"Own the libs"

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“Raise your hand if you’ve ever posted anything online to quote unquote own the libs,” President Trump’s Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley recently asked a crowd of high schoolers. Most of the teens in the audience raised their hands, then exploded into uproarious applause. “I know that it’s fun and that it can feel good,” Haley continued, “But step back and think about what you’re accomplishing when you do this — are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading?”

It would be ironic for a Trump official to admonish the youth for inflammatory political tactics if irony hadn’t died in 2016. But with Haley’s utterance of the phrase IRL, the concept of “owning the libs” officially went mainstream.

To “own” someone on the internet is to dominate and humiliate them, and the “libs” can loosely be defined as anyone to the left of Sean Hannity. If you hate yourself enough to read political commentary all day on Twitter dot com, you already know that “owning the libs” is an often-sung refrain.

To own the libs is to partake in the pettiest of culture wars. But moreover, to own the libs is to own yourself, no matter which side of the political spectrum you fall on. As comedian Patrick Monahan, an early adopter of the meme, tells Rolling Stone, owning the libs is “laughing as you post ‘Trump is still your President’ memes in Facebook threads while the bank forecloses on your farm. It comes down to a need for community and some kind of cultural ‘win’ [for the right] since they perceive culture to be against them at all times.”

The actual actions that yield successful lib-ownage vary.

“The funny thing about owning the libs is that it’s textbook performative virtue signaling, from people who say they hate that,” Monahan says.

Boycotting corporations that take a progressive political stance or patronizing companies perceived as right-wing are common ways to own the libs. After John “Papa John” Schnatter blamed his falling pizza sales on NFL players kneeling during the national anthem, right-wing conspiracy maven Jack Posobiec had his rehearsal dinner catered by the national pizza chain — and at least one Twitter user commented, “Eating horrible pizza at my wedding to own the libs.” When Netflix inked a deal with Barack and Michelle Obama, alt-right culture warriors claimed to have canceled their subscriptions to the streaming service in protest. Last fall, Keurig pulled its ads from Sean Hannity’s broadcast, following criticism of the Fox News host’s coverage of Alabama Senate Candidate Roy Moore’s sexual misconduct allegations. Hannity Heads rebelled against the company by smashing their Keurigs.

“Owning the libs” in its current form — i.e. blatant self-sabotage for dumb political reasons — first emerged when a user tweeted at Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, attaching a photo of himself lying face down in a dumpster.

At least on Twitter, the actual phrase “own the libs” can be traced back to June 2015, when user @randygdub tweeted, “thinkin about the one guy who laid down in a dumpster to own libs online and hoping ted cruz does it too.”

Reached for comment about his take on the meme now, @randygdub says, “A guy laying in a dumpster is the reason Trump is president now.”

He’s not wrong. Conscious acts of “triggering” the libs amped up considerably during the 2016 election, as Trump’s political rise corresponded with the intensification of online culture wars. (Some time after Trump took office, the conventional syntax of the meme slightly shifted to “owning” the libs, although “triggering the libs” is still alive and well.)

In October 2017, it felt as though we had reached peak lib-ownage, when a member of Turning Point USA — the anti-PC culture, conservative campus organization — protested college safe spaces by wearing a literal diaper.

To be fair, right-wing culture warriors made fools of themselves for the sole purpose of pissing off the left long before the rise of social media. After France declined to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush supporters protested the country by purchasing bottles of French wine and dumping them out in the streets of New York and tried to rebrand French fries as “freedom fries.”

As Wilson tells Rolling Stone, “This idea that conservative philosophy can be replaced with trolling is so fundamentally not conservative, and the fact that people on the right love it so much is because of their insecurities — the whole idea on the right is that, ‘Oh liberals are so much smarter than us, "

While the act of “owning the libs” is mostly a right-wing phenomenon, the left has co-opted the phrase as a straightforward way to comment on this absurdist style of politics. When Trump tweeted, “The great success of this Administration is making [the media] do and say things that even they can’t believe they are saying,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes observed:


Chris Hayes
✔
@chrislhayes
This is wonderfully honest. "The great success" of the Trump administraiton is....pwning the libs!

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
The Fake News is going crazy making up false stories and using only unnamed sources (who don’t exist). They are totally unhinged, and the great success of this Administration is making them do and say things that even they can’t believe they are saying. Truly bad people!

David Frum, an editor at the Atlantic and former George W. Bush speechwriter, tells Rolling Stone, “When people are losing politically, they retreat from politics and take refuge in cultural criticism.” Even though Republicans control two-thirds of state houses, the executive and the legislative branches, they still feel this underdoggian impulse to score culture war points.

“People on the left want to talk about Medicare-for-all and universal basic income and federal job guarantees,” Frum says. “They have a series of things they want to do with the state [and] big ideas that they want the public to think about. Conservatism really doesn’t have those right now.”

It’s worth noting that there are plenty of liberals doing their darnedest to out-own the conservatives. Shortly after Trump won the election, a New Balance VP told a Wall Street Journal reporter, “The Obama admin turned a deaf ear to us, and frankly with President-Elect Trump, we feel things are going to move in the right direction.” In response, liberals began burning their sneakers in protest.

In the era of President Donald Trump, during his campaign for the presidency and nearly two years as commander in chief, many Republicans and conservatives have adopted a new ethos: own the libs at all costs.

