The Time Has Come to Be Petty
A long convoy of black Suburbans crested a gentle hill towards a ritzy fundraiser, held on the premises of a powerful Republican donor, on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. Led by the local police and followed by fire and medical resources, the Secret Service zealously did what they have always done—they protected. They had spent the previous day securing every road, every waterway, and the sky itself to ensure their duty for that day was done without incident. Their charge was Vice President JD Vance—a man who was a heartbeat away from inheriting the most powerful office in the history of the human race.
As the motorcade arrived, they were greeted enthusiastically by a couple hundred ordinary people, and with handmade signs, inflatable couches, cat memes, and an image we affectionately call inside 50501 the “memecrime”—a ten-by-eight-foot banner depicting an … “accurate” representation of the Vice President. The stoic men and women of the Secret Service, the police who were there to ensure order, and the cars who arrived before and after the VP’s entourage burst out in laughter one at a time, some trying to hide their mirth with varying degrees of success.
The Presidency of the United States is an office imbued with almost imperial power if you squint at it for long enough. Yet in that moment the awesome power of the federal government withered under the mocking scorn of a couple hundred patriots willing to stand out in the afternoon sun and let their opinion be known. It was a gathering of the people’s contempt righteously earned. Humorous as the whole affair was, it is important to appreciate that mockery is a potent political weapon. We are the good guys but we should not refuse to use this tool on some high-minded principle. “When they go low, we go high” is no longer the rule. Instead we should meet them in the gutter and humiliate them at every opportunity.
The Meowtucket Protest of July 22nd was organized by the CatsOnACouch Instagram channel, along with several Indivisible chapters and a small amount of support from Mass 50501. It was a simple event that involved some music, a few speakers, and a short march up the hill to a strategic location to ensure the Vice President had to push the motorcade through the crowd so that the mockery would be visible to all. Then they just let people have fun.
Amanda McGonigle started CatsOnACouch last year with a simple mission in mind, namely to undermine through humor all the things that JD Vance has said and done up until the point that he was selected as the Vice President. She is the social media archnemesis to Vance—the warm, funny, and fierce yin to his pope-killing energy yang. Her mission—to become more powerful on the internet than he is, with nothing but cats and couches. The cats are a reference to JD Vance’s “childless cat-lady” comment, which was widely criticized in the media and culture. The couch is a reference to a rumor of inappropriate relations with inanimate objects; it’s not true and she knows that—but it was too funny a dig to pass up. There is now a curse for Vance that rhymes with pouch tucker.
Since then, CatsOnACouch has morphed into an ongoing stochastic activist operation. Calling themselves the “Meowlitia,” her followers engage in targeted and often self-directed campaigns to disrupt fascist operations, such as annoying Vance and his acolytes on their social media posts, carpet bombing Heritage Foundation feedback forms, and registering for events they have no interest in attending just to depress turnout for public events.
The meme crime of Nantucket is a rallying cry for CatsOnACouch. The Meowlitia is now buying large banners and billboards with donations that Amanda will be shipping across the country in JD Vance’s wake. Every diplomatic consult, every vacation, and every fundraiser, he will be greeted with a personalized and petty insult. Forever, until he is removed from power, he will be haunted by the contempt of the people. We get to have some good fun, and JD Vance will never know a moment's rest. Others are getting in on the act and it’s already going international. Cotswolds UK organizers rented a billboard truck for Vance’s UK visit, and proceeded to follow him around. In the UK, JD Vance is considered a joke, and is held in low regard by the vast majority of the population. Even foreign trips do not offer this administration safety from scorn.
