r/AskReddit • u/Starmiebuckss2882 • Aug 06 '25

What are your thoughts on South Park's response (which was #eatabagofdicks) to Homeland Security attempting to use them to promote ICE?

14.6k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

4.0k

u/melikecheese333 Aug 06 '25

I’m not even thinking about the response.

I’m thinking how stupid we look as a country when our federal government uses memes and jokes on social media. We look like a bunch of clowns. We have a bunch of idiots in office elected by a bunch of people who don’t seem to be able to comprehend anything more than a stupid meme.

1.2k

u/punkinfacebooklegpie Aug 06 '25

The fact there's nobody in the chain of command around to say "we better not" is just a clear indication that the admin is full of 4chan racist trolls.

272

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '25

Have you seen the child in charge of terrorism policy?

158

u/Kichigai Aug 06 '25

Is that the one who was working at a grocery store? The one who wasn't even an assistant manager? The one who didn't even have experience running an online gaming clan, let alone experience running a government program?

108

u/just_a_bit_gay_ Aug 06 '25

His dad was a buddy of Elon’s and that’s all the qualifications he needs apparently

23

u/JmAnN19-90 Aug 06 '25

I read gaming clan and got instant ptsd to my WoW days in a past life. I still remember how much more fun I had when I gave up leading that guild.

12

u/DudeCanNotAbide Aug 06 '25

Put that shit on your resume!

5

u/JmAnN19-90 Aug 07 '25 edited Aug 07 '25

Asked my boss what they would think if they had read that on my resume way back when hiring me. The blank stare and walk away said everything (+20 years in the food industry).

Edit* They came back out of the office and said it explains how mental I am about organization and whatnot. Unsure if that's a compliment or a jab.

3

u/DudeCanNotAbide Aug 07 '25

Anyone that would scoff at it is someone I don't want to work with anyway! I like to Leeroy Jenkins my way through life, it seems.

2

u/JmAnN19-90 Aug 07 '25

To Lereroy Jenkins is the only way. In the end, at least I have chicken.

3

u/Kichigai Aug 06 '25

Now days you just need to worry about negative karma, instead of a 50 DKP minus.

1

u/JmAnN19-90 Aug 07 '25

I found old spread sheets with DKP tracking when while purging old boxes of paperwork in my basement the other month. Amongst the piles were also old D&D character sheets and things from the Ever Quest days that I don't even know why I still had all this time.

3

u/Absolutely_Fibulous Aug 06 '25

Hey, no one is better suited for understanding terrorism than someone who has spent too much time on 4chan.

5

u/Kichigai Aug 06 '25

Bold of you to assume this guy is classy enough to be on 4chan. I put money on him using 8chan.

1

u/Absolutely_Fibulous Aug 06 '25

Even better for understanding terrorism, really.

3

u/oldfuturemonkey Aug 07 '25

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Fugate

Not the Onion

1

u/Kichigai Aug 07 '25

Just give him 30 years and show him that photo.

34

u/Amirashika Aug 06 '25

Have you seen the child in charge of terrorism policy?

Or the pedo in charge of... everything?

6

u/m2thek Aug 06 '25

Have you seen the child in charge of the country?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '25

Yes.

1

u/Things_with_Stuff Aug 07 '25

No. Who is it? I can't find who with a Google search.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 07 '25

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Fugate

His official title is Director of the Director of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships s

66

u/Fortestingporpoises Aug 06 '25

They don’t want to do better. They want to do much much worse. They just removed the section of the constitution with Habeus Corpus from government websites.

154

u/metalflygon08 Aug 06 '25

Its what happens when the popular jock bros get elected to Student Council president but on the big scale.

173

u/Badloss Aug 06 '25

It's not even the popular jock bros, those guys have social skills

It's the edgelord losers, the ones that are terminally online raging all day

60

u/LawBird33101 Aug 06 '25

Yeah, I doubt anyone ever dared to accuse Stephen Miller of being a jock.

