Michael Knowles dissects the White House's strategic meme warfare, analyzing how teenage staff leverage irony to counter Democratic fear-mongering. He decodes a DHS deportation offer as a subtle threat, contrasts Baudrillard-inspired hyper-reality in Gulf War references with ASMR-style chain videos designed to deter illegal re-entry, and compares SpongeBob terror tactics to Joe Pesci's menace. While reviewing Reagan-esque Justice Department slogans and shutdown-era blurry photos, Knowles concludes these viral clips effectively undercut scare tactics, evidenced by over a million self-deportations within the first year. [Automatically generated summary]
Everyone's focusing on President Trump's performance on the economy.
The Dow is over 50,000 for immigration.
The president has now fired her as secretary of DHS.
They're foreign affairs or whatever.
And there's a lot.
There's a lot, obviously, to be excited about and talk about.
But people have not paid sufficient attention to the White House's supreme use of memes in the second term.
You gotta remember, a lot of the people there were kids, teenagers, just coming up during the meme wars of 2016.
Now we're seeing that flower, and those meme war vets are now in the halls of power.
So the producers have compiled some of the greatest White House memes to be published to date.
Take it away.
I'm old man.
These are real.
This is actually from the administration, like DHS and the White House, Mr. Davies, is that right?
Yes, it is.
I wish I could pull up in front of me.
It was supposed to be in the video itself where you could see it.
But yeah, that is.
Let me pull up.
Very impressive.
Very, you know, it's funny because I'm, for all my doom scrolling, I don't know, my algo is real niche stuff.
It's basically like, you know, the Merovingian dynasty, like facts you didn't know and weird ukulele videos.
So I actually haven't seen a lot of these.
That's great.
Offer only valid to illegal aliens because that's one thing.
That's a level of memory that I really like.
The one level, the most obvious level would be, hey, you illegal aliens, you get out of here.
We're coming for you.
We're going to get you.
But it's a deeper level of meaning and irony to come out and say, hey, great news, illegals.
We'll fly you anywhere you want to go as long as it's your country of origin.
Like, get on board right now.
It's real exciting.
Okay, next one.
This one's to be expected because the postmodern philosopher that everyone's talking about right now in the kind of right-wing intellectual circles, even somewhat mainstream circles, is this guy Jean Baudrillard.
There are all sorts of reasons why he's the man of the hour and people like to cite him.
Many people haven't even read his books, but he's an interesting writer if you can make it through very confusing postmodern language.
But anyway, one of the reasons is he wrote this book called, I think it was The Iraq War Didn't Happen or the Gulf War Didn't Happen.
That's one of his that I actually have not read.
But the idea being that we now live in a hyper-reality that is in many ways divorced from the underlying reality.
So our experience of war now, be it in Venezuela or Iran, is really no different than the experience of a video game.
With that meme, there's actually a pretty deep level of meaning in how the American right sees itself and sees the world.
And I think mostly correctly.
Okay, next one.
This is from the official ex-White House ASMR illegal alien deportations flight.
The sound of chains.
I was expecting like whispers.
No, just chains.
Wow.
Well, much, much funnier than I was expecting.
What are the sounds of deportation?
Like, hola, Jose, you're going home.
You know, that would be the basic level meme, but no, just chains banging on a metal staircase.
Yo.
But by the way, some people are going to say this is gratuitous.
And they're going to say this is, you know, performative and it's red meat to the base, whatever.
It serves a strategic purpose because a ton of these guys re-enter.
You deport them.
And then under Biden, under Obama, they just re-enter.
They just come right back.
I mean, some of these people have been deported like five times.
So if you want to actually keep them out, you need to make the process of being deported a little less comfortable, let's say.
And chaining people up and then videoing them being chained up and then posting that to hundreds of millions of people on the internet in America alone is that's one way to do it.
Okay, next one.
Go to hallow.com slash Knowles, Canada WLAS.
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All right, this next one's from the official White House Instagram captioned Justice the American Way with 64 million views.
Wake up, Daddy Sean.
Welcome home, sir.
Strengthen on our strength and honor.
What will you do without freedom?
Raverick Simba.
The Good America Feeling00:07:57
You can't conceive of what I'm capable of.
Finishing this fight.
Yeah, I'm taking on back.
I'm here to fight for truth and justice in the American way.
I am the danger.
Time to find out.
Maximum effort.
Person.
Here it comes.
Now end this flawless victory.
Can I say something?
Can I say something?
This is Reagan-esque.
And it's not Reagan-esque in the sense that Reagan was really polished and well, you know, because the 80s were more restrained than now.
But this is Reagan-esque in the sense that when Reagan came in, he made people for the first time in almost a decade feel good about being Americans, feel like America was a good place, stood for good things, that we should be strong, that it is good for us to demonstrate our strength.
All of those things that Biden downplayed, that Obama more or less outright denied, that Bush fumbled.
You get that.
You get that.
