2020 election

Have you been seeing your favorite Instagram meme accounts posting cringey exchanges with presidential hopeful Mike Bloomberg? You're not imagining things. Bloomberg's campaign has been working with big money-hungry meme accounts like @tank.sinatra to try to reach young voters.  The group of memers is calling themselves "Meme 2020" and is run by strategist Mick Purzycki - chief executive of the controversial Jerry Media marketing company. Jerry Media is the brainchild of @fuckjerry - who was most recently in the news for being at the heart of a meme-crediting controversy a la @thefatjewish. The accounts within the collective are posting fabricated exchanges with Bloomberg's Instagram account, usually involving Bloomberg asking for them to make him seem like hip candidate. Yikes.

According to Know Your Meme, the accounts posting for Meme 2020 are as follows:

• @fuckjerry 
• @fuckadvertisements
• @WhitePeopleHumor
• @TheFunnyIntrovert
• @KaleSalad
• @Sonny5ideUp
• @Tank.Sinatra
• @ShitheadSteve
• @adam.the.creator
• @moistbudda
• @MrsDowJones
• @TrashCanPaul
• @cohmedy
• @NeatDad
• @FourTwenty
• @GolfersDoingThings
• @DrGrayFang
• @MiddleClassFancy
• @DoYouEvenLift 

It's a hefty list with a combined reach of tens of million Instagram users. Most of the accounts are paid to regurgitate other people's content, often from Twitter. It should come as no surprise that they would jump at the attempt to make some money in this manner. Unfortunately for these accounts, their efforts at elevating Bloomberg's campaign are being viewed as incredibly cringey. Other memers are retaliating with parodies of the fake Bloomberg exchanges  - but at this point, is that not free PR for Bloomberg? 

The whole thing is a bit of a confusing mess, especially when considering that the posts' ironic nature makes it less clear that the content is sponsored. We've clearly entered a new era of campaigning, and it looks like we'll just have to buckle up and see what happens. Just keep using your best judgment - even when mindlessly scrolling through memes.

Old habits die hard, and according to this new Twitter meme, you don't have to be in high school to roast people over music. And what kind of people does Twitter just love to troll and meme? Politicians. The latest victim is Mayor Pete Buttigieg, one of several Democratic candidates vying for the 2020 presidency. 

The meme uses an April 2019 photo of Buttigieg making a radio appearance, but in the last month the photo has been used by Twitter users to mock the dude musically. Folks are pairing the photo of Mayor Pete in lime green headphones with "bad" or absurd artists. It's a low-effort meme, but the site seems to be enjoying them. And Bernie Sanders even makes an appearance in a few iterations. We're not going to pretend that the meme is doing anything revolutionary, but we're having fun with it. It's definitely more creative than people calling each other names!

Meet the Shadow team in charge of developing an app meant to help tally the votes from the Iowa caucus on Monday night. The purpose of the app was to help the process run more smoothly, but in the end it proved to be a complete and utter disaster, as precinct chairs supposedly couldn't get the app to actually work, in turn causing a delay in reporting.

The delay was blamed on "inconsistencies" in reporting, but honestly, who really knows what the truth is.

The team is reportedly run by people who worked on Hilary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016. Additionally, 2020 candidate Pete Buttigieg's campaign paid the tech firm over $40,000 in 2019 leading many to suspect foul play.

But this is America, and we can't possibly have problems with corruption, right?

As of right now, we still don't have all the results from the caucus, so while you continue to anxiously refresh the New York Times page, have some hot Twitter takes on the people (rats) behind Shadow, Inc.

What started as Bernie Sanders writing an innocent thank you note to his field staff on a white board turned into memers filling it in with hotter takes and less savory messages. Seriously, people should know better at this point than to post images on the internet of people with white boards. It's just asking for bad news.

Instagram user @bringbackdialup discovered one way to make the Democratic debate last night a bit more bearable. In a multi-photo upload to the image sharing site, he shared that "If you put your phone really close to the top of your tv and tilt it down all these candidates look really big brained." The resulting images of presidential hopefuls such as Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang are absolutely ridiculous, but a welcome laugh for people suffering from election and general political fatigue. 

Can you believe we're already into the 2020 presidential election cycle? Neither can we. Last night's democratic debate certainly came with its fair share of ridiculous moments, including but not limited to our new favorite person Marianne Williamson - spiritual guru, author, and activist. 

No, that is not a joke.

Williamson has been getting meme'd and mocked like crazy for her recent comments on the "Orwellian" nature of government-mandated vaccinations. Last night she may have hit an all-time high with her hippie-like comments including that she planned to "harness love" in order to defeat Trump in the election.

In what feels like the blink of an eye, people have since been creating memes and digging up old tweets made by Williamson, and we gotta say: they're really...something.

Last night was the First Democratic Debate, featuring Beto O'Rourke, Bill Deblasio, Julián Castro, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee, John Delaney, and Tim Ryan. While the first debates tend to say a whole lot of nothing about who will win the favor of the people, Beto O'Rourke was quick shoo-in for most meme-able candidate. At the very beginning of the debate, O'Rourke was asked a question about the economy, and he opted to give a non-answer in both English and Spanish. The move puzzled his opponents (Namely Booker and Warren) and viewers alike. It didn't take long for people on Twitter to roast the Texan's his attempt at a bilingual answer. Here are some of our favorite spicy jabs.