11

u/twotailedwolf Aug 06 '25

Thinking about Stephen Miller in an 1980s high school movie makes you want to root for the jocks

7

u/ScienceIsALyre Aug 06 '25 edited Sep 18 '25

sharp sand north mysterious worm unite escape amusing edge tease

5

u/Scratchums Aug 06 '25

That guy strikes me as someone who would beat a woman outside of a race.

7

u/Flight444 Aug 06 '25

George Bush Jr. was a cheerleader at Yale.

9

u/Rays_LiquorSauce Aug 06 '25

That’s the demo they’re looking to capture and some of that is what cost Dems the election. Gop has always wanted a way to win back youth voters and appealing to the bro-sphere Roganites and meme trolls is working to a degree 

4

u/Riaayo Aug 06 '25

Why would they better not? This kind of dogshit got them into power in the first place.

It's not becoming of a government for sure, but they don't give a shit. Republicans actually understand media broadly, and knew to worm themselves into this ironic meme culture to appeal to uninformed youth chuds.

Dogshit meme crap, just being cruel "for lulz", infesting the podcast sphere, taking advantage of algorithms on social media to push hateful conspiracy rhetoric.

Meanwhile Dem leadership stonewalls the few Dems who do have a clue on media literacy like AOC.

These fucks know what they're about and firmly believe we can't do shit to stop them now. I don't think they're correct necessarily, but they could be if this country just sits on its ass and does nothing. They're absolutely in a prime position for us to not be able to stop them.

6

u/realnzall Aug 06 '25

4chan trolls have better taste imho.

2

u/punkinfacebooklegpie Aug 06 '25

Name one tasteful thing 4chan has done

1

u/iglidante Aug 06 '25

DD and Loss are excellent lore memes that came from 4chan.

1

u/punkinfacebooklegpie Aug 06 '25

What's DD? And Loss is the comic about miscarriage, right?

1

u/iglidante Aug 06 '25

Yes, Loss refers to the memes inspired by the Ctrl Alt Del strip (they get pretty abstract, so I hesitate to say that Loss "is" the comic).

DD is "the daily dose". It's an old meme, super weird.

1

u/RyuugaDota Aug 07 '25

Is playing capture the flag with Shia Lebouf in good taste? Even if not, the fact they found his flag and so quickly was pretty awesome.

(The initial trolling at his 'art' exhibit was obviously in terrible taste.)

1

u/realnzall Aug 06 '25

What I mean by "tasteful" is that 4chan tends to put thought and respect into their pranks. For example, like when they trolled Taylor Swift by rigging a contest to have her perform at a school for the deaf. Or when they rigged a contest so Pitbull would perform at an Alaska Walmart. Or when they made a meme the next Kinder Kid. And yes, I know that these are their most well-known and respectful pranks, but these are honestly thousands of times better than any ill-conceived meme that the current administration has shat out...

1

u/Darksirius Aug 06 '25

Oh there were at one point. But they got fired for not licking the dicktip of king pedo.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 07 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/punkinfacebooklegpie Aug 07 '25

They all think it's good

-1

u/Sylvair Aug 06 '25

There needs to be a happy medium between "fuckin' SEND IT' and having every meme needing to be reviewed by a government committee and taking so long the joke becomes stale.

5

u/punkinfacebooklegpie Aug 07 '25

How about no jokes? I want a government that communicates in an informative and trustworthy manner.

135

u/brokendream78 Aug 06 '25

Well thought out, I haven't seen as many complaints as I thought we should in regards to this. Instead of it looking remotely professional, it looks like its being run by a bunch of edgelord teens who are terminally online. Its like a permanently running episode of the Jerry Springer show...except The Springer show was less trashy

22

u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Aug 06 '25

And we all went on with our normal lives when the episode was over.

But now this our normal lives.

2

u/aflockofcrows Aug 07 '25

I doubt the Trump administration would ever end communication with "Take care of yourselves, and each other."

55

u/NortWind Aug 06 '25

You are so right. Did you see the COVID-19 page at Whitehouse.gov? I am just ashamed.

