Katie Porter's Whiteboard

About

Katie Porter's Whiteboard refers to a series of viral videos and memes of United States congresswoman Katie Porter using a dry-erase board in congressional hearings. These arguments usually involve basic economics as a means of shaming wealthy business executives.

Origin

One of the earliest examples of Porter's whiteboard use was on March 12th, 2019, during questioning of Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan (shown below).

Spread

Representative Katie Porter first went viral on YouTube on March 28th, 2019 with an argument against Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director on "what APR is." The post received more than 630,000 views in less than two years (shown below).

About two weeks later, Porter tweeted^[1] a photograph of herself holding a whiteboard. She wrote, "During my questioning,
@jpmorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he didn’t know if all my numbers were accurate. Here’s the math so he can check." The post received more than 46,000 likes and 14,000 retweets in less than two years (shown below).

On March 12th, 2020, McSweeny's^[6] published the satirical article "I’M REPRESENTATIVE KATIE PORTER’S WHITEBOARD, AND MY GIRL AND I ARE ABOUT TO KICK YOUR ASS."

On September 30th, 2020, the Twitter account @PublicCitizen shared a video of Porter using a whiteboard to make an argument against former Celgene CEO Mark Alles. The post received more than 21 million views, 511,000 likes and 170,000 retweets in less than two days (shown below).

That day, Twitter^[2] user @gabebergado shared an image of a whiteboard and an image of Porter with the caption "name a more iconic duo i'll wait". The tweet received more than 190,000 likes and 25,000 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below).

Several media outlets covered her use of whiteboards, including The Guardian,^[3] The Washington Post,^[4] Huffpost^[5] and more.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References