NJ Mayor Can't Stop Streisanding Himself After Being On The Receiving End Of The Crying Jordan Meme

from the i-see-what-he-memes dept

Of all the wonderful gifts the internet has bestowed upon humanity, there is perhaps none more precious to me than the now famous Crying Jordan meme. After Michael Jordan's tearful Hall of Fame induction speech, an image of him in tears took on the secondary purpose of being photoshopped onto anyone the internet wanted to portray as being sad or upset about pretty much anything. The creativity of some of the memes is nearly unmatched, leading to it becoming so popular that then President Obama brought it up when giving Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In other words, as far as internet memes go, the crying Jordan meme is nearly as prolific and celebrated as the basketball career of Jordan itself.

Which is why it's somewhat odd that the loser of a local township committee election went completely bonkers when he himself got "crying Jordan'd."

Cinnaminson (N.J.) mayor Anthony Minniti lost his bid for re-election to the township committee Tuesday when a retired police sergeant defeated him in the Republican primary. When a Facebook user Crying Jordan’d Minniti’s campaign flyer and posted the image to the Cinnaminson Friends & Neighbors page, well, the mayor got real mad:

“Obviously, I’m disgusted by this post, but sadly not surprised,” Minniti said about what he described as the “inflammatory, outrageous rhetoric” of the Facebook page. “It was only a matter of time before someone took this moblike behavior too far, and this is definitely too far,” he said. “Hate has no place in Cinnaminson, and this needs to be treated with the seriousness it warrants.”

In other communications, Minniti has suggested not just that the meme is an output of some demonic hate-engine, but that it's racist. Why? Because the Jordan meme is barely known in common circles and its true purpose is to put white people in "blackface." Yeah, seriously.

Portraying any white person in blackface is racist and unacceptable. There’s no question about that,” he said. “If this was such a well-known meme and this is something everybody knows about, why did the Facebook administrator pull it down? It was flagged as racist by others. It was taken down because it was racist, or deemed racist by the administrator.

We'll do the easy part of this first: the crying Jordan meme is most certainly not racist. Jordan himself has noticed the meme and has reportedly received it with somewhere between a shrug and mild annoyance. Also, I'm fairly certain our first ever black President would not toss around jokes about a racist meme while celebrating an African American award recipient. In addition to all of that: shut up, it's not racist. It's just not.

But it's worth noting that this is a story about a person who lost a mayoral election at the primary stage in a small town in New Jersey. I'm not certain how many people would be aware of the story at all, nor would they have seen the following meme in question, had Minniti not chosen to throw his shit fit about it all. But I'm fairly certain that answer could be stated as "less", with so much media coverage over Minniti Streisanding this into the mainstream.

Anger about being the subject of a meme that then makes that meme go viral is not anger well spent.

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Filed Under: anthony minniti, cinnaminson, crying jordan, memes, streisand effect


Reader Comments

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  • icon
    orbitalinsertion (profile), 26 Jun 2017 @ 6:42pm

    Cinnaminitti'd.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    seedeevee (profile), 26 Jun 2017 @ 7:00pm

    I'm fairly certain our first ever black President

    would never call in a hit on an American citizen, then another on his teenage son and furthermore have his press secretary go on about the teenage son should have had a better dad.

    or be the first president to be at war his entire 8 years of office

    or be the president that hoped and changed so little that Black Lives Matter arrived in response to his first presidential blackness

    or on and on and on

    Maybe you should just remove that "first ever" bullshit

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Stephen T. Stone (profile), 26 Jun 2017 @ 9:13pm

      Re: I'm fairly certain our first ever black President

      Wow, what crawled up your ass and started paying rent?

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Thad, 26 Jun 2017 @ 9:41pm

      Re: I'm fairly certain our first ever black President

      I...gotta admit I'm having trouble following your logic.

      Obama was at war for 8 years, therefore he wasn't the first black president?

      Which one of those things does 8 years of war cancel out? Does it make him not black, or not the president? Or does it cancel out "first", and retroactively make another president the first black president? (You know Toni Morrison was speaking metaphorically when she said it was Bill Clinton, right?)

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        David, 26 Jun 2017 @ 10:48pm

        Re: Re: I'm fairly certain our first ever black President

        I think the point was that Obama fell not just short but opposite of the mark on so many campaign issues (which he received a Nobel Peace Prize for) that any sentence starting with "surely Obama of all people", whether based on previous promises or his skin color or his party affiliation, is bound to make a lame argument.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

        • icon
          PaulT (profile), 27 Jun 2017 @ 12:08am

          Re: Re: Re: I'm fairly certain our first ever black President

          Actually, I think the point is that some people are so reactionary and intent on attacking Obama (presumably because the current president is so ripe for accurate mockery) that they lost their train of though partway through and post utter nonsense. There's no internal logic nor any respect for what actually happened, just a bunch of random train-of-thought attacks with a surreal conclusion (Obama isn't the first black president because he didn't have the first ever 100% success with campaign promises).

