On Tuesday, October 6, senior White House aide Stephen Miller confirmed his positive COVID status. Miller is one of a dozen staffers close to President Trump to have tested positive, but he’s the only one to have generated a lively Twitter conversation on the dos and don’ts of anti-Semitic tropes.
Anyone who’s spent anytime on Twitter has probably seen some form of #IsOverParty trending. In its most common usage, IsOverParty is written after the name of someone or something that is “canceled.” Generally, if #IsOverParty is trending, clicking on it will pull up tweets that explain what the person has done to deserve such a party. Recently, however, many on Twitter have used the hashtag to ask why #IsOverParty is trending in the first place, flooding Twitter with tweets of confusion, making it difficult to find the reasons behind the tweets.
To better understand how something becomes the subject of viral memes, simply analyze the recent Twitter reaction to the new Washington football team name, The Washington Football Team.
There’s no doubt that Hamilton will become part of larger conversations rethinking depictions of the founding fathers, right alongside the statues and history books that society is beginning to pick apart in an attempt to rectify America’s long history of racial injustices. But today, on what Twitter has ordained Hamilton Day, people seem to be taking a moment to just enjoy the show for it’s groundbreaking, once in a lifetime artfulness, appreciating how lucky we are to be alive right now.
It’s hard enough to digest current events without an endless stream of unsolicited commentary clogging up your newsfeed. So it’s understandable that some of us avoid Twitter. In this new series, Moment will shed some light on what’s been trending and why.
Whether these other conversations, about his celebrity look-a-like and Jewish roots, eclipsed the impeachment conversation probably depends on which Twitter world one inhabits—the one that shows up for the news or the one that shows up solely for the memes.