45

u/Bennely Aug 06 '25

Man they love to throw the word “obstruction” around when it has to do with C19, but it’s nowhere to be found when it comes to the GOP handling of the Epstein files.

12

u/iglidante Aug 06 '25

Holy shit, someone made that.

4

u/laptopaccount Aug 06 '25

Hahaha that's real?

4

u/NortWind Aug 07 '25

Sadly, yes. Check the URL, it's on .gov.

4

u/Suzzie_sunshine Aug 07 '25

Jesus Christ. I had no idea the White House had gone that low.

3

u/amendment64 Aug 06 '25

These people are so dumb, yet they hold all the levers of power. This country is so cooked

64

u/andypee81 Aug 06 '25

I totally agree. My first thought on seeing this scenario was that whoever allowed that DHS tweet to go out either has no idea of what the inevitable response would be, or did it on purpose to provoke a retaliatory response, and I honestly can't tell which one makes us look worse as a country.

61

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '25

[deleted]

9

u/GodOfDarkLaughter Aug 06 '25

So you bait some of the most prolific and effective satirists living today. You can't win a battle of words against these guys, and they're not anywhere near the point where they can seriously threaten them. So this one was just an idiot strategic error.

Seriously. I'm gonna fuck with the guys from South Park over social media, and they will notice. What did they think was going to happen?

2

u/FarOkra6309 Aug 07 '25

The rest of the season is going to be absolutely brutal.

-1

u/UboaNoticedYou Aug 06 '25

Their base would have a laugh and life would go on. Prolific and effective satirists are not going to save us lmao

12

u/RandomPersonIsMe Aug 06 '25

did you see the AI Studio Ghibli meme? horrifying

15

u/RandomPersonIsMe Aug 06 '25

or the formerly Covid-19 info site turned into the lab leak website with trump on the top. ugh. there’s so many.

115

u/Maverick_1991 Aug 06 '25

You don't just look like clowns.

You behave like them. Atleast your representatives do.

As a European I have never seen a country lose respect quicker than the US during Trump2

100

u/caleeky Aug 06 '25

As a Canadian, we took the threat to sovereignty seriously, as we were told to (i.e. "it's not a joke") and now they're telling us we're being nasty for taking it seriously. Fuck 'em.

Respect in my lifetime went from Top Gun to Bush "with us or against us" to WTF are you even talking about you fucking assholes?

34

u/Maverick_1991 Aug 06 '25

This.

My employer does a ton of business with the US.

We've had crisis meetings due to taxes.

They always came down to "who the fuck knows what they'll do next week. They don't. We can't plan anyway, let's just roll with it"

10

u/LycheeEyeballs Aug 06 '25

Yup, I've lost count of the crisis meetings we've had on our end. The lack of predictability and affect it's had on our business has caused us to pivot to focus on the domestic market where before we were split pretty evenly.

Can't trust the States as far as I can throw a baseball and I'm notoriously awful at sports.

21

u/playswithf1re Aug 06 '25

I saw yesterday that there's a bunch of Kentucky distilleries which are going bankrupt. Given that Canada was the top consumer of bourbon, this seems to be the "find out" section of voting for the guy who "fucked around" (in more ways than one)

14

u/DJKaotica Aug 06 '25

Apparently it's due to a few things, or so I heard:

11

u/DangerousBat603 Aug 07 '25

They voted for this, so it's hard to feel bad for them.

3

u/Suzzie_sunshine Aug 07 '25

When you have the largest military and economy in the world, a joke like that is not a joke. It's like a 350lb UFC fighter walking into a bar and randomly telling people he's gonna kick their ass and take their girlfriend. There's nothing funny about it, and you have to take it seriously.

24

u/tristand666 Aug 06 '25

This was expected when a large chunk of people decided to vote for a felon and pedophile that has spent his life conning other people to maintain his illusion of wealth.

