There’s a genre of cringey content — A-list-celebrity political stunts, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids TikTok dances, #DarkBrandon, etc. — that seems to be exclusively produced by a particular class of elite progressive technocrats. Stephen Miller’s knife-fighting lawfare outfit, America First Legal, reports on the latest iteration:
Did you see @US_FDA’s cringey propaganda memes about the COVID-19 vaccine? We FOIA’d the FDA and found more draft memes.
Why is the FDA spending taxpayer dollars to engage in meme wars instead of responding to credible concerns about the vaccine? pic.twitter.com/ITxYjfQvOJ
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) December 19, 2022
Look, if the federal bureaucracy is making memes — with my tax dollars, no less — I want to know about it. All the more so if they’re humorless and viscerally cringe-inducing. And if they’re not actually memes at all — if they’re really just standard-issue “Follow The Science!“ talking points repackaged as half-baked imitations of memes — well, I consider that a matter of significant national concern. Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that if despotism ever came to America, it would arrive in the form of FDA interns tasked with orchestrating ill-fated social-media campaigns. (Or something like that. It’s been a while since I read Democracy in America.) The point is: These are things that the American people deserve to be made aware of.
Schopenhauer said that a sense of humor is the only divine quality of man. If that’s true, it leads to uncomfortable conclusions about the most humorless amongst us. I’ll leave it to our intrepid readers to reach their own conclusions about the authors of the memes in the FDA’s draft folder.