There is a scene early in the Apple+ streaming show Severence when the main character, Mark Scout, goes to a dinner party held by his sister and brother-in-law where no actual dinner is served, just tall glasses of water and empty plates. Instead, the characters gather to discuss, to Mark's growing frustration and consternation, issues of the day from a decidedly woke perspective. At one point in the terrible conversation, the brother-in-law remarks, 'At the point where one would traditionally say ‘dig in,’ I must say I think that the lack of food has allowed us to already do so on a much deeper level.'
You can practically see Mark's eyes roll into the back of his head at that 'deep thought.'
I have to imagine that this is what dinner parties must be like that are held by anyone who works at The Atlantic.
Over the weekend, Twitter was overwhelmed with an organic and viral trend of 'JD Vance memes,' in which the Vice President's face was superimposed onto movie characters, other popular memes, works of art, and pretty much anywhere users' imaginations could take them. No one really knows how or why it started, but that's the best thing about viral trends on Twitter. You don't have to know. Just enjoy the fun and ride the wave until it inevitably fades out.
It was so hilarious, even Vance himself chimed in to get in on the fun:
Recommended
— JD Vance (@JDVance) March 8, 2025
HA. Have I mentioned before that he is the best vice president ever?
Of course, sitting back and having a good time with the trend was not good enough for Ali Breland of The Atlantic. Yesterday morning, he had to announce that he had written an entire article about the 'zeitgeist' of it all. OK, he didn't use the word zeitgeist (thankfully), but he came close by noting the 'collective unconsciousness of the internet.'
wrote about the baby faced jd vance memes and a theory of political memes as a glimpse into the collective subconscious of the internet https://t.co/Ip0Ur1dvwL
— Ali Breland (@alibreland) March 8, 2025
And now OUR eyes are rolling into the back of our heads.
It gets even worse when you dive into the article itself as Breland attempts to psychoanalyze why the right would create, in his words, 'embarrassing and unflattering' memes of a vice president we love. At one point, he notes how he spoke with some popular conservative accounts about the phenomenon.
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.
That should have been the end of the article right there. 'They're just funny.'
Period. Full stop. Move on to the next subject.
Instead, Breland goes on to continue to try to 'understand' the memes and that tells us everything we need to know about him, the writers at The Atlantic, and the vast majority of the left in 2025.
They can't understand it because the very basic concept of just having fun with something has become completely alien to them.
I could note other aspects of the Vance meme phenomenon, like how the right is not afraid to poke fun at our own because we don't worship politicians, and that is true enough. But in the end, conservatives are just plain more FUN these days.
Later in the article, Breland continues to show how much he doesn't get it by trying to compare the Vance memes with 'Dark Brandon' or Kamala Harris's coconuts.
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 ... Both the Biden and Harris memes eventually made their way to Democrats, who tried to lean in to the jokes. Biden supporters made memes that earnestly portrayed him as a savvy, Machiavellian political operator (with laser eyes, of course). Harris supporters started putting coconut and palm-tree emoji in their display names on social media, calling themselves 'coconut-pilled.' This strategy seemed successful at the time. As my colleague Charlie Warzel noted when people first started coconut posting, the memes had an “authentic” and “maybe even fun” energy to them. 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.
Pardon me for a moment, but ... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Oh, honey. Honey, no.
The reason 'Dark Brandon' and coconuts failed on the left was exactly because they were NOT authentic. They were top-down, inorganic, and cringy attempts to simulate 'fun,' and Twitter saw right through them.
Remember 'brat summer' or when the DNC tried to convince everyone that the Harris campaign was based on 'joy'? The same thing happened. It blew up in their faces. No one believed it because it was, on its face, unbelievable.
Conservatives were not trying to actually pretend that Vance was Indiana Jones or Galdalf the Gray (like Democrats were trying to pretend that Biden wasn't senile or Harris wasn't a blithering idiot). We were just having fun with the ridiculousness of it all.
It's not a surprise that all of this is lost on Breland. After all, he's about as tuned into social media trends as the octogenarian Taylor Lorenz.
Same guy wrote this article in November. He’s very savvy with social media. https://t.co/TBIB55IEve pic.twitter.com/rV7DGIHzu5
— Magills (@magills_) March 9, 2025
LOL. Yikes.
But, at the risk of turning into Breland myself, his article underscores a deep problem that the left has right now.
They are unrelatable. For the very simple reason that they do not know how to relate to people. And when they try, it always goes horribly, like recently when 23 Democrat Senators read the exact same script in TikTok-style videos that they thought would be cool because they all used the word 'sh*t' in them.
They might as well have all held skateboards, turned their baseball caps backwards, and recorded themselves saying, 'How do you do, fellow kids?' like the Steve Buscemi meme.
Breland and The Atlantic trying to conceptualize the 'subtext' of silly memes and 'deconstruct their political significance' could not encapsulate the humorless state of the Democrat Party any more perfectly.
This is why you don’t get invited anywhere.
— Acoustic Larry (@acousticlarry42) March 8, 2025
Not even to a dinner party where no dinner is served.
"We don't post memes making fun of our friends. It's not nice."
— Fenton Wood (@WoodFenton) March 9, 2025
"Mom, you don't understand. Guys rag on each other all the time. J.D. thinks it's hilarious."
"How would you feel if somebody made a meme of you?"
"I dunno, that would be friggin' sweet." https://t.co/jdGZg6ac4d
What they cannot understand is that in flooding Twitter with memes, each more ridiculous than the last, we were not laughing AT the Vice President, we were laughing WITH him. And, as he showed everyone, he was laughing with us as well.
But we are laughing AT Ali Breland. And everyone like him.
We’re all laughing at you. pic.twitter.com/5JBKRI4cJH
— Jack’d 🇺🇸✊🏻 (@MINFORMACI0N) March 9, 2025
LOL. That's a good one. I had not seen that one before.
Yes, leftists. We are all laughing at you. Because we know how to laugh, and you do not.
The fact that you don't get the joke -- and you never will? Well, that just makes it even funnier for us.
To quote another popular meme on Twitter, 'It was funny until you got mad. Now, it's effing hilarious.'