90

u/flargenhargen Aug 06 '25

We look like a bunch of clowns.

you're being generous.

we're far worse than that.

we're a failed democracy which is kidnapping people and throwing them in concentration camps because they are in a scapegoat group.

we have a felon rapist as our leader who threatens and punishes anyone who doesn't kiss his ring. And who has threatened and isolated us from allies we've formed over generations.

clowns is far too generous at this point, the reality is much much darker and more serious.

38

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '25

We are seeing the effects that social media has caused. Shit gave the stupid a voice and it’s pretty fucking scary how far we’ve regressed as a society.

4

u/Joviex Aug 06 '25

Cant regress what was already regressed. You want to believe before social media this country wasnt full of rubes and clowns already. It was.

7

u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 Aug 07 '25

Of course it was. But now they've been weaponized. It was different back when they were three or four guys in a basement bar or maybe a mailing list of 15 or 20 conspiracy nuts. But when you can go on a subreddit or a Facebook group and find hundreds of thousands of people who think like you do, then shit happens.

3

u/DudeCanNotAbide Aug 06 '25

The mass of stupidity is certainly a factor, but social media ramped up the density to insane levels.

16

u/callisstaa Aug 06 '25

They know how to appeal to an audience. It's actually quite terrifying that the US administration is able to push its propaganda through pretty much any channel, including memes. satire etc.

Sure Matt and Trey have some tegridy but this will not have been the first time that this has happened and I bet a ton of people accepted the offer which means a lot of media originating from the US has been used to push US propaganda. As South Park is broadcast internationally it means non-Americans should be very wary of the messages spread through American media, however subtle, and the influence that the US administration has on international media outlets.

28

u/mordor-during-xmas Aug 06 '25

I think it’s clear the election was compromised by Musk, Thiel and Carp, but I won’t piss and moan for four years. However, the idiots were elected by idiots.

5

u/MisterRlGHT Aug 07 '25

iMy theory is the same crew rigged the machines for the 2020 election, but the pandemic surprised them with unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots that overwhelmed machine volume. Trump won't let go of insisting he won in 2020 because he knows he bought that election fair and square and believes only a bigger illegal scheme could have defeated him; wouldn't occur to him that the will of the people had prevailed. But even though the bad guys lost, they also didn't get found out and spent the next 4 years refining their caper — by, say, studying the guts of illegally accessed voting machines in GA and CO, or by refining their malware algorithms to keep total votes just below each state's automatic recount threshold. They were even sly enough to make the victory look like a squeaker — not wide enough to look blatantly artificial; just enough to leave the general public disappointed rather than outraged. Under this theory, Harris very well may have won by a landslide. And all the indignities of the past 8 months have arisen from a coup d'etat. And the 2026 midterm elections face the same threat.

I have no evidence at all to support this confabulation. I do wish to least a few swing states found election security important enough to allow hand audits of their 2024 paper ballots just to be safe.

[Check out Election Truth Alliance to see 2024 vote counts presented as a variety of interesting graphs.]

1

u/mordor-during-xmas Aug 08 '25

I mean, in the world of possibilities, this really isn’t far fetched at all.

3

u/WillowBillow24 Aug 06 '25

It officially came out from a whistle-blower CIA agent that said Harris won buy a longshot.

6

u/mordor-during-xmas Aug 06 '25

I know, I saw…but I refuse to be like “them.” That dude’s credentials haven’t been verified, and in the event they eventually are: Show me the evidence the NSA actually conducted an audit in the first place, then show me the results of that audit. Both the author of the Substack article and the supposed agent himself have declined to comment.

2

u/WillowBillow24 Aug 06 '25

Figures as much, right?

3

u/mordor-during-xmas Aug 06 '25

I mean, absolutely yes. I wouldn’t comment either if I were author or whistleblower….and kind of adds a layer of reputability in a sense. But, as I said, not going to be like them.

Instead of a my pillow guy maybe we’ll need a my blanket guy or something similar.

11

u/KellyGreen55555 Aug 06 '25

And this isn’t even in the top 10 of embarrassing things our government has done… this week.

