The Goose Chase Meme

This modern world is a strange place of siloed information. Memes are an example of this. There are many that some people assume everyone knows, which I've never heard of or seen. I've known this for quite a while, and accepted it as part of getting older.

So I come to the subject of the goose chase meme humbly. 

It seems to me as if everyone must know what it is, because on BlueSky, "everyone" appears to reference it.

Do you know it? In its bare form, it's like this:


The memes can be generated here.

The idea is, the goose asks some question in the first panel, and then the person who was asked the question runs away in the second, while the goose pursues them with a more stringent version of the question.

This is the original cartoon it was derived from:

This is the version that everyone on BlueSky appears to know:

The context of that — the "which views?" — is this: A conservative person, maybe a student on a college campus, says they were scared to share their views in class or with friends. But they aren't conservative views like lower taxes or small government. Instead, they're, "Black people have lower IQs" or "women shouldn't be allowed to vote" or "being gay is unnatural."

As Son of Baldwin (novelist Robert Jones, Jr.) said, "We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist."

Here's another one, generally in the same vein:



These two memes point out denialism, which is popular on the Right, and that's what I associate the goose chase meme with. 

So I was surprised when I searched it and saw versions that weren't about a version of denialism, and even just that there aren't that many versions of it that turn up at all. If BlueSky was your only source, you would think there would be hundreds of versions, or at least that the same few would turn up many times.

A week or so ago I happened to hear David Remnick on the New Yorker Radio Hour, interviewing Robert P. George, a conservative professor at Princeton. George is a good example of a talking version of the goose meme, as so many of the people who decry the left-wing dominance of higher ed are.

Oh, you've had your feelings hurt by not being the dominant thought leader of your generation? Well we're in the middle of a fascist takeover right now. Maybe you could stop talking about those mean students from 10 years ago and figure out what matters now.

If we don't do everything we can, we'll be goose-stepping instead of goose-meming.