          Whatever you think of Obama, he's definitely the first black president and reusing racist memes is more the style of the current shower. Arguing otherwise is fairly surreal.

          link to this | view in chronology ]

          • identicon
            Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2017 @ 6:34am

            Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm fairly certain our first ever black President

            I think you all missed the boat here.

            Like a politician that is getting paid by a lobby it becomes their JOB to misunderstand an issue so they can continue being a patsy.

            The OP was alluding to the fact that the Writer of this article is off based in their attempt to imply that Obama would not have stooped to playing the race card in this event if it were targeted at him.

            Thank you for playing, but I understood the logic quite well. Read it a few more times and you should get it. It's not really about the facts, but all around the supposition that they bring. Kinda like a sore winner. Sure the winner was in "first" place, but if they are terrible sportsmen, then it will not do you any favors by calling that "fact" out.

            So in short, Obama may be the "First Black President" but his authenticity is definitely called into question on if he truly served the interests of black Americans or if he just used his race to his advantage against a hopeful but ignorant electorate. Thus, talking about Obama being the First and Black in a certain context could be viewed as an insult instead... regardless of it being factually correct.

            I view Obama as an exceptionally corrupt human being that does a great job of pretending that he cares when he really does not. Much like I view Trump. In fact I view Trump as a natural repercussion of a person like Obama and I do not understand the sycophancy that people have about either of these human pieces of trash.

            link to this | view in chronology ]

            • identicon
              Thad, 27 Jun 2017 @ 12:07pm

              Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm fairly certain our first ever black President

              The OP was alluding to the fact that the Writer of this article is off based in their attempt to imply that Obama would not have stooped to playing the race card in this event if it were targeted at him.

              Then maybe he should have said that, instead of saying that Obama was not the first black president.

              Or, better yet, said something actually relevant to the topic of the article, instead of going off on an irrelevant tangent because it briefly mentions Obama.

              link to this | view in chronology ]

            • identicon
              Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2017 @ 12:50pm

              Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm fairly certain our first ever black President

              Yeah, kind like Trump isn't white, either.

              link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2017 @ 4:19am

    Thanks, Minniti, now I learned about the Crying Jordan meme!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Ninja (profile), 27 Jun 2017 @ 8:02am

    No seriously, the Internet. It's beautiful.

    That meme would fit Erdogan (the thin-skinned Turkish president) as he saw the comparison between him and Gollum. Excuse me while I laugh of the thought.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2017 @ 9:46am

    Yeah, he is calling attention to himself, but who cares? Minniti doesn't care if people in California see it, cause he doesn't know them. He does care what the people of his small town sees, they have all probably seen the meme and he knows them, so to him, that is the only thing that matters.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2017 @ 9:58am

    Wtf is wrong with NJ politicians? Is it the water?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2017 @ 10:42am

      Re:

      Still better than NY politicians, although that bar isn't all that high.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      trollificus (profile), 17 Sep 2017 @ 1:49pm

      Re:

      I know, right? It's like they're unaware that Florida is already the Florida of the United States. No amount of corruption, stupidity or bizarre behavior will overcome Florida (the REAL Florida, site of all "That has to have been in Florida, amirite? Am I?" speculations) for that "honor".

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Michael, 27 Jun 2017 @ 10:13am

    "But I'm fairly certain that answer could be stated as "less""

    Technically, it would have to be stated as "fewer".

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Jun 2017 @ 6:42pm

    President Obama was our first bi-racial President, actually.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Cowardly Lion, 28 Jun 2017 @ 2:50am

      Re:

      "...our..."

      Maybe he was your president. I don't recall him ever being mine.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        The Wanderer (profile), 28 Jun 2017 @ 4:48am

        Re: Re:

        ...why did you feel the need to make an oblique, passive-aggressive post indicating that you aren't American?

        link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    trollificus (profile), 17 Sep 2017 @ 2:01pm

    "shut up, it's not racist. It's just not."

    Sorry, Mr. Geigner. Because of the weaponized re-definition of the word "racist", it is now the case that only the *accused* can say what's racist, or what they mean when they make the accusation.

    The Internet has reached new record lows in unproductive discourse when you see A telling B that what B said didn't mean what he thought it did because A defines a word differently, and B telling A that what HE said didn't mean what he thought he said because he doesn't really think that (false consciousness). I know. Inconceivable, right?

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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