Capitol Meemaw, Then I Just Burst Into Tears, And This Week's Other Best Memes, Ranked
Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream and instead just bounce around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked. This week, we've got Capitol meemaw, then I just burst into tears, replacing Donald Trump in "Home Alone 2," Damn Shawty, let's… and Trump got banned from Twitter.
5. Then I Just Burst Into Tears
The meme
Back in May 2012, pre-fame Megan Thee Stallion tweeted the following:
After fans unearthed the emotional moment from the depths of Twitter, Photoshop experts people blissfully decided to share their own memorably histrionic moments in which they burst into tears.
Examples
James Crugnale
4. Replacing Donald Trump In 'Home Alone 2'
The meme
Last Sunday, someone tweeted out a petition to digitally remove Donald Trump from the Christmas classic "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York." Before too long, Macaulay Culkin himself had signed on.
Twitter users responded to the petition with gusto, with many offering up edited versions of the scene in which Culkin, as the one and only Kevin McCallister, talks to Donald Trump in the Plaza Hotel.
According to director Chris Columbus, Trump had bullied his way into getting a cameo in the movie, reportedly allowing the "Home Alone 2" crew to film in the Plaza, which he then owned, only if they included him in the movie.
Examples
BJ Pang-Chieh Ho
3. Damn Shawty Let's
The meme
What's the opposite of Rule 34? This meme. While its origins are explicit, it morphed last week into a wholesome escape and purified the timeline. Would you consider this a date?
Examples
Adwait Patil
2. Capitol Meemaw/Aunt Tifa
The meme
Last Wednesday afternoon, while a pro-Trump mob still occupied the United States Capitol, @FlockaKnows tweeted the following photo of demonstrators along with the caption, "This is white privilege in America."
Within minutes, someone else, @1BrayWoods, quote-tweeted the image, adding to it a close crop of a smiling older woman holding an American flag, her expression firmly at odds with the mayhem unfolding in the nation's capital. "She don't even know where the hell she at," @1BrayWoods added. And just like that, the Capitol Meemaw meme was born.
Given the insurrection's grip on the nation's attention, many understandably interpreted the photo as being of the Washington, DC, crowd. It turns out, however, that the woman pictured wasn't actually at the Capitol — nor is she a grandma, in fact.
According to reporting by BuzzFeed News's David Mack, Capitol Meemaw was actually a peaceful demonstrator who was photographed at the Kansas State Capitol where she had gone to pray for the United States.
Now that we've fact-checked Capitol Meemaw, here are the best ones.
Examples
Jon-Michael Poff
1. Donald Trump Got Banned From Twitter
The meme
Shhh — do you hear that? Listen closely: it's the sound of a completely ordinary day on Twitter... without Donald J. Trump.
As most people online in America now know, President Trump was banned from Twitter following rhetoric in his posts that incited and encouraged the violence at the Capitol on January 6. It's far from his only offense — he has also been denying the results of the 2020 presidential election for months, with his sole penalty being an overly diplomatic warning at the bottom of his misleading tweets — but this was, it seems, the one that Twitter would not tolerate.
Because Trump was desperate to thwart the ban and get back on Twitter by any means necessary, he was limited to retweeting from the @POTUS account, got a bunch of new handles he created banned, and got his campaign manager's Twitter account suspended as well. RIP Gary Coby, we hardly knew ye.
Twitter had a field day with the news of Trump's ban, and the jokes were — as they always are at the most hectic of times — on point.
Examples
But amid all the joking, don't forget what this historic event is really about: the ability to stay on Twitter as long as we want without having to log off out of existential dread because of the president's unhinged tweets, and instead, only logging off out of generalized existential dread.
Molly Bradley
And if you're hungry for more memes, here's last week's "The Week's Best Memes, Ranked" article, where we rank men will literally do anything instead of going to therapy, Bean Dad, this could not be more Orwellian, places that are harder to get into than the US Capitol and the CIA rebrand.
