The following article contains discussions of extreme sexual content and polarizing political subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.
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Welcome to 2023! As if we Canadians didn’t have enough problems right now, seeing as whole swaths of our land are on fire at this time of writing, we have been forced to become aware of the imminent American presidential election. The presidential election, much like a herpes flare-up, creeps up on us every so often and makes us brutally aware of the half-thawed corpses whom the RNC and DNC decided are appropriate for public office. On the “lesser of evils” side is Sleepy Joe, and on the “would throw a baby in a woodchipper for $1000” side is the imperishable Donald Trump and a new, horrible villain called Ron DeSantis.
I’d barely heard of the guy until he started fighting Disney in court. This situation is deeply muddled and ongoing, but in short, Disney World could lose a tax status that allows it to run as a self-contained fiefdom. This court case made DeSantis a household name, but for my friends in Florida, they have long known Governor DeSantis as a Captain Planet villain…he brought in what’s nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill, in which merely referencing the existence of non-straight, non-cisgender peoples in public school gets you sent to the Doom Dimension. DeSantis then went about signing a number of other transphobic bills that limit personal freedoms, such as using a bathroom for a gender you weren’t assigned at birth…I need to pause here. Why are alt-right conservatives so self-assured in constantly talking about trans people taking shits? It’s just like in the 2000s when they couldn’t stop talking about men having sex together, and how this was a national problem for some reason. I’ve never seen a trans woman do something obscene in a women’s public bathroom, and I doubt I ever will. You are more likely to see people doing fentanyl or getting into fistfights in a public bathroom than you are to see some womanly penis, because everything to do with America’s recent wave of transphobia was manufactured. Any political pundit screaming about “wokeness” or roving gangs of trans people are doing so just to distract from one of their failings.
Back on topic: DeSantis is more of a danger to society than Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t have the initiative. He can’t manage a business to save his life, and as I was writing this article, he was hit with 37 federal charges, not limited to but including storing classified government documents in his bathroom. He’s a living joke, only revered by insane people because they made up so many fables about him. Meanwhile, DeSantis has clear goals in mind, and is at least smart enough to play the system around him and do things like shuffle around Venezuelan immigrants and potentially create a fascist empire. For the longest while, all anyone could hope for was that Disney would destroy DeSantis through court procedures, but all these scuffles are bleeding Florida taxpayers dry, and the Disney case will be seen by a judge who favoured the Don’t Say Gay Bill. However, DeSantis’s downfall could come through the same thing that has boosted and destroyed so many political campaigns before: social media shitposts.
I’ll start with the less disgusting DeSantis memes. At the very start, DeSantis was caught eating pudding with his fingers like an overripe toddler on numerous occasions. Everybody has their quirks, but there is no good reason for a neurotypical grown man to be spooning Jell-O Pudding into his mouth during a conference meeting, especially when this is the same man bulldozing human rights in a plea to appeal to the most hateful voters alive. His pudding proclivities soon took off as a meme on Twitter. Right after this, the public was exposed to another one of DeSantis’s shameful habits: making stupid faces.
DeSantis recently went to Japan for some reason, and during a press conference, a reporter asked him how he felt about falling behind Trump in the advance polls, to which DeSantis made the gooniest face imaginable. This is a very mundane political question, all things considered…politicians are often put on the spot like this just to gauge their reactions to failure or shortcomings, but in Pudding Boy’s case, he put on a mug like he’d just received an ice-cold enema. It was like a Howard Dean scream for the 2020s. Hatred of DeSantis had been boiling on Twitter for a long while, and his silly-face-making finally gave them a reason to turn him into a memeable spectacle.
Apparently, DeSantis has a history of making silly faces out of nowhere. Twitter denizens began to compare these faces to the “wojak“, a common meme format depicting minimalist human faces in any number of ways…the meme originated as a Polish 4chan user’s expression of loneliness, but the face has evolved into a wide spectrum of characters and expressions. One of these offshoots is the “soyjak“, based on a “quirky” facial expression that many white men seem to just habitually make when photographed. In 2020, two men were especially excited to see plant-based fried foods at KFC, and this histrionic reaction was turned into its own soyjak. Hell, I’ve parodied this meme myself in one of my Mission Earth illustrations. The DeSantis face very closely resembled that “white guy shocked face”, and so, a user thought to create the Ronjak. One of the first known edits depicted two DeSantii excitedly pointing at a pudding cup, with fingers that were no doubt moments away from being submerged in that same pudding.
