Menacing Josh Romney

About

Menacing Josh Romney is an image macro series based on a screen capture of Josh Romney, the son of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, staring intently at the camera during the 2012 U.S. presidential debate in October 2012. Largely due to his possessed-like facial expression, the image of Josh Romney became a target of mockeries on the web.

Origin

Shortly after the broadcast of the second round of 2012 U.S. presidential debate on October 16th, BuzzFeed Tumblr posted a muti-pane image macro featuring the face of Mitt Romney’s second oldest son captioned with SOON (shown below, left). The post instantly went viral on Tumblr, gaining more than 53,200 notes in less the first 48 hours.

On the following day, Redditor acore8604^[2] submitted the first image macro instance with a reference to Darth Vader’s quote from the 1980 space film Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. (shown below) In the first 24 hours, the image received more than 22,800 up votes 21,070 down votes.

Spread

Throughout October 17th, the series spread across Tumblr^[3] and Twitter^[4], while nearly 500 instances were uploaded to Quickmeme^[4] and more than 69 image macros were submitted to Reddit’s /r/adviceanimals subreddit^[6], including four instances that have gained more than 1,500 upvotes in the first 48 hours. By October 18th, the “Menacing Josh Romney” meme had been featured on the Huffington Post^[7], Buzzfeed^[8], Uproxx^[9] and the FWD.^[10]

Notable Examples

External References