And you think, well, if America's big cultural export, sorry, our big export period is our popular culture and is Hollywood and are these narratives, then why aren't we using that for our own good?
I am the danger.
I remember, this was 20 years ago now, maybe, when Superman got rid of Truth, Justice, and the American Way as his motto.
And it became truth, justice, and that other stuff.
Does he still stand for truth, justice, all that stuff?
Wait, what?
They were embarrassed of America.
It was so just cringe.
It was kind of peak American decline.
And then we come out and we use it again.
We say, yeah, this is who we are, man.
Pretty scary, ain't we?
This is what?
A message to terrorists from the White House TikTok.
You want to see me do it again?
Yeah, what makes it work, obviously, is SpongeBob.
It's not enough to just post videos of the bombs going off.
That'd be fine.
That's what propaganda does.
And it would be refreshing because America has been so weak and loath to show her strength.
But the SpongeBob, paradoxically, makes it much more menacing.
Makes it much more menacing than just the bomb.
It's like that scene in Casino.
You had a great scene in Casino where Joe Pesci's talking to the banker and he goes, hey, I want my money.
Where's my money?
And the banker says, oh, well, you know, haha, well, I want my money because what I'm going to do is go down to the bank.
And if you don't give me my money, I'm going to crack you skull in with a crowbar.
And then in 20 years, when I get out of prison, you might be coming out of your coma.
And you know what I'm going to do?
I'll crack your skull again because I'm stupid.
I don't care about prison.
And it's a very menacing scene.
It's menacing because it seems irrational and absurd.
That's SpongeBob.
SpongeBob is Joe Pesci.
Donald Trump is Joe Pesci in casino.
Okay.
Here illegally, the Deportation Express this holiday season, believe you can go home.
Okay, that's what makes it make sense.
So it's all about, you know, going home again.
Hey, where you going?
Home.
Oh, okay.
Okay, good.
You are going home.
That raises it from the level of just mere provocation to an actual work of mimetic art.
i like it
Yeah, it's
funny.
It's funny because it's in your face.
It's a pretty easily recognizable cultural reference.
You wouldn't get it if you're, I don't know, if you're like a boomer who only watches cable news or something, you wouldn't get it.
But then you wouldn't be on these social platforms anyway.
But if you're on the platforms, you get this Spotify thing.
And I like that it's personal.
You know, what makes this work, what separates it from cringe to actually pretty effective, is that they're going after specific journalists that you guys are.
Like you, John, or whatever, whoever it was, you're the liar.
That's, it's good.
It's got, it's edgy.
Got edge.
Next one.
Yeah, the penguin.
Penguin's great.
The penguin stuff was great, especially because it triggered the libs.
Actually, there aren't any penguins in the Arctic.
Did you know the penguins are in the anarchy?
You think, yeah, shut up, nerd.
Yeah, you would say that, nerd.
Nerds.
Guess what?
We're going to add more penguins to our memes.
We're going to give you a swirly.
No, but they're not there.
There aren't actually penguins in Greenland.
Did you know that?
Yeah, we know.
We know.
We know.
We always know.
We heard your feedback.
You can't believe this is the real White House.
G, I can't.
Well, I like that they capitalize the G even in OMG.
You don't want to use the name of God in vain or even the initial, but they did lowercase M and capitalize G.
I kind of appreciate that.
Maybe it wasn't intentional, but in any case, okay.
I can't believe the White House posted this.
However, the Dems shutdown means most of our team is furloughed.
So we have an important announcement.
We're doubling down.
That's great.
During the shutdown, when they started posting major White House events, but it was with pictures of a thumb in front of the camera or kind of sideways and blurry.
It says, sorry, our photographer's furloughed.
We don't, we just, all we got is our cell phones now.
It's good.
They get it, man.
They get it.
It's also because the, you know, the median age of the White House staff is like 14.
You know, I mean, it's, it's young.
It's vibrant, energetic, good looking.
All right, which one of the memes do you think was the most effective?
Which one's your favorite?
My favorite one of these, the most effective probably are the deportation ones.
Really, all of the deportation ones, because they check so many boxes.
They do send a message to the illegal aliens.
Don't forget, over a million illegal aliens self-deported in the first year.
Even as they were being processed, they just left because they gave up because they didn't think they were going to be able to stay.
So send a message to them, send a message to the American people.
Don't forget, Trump won the popular vote running on that issue.
And it was funny and it was light.
And, you know, one way the Dems use the immigration issue, the deportation issue, even though they lose on the issue generally, they were able to try to turn it against Republicans by making the Republicans seem scary and, you know, like they were the Gestapo or something.
So when you have these light, kind of funny deportation memes, it undercuts even that.
It was very effective.
The ones of bombing the terrorists and the foreign enemies and all that kind of stuff, they were good.
And the most effective one was SpongeBob for all the reasons I previously said, because the absurdity is so menacing.
But I give it to the deportation memes.
Really?
I mean, the flight away, you know, get your vacation now.
Or the nastiest one, the one that really resonated with me.