Not long after this, someone traced the original DeSantis face into the traditional minimalist wojak design. Several variants followed based on alternate angles and different faces: sometimes Ron was reacting with awe at some fresh pudding, other times he was gaping in fear at a transgender pride flag. Far-right Twitter users tried to use this as an example of “the left can’t meme”, a catchphrase claiming left-wing people are inherently incapable of making funny memes, but the Ronjak seemed to be embraced by all angles of the political spectrum. However, his campaign staff made a critical error by publicly acknowledging the meme.
Internet culture over the last two decades has proved that the only way to let an unflattering meme die out is to ignore it. It may be difficult, but one must let the meme run its course until people move on to the next thing – which happens almost every week on the modern internet. In this case, the DeSantis campaign admitting they were analyzing the Ronjak was like a call to action for Twitter users who loathe DeSantis. It’s middle school rules: if you let the rest of the class know you hate being called “Cheese Breath”, everybody is going to start calling you Cheese Breath for the rest of the school year. The users barking “left can’t meme” were no longer enough of a deterrent from posting the Ronjak; why be dissuaded by a stranger with an anime girl in a MAGA hat for an avatar when you know for a fact that the neo-fascist’s PR team hates it when you post his silly faces? Users reacted with edits of a Starship Troopers scene, declaring, “It’s afraid…it’s afraid!“
In the meantime, users of alternative social media website Tumblr saw their own DeSantis meme. Tumblr has long been known as an unapologetically esoteric website, having seen incidents such as the amputated toe necklace, a post by author John Green being edited into a love letter about sucking cock, and countless fake life stories (such as the infamous “oppa homeless style“). In this particular incident, one Floridian Tumblr user named curioscurio found themselves at their wits end of dealing with DeSantis’s blatantly fascist policies. On 23 May 2023, they made an announcement: “I think, if we all work hard and really Goncharov it, we could get Ron DeSantis to deny that he uses heat suppressants on national TV.”
Goncharov refers to a nonsensical bootleg shoe tag claiming the existence of “the greatest mafia movie ever made” and produced by Martin Scorsese. The “film” became a Tumblr meme in 2022, with users animatedly discussing their favourite scenes, characters, musical cues, etc., in spite of the film never actually existing. This fandom activity even fooled people off-site, who soon became frustrated when they tried to locate the film on torrent and streaming websites. The act of Goncharov-ing something refers to gassing up a completely false concept, and in this case, it was the concept of Ron DeSantis needing to use “heat suppressants”, because…oh, hold onto your boots for this one.
There is a relatively underground sexual fetish called alpha-beta-omega. Characters in this fetish universe experience animal-like mating urges, based on the outdated theory that wolf packs have internal rankings. At the top of the “Omegaverse” ranking is the alpha, who seeks out submissives via the pheromones they generate when in heat. At the bottom of the ranking is the omega, who emits those pheromones, and “slick”, equivocal to human vaginal secretion. “Heat suppressants” are an item in the Omegaverse that omegas take to subside their mating urges. With this in mind, user curioscurio was suggesting that if enough people suggested Ron DeSantis was an omega, he would be forced to admit on a national level that he was not a creature of the a/b/o community. (The alpha-beta-omega lore is frequently referred to with these slashes rather than as a straightforward acronym, because without them, it becomes a slur against Australian Aborigine peoples. It’s never a good sign when your fetish can be truncated as a racist slur.)
A fellow Tumblr user added onto curioscurio’s post, innocently adding to the joke in a different direction: they assumed these heat suppressants were meant to tolerate temperature, and joked how a Floridian man like DeSantis could withstand Florida’s weather. Curioscurio politely replied, “I’m sorry to tell you this. But that’s not what heat suppressants are.” They created a comic about their scenario that same day, but remarked they were unable to post it to Twitter due to technical issues. Still though, curioscurio and other Tumblr users continued to joke about the omega DeSantis, until they created one particularly foul image: the Ron DeSantis Omega Proof infographic.
There is nothing especially funny about it. It depicts an edited photograph of DeSantis and his wife walking on the beach, with several Omegaverse traits applied to DeSantis; it provides more repulsive mental images than it does laughs. However, what Tumblr users found funniest about the image was not its contents, but how quickly it was flagged by Tumblr’s automatic content flagging system.
