of Kamala Harris initially started out as right-wing attempts to denigrate the Democrats. “Dark Brandon” caricatured Biden’s reputation on the right as a doddering old man by imagining that he harbored a secret personality as a cold-blooded killer. And “coconut-pilled” began when the right harped on a clip of Harris recounting how her mother had once said the phrase “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree.” Harris then awkwardly laughed.
Yeah, how did that work out for Biden when his hyper-online handlers tried to place him in a real-life “Dark Brandon” meme?
Different leftist, but Ali Breland comes across much like the Atlantic’s Emma Green when she interviewed Kyle Mann of the Babylon Bee in 2021:
[Emma] Green: You guys wrote an article in January 2020 that was shared roughly 3 million times, claiming that Democrats called for the American flag to be flown at half-staff when the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was killed in an American strike.
What makes this funny? I know that’s the worst question to ask somebody who writes jokes.
[Kyle] Mann: It’s funny because General Soleimani died and then they called for flags to be flown at half-mast. Get it?
Green: But that’s what I’m saying. Besides just saying the joke again, what makes it funny?
Mann: Do you want me to explain the joke to you? Because the joke is that General Soleimani died and Democrats were sad.
If you don’t know why that’s funny, then you’re not the audience for the joke. The funniest part is that it got fact-checked because it was so believable that Democrats would do that. That’s a real honor.
As Frank J. Fleming tweeted at the time, “The interviewer comes off sounding like Data. ‘I don’t understand. Why is this making you laugh, Captain.’”
(Note that this cluelessness, feigned or genuine, isn’t exclusive to leftists at the Atlantic when they interview someone on the other side of the aisle: Whoa: NPR Host Interviews Greg Gutfeld, Fights With Him Over ‘Racist’ Asian Joke.)
The Atlantic apparently can’t, or doesn’t want to understand why the right are having fun with Vance, the same way they did for Trump during the run-up to 2016, by creating fantasy memes for Vance as a rock star or superhero. Creating those memes in 2016 required skill with Photoshop. Today, it’s often just typing in a series of prompts for Grok or ChatGPT 4o.
UPDATE:
The idea of a Dem making fun of Obama is unthinkable of course. Because he’s their religious leader.
— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) March 9, 2025