Trump, Rick & Morty, and the Preservation Found in Ruination
It was on Saturday, October 7th, 2017 that a teenager going by the name Chairman Mar, known for such works of internet art as “TOP 10 ALT RIGHT ANIME FIGHTS” and “BUILDING THE YEEZY HEELYS” walked into McDonalds to make a charged social statement, protesting the lack of Mulan Szechuan Sauce being sold. To accomplish his brave protest, he jumped onto the counter and began to scream. “WHERE’S. MY. SZECHUAN. SAUCE!? I’M PICKLE RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK! WUBBA LUBBA DUB DUB!” he wailed to the moderately crowded restaurant. He eventually fell off the counter where he began to shout a battle cry of the now- infamous Pepe the Frog, “Reeeeee! Reeeee!” He then got up and, in a self-described “Naruto run,” fled the McDonalds.
Just one year earlier, on November 9th, 2016 Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. There is one unifying force that led to these two events a fringe style of group preservation that has become far too relevant in our modern day. Now to understand this force we must first understand the Squonk, the ugliest creature to ever roam this earth.
The Squonk was a majestic and beautiful mythical creature from the woods of northern Pennsylvania. These creatures were hunted for the their illustrious fur coats, and almost driven to extinction, by the native Honniasont and the early Pennsylvania Dutch communities. Discouraged, the Squonk saw that the only path to survival was to eliminate their beauty and forgo their beloved coats. Removing the desire of the trappers to hunt saved the Squonk but it came at the cost of the Squonk’s own identity.
Rick and Morty is an American science fiction cartoon created in 2013 by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. The show had moderate success until the third season when its popularity exploded. While most supporters would encourage the success of something they love, there was a section of the original fans who fought back against this new mainstream popularity. They became a faction of pseudo-intellectuals trying to use a “genius IQ” to make the show they felt ownership over unbearable for all newcomers. It started small, with internet comments claiming the only way to understand the show, which has an average of 12 burps an episode, is to have a solid understanding of theoretical physics.
This toxicity continued to spread in the community until no online discussion could take place without someone issuing a purity test, quizzing various commenters on whether they understood the deep philosophical meaning in the scene when one character tells another to shove some seeds “way up their ass.” This all led up to the events of Saturday October 7th, 2017, when the hard-core fan base filed into McDonalds restaurants, led by the likes of Chairman Mar and other heroic types, demand the Mulan Szechuan McNugget Sauce, a reference to one of the show’s most intellectual plot lines where Rick, the genius and god-like inventor, reveals that his one goal and motivation in life is to taste the Mulan Szechuan McNugget sauce one last time. This was the final straw in the battle for the soul of the show, leaving any newcomer or casual fan behind.
The United States of America is a country in the northern range of the Americas that was created in 1776 by a group of people who weren’t too fond of taxes. It was moderately successful until the World Wars made the nation one of the most influential in the world. This led to critical success with an unprecedented 353 Nobel prizes, completely squashing Frasier’s 37 Emmy wins. With all its praise, the USA generates tons of new fans each year, with 1.38 million foreign-born individuals immigrating to the USA in 2015 alone. This constant influx of new fans has created the same problem in America as in Rick and Morty as native born Americans started to feel these newcomers would drag the nation down.
Recently America has seen a rise in the “Alt-Right”, a group dedicated to making citizenship so unbearable that no new fans will come. America was, traditionally, an open nation with a philosophy that anyone can come, work hard, and succeed. This group has the idea that if they bring out the most racist and hateful rhetoric, the new potential members of the nation would stop coming, while the ones already in the country would eventually leave. This strategy was a major influence in Donald Trump’s election. Put a buffoon in office who would make a mockery of the nation and then no one will come. America will become the Simpsons and fall out of the mainstream. It’s a grand experiment in society and politics, and a cartoon frog started it all.
Pepe the Frog was created in 2005 by Matt Furie as a character in a comic series that dealt with why one would pee at a urinal with their pants all the way down. After his run on the series Pepe became a staple of the internet due to his likable nature and the tireless work of hardcore supporters who sought to make the grandest Pepe memes possible. Pepe, like Rick and Morty, went mainstream around 2014, when various “normie” (a term for those not deemed knowledgeable about the internet community) celebrities such as Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj used the image. It was around then that the community of Pepe the Frog turned against the mainstream popularity their frog had generated.