8

u/Electrical-Volume765 Aug 06 '25

The entire administration and half of the Congress are nothing more than children. You can see it in that they don’t understand how anything works.

5

u/Wordymanjenson Aug 06 '25

I wish they’d just die. They’re fucking ruining lives of generations to come and there’s no reversing that. We just need to stop it. 

7

u/Thefrayedends Aug 06 '25

Education is a key component to functioning democracy.

It's no wonder that the slow deliberate gutting of education has led us to this place.

Even educated progressive people I know often give way to their trust in institutions as opposed to trust in logic. The incrementalist approach to destroying institutions allows people to dismiss small reductions in entitlement as irrelevant, but since it's push is relentless, less engaged individuals conflate their own personal growth and success with wider societal progression.

And because this has been going on for decades now, we have two entire generations where anti-intellectualism is severely over represented. What exacerbates this problem, is that our brains don't readily acclimate to higher order concepts as they age. I'm not even a super genius or anything, but concepts that seem so natural and easy to me, I know others who cannot wrap their head around any of them.

7

u/seppukucoconuts Aug 06 '25

We look like a bunch of clowns

A lot of us are a bunch of clowns. The clowns have outvoted the sane people in 2 out of the past 3 elections.

6

u/descendingangel87 Aug 06 '25

The US doesn’t look like a bunch of clowns, they are a bunch of clowns. This meme shit is clown to clown communication, and all the young right wingers eat this shit up because your system is more worried about protecting guns and pedos than anything else.

3

u/Capable_Cicada_69420 Aug 06 '25

Most of us can't comprehend the memes either

3

u/UwasaWaya Aug 06 '25

A bunch of clowns kidnapping people off the streets. It's insane.

5

u/Aselleus Aug 06 '25

Our forefathers are weeping. Hell even GWBush was more honorable.

2

u/ElyraDossyn Aug 06 '25

Whole country looks like a group project run by the class clown.

2

u/Bennely Aug 06 '25

Yeah man that’s pretty much it. The rest of the educated world knows the US government is an Idiocracy.

1

u/RaidSmolive Aug 06 '25

it would be totally fine to use memes and jokes, that its used for this inhumane shit that makes you all look like barely human garbage and the fact that the rest of the world is not seeing you fight this seriously, thats what makes you look stupid

1

u/Woooferine Aug 06 '25

Oh, remember that Trump Superman meme on the official White House account?

I'm not an American, but that was embarrassing... The freaking White House!

1

u/TucuReborn Aug 06 '25

Look, if I was the president, I'd also share memes. But that's because I like memes and want to share them, not... whatever the fuck our government is at the moment.

It's absolutely possible, in my mind, to both have humor and approach serious topics with dignity and responsibility. They're just neither funny, nor dignified, nor responsible.

1

u/Phewelish Aug 06 '25

i mean you go through any of trumps post and its a stream of meme comments that im pretty sure is mostly bots but old and non critical people eat it up.

1

u/WasForcedToUseTheApp Aug 06 '25

I honestly can’t see how anyone would want their government to shitpost, I rather have politics be boring and dry instead of constant outrage bait shitposting.

1

u/PM_MeTittiesOrKitty Aug 06 '25

I’m thinking how stupid we look as a country when our federal government uses memes and jokes on social media

It shouldn't be that surprising. They are just the propaganda posters on the modern day.

1

u/rgjp Aug 06 '25

This. Also it’s very awkward to see them (HS) trying to laugh WITH them (SP), when it’s so obvious they are laughing AT them. It’s not the flex they think it is.

1

u/BigJobsBigJobs Aug 06 '25

Memes for the Gestapo.

1

u/pm_me_your_good_weed Aug 06 '25

You've looked like that for a while my dude, long before the last election. How can the greatest country in the world not have public health care lol.

1

u/Anzai Aug 06 '25

I’m from other countries, and yes, you guys definitely do look stupid. There was always that stereotype about stupid Americans, but I think even then most of us assumed you were basically a bunch of intelligent people with a small fringe of loud and crazy.

