Kraken and the Trumpian beastiary
From Pepe the Frog to the scrappy little honey badger to the giant and unambiguously fictitious Kraken.
Nine years ago somebody who called himself Randall (but was in fact a guy named Christopher Gordon whose father had been a cameraman on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom) posted on YouTube footage of a honey badger with some commentary about its fearlessness. “Honey badger don’t care,” Randall said. “Honey badger don’t give a shit. It just takes what it wants.”
The footage went viral, attracting innocent attention from respectable people like Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic. Eventually, though, the honey badger was embraced as a symbol by misogynist reactionaries (some of them women) and so-called “involuntary celibates,” or incels—a scary, sometimes violent subculture within the so-called Men’s Rights movement—as a symbol of their contempt for societal norms of behavior.
A lot of these misogynists were obsessive video gamers who around the same time were getting embroiled in a vicious online campaign of sexual harassment called Gamergate. The Gamergate mess attracted the attention of Steve Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart, who knew this world because in 2005 he’d sought, unsuccessfully, to create a real currency market based on the trading of virtual weapons in the video game World of Warcraft. It was Bannon’s special insight that these pasty-faced woman-haters could form the core of a political movement. The honey badger became Breitbart’s mascot. “We are honey badgers,” Bannon explained to Bloomberg’s Joshua Green in 2015. “We don’t give a shit.”
Bannon took over management of the Trump campaign in August 2016, and, in spirit, he took the honey badger with him. “What makes Trump’s campaign unique,” New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore wrote that month, “is the extent to which, as a major-party nominee, he has bought into unconventional theories about politics.” Down-ballot Republicans might distance themselves from “their new overlord and his thuggish subalterns,” Kilgore observed, but “it’s unlikely Trump or Bannon will make much of an effort to dissuade them. After all, they don’t give a shit.”
We all know how that story turned out: Trump won the 2016 election, mainstream Republicans fell quickly in line, and Trump’s style of governance proved so impulsive that the GOP didn’t dare adopt a party platform in 2020, the year Trump lost re-election to Joe Biden. In a twist of the knife to the honey badger, it was women voters who helped finish Trump off.
“If you trace a line backward from [Donald] Trump’s election,” Green writes in his 2017 book Devil’s Bargain,
it doesn’t take long before you encounter online networks of motivated gamers and message-board denizens such as the ones who populate Trump-crazed boards like 4chan, 8chan, and reddit. During the [2016] campaign, users of these message boards were eager purveyors of racist, alt-right invective, such as the anti-Semitic Pepe the Frog images that the Anti-Defamation League declared a hate symbol. Trace the line back a little further and it leads to Breitbart News and Bannon, whose hiring of the anti-feminist internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos as Breitbart’s tech editor in 2015 greatly exacerbated these forces.
Pepe the Frog was another key mascot for the alt-right. Invented in 2005 by the comic book artist Matt Furie, Pepe was a weed-smoking froggy bro with a penchant for scatological humor (“Wipe here often?”) who otherwise minded his own business. Like honey badger, Pepe was appropriated by white nationalists, who showed Pepe reading Mein Kampf, etc. (The association of hard-right mascots with either the word shit or the moving of bowels is a fruitful topic for future academic study.) Trump and Don, Jr. took some heat for tweeting images of Pepe during the 2016 election. But Pepe was a little hot even for the alt-right to handle, and after the ADL joined forces with Furie in a “Save Pepe” campaign he receded from view as the Trump fringe’s favored meme.
Honey badger also faded into the background, perhaps because Bannon is no longer associated with Breitbart. Breitbart’s index of Pepe stories shows only one since 2017, and its index of honey badger stories shows only two. These smallish beasts have given way among Trump’s most fanatical followers to a large sea monster called the Kraken.
The coprophilic theme carries forth with the Kraken, whose releasing, according to the online Urban Dictionary, means “to defecate ferociously” (or did so 10 years ago). Originally, though, the Kraken was a beast from Norse mythology that resembled a huge octopus. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in a famous sonnet titled “The Kraken” of a creature that “hath lain for ages” on the ocean’s bottom in “ancient, dreamless, uninvited sleep” but will “rise and on the surface die” when “the latter fire shall heat the deep,” i.e., on the Day of Judgment. The unleashed Kraken dies for the sins of man, much as Sidney Powell’s lawsuit to overturn the election results died today in Georgia.
It was Powell, of course, who made “release the Kraken” her rallying cry, baffling much of the world. According to an excellent Kraken explainer by Ben Zimmer in the Dec. 3 Wall Street Journal, the Kraken surfaced briefly in 1953 to do battle with Captain Marvel in Whiz Comics. But what really stirred the Kraken from its Victorian slumber was the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, a famously terrible re-telling of Greek myths. Playing Zeus, Laurence Olivier cries “Let loose the Kraken,” unaware, apparently, that there is no Kraken in Greek mythology. In both this film and a 2010 remake, the Kraken is defeated when Perseus holds up the severed head of Medusa, thereby turning the monster to stone.
Like honey badger and Pepe the Frog, the Kraken was initially an apolitical internet meme, inspired by Liam Neeson’s hammy reading of the line, “Release the Kraken,” when he played Zeus in the 2010 remake. (I’d guess that the scatalogical meaning shares the same source.) Powell, whose efforts to overturn the election are so unhinged that even the Trump White House has disavowed her, turned the Kraken into a symbol of Trumpian defiance. According to Zimmer in the Journal and a separate BBC explainer, the beast travelled from Powell to QAnon conspiracy theorists and others of that ilk through the hashtag #releasethekraken. More likely, though, the Kraken was making the alt-right rounds before Powell popularized it; she doesn’t strike me as a likely pop-culture junkie or a student of 19th century British literature.
Frogs are little. Honey badgers are only somewhat larger. Krakens are huge, and unlike frogs and honey badgers, they aren’t real. The Trumpian bestiary thus demonstrates a progression toward grandiosity and fantasy as Trump himself marches toward defeat in his efforts to overturn the election. “We’re all victims,” Trump told a crowd in Georgia this weekend. It was an extraordinary thing for a president of the United States to say. Like the Kraken, he will rise from the depths and (figuratively) die, and perhaps be resurrected in 2024, though I kind of doubt that part. I never thought I’d miss that nasty little honey badger, but at least he didn’t have a messiah complex.