Why is the MAGA universe joking about Donald Trump saving America’s pets?
Over the previous 24 hours, the MAGA trustworthy have been busy sharing cat memes with each other. These will not be the cute “lolcats” which have circulated on the web for nicely over a decade, however one thing darker. They reference a baseless and racist declare from Donald Trump’s working mate, J. D. Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are consuming individuals’s pets. Trump, the memes present, will defend America’s home cats from this supposed risk. In a single such submit, he’s depicted working away from a mob of Black individuals whereas clutching two tabbies; in one other, Kamala Harris prepares to cook dinner a cat in a pot.
These cat memes, which have been posted or reposted by the likes of Senator Ted Cruz, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump Jr., aren’t fairly a joke, and so they aren’t fairly severe. They’re traditional trolling. When Cruz posts a picture of two cats hugging overlaid with the textual content please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us, he’s winking at his followers and making an attempt to get an increase out of his political opponents. Taken severely, the content material of those posts is deeply offensive and dehumanizing. However the individuals sharing them get to cover behind a skinny veil of irony: They’re just a few humorous cats. Should you’re offended, that’s your drawback. (The absurdity is just heightened by the truth that most of the photographs had been clearly made with generative AI, lending them a wierd, cartoony aesthetic.) Trump is nicely versed on this tactic—he routinely makes an attempt to stroll proper as much as the sting of believable deniability. Contemplate, for instance, the time he floated the concept of executing certainly one of his high generals. Vance made this trolling logic plain earlier at the moment, when he posted, “Don’t let the crybabies within the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Maintain the cat memes flowing.”
Up to now, this conduct has been known as doing it “for the lulz.” As Adrian Chen chronicled in The Nation in 2014, lulz—a perversion of lol—justifies heinous conduct on-line. The time period got here out of the bowels of 4chan within the mid-aughts and usually means maniacally laughing at a sufferer. It has typically been related to jokes about matters such because the Holocaust, suicide, terrorism, and rape. Chen’s article describes 4chan customers flooding the memorial web page of a teenage car-crash sufferer with pictures of the accident, and harassing an 11-year-old lady who had posted a YouTube video they didn’t like—all of it for the lulz.
The lulz have all the time been a instrument to obfuscate that a person was being racist, sexist, or typically hateful. Chen’s story provided the instance of the notorious hacker Andrew “weev” Aurenheimer. Weev was a part of the primary waves of what would ultimately turn into often known as the alt-right, and he incessantly went on anti-Semitic rants “for the lulz.” Besides there was no irony to be discovered: He was really only a neo-Nazi. In 2014, he revealed an article in The Each day Stormer, and in 2016, he exploited unsecured printers on faculties throughout the US by inflicting them to print swastika-covered fliers supporting “the battle for international white supremacy.”
The endgame of prior for-the-lulz moments gives clues as to the place the MAGA cat memes are headed. The informal misogyny that the trolls of 4chan espoused ultimately culminated in cyberstalking and on-line harassment of girls that was typically so pernicious, it drove them away from the web altogether. (Gamergate is probably the most well-known and most vital instance of this.) This sort of posting nearly by no means stays on-line. It’s all enjoyable and video games, till it isn’t.