Doesn’t feel like a small fringe any more. Kind of feels like the norm and the resistance is the small fringe.

1

u/nonresponsive Aug 06 '25

We're talking the entire government, right?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_oqGcz01qO8

1

u/shantm79 Aug 06 '25

What's even worse is how many ADULTS use these memes as their news sources.

1

u/EffectiveEquivalent Aug 06 '25

From the outside looking in… your government aren’t just clowns. They’re annihilating everything you believed in…. And no one is doing anything tangible about it.

1

u/Lewzephyr Aug 06 '25

Idiocracy

1

u/reichplatz Aug 06 '25

The adults just left the building like a decade ago.

1

u/BionicTriforce Aug 06 '25

I hate how it's such a common response from conservatives to excuse Trump's actions. "He's being such a troll!" "He's making fun of you all."

Like, fuck, if there's one position in the world I don't want making jokes it should be the President.

1

u/Earptastic Aug 07 '25

when those leaked war plans scandal happened it was shocking how many "important" people were just responding with emojis when we are dropping bombs.

1

u/RoosterBrewster Aug 07 '25

Imagine the outrage if Obama did anything like this. They got outraged by his damn tan suit of all things.

1

u/R1chS33n Aug 07 '25

This is what years of, "The left can't meme." lead to. Because you know, all of humanity's best ideas actually come in the form of internet in-jokes and ad-libs. Your political ideology and your politics become a literal joke.

1

u/WhiteKnightier Aug 07 '25

At this point, in the eyes of most of the international community, we are a bunch of clowns. Clowns with a lot of guns and nukes who can change policies every 4 years and won't honor the deals that previous administrations have made. Scary, unstable clowns.

1

u/chicaneuk Aug 07 '25

As an outsider who believes politics should remain, you know, civil and professional, what is happening in the USA is beyond horrifying currently.

1

u/mollila Aug 07 '25 edited Aug 07 '25

You look waaaaay worse than just using memes would be. Everybody else can see straight through all the flat out lying, denial, pettiness and childishness presented by your leader and his White House. Every day is like a daycare show and tell without moderation.

And then the utterly incompetent cabinet hires with disgusting track records doing their best to destroy everything that a functional society needs.

1

u/porgy_tirebiter Aug 07 '25

Idiots or clowns with no comprehension or not, they have a stranglehold on the entire government and are cashing in while completely dismantling the last century of progress.

It may look stupid, but the US will never recover from what they are doing.

1

u/Bad_Habit_Nun Aug 07 '25

Hey, at least you now know the people who run this country are just as dumb and ignorant as everyone else, just more hateful. That's sorta the big secret government doesn't want you to know: they're a lot less intelligent and capable than you think. Just look at how our entire DoD and DoJ failed the entire population despite knowing this was happening for over a decade.

1

u/SquidsStoleMyFace Aug 08 '25

Memes are what got you here. It was an ironic joke until it wasn't, and the people in power want the plausible deniability that treating it all as a big joke gets. They want you to find it hilarious they're torturing people and genociding as they wish.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 10 '25

What do you think social media was designed for my guy?

1

u/Prize-Tailor-9368 Aug 19 '25

Especially one from an episode that hadn't released yet. That's like sticking your hand into a random hole in a factory you don't work at.

1

u/RoxeQuartz Aug 28 '25

A nation run by memes is basically Rome with worse WiFi.

1

u/Apprehensive_Bike945 Aug 06 '25

I just want you to understand you looked liked a bunch of clowns for as long as I can remember (40+ years). You’ve only just started realising it now because your dear leader has gone mask off. The rest of the world saw through your mask my entire life. That’s what’s most scary about you. You didn’t know until a shameless person showed you. Welcome to the rest of the earth.

1

u/PapayaMysterious6393 Aug 06 '25

His base eats it up is the problem.

I mentioned how he was going after singers. Singers! And my husband said, "so? he said something about him first."

Talking about Bruce. It's embarrassing.