Manufacturing a war of reclamation, the community turned to a strategy of turning their beloved mascot into something far darker so that only their fringe of the internet would use him. They turned to unsavory methods to make Pepe unusable by the mainstream, contacting with the ancient Egyptian god of primordial darkness, Kek, to form an online nation called Kekistan which housed their fight of internet Jihad. One of the most controversial moves and, in the end most effective, made by the community was mixing Pepe iconography with that of the White nationalist movement.
As described by right-wing parody twitter account @JaredTSwift, who posed as an actual Neo-Nazi in an interview with The Daily Beast, the community “basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda” in order to “reclaim Pepe from the normies.” This article and interview would go on to form the basis of a now-deleted post on Hillary Clinton’s web page explaining Donald Trump’s use of the character. It was a plan to ruin the image of Pepe, rendering him unacceptable and unusable by the mainstream, to achieve their desire to preserve the edgy hipster aspect of their frog god. This is the same form of preservation that the fans of Rick and Morty are have utilized and it’s the method that Donald Trump and a portion of his supporters now try to impose in America.
This reclamation of Pepe by the now self-labeled Kekistanis, found the group drifting closer to parts of the internet occupied by a then-fringe group known as the Alt-Right. The Alt-right, a big tent movement comprising of but not limited to shitposters, white nationalists, anti-feminists, white supremacists, neo- monarchists, and edgy online nihilists united by their dislike of the nation’s loose immigration policy, witnessed the Kekistanis’ accomplishments and decided to take the strategy for their own.
The Alt-Right knew that they didn’t have the governmental or popular support to institute their anti-immigration policies for what they saw as the necessary preservation of the White Christian America. So, they sought a new strategy of ruination for the sake of preservation, through which they would try to associate America with the vulgar, the racist, and the inept.
This is one of the major factors leading to the Great Meme War AKA the 2016 presidential election. The Alt-Right leda grassroots culture war fought with pieces of internet humor called memes, which were designed to sneak far right concepts into the public through humorous pictures. This campaign was mainly in support of the ridiculous entity known as presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, an ex-reality T.V. star turned polititian who encapsulated the concept of ruination. Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States and, throughout his first year in office, he has lowered most of the world’s opinion of the United States. One of the major goals of the Alt- Right was to limit immigration, and while the Trump administration has failed to deliver on any lasting policy dealing with the issue, his very nature alone has dropped the number of people immigrating to the United States by about ten percent.
America has traditionally been a place for all to come, from the crossing of the Bering Strait to the Mayflower to when my great-great-great grandfather snuck himself and his two sons into America through the Canadian border during the dead of winter to avoid angry customers who had discovered that his snake oil didn’t actually cure toothaches. However, who would want to come to a nation of the vulgar, racist, and inept?
The damaged perception of the United States has subsequently lowered the number of people who see the American Dream as something worth following. America has tarnished its reputation as the land of opportunity to keep its paranoid members comfortable. Yet in the very process, it has lost what made America worth protecting in the first place.
Now, the Squonk disappeared from the world after it left its coat behind, and faded into legend. After the early colonial period, there was only one encounter with the animal, recorded in William T. Cox’s book Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts, published in 1910. In the book Cox describes the quest of J.P. Wentling who, determined to find the mythical creature, spent months searching through the lumberwood forests of Pennsylvania for the creature thought only to be folklore. Wentling eventually followed strange trails and tracks to a cave in the far north of the Pennsylvanian woods, only to discover a creature covered in warts and various blemishes crying. In the years after its retreat from the world, the Squonk had become hideous and was ashamed of its appearance. Though alive, the Squonk had damaged itself to the point it was no longer recognizable. The mess of a creature didn’t fight against Wentling as he picked it up and placed it in his bag. Dragging the creature back to the nearest town, Wentling heard only the constant crying of the humiliated creature. By the time Wenting had covered four miles, the crying had stopped and the bag no longer weighed the same. Confused, he put the bag down and peered inside, only to find a bag full of tears.
