On the “Jill Stein Dank Meme Stash” Facebook page, supporters of the Green Party Presidential candidate share bafflingly absurd and occasionally funny “dank memes” about her and the other candidates. Photograph from Twitter / @DankJillMemes

The Dank Memes That Are “Disrupting” Politics

The New Yorker | 4 October 2016

Making fun of politicians often serves as a release valve, a way to make difficult truths into something digestibly viral. The problem with “S.N.L.”-type parody in a time of Trump is that the truth no longer feels sufficient; it will not set us free. Maybe this helps explain why television’s exasperated, pretend-news anchors are having a tough time keeping pace with real life. Over the past few months, it’s been hard to discern whether Trump’s campaign is a series of disasters and happy accidents or a disinformation drive carefully mapped by a team of semiotics majors. In other words, it’s hard to expose bullshit when the baseline suspicion is that everything is bullshit.

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