Studio Ghibli memes beaten to death: Bear with me as I attempt to explain something extremely online that nevertheless carries some political significance.
You may be familiar with Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio helmed by Hayao Miyazaki, behind classics such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Open AI, the creators of ChatGPT, recently released another higher-quality image generator that people have realized allows images to be rendered in the Studio Ghibli house style. Note that this is contra Miyazaki's own wishes ("I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself," the 84-year-old said of overly incorporating technology into art) and possibly a copyright violation, but that's sort of the least of our worries here. The main controversy now is that people have been putting all kinds of famous images into the meme generator—George W. Bush being told about 9/11, Tony Montana in Scarface, etc.—and that the White House has, uh, decided to throw some images of their recent deportations in there too.
So here's a Studio Ghibli version of the deportation of Dominican woman Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a 36-year-old fentanyl trafficker who illegally reentered the country and was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on March 12:
