A Pretty Good Litmus Test for Politics

Submission 9,231

Part of a series on Catchphrases. [View Related Entries]

About

A Pretty Good Litmus Test for Politics: Do You Regard These Men With Respect, or Disgust? is a catchphrase used in meme captions that's paired with photographs, GIFs and videos of men engaged in various activities, often for the purpose of parodying the original tweet. The parody format gained virality on Twitter in November 2022.

Origin

On November 18th, 2022, Twitter^[1] user @erichhartmann posted a clip of two oil well workers operating machinery (originally posted by TikToker^[2] @oilfeildoutlaw), captioning it, "This video is a pretty good litmus test for politics: do you regard these men with respect, or disgust?" The post gained over 1,700 retweets and 16,500 likes in four days (shown below).

Spread

The tweet inspired parodies in the following days as users combined the caption with images and videos of people and characters engaged in various activities. For example, on November 20th, 2022, Twitter^[3] user @ViceApologist posted a clip from the 2017 film Kong: The Skull Island that gained over 3.6 million views, 3,000 retweets and 47,300 likes in two days (shown below).

More memes using the caption were posted on Twitter and other sites, including Reddit. On November 20th, Redditor SirGiedonOfnirReal posted a meme that gained over 850 upvotes in the /r/shittydarksouls^[4] subreddit (shown below, left). Also that day, Twitter^[5] user @SouthernAtlas posted a historic photo of The Clinton 12 paired with a version of the caption. The tweet gained over 170 retweets and 1,800 likes in two days (shown below, right).