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If you’ve been on TikTok this winter you’ve probably noticed the “owl impression” trend — dozens of creators puffing up their eyes and letting out little “hoo” noises while mimicking celebrities, regional accents, or entire communication styles. What began as harmless, silly meme-making has ballooned into thousands of videos that treat whole cultures as punchlines, a phenomenon documented across cultural roundups and trend trackers this year.
Ben Shapiro rightly pointed out the absurdity of reducing complex peoples and histories to a single syllable, calling the craze essentially an effort to “sum up a culture in a grunt” while he ranked viral TikTok trends on his show. His mockery of the trend wasn’t merely humor; it was a conservative reminder that Americans ought to take culture — and our neighbors — more seriously than the latest social-media shorthand allows.
Supporters of the trend insist the owl acts as a neutral, animal-shaped buffer that softens caricature into comedy, but that defense misses the point: wrapping a stereotype in a costume doesn’t erase the stereotyping. Trend explainers note the owl’s role as a non-human stand-in, yet even neutral stand-ins can normalize lazy cultural reductionism and encourage millions to treat nuance as expendable.
This is a broader symptom of social media’s infantilizing effect — quick, repeatable gags crowd out serious conversation and reward the least thoughtful takes with the most views. Platforms designed for bite-sized dopamine hits turn cultural literacy into a game of who can shout the loudest, not who can engage the deepest, and that’s a problem for any society that values knowledge and civility.
There’s also a political hypocrisy at work: the same coastal elites who lecture Americans about respect, representation, and the dignity of marginalized groups will often shrug when those groups become the butt of a viral meme. Ben Shapiro’s criticism exposes that double standard — cultural respect shouldn’t be selective, and mockery dressed up as “comedy” doesn’t excuse the erosion of basic civil regard.
Conservatives should not be reflexively against humor, but we should insist on humor that punches up, not across entire peoples, and that recognizes the role that manners and restraint have always played in a functioning republic. If TikTok and its imitators are going to keep shaping how young Americans think about identity, then those who care about tradition and civic cohesion must speak up with clarity and conviction.
Hardworking Americans deserve a culture that teaches nuance and responsibility, not one that trains the next generation to reduce neighbors to noises for clicks. Let’s call out lazy trends, defend dignity where it’s due, and remind the country that real patriotism means treating people — and our culture — with seriousness, not a cheap laugh.
