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What’s DOGE? Musk’s new political appointment under Trump is a crypto joke

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that one of his top donors, Elon Musk, will co-lead the newly created Department of Government

Its owner, a kindergarten teacher in Japan, first posted a picture of Kabosu in 2010, but the Doge meme went viral in 2013 when people added multicolored Comic Sans-styled text to the photos, imagining a dog’s internal monologue in broken English. People felt a kinship with the meme, often adopting him as their avatar on various forums like 4chan’s/b/ board, which generates some of the most heinous content on the internet due to its lax rules and decades-long reputation for breeding chaos. Because the meme is so divorced from the original context of the Matt Furie comic, the apolitical character became a de facto dog whistle signaling involvement in alt-right movements.

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