Floor Charts Staged to Go Viral: Senator Mike Lee's "Meme New Deal"
The saga of one Senator loading up on memes to compare the Green New Deal to Ronald Reagan riding a velociraptor, Luke Skywalker on a Tauntaun, Aquaman and more.
“This image has as much to do with overcoming communism in the 20th century as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st century.”
-Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), March 26, 2019. (Transcript)
Two years ago tomorrow, Utah Senator Mike Lee (R) spoke for more than 10 minutes on the Senate floor about the Green New Deal.1
In a moment staged to ensure it went viral2, the Senator’s office queued up posters with a handful of meme-able moments the internet generation knows on sight, from Star Wars to Ronald Reagan on a velociraptor3 and ‘Sharknado 4.’ This was all to serve one purpose: Counter a narrative with his own.
There really is no comparable moment to this since I started tracking props and posters in Congress in 2012. Moments from either chamber that have also gone viral - like Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) wearing a hoodie4 as a tribute to Treyvon Martin - either did not mimic Senator Lee’s tone, nor were they as elaborate in their use of props. (Unfortunately for Senator Flake, “Jurassic Pork” never really took the internet by storm.)
Whether you agree or disagree with Senator Lee, there’s no doubt that some members of Congress are more adept than others at harnessing the Congressional cameras for their own purposes. But in this instance, rather than trying to convince cable programs, national news outlets and internet influencers to speak his language, Senator Lee spoke theirs instead: humor.
Does it matter if a majority of news coverage panned the Senators remarks? Or, as the Daily Beast so aptly put it:
“Senator Mike Lee, Reagan, a Machine Gun, and a Velociraptor”
If the headline doesn't make any sense to you, the entirety of the Utah senator's argument against the Green New Deal won't either.
No, not really. Images travel faster than words in the ecosystems of Facebook and Twitter, not to mention e-mail forwards, Snapchats, and text chains. (Senator Lee wasn’t alone in uploading his video to other platforms - news outlets did, too. Because reach, clicks, shares, and - hopefully - conversions into subscriptions are everything online.)
Even The Late Show with Stephen Colbert amplified5 the daylights out of the Senator’s play. (And ridiculed it.) And 1.4 million views later - just on YouTube - it is safe to say that Senator Lee reached the audiences he wanted.
Who were they? The ones who didn’t normally tune in. The individuals who do not follow him on Twitter, or know who he is back in Utah. Those “lurkers” on reddit who do not comment - but surf and click. And yes, liberals who pay zero attention to Republican Senators until they do something worth tweeting about.
(And before you ask — yes, this moment did cost taxpayers money. The average chart or poster runs anywhere between $25 and $100 and typically it comes out of each office’s budget. Historically, members and staff are pretty cagey about revealing specifics when asked.)
I’m sure this is not the last time we will see internet memes turned into floor speeches in the House and Senate - but I doubt we will see something as elaborate, and certainly not until the COVID-19 pandemic ends.
Senator Lee’s charts and posters were just a handful out of thousands in the FloorCharts archive. I encourage you to surf away or Tweet @FloorCharts if I can help you. Alternatively, if you only want to see the most popular charts, props and posters according to the 55,000 followers on Tumblr, click here.
Now, in case you’re curious and want to read Senator Lee’s speech (rather than watch it or stare at the charts), here it is.6
Remarks on the Green New Deal
MR. LEE: Mr. President, fear has become an all too prevalent quality in America's political discourse, and, unfortunately, fear is unavoidable when debating the substance of the resolution before this body today; that is, climate change, socialism, and the Green New Deal.
On entering this debate, I have a little fear in my heart as well. My fear at this moment may be just a little different than that of some of my colleagues. Unlike some of my colleagues, I am not immediately afraid of what carbon emissions unaddressed might do to our environment in the near term future or our civilization or our planet in the next few years. Unlike others, I am not immediately afraid of what the Green New Deal will do to our economy and our government. After all, this isn't going to pass--not today, not anytime soon, certainly.
Rather, after reading the Green New Deal, I am mostly afraid of not being able to get through this speech with a straight face. I rise today to consider the Green New Deal with the seriousness it deserves.
This is, of course, a picture of former President Ronald Reagan naturally firing a machine gun while riding on the back of a dinosaur. You will notice a couple of important features here.
First of all, the rocket launcher is strapped to President Reagan's back, and then the stirring unmistakable patriotism of the velociraptor holding up a tattered American flag, a symbol of all it means to be an American.
Now, critics might quibble with this depiction of the climactic battle of the Cold War because, while awesome, in real life there was no climactic battle. There was no battle with or without velociraptors. The Cold War, as we all know, was won without firing a shot. But that quibble actually serves our purposes here today because this image has as much to do with overcoming communism in the 20th century as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st century.
The aspirations of the proposal have been called radical. They have been called extreme, but, mostly, they are ridiculous. There isn't a single serious idea here--not one. To illustrate, let me highlight two of the most prominent goals produced by the plan's authors.
Goal No. 1, the Green New Deal calls essentially for the elimination of airplanes. Now, this might seem merely ambitious for politicians who represent the densely populated northeastern United States, but how is it supposed to work for our fellow citizens who don't live somewhere
between Washington, DC, and Boston? In a future without air travel, how are we supposed to get around the vast expanses of, say, Alaska during the winter? Well, I will tell you how.