Robby Roadstreamer, a social media performative comedian, has been exploding in popularity recently. He has an interesting act, where he dresses like the “Guantanamo Gator”, complete with a thong over the costume, and attends MAGA rallies. Then he twerks in front of the crowd while singing extra annoying songs about Jeffery Epstein's plane, or encouraging the crowd to conduct an insurrection at Applebee’s. He’s now fully absorbed with an “Unfuck America” tour with this performance. He’s a Massachusetts resident, as is CatsOnACouch. We are exporting Bostonian sass at scale, and with these acts we are helping to rally the country to the robust, aggressive, and unapologetic defense of the nation that is fundamentally required, if this republic is to survive the next few years.
This movement is starting to understand the assignment, and those who are not normally considered movement actors are getting in on the fun. After inking a 1.5 billion dollar deal with Paramount, South Park went on the offensive against the administration, mocking him for his penchant for litigiousness, using the same floppy headed cut-out motif they applied to Saddam Hussein almost 20 years ago in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. They portrayed him as being an abusive lover to Satan, and they put googly eyes on his comically tiny penis. It took Trey Parker and Matt Stone four days to get it past Paramount’s censors, but they explained that “It’s a character” and thus fit for TV.
The next episode they portrayed Kristi Noem with a melting Botox face, ICE raiding a Dora The Explorer convention, and mocked ICE’s poor hiring standards as it has failed to recruit the people they need and their desperation increases. When Noem tried to clap back, they released a clip on social media showing an animated Noem going into a pet store and executing puppies by the dozens. They are pillorying her admission that she put down her own dog with a pistol, and they are not afraid to get into people’s comfort zones and they are not afraid to be a bit mean about it.
The people that the Regime has assembled are weird, maladjusted humans who do not have their shit together, and it’s obvious. It’s okay to mock them for character flaws, odd behavior, and general kookiness when they manifest those flaws in policy choices meant to harm other people. Just because we are fighting the good fight against a tireless and malevolent thing, does not mean we need to be nice.
The ill-fated dictator of 1940s Italy was also an absurd human being. Benito Mussolini wore ill-fitting military dress uniforms bedazzled with excess decorations and self-awarded accolades. During speeches he would gesticulate wildly and chaotically, while he accused everyone who offered any criticism at all of treason. He was a cartoon character for so many, so ridiculed in Italian media that he was coded in the minds of the general public as crazy but harmless. Until he bullied all the institutions supporting him into compliance. People were now cowed, as this absurd act took on the valence of the truly sinister.
The Authoritarian is a truly ridiculous kind of human being. They have a kind of goofy affect around them. They can be socially awkward and intellectually shallow and they confuse fear with respect, not realizing how little of the latter they truly have. They are brittle, broken human beings with thin skins who cannot long endure the contempt and ridicule of the people. They wreath themselves in power because they sense at least one thing to be true—that their hold on power is tenuous and that at any moment the house of cards they built with errors, gamble, and bluster may come crashing down around them. This fear of inadequacy fuels their narcissism—it’s not that they believe they are invincible—they want to believe they are and know deep down in the pit of their souls that they are not. It’s a deep character flaw that separates authoritarians from everyone else, and it’s why these projects always turn to ash in the end.
But authoritarians are nothing without the cult of personality around them. Those people who feel that society offers nothing for them are always the first on the authoritarian train and the last to leave. Authoritarian movements use the security blanket of identity to manipulate people into believing things that are not true. They ensconce ideas that flatter themselves and tar their perceived rivals with lurid, impossible scandals. They dehumanize the truly weak and the vulnerable to mask their own internal weakness and vulnerability. This framing allows the people to excuse away bad behavior, and it is harder to resist that temptation when you have lives full of real worries and problems, material or otherwise.
People often join movements to get a sense of belonging and that is a good thing, but the instinct can be warped by bad actors. Biting and ruthless humor inverts this equation and makes it easier for people with doubts to slowly and silently move off the train. It’s unlikely those perturbed by the jokes at the expense of people they have chosen to subordinate themselves to will become our allies, but they can be persuaded to phone in their support, if only in an effort to avoid becoming the object of ridicule and scorn themselves. This is a strategy of social coercion and it is effective for that reason.
