Memes tend to be drawn to pop stars, politicians, and villains. But this week, a central banker was found on the internet.
Jerome Powell, the 72-year-old chairman of the Federal Reserve, is not exactly what you would expect. Instagram and Tiktok’s highly saturated techno remix tunes. However, his image has broken containment in the past few days, with Gen Z turning the famously taciturn technocrat into a symbol of defiance in the second Trump era, dressed in pious edits usually reserved for K-pop stars.
That’s quite an improvement for the central banker Trump initially chose to succeed Janet Yellen, who later became Joe Biden’s Treasury secretary. Trump reportedly admired Powell as early as 2017 “central castingBut the longtime Washingtonian surprised onlookers by maintaining and even expanding Yellen’s focus on the “economy” in the years that followed.full employment” One side of the Fed’s dual mission.
In August 2020, Powell revealed that the Federal Reserve had modified its monetary policy framework to emphasize the “broad-based and inclusive goal” of maximizing employment and do its best to keep the economy running and get all Americans back to work. quick to criticize pouncewarnings about the risk of rising inflation, and Powell’s series of aggressive interest rate hikes in 2022 and 2023, making this policy a near but distant memory. Still, in a period known as the “Great Resignation”, Labor has the most clout in a generation to demand a pay rise, with one man, Jerome Powell Heroes of the Millennium Era.
Gen Z seems to be discovering what their older siblings were doing five years ago.
One manifestation of this trend began with video Produced by Democratic strategist and popular YouTuber Keith Edwards. An impromptu rendition of “We Are Charlie Kirk” song After the death of the right-wing activist, a policy embraced by conservatives, Edwards decided to flip the script and change it to “We Are Jerome Powell.”
“We are Jerome Powell and we stick to the bottom linemoaned a man’s voice longingly. “Not against a person, but against the law and time.” “
Edwards said he used artificial intelligence to generate the lyrics and the video itself.
“I personally think that if you look at memes in 2016, they’re very liberally coded,” Edwards said. wealth. “I think the situation has reversed. Conservative ideas are spreading faster on the Internet now.”
For Edwards, the Powell meme is a tactical necessity in what he calls a literal “information war.”
“We are at war,” Edwards said. “When you’re in a war, you grab the biggest weapon and fire it. I would pull out every grenade I could and throw it away.”
In this context, Powell is the “hand grenade.”
Powell became an unlikely symbol of resistance online after he released a rare video statement confirming the Justice Department subpoenaed him over renovations at the Fed’s offices and explicitly blaming the probe on political pressure for his refusal to speed up rate cuts.
Edwards explained that to him, Powell represented a disappearing archetype: the technocratic figure who still believed in institutional norms and “played by the book.” It’s similar but different to the Powell boom years of the pandemic “maximum jobs” era, when the Georgetown figurehead arguably woke up to his promise to get every American back to work.
The internet — or more specifically, Gen Z — thought Edwards’ video was “terrible.” They’re now starting to produce fan cam footage of Powell looking tough. He posed in a smart suit and gave Trump a dirty look as they all stood around wearing metal hats. It’s reminiscent of another #resistance hero who, in the world of memes, displayed an almost Marlboro Man-like toughness about America: the former FBI director and special counsel, Robert Miller.
Aiden Walker, a researcher who specializes in online culture, said the appeal had more to do with Powell’s seeming uncoolness. The “alchemy,” he argued, was in the contrast: Powell was both “respectable” and “humble,” and there was a “mildly subversive irony” in putting that image into fan cameras usually reserved for K-pop idols or action stars.
Walker said Powell was “very true to himself,” and Gen Z likes authenticity (or like Trump, they like the core casting aspect of a gray-haired politician).
“He was an old banker who had been around the block,” Walker said. As an example, he pointed to a moment when Powell and Trump, wearing construction hats, argued about the number of renovations on a building.
“It’s his posture,” Walker said. “He’s obviously not a guy who wears a construction hat, but that’s what they’re doing and he’s very true to himself and I think people online like that.”
But there’s also a deeper shift in the public’s relationship with the Fed. We are no longer in an era where the Fed is a black box to everyone but Wall Street. Commission-free apps like Robinhood, along with the explosive popularity of pandemic-era “meme stocks” and spaces like r/WallStreetBets on Reddit, have created a culture around retail investing in the 2020s.
The numbers prove it. Before the outbreak, retail order flow rarely exceeded 10% of daily trading volume in U.S. equities. In contrast, JPMorgan Chase reported that retail activity reached A record high of 36% Total order flow on April 29, 2025.
“There are a lot more retail investors today,” Walker noted. “People in their twenties own a few stocks on Robinhood. They feel closer to the market.”
The result is a new familiarity with figures like Powell, even among left-wing Gen Zers who may not trust the Fed.
“There’s a fan logic now,” Walker said. “He’s a funny, sarcastic character because he obviously doesn’t necessarily want to be famous. It’s just forced.”
Artificial Intelligence and Accelerationism
2016 – a period of time In the minds of many people While the internet celebrates the origins of slower internet culture, it can take days or weeks for political memes to permeate the culture. By 2026, AI-generated content has compressed this cycle into hours.
“AI generation makes Jerome Powell’s editing easier and faster,” said Walker. “You could watch Powell’s clip and have your editor respond within two hours.” This speed not only accelerated the development of the meme, but changed its nature and the nature of the topic, turning news events into absurd spectacles of participation.
In postmodern theory, this is known as “accelerationism”. By subsuming a stuffy institutional figure like Powell into a torrent of AI memes, the Internet has hijacked the Fed’s image and accelerated it beyond its professional locus of control. The process of taking a serious person out of a serious context — the perspective of a French psychoanalyst Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called “deterritorialization“— inserting them into a high-speed digital world, where they are shaped into a specific atmosphere. In this framework, memes are what psychoanalysts call “superstitious”, a digital novel that, through the sheer force of speed and repetition, comes to determine how we view the actual stability of our institutions. Philosophers sometimes use examples from cyberspace to explain superstition, pointing out how science fiction authors view superstition. William Gibsonimaginary cyberpunk world Shaped the spiritual temperament It actually became the Internet.
Although the Powell meme is ultimately one-dimensional or “boring,” Walker said he’s glad Gen Z is paying attention.
“I would say there are a lot of people who may have seen a scroll like this and maybe Googled who he was or what he said,” Walker said. “We’re Jerome Powell and it’s more sarcastic than a sarcastic post because it’s sincere again because we like him.”