Weekly Scroll: Vance Memes

Plus: Media Literacy (gone) and Production (still here)

Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, your guide to the previous week on the social internet! This week’s post is extra long, so click through to make sure you get the whole thing.

Extremely Rare Vances

The most bizarre trend of the last couple of weeks: everywhere you turn, there’s a photoshopped picture of JD Vance.

This has already been analyzed to death in The Guardian, the Washington Post, and dozens of other publications. What started as a couple photoshops making fun of Vance’s chubby face or his occasional use of eyeliner has become full blown meme phenonemon. I’ve seen literally thousands of them by this point. Hillbilly Vance. Toddler Vance. Fat Drag Queen Vance. Unspeakable eldritch horror Vance. X user uncledoomer said “Twitter is fucking unusable. im trying to get updates on whether world war 3 is on but all im seeing are fat JD vance memes”. A couple of these have been circulating since October¹, but they really took off in the wake of Vance’s confrontation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky last week.

(You can find good collections in the posts and replies here, here, here and here)

Vance has seen the memes himself, and while his public comment is that they’re ‘funny’ he’s exactly the right level of online that this probably bothers him immensely. What’s interesting is that both the online Left and the online Right seem to be joining in. The left is obviously mocking Vance and trying to make him look ridiculous, but even right-leaning users seem to have joined in - their photoshops aren’t any kinder to him. Despite Vance being on their side, they’re also making him look like a big baby. Maybe they think any attention is better than no attention?

For a while I debated how I wanted to cover this. What’s the deeper meaning? Is there one? Maybe it’s just that Vance has an odd face. He’s not notably overweight for a middle-aged man, but he does have cherubic cheeks² that give him a little bit of a funny appearance. He’s got unusual eyes and has had some weird experiments with eyeliner. Maybe it’s not any more complicated than 1. Famous man 2. Funny face. 3. Meme time. But I don’t think that’s quite right: