Tag: memes

White House Speaks Out Amid Backlash Over Meme of Trump as Superman

The White House has responded after drawing ire and backlash over its recent memes, one of which included a fake movie poster depicting President Donald Trump as Superman.

In a post shared across its core social media accounts on Friday night, the White House said: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes,” alongside a picture of an announcement board that read “OMG, did the White House really post this?” In response, one X user argued that such memes show “how unserious this Administration is.” The White House’s defiant stance was also shared across the official POTUS accounts on X, Instagram, and Facebook.

The White House earlier on Friday posted an AI-altered image of Rep. Jimmy Gomez of California, a Democrat, after he criticized an ICE raid at a marijuana farm. The post featured a doctored image of Gomez crying, labeling him “cryin’ Jimmy.” The upload was condemned by many, with one Instagram user asking: “Why is the official White House page making these kind[s] of comments?”

Meanwhile, on Thursday night, the White House social team prompted reactions far and wide, some of the mocking variety, when it replaced actor David Corenswet with Trump in a meme of the poster for the new movie Superman. Where the original poster says “A James Gunn film” at the top, the Trump team’s alternative reads “A Trump presidency,” followed by the slogan: “Truth. Justice. The American Way.” The accompanying caption referred to “Superman Trump” as the “Symbol of hope.” The mock-up movie poster stood out amid a slew of other posts that focused on high-stakes matters such as the Trump Administration’s border patrol policies and the relief efforts for the devastating Texas floods.

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Court Overturns Douglass Mackey Meme Conviction

A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of Douglass Mackey, the man prosecuted for posting satirical memes ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on July 9 that the government failed to prove Mackey knowingly participated in a conspiracy, a requirement under the statute used to charge him.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

Mackey had been found guilty in 2023 of violating 18 U.S.C. § 241, a law dating back to Reconstruction that punishes conspiracies to deprive individuals of their constitutional rights. Prosecutors claimed that Mackey’s memes, which joked that Hillary Clinton supporters could vote via text, were part of a coordinated scheme to suppress votes.

That case has now unraveled.

“The mere fact that Mackey posted the memes, even assuming that he did so with the intent to injure other citizens in the exercise of their right to vote, is not enough, standing alone, to prove a violation of Section 241,” wrote Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston in the court’s opinion. Because Section 241 applies only to conspiracies involving “two or more persons,” the government had to prove that Mackey entered into an agreement with others, a threshold it did not meet.

Prosecutors attempted to tie Mackey to private Twitter message groups such as “War Room” and “Madman #2,” where users discussed political memes.

The court found no evidence that Mackey saw, let alone participated in, any of the conversations that allegedly formed the conspiracy. “This the government failed to do,” the panel wrote, noting that “Mackey did not send any messages in the War Room in the two weeks before he tweeted the text-to-vote memes.”

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Norwegian tourist, 21, is barred from entering the US after ICE guards find meme showing JD Vance with a bald head on his phone

A Norwegian tourist claims he was harassed and refused entry to the US after immigration officers found a meme of JD Vance on his phone.

Mads Mikkelsen, 21, arrived at New Jersey‘s Newark Airport on June 11, excited about his holiday.

But, his plans were thrown into disarray when he was reportedly pulled aside by border control and put in a cell.

The tourist was then subjected to what he described to Norwegian outlet Nordlys as an ‘abuse, of power and harassment’.

‘They asked questions about drug trafficking, terrorist plots and right-wing extremism totally without reason,’ he told the outlet.

Mr Mikkelsen, claimed the officers then threatened him with a $5,000 fine or five years in prison if he refused to give the password to his mobile phone.

The guards reportedly found a meme on the device’s camera roll showing US vice president JD Vance with a bald, egg-shaped head.

Mikkelsen said after discovering the image the authorities sent him home to Norway the same day.

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Belgian Nationalist Given 12 Month Suspended Sentence Because Someone Else Shared a ‘Racist’ Meme

Belgian conservative-nationalist Dries Van Langenhove has again been sentenced on appeal to one year in prison as a suspended sentence for what the judge said were violations of the Racism and Negationism Act.

The sentence stems from racist memes that were not even posted by him, but by members of a group chat he administrated seven years ago.

The sentence was delivered today by the Court of Appeal in Ghent, although Van Langenhove does not accept the sentence, and the case now goes into cassation.

On X, Van Langenhove simply wrote, “Guilty. 12 months in jail. Madness.”

He later clarified upon receipt of the written verdict that the custodial sentence “appears to be a suspended sentence,” which he suspects is “most likely because the prisons in Belgium are literally full of illegal migrants.”

“Most people don’t realize that the end result of such a sentence is the same. One politically incorrect tweet can now put me in jail. One meme sent by someone else in a group chat I am in can turn the suspended sentence into an effective one. This suspended sentence is the gravest form of censorship they could pursue and an effective way to kill activism,” he added.

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