About

Liberal Douche Garofalo is an advice animal styled image macro series centered around a headshot of American stand-up comedian and activist Janeane Garofalo with various captions satirizing radical leftist viewpoints.

Origin

Janeanne Garofalo^[1] is a stand-up comedian and political activist best known for her outspoken liberal political views and harsh satires of American conservatism. During her appearance on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on April 16th, 2009, she asserted that all members of the highly conservative Tea Party members were being racists.

"Let's be very honest about what this is about. This is not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don't know their history at all. It's about hating a black man in the White House."

The clip was uploaded onto YouTube on the same day and subsequently picked up by both liberal and conservative political blogs. Months later in September 2009, users on 4chan's /b/ (random) board began using advice animal-style image macros of the comedienne to make fun of hypocritical or self-contradictory statements put forth by self-claimed leftists.^{[researching]}

The earliest known instance of image macro (shown right) can be found in Photobucket user blackxlinerxrun's /b/ folder^[15] on September 7th, 2009. The series can be also seen as the predecessor of College Liberal image macros.

Spread

The Memegenerator page^[3] for "Liberal Douche Garofalo" was created sometime in early September 2009, according to Google's cached data. A link to the Memegenerator page was posted on AR15 forum^[16] a few days later on September 8th. The definition of "Garafalo" as an English verb was submitted to Urban Dictionary^[5] on February 2nd, 2010, which referred to her quote from the April 2009 interview on Countdown:

Garofalo: (verb) To call someone a racist or bigot as a last ditch effort to marginalize them because your argument is empty and flawed.

In 2010, the series continued to gain momentum on 4chan^[14] and Memegenerator while numerous instances began appearing on mostly conservative-political forums and blogs. By August that year, "Liberal Douche Garofalo" had spread across non-English imageboards like Finnish imageboard Nyymichan's Politics board.^[13]

However, the series didn't reach the aggregator hubsite Reddit until February 7th, 2011, when Redditor rickytickytappy submitted an instance in a post titled "Liberal Douche Garofalo loves immigration." The Quickmeme page^[2] for "Liberal Douche Garafalo" was launched a few months later in June 2011.

The number of image macros continued to grow in the following year, boosted by the launch of the single topic Tumblr^[10] in January 2012 and the official Facebook page^[6] in the following month. As of March 2012, the Memegenerator page hosts over 2,020 instances and Quickmeme page has over 1,170 instances.

Notable Examples

Liberal Hypocrite Nyan Cat

On January 22nd, 2012, YouTuber IndomitableRealist posted a compilation slideshow of "Liberal Douche Garofalo" image macros set to the background music of Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!, a repetitive dance song that became immensely popular through the 2011 viral video Nyan Cat.

Oil Painting Tribute

On March 2nd, 2012, Etsy artist Anoobis^[11] listed an oil painting of the image macro template for sale:

Search Interest

Google search queries for "Liberal Douche Garofalo" experienced its first spike in late August 2011, shortly after the series began to take hold on Reddit and Quickmeme.

External References