RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Recently, the official White House X account continued its now-familiar pattern of appropriating someone else’s art without permission, posting an AI-slop remix of the Rick and Morty title sequence. Using the show’s original audio and an inconsistent approximation of its distinctive animation style, the administration’s version replaced the titular characters with Trump and JD. Also peppered throughout the clip’s 36-second runtime are a bunch of MAGA culture war greatest hits. Diet Coke? Check. Red hat? Check. Chuck Schumer bad? Check. As with most things one can just prompt into existence, it’s very uninspired, inert, and slapdash. And yet, it’s still so pregnant with meaning.
These propagandists do not deploy pro-Trump parody to ingratiate themselves with existing pop-culture communities, nor are they stealthily seeding dogma for potential converts. With so few actual jokes, their posts barely qualify as MAD Magazine -style satire . In Trump’s AI-infused second term, parody has instead become a culture war salvo that goes well beyond the scope of a typical social media manager searching for a news peg or discourse entry point. MAGA’s intrusion into your moments of respite is the product.
AI slop posts like the White House social team's are displays of dominance and acts of revenge. Their recent Rick and Morty post crystallized how much this has become a bona fide fetish for them and how central nonconsent is to the pleasure. Your entirely warranted knee-jerk revulsion to them sullying that thing you were enjoying is the final key ingredient. Their post is not truly complete until you offer it.
At first blush, one might mistake the MAGA’s mashing of Trump into otherwise neutral bits of pop culture as scale-balancing—mere retribution for a decade spent enduring a supposedly “woke” Hollywood that cast Black or trans performers in familiar roles. But that’s an adjacent and increasingly foggy battle in the online right’s culture war. For all the stink they made over The Odyssey ’s casting decisions , the pearl-clutching and outrage have been a lot harder to sell since the film’s premiere.
Though chronically offline , Christopher Nolan somehow made a film that would end up rebuffing the core grievances of its most noxious audience members: Elliot Page’s brief appearance proved difficult to attack on the merits, while Lupita Nyong’o’s even shorter turn as Helen further exposed the absurdity of the racist tantrum over a Black actress playing “the most beautiful woman in the world” in a story set around the Mediterranean. Adding insult to injury, the film's thesis offers a scathing critique of the nostalgia opiate that undergirds so much of MAGA. Universally beloved and just getting started, Nolan’s Odyssey is on track to easily clear $1 billion and then some, toppling the “go woke, go broke” maypole MAGA had been dancing around for years. Life always imitating art, we’re left with a bunch of unsavory audience members struggling to get a handle on reality now that the king, whose grave they’d been dancing on, is undeniably back at full power.
It’s telling that Elon Musk, the obvious Antinous in this analogy, has been so bothered by Nolan’s boffo B.O. that he’s spent days online pitching the concept of a more “historically accurate” competing film. Initially replying to a Twitter post that proposed he give Mel Gibson $100 million to direct an interpretation of Homer’s epic (minus the diversity and Fabletics armor) with “I’m down,” Musk quickly pivoted to instead promising a feature-length competitor film before 2027 that would be generated entirely by Grok . Musk is no stranger to talking out of his ass , and Grok’s anti-woke Odyssey iteration will invariably suck for myriad reasons, if it’s even brought to fruition. But it’s the speed at which he landed on outsourcing the task to AI that says everything.
For all his faults, Mel Gibson is a well-regarded director. A problematic fave among cinephiles and a seat-filler for the masses, checked out from all the scandals. No matter their politics, anyone who’s seen Apocalypto or The Passion of the Christ would likely be seated for Gibson’s take on the ancient poem brought to life by the pocket change of the world’s wealthiest man. The proposition, if realized, would be a no-look slam dunk—a legitimate job-creating project with an extremely high likelihood of producing something of artistic value that would make its money back plus profit. But there’s the rub. Elon and his fellow aggrieved rabble aren’t actually interested in making art (or money) here. All they really want to make is you upset , and as immediately as possible.
AI has provided them the perfect tool for such petulant goals. It doesn’t just neutralize the years of hard work and focus historically required to hone one’s craft into a shape worthy of public consideration. It also lets them bypass all those other time-sucking obstacles, like forging a personal relationship with a desired collaborating director, actor, or artist, and instead just jack their look with a few prompts. In the real world, the star’s unaffordable quote and the odious politics of MAGA would scuttle the project before the pitch. With AI, that initial rejection never has to happen, and their later protests are icing on the cake.
Coupled with the reach of federal social media accounts, this unscrupulous use of AI gives MAGA’s sadistic streak a new frontier. As more water-cooler and coffeehouse conversations move online, no innocent discussion is safe from interlopers barging in to delight in everyone else’s displeasure. It's the Jackass ethos of ruining some bystander’s day for the bit, digitized and without any of the ingenuity or wit. The White House post, released mere hours after Rick and Morty ’s Season 9 finale, had all the subtlety of Chris Pontius leaping from the bushes in a gorilla suit—and the same goal of farming shocked reactions.
Like Breaking Bad , Rick and Morty became such a cultural pheno...
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