Tumblr users have long regarded this system as a joke…early in its operation, the system would flag images of sand dunes and sunsets as “sexually explicit content” due to these images containing vaguely flesh-coloured shapes. At the same time, illustrated and real-life pornography was (and still is) abundant elsewhere on the website. However, the system came for “Omega Proof” almost instantaneously. Some users tried to repost the image, and quickly found that their screenshots were also flagged for explicit content; the leading theory is that the image itself is now blocked sitewide by Tumblr’s flagging system. I myself reblogged a fresh repost of “Omega Proof” as a test, but I soon found it had been hidden from my blog and was only visible to myself. Days later, a popular Tumblr user named pissvortex put out a beacon asking if the image had been banned outright, which increased user interest in finding the uncensored image. At this point, the image was funny not because of its content, but because it had been determined so grotesque that it needed to be banned on a site-wide level.
Tumblr is a relatively left-leaning website with users who are either aware of DeSantis and dislike him, or would dislike him if they knew more about him. People on Tumblr quickly began to associate DeSantis with intrusive transphobic laws and a nonsensical image depicting him as a “slick”-leaking breedable submissive. Users hated him for what he was capable of, but moreover, they could no longer take him seriously as a person. These users begun to joke about DeSantis as if he truly were a deeply-repressed beast in heat, much like user curioscurio had hoped for. Much like the Ronjak, this infrastructural resistance turned a sub-par image into a contagious anecdote.
At the end of the day, two major social media websites developed their own absurdist mockeries of a hateful politician. For many users, especially those outside of America, it was the first impression they ever had of him – there are more people in Europe who know DeSantis as just a pudding-eating creature who occasionally goes into heat. Sure, this is funny, but we shouldn’t stop taking taking Ron DeSantis seriously. I sometimes get flashbacks to 2015-2016 when we all couldn’t believe Donald fucking Trump was running for president of the United States…the announcement was so absurd that Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County comic series returned afte a 25 year hiatus to mock this presidential campaign. The jokes were abundant, the mockery was widespread…and yet, Trump’s team knew what to say to appeal to a particularly gullible voting class. He’s going to drain the swamp! He says what everyone’s thinking! (Although that “everyone” was a pretty small demographic.) And then, he emboldened all the worst people alive, and we spent four years dealing with the rise of neo-nazis and incels who worshipped Trump like a god even though he regularly forgot where he was. DeSantis is a far more dangerous version of Trump. I wouldn’t mind seeing him try to explain why he’s not an omega on live television, but to be honest, I’d rather never see him in public office ever again.
In spite of everything both you and I have seen, I have faith that human decency will prevail. People are getting tired of living surrounded by hatred. My country remains adamant that gender identity is a personal right, and in America, states like Maryland, Connecticut, Washington, Minnesota, and likely more to come have recently declared themselves “sanctuary states”. If you so dare as decide you want to live the rest of your life as a different gender, you can do so there. Even the rest of Florida is telling DeSantis’s clan to back off. It’s fun to call him a nasty little pudding boy, but we need to also keep our voices loud in the more serious political sphere.
People transing their genders, or realizing they don’t have to conform to rigid gender roles, will one day no longer be a big deal. It wasn’t always this big of a deal! So many movies from the 2000s and earlier used the “man in a dress” trope as a joke to the point where it just became a household concept at one point. I mean, hell, look at the entirety of Some Like It Hot or Connie & Carla. Drag is just playing a campy character, and transsexualism is just deciding you’d like to live within another gender binary. I don’t care what microcosms on Twitter are saying…transgender culture didn’t affect others until about a year ago, when American Republicans decided they needed a new punching-bag in place of their various failings.
If someone decides they’d like to live as a woman, they’re willingly taking on some of the most dangerous, judgemental living conditions they could possibly live under. That’s bravery. You can take a shit in the same public bathroom as me. You can shop at the women’s clothing store I work at. If you, with all your heart, want to be called a woman, then that’s all I need to believe you’re a woman just like me. It’s just unfortunate that we now have to deal with troglodytes like DeSantis deciding transgender women using public bathrooms is more of a threat to public safety than rampant mass shootings or Catholic clergy sex abuse.
I hate to get so serious in the same article that I explain the alpha-beta-omega fetish in, but never forget to vote. Vote, and demonstrate, and raise hell. It’s not a one-or-the-other type of thing. This is our world, not the world of the shadowy handful of rancid old bigots who think they’re smarter than us. Like my uncle Hunter used to say, in democracy, you have to be a player. If we don’t flex our democratic rights, we’ll lose them one day. And, if we don’t exercise our freedom of speech by spreading nonsense like Ron DeSantis’s omega proof, we’ll lose that too. Sometimes, participating in democracy means going to the polls and telling your friends Ron DeSantis got railed by three alphas in exchange for a box of Jell-O brand pudding. If it works, it works.
The Gonzo Brigadoon 
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