It’s Not Just You. Everything Does Feel Chaotic and Insane Online Right Now.
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe Trump assassination attempt revealed the real ‘mainstream media.’, Donald Trump assassination attempt: The memes and reactions to the shooter was downright horrifying.
The internet was immediately jammed with uncertain, emotional perspectives following the horrific assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday.
Mainstream news outlets took care with their choice of words as facts from the scene were verified—a level of caution that led right-wing pundits to insist that they were downplaying the severity of the shooting. Conservative media soon pivoted to either boosting their hero (and that stunning fist-pump photo) as an icon of American fortitude or blaming liberals for supposedly escalating political violence through their (correct) denunciations of Trump and his antidemocratic bona fides. The MSM was quick to supplicate by temporarily muzzling opinion shows like Morning Joe and pausing Trump critiques, while Democrats pulled the Biden reelection campaign’s ads from TV and appeared to resign themselves to another Trump term.
It was striking to compare the reactions to the assassination attempt with the right’s insensitive-at-best, conspiratorial-at-worst responses to events like the Capitol Hill mob that wanted to ‘hang’ Mike Pence, the attack on Paul Pelosi, and the pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats. Still, if traditional media confined itself to typical postures, there was still one place where it seemed as if no one held back their thoughts whatsoever, no matter how unhinged: the social media meme mines.
As many observers noted, this was the nearest assassination attempt of a current or former president since John Hinckley Jr. shot and wounded Ronald Reagan in 1981. Which means that Trump’s close call was the first such event to take place in the age of cyberspace, and the first of its kind for this particular era of the information age.
9/11 was famously interpreted and dissected in real time on text-heavy message boards and slow-loading news blogs. The Trump-rally shooting, however, occurred against the backdrop of a fractured digital environs flooded with poorly regulated social networks, high-quality videos and livestreams, sophisticated disinformation operations, artificial intelligence slop, and easily edited, easily transmitted memes that were posted and reposted and reshared across Instagram, TikTok, X, Truth Social, and beyond.
But it was also a moment of clarification. Oligarchs like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, along with online retailers like Sticker Mule and Broken Bow Country, welcomed the chaos and brief moment of near-universal shock to publicly throw their hats in the ring for Trump. If you’re still a 50 Cent fan, the rapper may have broken the news to you in Boston after he displayed a Photoshop of Trump’s head over the iconic cover of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and performing album track ‘Many Men (Wish Death),’ transforming the early-2000s hit into an adopted MAGA anthem.
It’s also not implausible that you or a loved one may have heard the news directly after receiving a copypasta text like this:
Unlike in the moments after Reagan and his predecessor, Gerald Ford, were shot, you probably didn’t turn on the nearest TV or flee to the closest newsstand to get the lowdown. You probably just pulled out your phone and scrolled your favorite platform. (If you did open a news app first and foremost, we from the embattled world of fact-based journalism thank you for your support.) And, chances are, your experience was something akin to this:
I note all these not to add to the long-tired article genre of ‘meme listicle’ but to take heed of a more interesting phenomenon: the populace learning of, grappling with, and expressing its feelings about the assassination attempt on Trump in hyperfast real time, down to the second.
Meta, despite its preemptive restrictions on the algorithmic boost of ‘political content,’ could not suppress the wave of memeage that swarmed Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp. Nor could it hold at bay the tweet screenshots and TikTok reuploads that thundered its way. Before I knew anything else—about the shooter, about Trump’s condition, about the tragic fatality—I gauged how Trump was faring through an Instagram meme comparing his bleeding ear to a piercing gone wrong at Claire’s. When the commenters weren’t in awe of how quickly @whitepeoplehumor had prepped this (‘Brother this just happend’; ‘This is how I get my news’), they were arguing, naturally, about whether the whole thing was ‘staged asf’ or a wrestling-style false flag. And so the conspiracy cycle landed:
It’s not bothsidesism to scope the way bad assumptions flew from left and right. The latter fell back upon its tried-and-tested tropes: It’s because there are too many women agents in the Secret Service, who landed their positions and were held to lower standards because of DEI; actually, ‘an Antifa member‘ was identified as the suspect; it all goes back to MK Ultra. It was hard to tell just who was making dark jokes—like a link to Boeing—or who actually bought into the nonsense before actual details began to surface.
When we learned that the shooter was Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old registered Republican and gun enthusiast, the right went into overdrive, either dismissing his ideological affiliations or pointing out that he’d appeared in a 2022 commercial from frequent conservative villain BlackRock. (The asset manager condemned the shooting and pulled down the footage, mentioning in a statement that Crooks had incidentally appeared in the background when the ad was filmed at his old high school.) Further reporting from the Associated Press defused the Secret Service DEI theory by confirming that a local police officer had noticed the shooter on the roof and backed away after Crooks had pointed a gun in his direction.
Of course, Adult Swim’s wildly popular Smiling Friends made an appearance after that:
But one right-wing meme beat them all. Just like last year, when Trump was photographed raising his fist outside Trump Tower en route to his Manhattan Criminal Court arraignment, the post–assassination attempt fist pump ultimately won the day. On Truth Social (whose stock value earned quite the surge Monday morning), you could find that photograph filtered through the old Obama ‘Hope’ poster colors, alongside Trump supplicants’ renditions of an angel blessing their president, a comic once again poking fun at Joe Biden’s frailty, and a riff on the classic ‘Pass It On’ posters.
Of course, this is just how political discourse moves and spreads now. The first 2024 presidential debate, a disaster for the incumbent, was also interpreted through the spread of memes attacking Trump’s comments on ‘Black jobs.’ Other debate moments were filtered through YouTube Poop–style edits. The potential of Kamala Harris to take over the Democratic ticket is soundtracked to Kesha. Following Monday’s Republican National Convention announcement that Trump had picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential hopeful, a box of text from poster @hellcity_merriman made the following request, selectively censored to avoid the Meta police: ‘If this is how you found out Trump picked JD Vance, Ohio Senator who said women should say in v**lent marriages and continue pregnancies caused by r*pe, as his Vice President on the Republican ticket, be honest.’ It’s little wonder that after we learned the name of the firefighter who was tragically killed at the Trump rally, Corey Comperatore, internet sleuths went digging and found his very last tweet: a reply to Catturd.
After JFK was murdered in 1963, the British broadcaster Jonathan Miller viewed the rolling postassassination TV news coverage and found that the medium had been ‘forced … into a brief maturity,’ tamping down the typical ‘greedy squalling’ before ‘the commercials came yapping back on Tuesday.’ No such rest and respite occurs now. When a country’s divisions, ideologies, and observations are all memeified bit by bit, it’s only ever greedy squalling.
Ref: slate
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