Tauntauns is that beloved species of reptile mammals native to the ice planet of Hoth. Now, while perhaps not as efficient in some ways as airplanes or as snowmobiles, these hairy bipedal species of space lizards offer their own unique benefits. Not only are tauntauns carbon neutral, but according to a report a long time ago and issued far, far away, they may even be fully recyclable and useable for their warmth, especially on a cold night.
What about Hawaii? Isolated, 2,000 miles out into the Pacific Ocean, under the Green New Deal's effective airplane prohibition, how are people there supposed to get to and from the mainland and how are they supposed to maintain that significant portion of their economy that is based on tourism?
At that distance, swimming would, of course, be out of the question, and jet skis are notorious gas guzzlers. No, all residents of Hawaii would be left with is this. This is a picture of Aquaman, a superhero from the undersea kingdom of Atlantis but, notably here, a founding member of the Super Friends.
I draw your attention to the 20-foot impressive seahorse he is riding. Under the Green New Deal, this is probably Hawaii's best bet. Now, I am the first to admit that a massive fleet of giant, highly trained seahorses would be cool and it would be really, really awesome, but we have to consider a few things. We have no idea about scalability or domestic capacity in this sector. The last thing we want is to ban all airplanes and only then find out that China or Russia may have already established strategic hippocampus programs designed to cut the United States out of the global market. We must not allow and cannot tolerate a giant seahorse gap.
For goal No. 2, the Green New Deal anticipates the elimination of all cows. Talking points released by the sponsors of the resolution the day it was introduced cited the goal of ``fully get[ting] rid of''--and I will paraphrase a little bit here--``[flatulating] cows.''
Now, I share their concern, but honestly, I think you have to remember that if the cows smell bad, just wait until they get a whiff of the seahorses.
Back to the cattle, I have a chart to illustrate this trend. As you can see on the left, these little cows represent the bovine population of America today. On the right is the future population under the Green New Deal. We would go from about 94 million cows to zero cows--no more milk, no more cheese, no more steak, and no more hamburgers.
Over the State work period last week, I visited some farms to find out for myself what Utah's own bovine community might think about the Green New Deal. Every cow I spoke to said the same thing: Boo.
The authors of this proposal would protest that these goals are not actually part of the Green New Deal but were merely included in supporting documents accidentally sent out by the office of the lead sponsor in the House of Representatives. This only makes my point. The supporters of the Green New Deal want Americans to trust them to reorganize our entire society and our entire economy, to restructure our very way of life, and they couldn't even figure out how to send out the right press release.
The Green New Deal is not a serious policy document because it is not a policy document at all; it is, in fact, an aesthetic one. The resolution is not an agenda of solutions; it is a token of elite tribal identity, and endorsing it, a public act of piety for the chic and woke. And on those embarrassing terms, it is already a resounding success. As Speaker Pelosi herself put it, ``The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they're for it, right?'' Right.
Critics will no doubt chastise me for not taking climate change seriously, but, please, nothing could be further from the truth. No Utahn needs to hear pious lectures about the gravity of climate change from politicians from other States, for it was only in 2016, as viewers of the Syfy network will well remember, when climate change hit home in Utah, when our own State was struck not simply by a tornado but by a tornado with sharks in it.
These images are from the indispensable documentary film ``Sharknado 4.'' They captured the precise moment when one of the tornado sharks crashed through the window of Utah's Governor, Gary Herbert. A true Utah hero and a fine American, Governor Herbert--who, by the way, is an incredible athlete and expert tennis player--bravely fought off the animal with the tennis racket that he keeps by his desk precisely for occasions such as these.
So let's be real clear. Climate change is no joke, but the Green New Deal is a joke. It is the legislative equivalent of Austin Powers' Dr. Evil demanding sharks with ``frickin' lasers'' on their heads.
The Green New Deal is not the solution to climate change. It is not even part of the solution. In fact, it is part of the problem. The solution to climate change won't be found in political posturing or virtue signaling like this. It won't be found in the Federal Government at all. Do you know where the solution can be found? In churches, in wedding chapels, and in maternity wards across the country and around the world. This is the real solution to climate change: babies.
Climate change is an engineering problem--not social engineering but the real kind. It is a challenge of creativity, ingenuity, and most of all, technical innovation. Problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws; they are solved by more humans, more people, meaning bigger markets for innovation. More babies will mean more forward-looking adults, the sort we need to tackle long-term, large-scale problems.
American babies in particular are likely going to be wealthier, better educated, and more conservation-minded than children raised in still industrializing countries. As economist Tyler Cowen recently wrote on this very point, addressing this very topic, ``by having more children, you are making your nation more populous--thus boosting its capacity to solve [climate change].''
Finally, children are a mark of the kind of personal, communal, and societal optimism that is the true prerequisite for meeting national and global challenges together.
The courage needed to solve climate change is nothing compared with the courage needed to start a family. The true heroes of this story aren't politicians, and they aren't social media activists; they are moms and dads and the little boys and girls whom they are at this very moment putting down for naps or helping with their homework, building tree houses, and teaching them how to tie their shoes.
The planet does not need for us to think globally and act locally so much as it needs us to think family and act personally. The solution to climate change is not this unserious resolution that we are considering this week in the Senate but, rather, the serious business of human flourishing. The solution to so many of our problems at all times and in all places is to fall in love, get married, and have some kids.
C-SPAN. Senator Lee begins speaking at roughly 2:08:00 mark.