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Leopards, MAGAs and the Laws of Nature [1]

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Date: 2025-04-06

“I never thought the leopard would eat MY face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eat People’s Faces Party. — Adrian Bott, Twitter post, 2015

This internet meme, which went viral when Mr. Bott created it, and is still circulating, is a metaphor, of course. Today, it refers to the buyer’s regret that people who voted for Trump, believing that he would benefit them and hurt their “enemies,” experience when they realize that his malevolence and incompetence hurts them too. When they realize that he doesn’t really give a shit about them, or even think about them, now that he has gotten what he wanted from them; realize that their condition, just like that of their enemies — the brown people, immigrants and “Libtards” they want to “own” — is becoming desperate as many of them join the ranks of the unemployed, impoverished and downtrodden.

The leopard meme provides moments of schadenfreude that those of us who tried warn them not to FAFO can use to relieve our own suffering caused by their hate and fear of the “other,” their racism, toxic masculinity or the sheer laziness that led them to bring this pox down upon us all.

Because now the leopards, in the form of a collapsing economy, faltering Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and numerous other government services are starting to munch. Just starting. Just claiming a few victims here and there. Picking off a few U.S. Veterans, MAGAs and others, who have lost their benefits; destroying the economies of remote gateway towns to national parks that lean “rural” in their voting habits; cutting or eliminating vital services needed by average Americans everywhere. The Feast of the Leopards is still in the appetizer phase. But it will proceed to the main course very quickly — far more quickly than many of us would have thought — much faster than the MAGAs, fully expecting Trump to lead them to the Promised Land, ever imagined was possible.

A basic principle of ecology explains why. Called the Lotka-Volterra rule after its discoverers, the “Law of the periodic cycle,” models a reciprocal relationship between the predator and prey populations in an ecosystem. When the predator population is at its peak, the prey population is low, because the predators gobble up all the available prey. Then the predator population plummets due to the lack of food. As the predator population dies off, the prey population recovers, and, when it once again approaches its peak, the abundance of food allows the predator population to increase exponentially, possibly doubling its population with each ensuing generation. (The real dynamic is more complicated, as predators often rely on food sources other than their primary diet, there is competition for most types of prey, and complications such as diseases and predation upon the predators themselves play their roles. But we’re talking idealized models here.)

What does this have to do with the metaphorical leopards that are starting to come for the MAGAs?

Until Trump was elected to his second term, those leopards were locked up in metaphorical cages, and their population was kept to a minimum. Those cages consisted of policies such as a strong and growing Biden economy and the socio-economic safety nets of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, the VA, SNAP and so on. Now, just a few months after Trump’s inauguration, that economy is falling apart and those services are being seriously disrupted or altogether eliminated — mostly so their benefits, such as the Social Security fund, can accrue to the oligarchs who are purposely unlocking the cages.

The leopards will start by eating the most vulnerable, the easiest to catch — those who depend on their Social Security checks for survival, the children of the poor, our disabled veterans. Once they’ve fattened on them, and increased their numbers some, their population will begin to explode as the cats attack recently-unemployed homeowners, and, as they did during the last recession, gobble up their houses when they default on their mortgages; as they hunt down union workers, and eat their wages and benefits; as they prowl unattended national parks and devour our land — growing ever fatter and more numerous. Thus the leopard population will grow exponentially until most of their prey — including the working class MAGAs, many of whom are keeping the faith and are unlikely to take whatever appropriate precautions they can, are gone — gone in the sense that they have no more economic fat for the oligarchs to glean.

But in society, as in nature, what goes around ultimately comes around. When the leopards have devoured the MAGAs and most of the rest of us, they’ll start getting hungry. Scrounging about for food, one of them could come across a half-eaten corpse wearing a bloody, tattered T-shirt that reads, “Hungry? Eat the RICH.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/6/2314888/-Leopards-MAGAs-and-the-Laws-of-Nature?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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