The Weekly Discourse: Brainworms All Over The Shop

Like prisoners seeing the sun after release, posters are wading into the Joe Biden era with a newfound appreciation for the freedoms they once took for granted, only in the posters' case, their freedom is to post whatever cockamamie nonsense they want.

Of course, these freedoms existed during the Trump era and were abused with reckless abandon, but there's been a noticeable shift in the tenor of Twitter in the past week as people who were, say, "not fans" of the former President have taken the delirium of his absence and turned it into maniacally awful, golden posts. The classic of this week was Repeat After Me: I Am Not Smarter Than Joe Biden, which is the kind of infantile, left-punching centrist take a true discourse lover wakes up for in the morning, but it was but one of a seeming thousand brain-melting takes coming out of the first week of the Biden era.

This week: an "Ice Cold Feminist Take" about the Bernie meme, a sound that is frankly unfathomably disgusting to hear, and a woman proudly declares she's gone full Karen.

Ice Cold

An important rule to remember when entering the discourse is you're allowed to not like something. Your opinion doesn't always need ethical grounds to stand on, especially when it's about something as innocuous as the latest viral meme of a septuagenarian sitting down on a cold winter day.

This is a delicious post, a prime example of how the politics of intellectuals have been profoundly warped by personal grievance and projection. This shot of Bernie Sanders sitting down on a cold winter day became a ubiquitous meme, as you may be aware, thanks in part to just how normal the picture is. It's Bernie Sanders in a coat and mittens. There's literally nothing more to it. To suggest Sanders was intentionally spurning the "emotional labor" required of him at the Inauguration by watching the proceedings in mittens, seems like quite a stretch to say the least.

But posts like Hoover Green's came in droves and were amplified by Twitter users rolling their eyes at his critics who saw in it some grievous, misogynist and hell, even racist implications in Bernie sitting down. Here's a smattering of the "ice cold" takes that flew around as Bernie memes flew around timelines:

The posts were so rampant that Twitter users started to recognize a pattern in their sources.

For many Twitter users, the 2016 Democratic Primary in which Bernie challenged Hillary Clinton's run for President is the greatest war of their lives, one they will continue fighting apparently until the end of time.

Does That Make A Sound?

Understandably, Democrats were excited that Joe Biden had finally been sworn into office. Some Democrats were perhaps a little too excited.

We've talked about the weird confluence of politics and sexual expression in this column before, and while we've seen objectively gross examples of people being horny for politicians before, it's always skin-crawling to discover that people's erotic inclinations towards the United States government have been rekindled for all to see.

The implication of Jasmine Pierce's graphic tweet is that no woman in America was ever horny during the Trump administration, but seeing the approximately 137-year-old Joe Biden take the oath was enough to turn all of America's women on. Pierce's post may have missed the mark of comedy gold, but she does write for Saturday Night Live, so it's not all that surprising.

Dana Calls The Police

We long ago reached Karen critical mass. What was once a term referring to the "speak to the manager" types ended up being the go-to word for every person having a public freakout while usually doing something racist. "Karen" content as it's presented today usually provides some moral comfort to the reader: they get to be astonished at the shocking behavior but also can feel safe in the fact they would never do something like that. But be warned: for every Karen ye scorn, ye may be a Karen yourself.

Such was the case with Twitter-famous podcaster Dana Donnelly, who last week bragged about calling the cops on her neighbor for asking her to move her car for a night and to try not to run over her dog.

Donnelly, evidently drunk with revenge to the unreasonable request to move her car so her neighbor's friends could visit, went ahead and shared the text that set her off.

Just to make sure she didn't look like the "bad guy" in this encounter, Donnelly posted "ACAB, obviously," but "this lady is white so she'll be fine."

Donnelly's thread was filled with followers cheering her on, with some posting memes about how she should run over the dog. It all seemed to be going to her clout-chasing plan until the posts started going around Twitter, where people were more agog at Donnelly's reaction to what is objectively a very gentle request to move her car and not run over a dog.

Donnelly's thread was ultimately deleted so we'll never know if the cops were actually called or what happened. Hopefully, the dog is okay.

The Weekly Discourse is a look at some of the spiciest hot takes on Twitter from the past week that may not have generated memes but were definitely bonkers.