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President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that a relative of his Major donorsElon Musk will co-lead the newly created company Government Efficiency DepartmentOr Doug. It’s a not-so-veiled reference to popularity Mimi Dogedepicts a cute Shiba Inu, which is also the inspiration behind the cryptocurrency meme Dogecoin.
The committee, which will advise Trump, is not an actual government department, but it should be Confirmed by Congress. But Musk seems to have succeeded in the transformation A joke he told on X in August to a de facto advisory role in the Trump administration.
Musk has been a known supporter of the Doge meme for years.
The meme itself is simple. It refers to the Shiba Inu, a breed of hunting dog from Japan. The dog, named Kapuso, has captured the hearts of the internet by being exceptionally cute, similar to other old animal-themed memes like Angry cat. Its owner, a kindergarten teacher in Japan, first posted a photo of Kapuso in 2010, but the Doji meme went viral in 2013 when people added multicolored Comic Sans-style text to images, imagining a dog’s internal monologue in broken English. A picture of a Shiba Inu in a pile of autumn leaves might read something like: Too many leaves, too piled, too many falling, like a pumpkin latte.
The jokes were funny 10 years ago, but like any meme, these off-beat phrases can only stay entertaining for so long. However, Doge has maintained its cultural significance because in late 2013, two software engineers created a new cryptocurrency as a joke and called it Dogecoinreferring to Mimi Doji.
For the cryptocurrency it was created for Makes fun of cryptocurrency itself, Dogecoin has taken on a life of its own, and in part, we have Musk to thank for that. He has been a long-time supporter of pointless currency, even announcing a Dogecoin-funded project.DOGE-1 mission to the moon“Via SpaceX. (Initially scheduled to launch in 2022, DOGE-1 has not yet launched)To the moon“.”)
Musk also confirmed that Tesla owned an unknown amount of Dogecoin when he was sued for $258 billion over an alleged extortion scheme aimed at inflating the price of the cryptocurrency. (The suit was It was rejected Earlier this year.) Musk briefly toyed with Dogecoin at X as well The company logo has been changed Last year Doge became a meme – another move that led to a sharp increase in the price of Dogecoin.
Likewise, Dogecoin It rose by almost 20% Tuesday night after Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk’s meme-driven actions are nothing new; See the 420 joke that was part of Tesla’s “Secured Financing” debacle, for example. But for Trump, it’s a bit less unexpected.
Dougie follows the same path as Pepe the Frog
The Republican Party has a history of embracing memes to its advantage. During Trump’s final presidential term, the popular meme was dubbed Pepe the Frog He became associated with the alt-right.
Created by comedian Matt Furie in his 2005 comedy “Boy’s Club,” Pepe the Frog is a cartoon character and the embodiment of the “Boy’s Club.”Guys rock“Soul – Short for immature, but not actively harmful, activities among groups of young people (like the “Boy’s Club” characters). For Pepe, this means he’s a carefree guy who just wants to smoke weed and play video games with his bros. Pepe probably doesn’t know What is a 401(k), and it is doubtful that he has a bed frame.
Most people who used the Baby meme never knew its origins; Instead, they just saw a frog with different expressions that they could use to depict their feelings, from deep sadness to absolute joy. People felt a kinship with the meme, often adopting it as their avatar on various forums such as 4chan’s /b/councilwhich generates some of the ugliest content on the internet due to its lax rules and decades-long reputation for generating chaos.
Pepe has been a ubiquitous presence on the Internet for more than a decade. In 2015, it was the frog Most reblogged memes on Tumblr. So when Trump announced his campaign for president that year, Pepe was still trending online. Because the meme is so divorced from the original context of Matt Furie’s comic, the apolitical character has become a de facto dog whistle signaling involvement in alt-right movements. Trump began posting pictures of Pepe that echoed his beliefs, as calls grew to “build the wall” on the country’s southern border with Mexico in the United States.
For online communities accustomed to depicting Pepe in Nazi uniform or as a US Border Patrol officer, Trump’s acknowledgment of their memes was an endorsement.
The matter escalated further when Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., shared a graphic mocking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s statement that Trump voters “inherit,” which included a version of Pepe as Trump. As a result, the embrace of the term “deplorables” grew and Pepe became synonymous with alt-right movements. In a television interview where the white nationalist Richard Spencer gets punched in the faceand he wears a Pepe pin on his jacket.
Memes like Pepe work well as a political dog whistle because they seem innocent and have already proven popular. However, what looks like images of sad frogs or happy dogs can be distorted into something much darker. Although not all uses of the meme were intended to refer to alt-right associations, the Anti-Defamation League did. classification Pepe as a symbol of hate.
Baby has come around since then. Oddly enough, Frog is more associated with cryptocurrencies and Twitch streaming than alt-right activism these days; The frog was even represented on the entrance signs Pro-democracy protests In Hong Kong. It is possible that Doge will now fall into the same trap that Pepe fell into, becoming a symbol of the second Trump administration and Elon Musk’s involvement in it. But as Pepe has shown, a meme has the power to be reappropriated and expanded into something new, over and over again. The unofficial DOGE led by Musk may not be the final fate of Kabosu the Shiba Inu.
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