Will I get deported for sharing this meme of JD Vance?

The Guardian

4 hours ago

I have a very important public service announcement to make. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, make fun of Vice-President JD Vance by sharing one of the millions of unflattering memes dedicated to him. Don't you dare chuckle at the images of him looking like the 'lollipop kid' in Shrek (the resemblance is uncanny) or a chicken nugget. And, whatever you do, do not share the meme that you can find here, where he looks like a big bald baby. You risk hurting the poor man's feelings and, also, you might get kicked out of the country.
So says a 21-year-old Norwegian called Mads Mikkelsen, anyway. Mikkelsen recently accused American border officials of denying him entry into the US because he had a meme of a bloated baby Vance saved on his phone. Mikkelsen, who had travelled to the US to visit friends, told the Norwegian paper Nordlys that immigration officers at Newark airport interrogated him, forced him to give fingerprints and blood samples, and went through his phone. After they found the Vance meme, as well as a picture of Mikkelsen holding a homemade wooden pipe, they sent him home.
'Both pictures had been automatically saved to my camera roll from a chat app, but I really didn't think that these innocent pictures would put a stop to my entry into the country,' Mikkelsen told Nordlys.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has rejected Mikkelsen's claim that he was kicked out of the country for disrespecting the vice-president. 'FACT CHECK. Claims that Mads Mikkelsen was denied entry because of a meme are unequivocally FALSE,' they posted on Facebook earlier in the week. 'TRUTH: Mikkelsen was refused entry into the US for his admitted drug use.'
A homeland security assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, also called the story 'BS' in a post on X.
Mikkelsen, meanwhile, insisted to the fact-checking website Snopes that the meme played a role in getting him denied entry. The 21-year-old claimed border officials told him he was getting sent home because of 'extremist propaganda [the meme] and narcotic paraphernalia'. However, that claim hasn't been verified.
We may never know if the Vance meme really did play a role in getting Mikkelsen kicked out of the country. While I don't normally side with border officials, one imagines the pipe picture was probably the actual culprit. Still, the story, which made headlines around the world, won't help America's tourism industry. International visitors are staying out of the US after a spate of stories about tourists getting sent to Ice detention centers without any explanation. The World Travel & Tourism Council has said the country could lose $12.5bn in international visitor spending this year.
The story has also reignited interest in JD Vance memes, which have been circulating for months now, peaking at end of February after the vice-president scolded Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an exchange that launched a million memes. Indeed, the Irish lawmaker Ivana Bacik recently held up the Vance baby meme while speaking in the Irish parliament about the Mikkelsen story.
While claims that making fun of Mr Hillbilly Elegy may get you deported might be exaggerated, the fact that so many people immediately believed Mikkelsen's claims is a sign of just how badly the US's international image has been damaged and how dystopian the country has become. The US is heading very quickly towards authoritarianism. It is cracking down on dissent and protest. Book banning has surged and the Trump administration has instructed the Department of Education to end their investigations into these bans, calling them a 'hoax'. Free speech rights are being shredded.
And the people responsible for all this? They're not evil geniuses, they're embarrassing dweebs with massively meme-able faces. 'I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down,' Rebecca Shaw said in a Guardian piece earlier this year. 'What I didn't expect, and don't think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be.'
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