Th-th-th-that’s All Folx!

This isn’t blanket praise; most memes are very dumb, taking a meat tenderizer to nuance, obsessed with granular cultural minutiae that frames hyperspecific sensations as universal. In the last month, though, as the United States again combusted in protests in response to the police killings of unarmed Black citizens, you could see the memes reorienting to the moment. The struggle for civil rights in this country is unremitting, the shape of it wearily familiar, but the discourse this time felt different, renewed. It’s a feeling traced in our memes, many of which assume the shape of our most beloved cartoon franchises: Patia Borja, the creator of the popular meme account @patiasfantasyworld, posted a dizzying image of Tweety, in a style popular from 90s airbrush flips, holding a glock and vowing to abolish the police. The account @sugarbombingstore started adapting Sanrio’s kawaii multiverse as antifacist activists: Pompompurin crushing a patrol car, the words “No cops, no masters” floating overhead. You can buy a silk handkerchief printed with one image, depicting Hello Kitty sailing over a rainbow on a unicorn, dropping a molotov cocktail onto a burning patrol car. Underneath it reads, “A new world in our hearts.”

If a meme can be defined as a visual shorthand that replicates frictionlessly, cartoons are an ur-text. Cartoons are so ingrained in the popular imagination that they become their own emotional lexicography: benign lethargy (Garfield), self-pity (Charlie Brown), cultural absolutism (Mickey Mouse). Cartoons are a visual comfort food. They hover above the surface, deathless, like a buoy in a typhoon of bad feelings. Bugs Bunny looks the same as he always has, waggishly dangling a carrot, inexplicably walking on his hind legs, which has never seemed to alarm anyone. That constancy is incredibly powerful, his appearance like a balm, a Cinecolor madeleine from a less irrational time (although that’s a mirage—every period in human history has been irrational). So the collision of these two ideas in a new protest art feels natural. The artist Johnny Ryan, whose illustrations are as gleefully gruesome as any Peter Saul, has reimagined Bugs as a ribald anti-police mascot, either being violated by or rabidly tearing at, dismembering, or firing a cannonball into Elmer Fudd-as-beat-cop with elastic cartoon violence (lopping off a cop’s hindquarters like a Christmas ham, for example).

Occasioned by intense imagery of hysterical police violence and an awakening to the brutality and indifference of the state, these memes function as both a reflexive coping mechanism and an effective conduit of information. They engage a swath of people in political discourse who would otherwise be excluded, either because they have historically found it too obtuse, or boring. Cartoons present a low barrier to entry. On Twitter, the most articulate writers routinely defer to Simpsons screenshots (or the refined analog, King of the Hill) to express complicated ideas economically, with varying success. There’s an understanding of cartoons as inherently anti-establishment, and their application as memes become a humble morsel of dissent, a piece of samizdat, given freely and shared widely.

A recent favorite, from the artist Martine Gutierrez, is a supercut of the title cards of Hollywood production studios and sitcoms altered to protest demands, like “Defund police” in the Disney font, an echo of the work of the Billboard Liberation Front, who in the 90s cannily augmented outdoor advertisements to reveal their insidiousness (a billboard for Camel cigarettes, the neon tampered with to read “Am I Dead Yet?”). The streetwear brand Ignored Prayers posted to Instagram an image of Bart Simpson leaning coolly against his skateboard, his talk bubble, where the familiar “Eat my shorts” would usually live, instead filled with the demand “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” These memefied calls for justice in the police killing of Taylor have been criticized as insensitive, which they are, but the intention, and its vehicle, remain what they are: a common denominator of communication and a plea for humanity.

This expression migrates offline—a barrel-chested Garfield spray painted on a wall, declaring “I hate Mondays and cops;” a mural of Franklin of the Peanuts gang leading Snoopy and Charlie Brown in a Black Lives Matter march in Brooklyn, or being deployed in a pamphlet primer on the racist history of policing (Snoopy is as durable an avatar as they come, a shorthand for pluralistic goodwill). The illustrator and cartoonist Eric Kostiuk Williams has taken to pasting images of neuroses icon Cathy at last seizing her destiny, stepping on a police officer’s head and wailing, in a subtle update to her woeful refrain, “ACK-AB!"

The best of these address what the Situationists called “the spectacle,” how capitalism pacifies and distracts from the ways it oppresses and subjugates. Cartoons enjoy a sheen of benevolence, despite the fact that most of them were designed as, or later perverted into instruments of advertising and consumerism. Because they’re ostensibly for kids, they enjoy a presumed, nearly incorruptible purity, even when they’re used to sell fast-fashion and hamburgers. Like the Situationists, who in a potent blend of Marxism and surrealism worked to identify and disrupt capitalism’s blunting forces, or the artist Ron English, who contorts cartoon mascots like Tony the Tiger and Ronald McDonald into grotesque mutations that better mirror the destructive effects of those companies, memes that torque consumerist icons into criticisms of police brutality and systematic racism also become savvy critiques of carceral capitalism, which policing helps to uphold. The cognitive dissonance of the saccharine-sweet Hello Kitty working to dismantle the police state is jarringly profound.

As protest art, memes are distinct, less raw than street murals and graffiti, less polished than graphic design or painting, but speaking to the same place. They can read as glib or dispassionate, but that’s a feint. They’re dismissed at your peril. When a wide-eyed Thumper urges you to prepare for the coming societal collapse, you tend to believe it.

Max Lakin is a journalist in New York City. His writing has also appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, GARAGE, The New Yorker, and more.