I have a very important public service announcement to make. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, make fun of Vice-PresidentJD Vanceby sharing one of the millions ofunflattering memesdedicated to him. Don’t you dare chuckle at the images of him looking like the “lollipop kid” in Shrek (the resemblance is uncanny) or a chicken nugget. And, whatever you do, do not share the meme that you can findhere, where he looks like a big bald baby. You risk hurting the poor man’s feelings and, also, you might get kicked out of the country.
So says a 21-year-old Norwegian called Mads Mikkelsen, anyway. Mikkelsen recently accused American border officials of denying him entry into the US because he had a meme of a bloated baby Vance saved on his phone. Mikkelsen, who had travelled to the US to visit friends, told the Norwegian paperNordlysthat immigration officers at Newark airport interrogated him, forced him to give fingerprints and blood samples, and went through his phone. After they found the Vance meme, as well as a picture of Mikkelsen holding a homemade wooden pipe, they sent him home.
“Both pictures had been automatically saved to my camera roll from a chat app, but I really didn’t think that these innocent pictures would put a stop to my entry into the country,” Mikkelsen told Nordlys.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hasrejected Mikkelsen’s claimthat he was kicked out of the country for disrespecting the vice-president. “FACT CHECK. Claims that Mads Mikkelsen was denied entry because of a meme are unequivocally FALSE,” theyposted on Facebookearlier in the week. “TRUTH: Mikkelsen was refused entry into the US for his admitted drug use.”
A homeland security assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, alsocalled the story “BS”in a post on X.
Mikkelsen, meanwhile, insisted to thefact-checking website Snopesthat the meme played a role in getting him denied entry. The 21-year-old claimed border officials told him he was getting sent home because of “extremist propaganda [the meme] and narcotic paraphernalia”. However, that claim hasn’t been verified.
We may never know if the Vance meme really did play a role in getting Mikkelsen kicked out of the country. While I don’t normally side with border officials, one imagines the pipe picture was probably the actual culprit. Still, the story, which made headlines around the world, won’t helpAmerica’s tourism industry. International visitors are staying out of the US after a spate of stories about tourists getting sent to Ice detention centerswithout any explanation. The World Travel & Tourism Council has said the country could lose $12.5bn ininternational visitor spendingthis year.
The story has also reignited interest in JD Vance memes, which have been circulating for months now, peaking at end of February after the vice-presidentscoldedVolodymyr Zelenskyy in an exchange that launcheda million memes. Indeed, the Irish lawmaker Ivana Bacik recently held up the Vance baby meme while speaking in the Irish parliament aboutthe Mikkelsen story.
While claims that making fun of Mr Hillbilly Elegy may get you deported might be exaggerated, the fact that so many people immediately believed Mikkelsen’s claims is a sign of just how badly the US’s international image has been damaged and how dystopian the country has become. The US is heading veryquickly towards authoritarianism. It is cracking down ondissent and protest. Book banning has surged and theTrump administrationhas instructed the Department of Education toend their investigationsinto these bans, calling them a “hoax”. Free speech rightsare being shredded.
And the people responsible for all this? They’re not evil geniuses, they’re embarrassing dweebs with massively meme-able faces. “I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down,” Rebecca Shaw said in aGuardian piece earlier this year. “What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incrediblycringeit would all be.”
“The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors, a national network of advocates for those hurt by domestic violence, found that 75% of the 170 advocates they surveyed across the country said the immigrants they serve fear they’ll face arrest or deportation if they contact authorities,”reports USA Today. Meanwhile the Fox News host Jesse Waters seems to think all this is hilarious. “I bet a bunch of guys that are dating illegal alien Spanish girls are like Ice, here’s the address! She hasn’t been very good,”Watters recently said. In related news, a man wasrecently arrestedfor allegedly impersonating an Ice officer and sexually assaulting a woman, saying he’d deport her if she didn’t comply.
Mark Rutte made a weird statement in which he referred to Trump as ‘Daddy’ andthen quickly walked it back.
Speaking at an office hours event, the Michigan representative Karl Bohnak (a Republican), said “I don’t” aftera constituent asked him, “So you don’t support a woman’s autonomy over her own body?”
The case, Medina v Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, “is part of a longstanding effort by anti-abortion activists to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood by cutting it out of Medicaid”,the Guardian reports. “Of the 2.4 million people treated at Planned Parenthood each year, almost half use Medicaid.”
The prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan,told his Facebook followersthat he was prepared to expose himself to the head of the Armenian church, to prove they were wrong that he had been circumcised. This is just the latest development in an ongoing spat between Pashinyan and the head of the Armenian Apostolic church. And they say women are too emotional to lead!
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As the title suggests, the gameinvolves a male protagonistwho is looking to get revenge on “gold-digging” women. After a lot ofcontroversyit’s been renamed Emotional Fraud Simulator, but the content is the same.
“I cannot go into further detail about the number of victims in the case beyond confirming that it is a double-digit number,” theOslo police attorney said.
Mel Owens,a 66-year-old former NFL player, who is the new star of ABC’s senior-focused dating show, has said he is only looking to date women between 45 and 60. “If they’re 60 or over, I’m cutting them.’”
The handful of attenders included alocal podcast hostwho praised the city’s lack of Black residents.
“[A] job title isn’t everything, and it’s more important to stay true to your values,”Judge Karen Ortiz, who worked in the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s New York office, said.
That’s according to a brilliant advertising campaign which aimed to destigmatise herpes via aspoof tourism advertisement.
Israeli officers and soldiers said that they wereorderedto fire at unarmed civilians waiting for humanitarian aid,Haaretz reports.
Here’s something to mews about: is it disgusting to kiss your partner after kissing your cat? You still have time to vote on this very im-paw-tant questionvia a Guardian poll.