More than the physical, there is something primeval and raw about the Authoritarian Leader. They feed a desire for simple, emotionally-satisfying answers to extremely difficult questions. This serves to instill in their followers a political identity that is less about principles and more about a shared sense of meaning and belonging in an indifferent universe. Wild acts trigger their opponents into overreaction and allow their supporters to shrug nihilistically and say to themselves, “They are all corrupt / stupid / weak, but at least he says what he thinks.”
The overlap between the cults of personality and the broader American Authoritarian Movement is not an accident—it’s baked into the fabric of who decides to join, which is why they are so drawn to it in the first place. Like the leader himself, the movement under him is often quite brittle and soft. With sufficient pressure, mockery, and scorn, tempered by a fierce and unyielding courage in conversation, it will often melt away. The desire to be taken seriously is the primary emotional motivator for Authoritarian Movements. This is a potent psychological vulnerability, so we should refuse them that privilege. Take seriously the threat—but belittle the leaders and most importantly the ideas under it. Condemnation is required, but if you condemn with a smile instead of a sneer it’s a lot more likely to stick.
Photo via Mass 50501 Volunteer
JD Vance wanted to demonstrate power—that he can come to a blue city in a blue state with his entourage and expect the people to bow, scrape, and accommodate. Instead, he was greeted by a 10-foot tall mural of a meme-crime and blow-up couches paraded down the street like an inverted Roman triumph. The Secret Service agents themselves were caught on video laughing with the protesters in Nantucket. Humor broke down the barriers between security and protester and the tension inherent in this work was subtracted from the environment. It is not possible to know what JD Vance thought of the creative shenanigans of his detractors, but it is likely he felt smaller as the crowd’s calm became a dismissive scorn and as the security detail loyal to him was getting in on the fun at his expense.
The event was subsequently plastered all over local and social media, ensuring that friends, family, and fellow travelers were reminded of his impotence. It generated a mention on Parkrose Permaculture and generated 150,000+ views and some local news coverage. The story of this protest briefly went national (and international) and we had fun while doing it. There was a strategic benefit to the broader movement.
To pour salt in the wound, the protesters later laid the mural on the ground at the air field, so that anyone who looked out the window of Vance's plane fleeing with its tail tucked between its legs, could see the people's contempt as they left. This will remain an insult in their memory for all time. We now live in Vance’s head rent-free, and he knows he will never escape judgment. Pettiness is a good thing for these types of political operations. The fascists cannot know a moment’s rest—for every minute they are contending with us, they have less time to dream up ways to damage, disrupt, and destroy our country.
Coming to Nantucket made him smaller, because the people of Nantucket along with friends and allies across the state came together to shrink him in the eyes of the people. The emperor has no clothes and all they did was call it out. No one is afraid of the butt of a joke. It is possible to partially strip the power of the highest offices in the land through a mischievous smile and a subversive attitude. The fool has always been the only one who could tell the king that he isn’t as cool as he thinks he is, and in that, the comedian is the more powerful actor.
Have some fun at the expense of these people, and be confident in the assertion that they deserve it. Sarcasm, ridicule, jeers—all of these things weaken them and strengthen us. Never forget that the program these people are now engaged in is malicious to the extreme—but at the same time do not give them the benefit of fear. Instead laugh at them. They are absurd people, with absurd ideas, that in another time would never be anywhere near the halls of power. Remind them that they are inadequate at every opportunity. Remind them that the weakness and brittleness of the character that drives their malevolence will be seen for the farce that it is, and that the movement that protects them from the consequences of their choices will wither and die in an open light.
This is the nature of opposition politics, and we should embrace the fire with laughter. The time has come to be petty.
Bryan Winter can be reached via Bluesky (@savingtherepublic.bsky.social) and Facebook.
Discuss this post in our Discord!
Enjoyed this article? Get updates on the movement, volunteer opportunities, and more by clicking below.