The expression to "own the libs" is a often used as a tongue-in-cheek criticism of obscure but increasingly common right-wing tactics ranging from upending GOP orthodoxy on policy, to throwing your own expensive coffee machine out the window in protest of an ad boycott, to wearing diapers during a campus demonstration.

It simply means that Republicans enjoy to a great degree, sometimes even more than actual policy achievements, opportunities to make Democrats and liberals feel bad or face plant. The conservatives who like to own the libs do it because it feels good and it's funny.

Owning the libs has come into full effect in 2018. Most recently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions chuckled and mimicked part of the "lock her up!" chant directed at Hillary Clinton during a speech to high-school-aged conservatives.

Groups like the Young America's Foundation and Turning Point USA have vast networks across college campuses where students can organize, host events, and propel themselves into careers in media and politics. Both YAF and TPUSA, while at odds with one another, utilize a heavy strategy of provoking what they view as a liberal control of America's colleges and universities.

The expression lives and breathes on the internet, with Twitter as its home base.

Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator and editor in chief of the highly successful, right-leaning website The Daily Wire told Business Insider in a phone interview that while owning the libs can be a funny, sarcastic game on Twitter, it is also representative of a larger problem on the conservative right.

"Ticking off the left by just saying nasty things is not productive," he said. "And it wasn't defeating political correctness, it's actually exacerbating political correctness. Because when yo''re a jerk just to piss people off then the natural reaction by people tends to be 'well we need more restrictions on speech, we need more political correctness, not less.'"

In some ways, Shapiro is one of the original owners of the libs. For years, he has given regular speeches at college campuses where he discusses conservative ideas and argues with progressive protesters. He also hosts one of the top podcasts on iTunes, during which he drinks out of a mug emblazoned with the slogan "LEFTIST TEARS."

One individual who has helped take the phrase into the mainstream is the Twitter troll @ComfortablySmug, often just referred to as "Smug." He rose to infamy by spreading false information during Hurricane Sandy, and now he regularly targets Democrats and boosts the president's tweets and actions.

In addition to owning the libs, Smug has also made a habit of tweeting at Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, often telling him to resign, that he is a disgrace, or that his loss in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries was a dodged bullet for the United States. Rubio's staff are very much aware of Smug's tweets, which they often find funny but also extremely annoying at times.

The most powerful example is Trump himself. The former reality television star bulldozed over more than a dozen Republican challengers and a Democratic nominee in Hillary Clinton in 2016 by mocking, name calling, and beating his chest.

There are too many examples to count. Trump's morning tweetstorms often feature new nicknames and insults for his political opponents, he'll shout down and berate journalists in the middle of press conferences with foreign leaders, and much more.

This week, when the White House announced it would revoke security clearances for former officials who have criticized Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan brushed it aside as "just trolling" by the leader of the free world.

I think he's trolling people honestly," Ryan said in a press conference Tuesday morning. "This is something that's in the purview of the executive branch."

Essentially, Ryan acknowledged that the White House was intentionally trying to provoke Democrats without any real agenda other than making them squirm and having a laugh about it. Ryan said this without any real hesitation or regret and went about his day.

Still, Republicans like Ryan, who tolerates Trump's tactics, and activists like Shapiro, who maintain that his actions are purely civil and well-intentioned, are in a very different Republican Party than what existed a decade ago. This new age is much more combative, with an entirely different set of priorities.

(3) ‘Turning Point’ wore DIAPERS to their college campus, I never knew conservatives had a diaper fetish before.

On a different note, does anyone think Republicans are sending Rudy Giuliani around to "own the libs"?

I've been involved with politics on social media for years and not once have I heard anyone say "own the libs." This must be something only a few do, otherwise I certainly would've noticed by now. That phrase in itself just sounds cringy and completely unappealing.

The Rolling Stone and Business Insider articles were published on July 26th and 28th, respectively. If “owning the libs” is like a typical social media meme, it became a phenomenon on or around July 24th, hit its prime around the 27th, and was obsolete by the 30th. If you happened to be on vacation that week, you would have missed it.

The Rolling Stone and Business Insider articles were published on July 26th and 28th, respectively. If “owning the libs” is like a typical social media meme, it became a phenomenon on or around July 24th, hit its prime around the 27th, and was obsolete by the 30th. If you happened to be on vacation that week, you would have missed it.

It’s hilarious!

Things conservatives have done to “own the libs” - or rather things conservatives have done to prove their uneducated redneck status:

(1) Go to a march and shoot themselves in the foot.
(2) To boycott Starbucks they BOUGHT Starbucks coffee and just asked for Trump’s name to be written on it - evidently giving a company $ is boycotting to them?
(3) ‘Turning Point’ wore DIAPERS to their college campus, I never knew conservatives had a diaper fetish before.
(4) They broke their own coffee machines, hell some of them even BOUGHT coffee machines to break them.
(5) They love showing how desperate they are by merely saying the name Trump and thinking that’ll upset people (when really it just shows how desperate they are).
(6) Forgot the pizza one, but yeah. They ruined their wedding forever lmaol.
(7) Trolling people on twitter while showing how uneducated they are through their hilarious spelling (ex: saw a real Trump supporter say Trump had “boner spurs” and they call everyone “looser”).

It’s like the redneck olympics. I love it. I’m excited to see how Trump supporters prove they’re not that bright to “own the libs” next. I mean who needs South Park satirizing Trump supporters when they’re doing it for us?

Boner spurs... ! ! !