Brace yourself. Election season is here, and the road to 2020’s presidential nomination is already paved in cringey political cartoons. Things are getting so bad that the internet can no longer tell when a comic is satirical, heartfelt, or something right in between.
Tuesday afternoon, Twitter account Cursed Boomer Images uploaded what appears to be a political cartoon depicting Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ivanka Trump. In a Facebook post shared with the comic, Klobuchar is seemingly shown wearing a blazer and adult diaper as she devours a miniaturized Trump.
Presumably, the comic is supposed to show the senator “taking a bite out of the Trump family.” Several hashtags adorn the image, including #KLOBZ and #THEKLOBBERER.
The “fan art” comic ends with the Minnesota senator rubbing her belly as the first daughter’s clothes are dissolved in her stomach acid, followed by excrement dropped into the presidential candidate’s diaper.
The comic was not received well on Twitter.
” I never expected to see straight up fetish porn on this account,” one Twitter user wrote, “yet here we are.”
This writer and her readers were similarly perplexed.
For the uninitiated, while the post is political, the actual original comic isn’t a political cartoon about Klobuchar and Trump. Rather, it depicts multiple popular online fetishes: vore (devouring another person), ageplay (fetishism involving roleplay of another age), adult baby diaper fetishism, and scat (or a kink for poop and pooping).
A reverse image search for the original illustration confirms Klobuchar was never the intended target. The Daily Dot was able to track down the comic to fetish artist HofBondage on DeviantArt. The original post, which has since been removed, was uploaded in January 2015 and received over 30,000 views prior to its deletion. The Daily Dot was able to access a version of the post saved by Google Cache, and a URL link to the piece is still available on DeviantArt’s servers.
The Daily Dot has declined to link to HofBondage’s portfolio due to depictions of underage children in the user’s fetish artwork.
Klobuchar wasn’t the intended target of HofBondage’s vore piece, but that hasn’t stopped internet users from taking the post at face value. Fetish artwork of a political candidate is certainly plausible in 2020. The fact a Facebook user can troll Americans with a fake pro-Klobuchar vore picture is a symptom of a much larger problem: the line between satire and reality is so blurry online that it’s hard to tell the difference anymore.
The Daily Dot reached out to Cursed Boomer Images and HofBondage for comment.
Update 4:29pm CT, Feb. 19: After this article’s publication, law student Alex Halladay reached out to the Daily Dot and claimed to have authored the original Facebook post.
The Daily Dot confirmed this to be the case.
Halladay originally saw HofBondage’s image in a satirical Facebook group about unsettling artwork, he told the Daily Dot. After having “the immediate realization” that the piece “might have been rule 34 for the 2020 election,” he wrote the Facebook post. The post was intended to be a joke, as if he was a Klobuchar fan supporting her with fetish porn.
When he woke up the next day, it had gone viral, complete with “a fairly long comment section” filled with right-wingers.
“It was a public post, I expected it to trend similarly to my other fetish joke posts, maximum 100 reactions, some group tags, maybe shares to two or three pages/groups,” Halladay said. “[I deleted] it considering doxing is a thing still, and as someone entering a field all about surface professionalism it would be a little weird/difficult to have my name associated with ABDL [adult baby diaper lover].”
As for the impact, Halladay finds the whole incident both “hilarious” but “also kind of depressing.”
And as a left-wing activist and organizer at his law school, he has choice words for some of the centrist Democratic presidential candidates.
“Don’t vote or vore Amy,” he said.
READ MORE: