MEME WARFARE
Internet memes, especially political ones, aren’t so innocent and funny anymore. Just ask Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Once a front-runner for the GOP nomination, DeSantis was the target of viral memes attacking everything but his politics in 2023 and the beginning of 2024. Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, said in 2024 that a potent, popular meme can “potentially sway an election.”
Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Shutterstock
The one weird trick of a political meme is its combination of image and text. The picture, often grabbed from a shared cultural moment, shapes the way the viewer interprets the text and sets up a mental frame. For a political meme maker, the goal is to make someone look silly or smart.
Once the meme is viewed, it’s stored in the mind and becomes a subconscious reference for future thoughts.
Pamela Rutledge, director of the research organization Media Psychology Research Center, said this exploits the availability heuristic: the mental shortcut of the mind reaching for whatever is most accessible.
If a meme successfully associates politician X with concept Y, the mind starts automatically linking those two ideas, even if the tie-in is not necessarily truthful. The effects are multiplied when the images are shared with like-minded people.
The Biden campaign is embracing the quizzical and maybe even scary Dark Brandon meme because, according to Caldwell, it probably wants people to link “Biden” with “powerful” instead of “Biden” with “old.”
The next phase of the meme war, according to Tarl Warwick—an author, video blogger, and meme maker—is video and audio-generating artificial intelligence. AI was already used to make “President Joe Biden” robocall unsuspecting voters and tell them to stay home on primary election day in New Hampshire this January.
Why? The brain inherently trusts the eyes and the ears. Seeing may no longer be believing, Rutledge said.
—Austin Alonzo
SPECIAL COUNSEL HUR UNDER FIRE
It was a battle on all fronts for special counsel Robert Hur yesterday as he fended off allegations of bias on Capitol Hill.
“Partisan politics played no part of my work,” Hur testified before members of the House Judiciary Committee.
Former special counsel Robert K. Hur testifies before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington on March 12, 2024. Win McNamee/Getty Images
The hearing followed the special counsel’s decision not to prosecute President Joe Biden over his handling of classified documents.
While Democrats found no fault with that decision, they did have a problem with Hur’s reasoning—namely, his claim that a jury would be too sympathetic toward “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) took Hur to task for those comments, accusing him of playing politics with his words.
“You understood how they would be manipulated by my colleagues here on the GOP side of the aisle, by President Trump. You understood that, did you not?” Schiff asked.
Hur denied having any political motives or hidden agendas, noting that his job was to provide a thorough report to the attorney general.
“What you are suggesting is that I shape, sanitize, omit portions of my reasoning and explanation to the attorney general for political reasons,” he shot back.
The special counsel also pushed back on Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Wash.) claims that his report “exonerated” Biden from wrongdoing.
“That is not a word that we used in the report and that’s not part of my task as a prosecutor,” he stressed.
Meanwhile, Republicans questioned why Hur let Biden off the hook after concluding that he willfully retained and disclosed classified materials as a private citizen.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said the evidence supported prosecution, pointing to Biden’s warning to his ghostwriter to “be careful” with certain information he’d provided as it “may be classified.”
“That warning to be careful because it may be classified—that indicates guilty knowledge,” Biggs contended.
Rep. Jeff van Drew (R-N.J.) agreed. Biden, he said, “was willingly and knowingly breaking the law. And it’s unfortunate that we have a Department of Justice that will treat one person one way and somebody else a different way.”
—Samantha Flom
FUTURE OF TIKTOK IN US TO BE DECIDED IN HOUSE
The House is set to vote today on a bill that could ban TikTok from being used in the United States.
TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance—a company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party that has been accused of stealing people’s information.
Critics say TikTok is just another tool for the CCP to get hold of personal details and that it has contributed to young people developing mental illnesses as well as engaging in dangerous activities.
The bill will be brought up under an expedited mechanism that requires a two-thirds majority for passage.
Last year, there was a lot of attention on an effort to ban TikTok, but those moves fell by the wayside until the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously to advance a bill that would give ByteDance a choice: separate TikTok from the CCP or else be banned in America.
Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif), who supports the bill, told The Epoch Times that no major social media platform should be owned by the CCP.
However, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who is not related to Mike Garcia, is against the bill.
“170 million Americans, including me, use TikTok. Rushing a TikTok ban would not help our national security and would undermine both creators and millions of people’s right to expression,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter.
The Department of Justice and intelligence officials briefed lawmakers on March 12 about TikTok—a discussion that Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), who introduced the bill and is the chairman of the House select committee to investigate the CCP, said was respectful. He remarked the bill is a regulatory, not punitive, measure.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the ranking member of that committee, expressed hope that the briefing swayed members on the issue.
—Jackson Richman, Joseph Lord, and Frank Fang
TRUMP, BIDEN CLINCH NOMINATIONS
Former President Donald Trump reached the magic number of 1,215 delegates to clinch the GOP presidential nomination, while President Joe Biden gathered 1,968 delegates to win the Democrat nod—both on the same night.
The general election starts now with polls showing a close race with Trump in the lead, especially in key states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Trump faces multiple court cases that could undermine his campaigning schedule and, more importantly, if they result in convictions likely leave the GOP with a dilemma.
Nonetheless, despite Biden easily winning the primaries in Michigan and Minnesota, the numbers of those who voted “uncommitted” could spell trouble especially as the former will be a key state and the latter has been shifting toward becoming a purple state.
In 2020, Biden won Michigan by 151,188 votes, while he won Minnesota by 233,012 votes.
In this year’s primaries, 101,457 people in Michigan voted for “uncommitted” while 45,914 people in Minnesota did the same.
—Jackson Richman
WHAT’S HAPPENING
- Biden campaigns in Milwaukee in swing-state Wisconsin.
- A federal judge in Delaware overseeing the firearms case against Hunter Biden will hold a status hearing to discuss setting a date for trial.
- The House will vote on a bill that could ban Chinese-owned TikTok on national security grounds.
A point of contention in this year’s election is President Biden’s age. It was the same case in 2020, but the Biden campaign was able to get over it. Author Sasha Issenberg, in an excerpt of her upcoming book, takes readers behind the scenes on how the 2020 campaign pushed back against the cognitive-decline narrative.
The legal cases keep piling up following the shuttering of the short-lived startup news site The Messenger. According to a report by The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona. Messenger news director Neil Sloane and ex-Business and Finance Editor Ciro Scotti filed a lawsuit against founder Jimmy Finkelstein, saying that he did not give severance as promised in the event they were to be let go, in accordance with their employment agreement.
The CDC is sending a team to investigate a measles outbreak at a Chicago housing facility where there are illegal immigrants, reports The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips. The team is scheduled to arrive in Chicago, which is a sanctuary city, on March 13.
The Republican National Committee is repeating a past mistake by the Democratic National Committee: pouring its resources exclusively into a presidential campaign, according to The Atlantic’s David Graham. This comes as there is new leadership at the RNC under chairman Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump.
Former NHL player Cody Hodgson is looking to make a comeback following a mysterious illness that sidelined him for several years, wrote The Athletic’s Thomas Drance. He is currently on a tryout with the American Hockey League’s Milwaukee Admirals.
