Given Musk’s short attention span, his government-subsidized Tesla circus, and his long history of broken promises, I wouldn’t count on it lasting. But I’m not here to tell you about what bizarro Batman and Robin will take away. Instead, let’s focus on what it has given us so far: a beautiful mess of memes.

To understand what DOGE is right now, let’s Marty McFly ourselves back to the original Doge meme. It all started with a 2010 photo of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu. Kabosu’s owner, Atsuko Sato, regularly posted photos of her dog on her Tumblr with bits of broken english typed in Comic Sans scattershot around his body to signal his thoughts.

Like many other memes of the time, the meme and the misspelled “dog” went viral in the nerdsphere. Regular human beings knew nothing about it until a couple of days ago, after Donald Trump got his mandate to become King Louis XIII and apparently named Musk his very own Cardinal Rich-a-Lies, who had bet everything on this opportunity to grab extraordinary power.

Musk thought it would be hilarious to have a laugh with the branding, so he came up the the DOGE acronym as a wink-wink nudge-nudge to the good ole meme. Which, incidentally, it’s also the symbol of Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency launched as a joke in 2013 that was fully endorsed by Musk himself. (Side note: Musk reportedly owns “a bunch of Dogecoin” and the cryptocurrency skyrocketed in value after the new department’s announcement, bringing an immediate moral question to this entire branding strategy, but who cares about moral questions at this point of the proceedings? Just look DOGE’s dollar sign avatar on X. They are not even bothering to hide it anymore). But I digress.

Musk’s new lineage of Doge meme sprang out the hairiest armpits of the bro dimension thanks to his very own Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot that lives inside the Musk-owned social platform X. It seems Musk has found Grok’s true utility: creating ugly graphics (because let’s face it, Grok is the worst of all diffusion image models). Now, it’s churning out these new DOGE memes faster than Musk can jump at a Trump rally.

It’s alive!

For the aliens that will find this text in a buried server room under a charred Earth covered in ice, let the record show that the new Golden Era of Doge officially started when Musk posted this Grok image that makes Paw Patrol look like a Hayao Miyazaki film:

And right on cue, Ramaswamy replied with the cute animal version of a January 6 rioter:

Seconds after, countless unabashed minions unleashed endless, AI-generated tornado of DOGE memes plastered with slogans promising “such efficiency” and “such innovation” in a government arm that is destined to do the opposite.

The master of broken bro toys and useless swag then hinted that “cool merch” for DOGE will happen soon. I can already see the assembly lines in China humming with the next generation of landfill-ready garbage, pumping out gnarly T-shirts faster than Trump can eat Big Macs. What better way to combat waste than with literal waste branded with AI-generated Shiba Inu logos. In fact, the merchandise grifting has just begun, with Trump selling DOGE T-shirts.

It’s notable that a government arm dedicated to reducing waste and promoting efficiency has only so far created a big bang of zombie Doge memes spurred by Musk himself. All the effort of creating Social Security paychecks, Medicaid, food stamps, student grants, endowments for scientific research, and NASA’s budget—unless it is to buy SpaceX rocket rides—are time wasted according to Musk and Ramaswamy. Suddenly, Shiba Inus are not funny anymore. Such crass. Much gross. Kabosu must be rolling in his grave.