I did that biden
I did that biden
‘I Did That!’ Biden Stickers Plastered on Gas Pumps Throughout Country
Stickers depicting a smiling President Joe Biden with a pointed finger captioned “I did that!” are popping up at gas pumps throughout the country as record-high gas prices are burning holes through the pockets of working-class Americans.
Biden deserves blame for high gas prices. Not because he banned Russian oil, but because his administration refuses to unleash the full energy potential America has to offer. https://t.co/TQg08vPyCG
lol everyone in America saw the Biden «I did that!» stickers on gas pumps as far back as November but okay https://t.co/6Bf6guAGro pic.twitter.com/w8qIo4Q4Ym
“I don’t go for the Democrats. They make it seem like they got the backs of minority people, but in reality, they’re just in it for themselves,” said Williams, a black man. “The rise in gas prices is B.S.”
Another motorist from the Upper West Side named Harold Frost, 29, recently spoke with the outlet about the sky-high prices.
“I just know everything he’s been doing since he took office has been going downhill. Bring Trump back,” Frost told the Post. “My car has been parked the whole week because of this. I took the train, but it’s dangerous now on the train. You gotta be careful.”
One assistant gas station manager in Alabama recently told WAAYTV that he is constantly scraping the stickers off pumps.
“I take off 5 or 6 a day from our different pumps,” said Perry Cagle, who works at an Exxon in Athens.
He noted that the higher prices climb, the more stickers he sees, according to the outlet.
“I got one here, it’s the ‘I did that’ and then they put it by the pump and it’s supposed to be that Joe, President Biden, is causing the gas to go up,” he told WAAYTV.
Javier Estrada Ovalles, who sells his own version of “I did that” stickers on his website automotiveanarchyco.com, told Slate that an uptick in business has coincided with rising gas prices.
“But in this last month alone, once the prices of the gas really started going up, I started getting bulk sales twice or three times more than it was before,” Ovalles explained, adding that he used to sell 20-30 individual orders daily, but the number has jumped to 80 per day.
“Me personally, I’m not either left or right or Democrat or Republican, nothing like that. It’s just whatever sells is pretty much what’s gonna go on the shelf,” he told Slate.
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Stickers blast Biden at gas pumps
Outraged motorists are sticking it to Joe Biden at the gas pumps.
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Outraged motorists are sticking it to Joe Biden at the gas pumps.
Decals of a finger-pointing President Biden, with the words «I did that!» in big, bold print, have been appearing on fuel pumps across the country — including New York City — as gasoline prices skyrocket.
«I just know everything he’s been doing since he took office has been going downhill. Bring Trump back,» said Harold Frost, 29, of the Upper West Side. «My car has been parked the whole week because of this. I took the train, but it’s dangerous now on the train. You gotta be careful.»
A sticker of President Joe Biden is placed on a gas pump at an Exxon Station on March 9, 2022 in Lakewood, Colorado. (RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
A satirical protest sticker critical of American President Joe Biden, with text reading I Did That, has been placed on a gasoline pump in Lafayette, California. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Mayor Melendez, 20, of Brooklyn, said he’ll have to make budget cuts elsewhere to fill up his Toyota RAV4
«I just got to keep reminding myself that, you know, Russia’s bad,» she said.
The stickers first started appearing last year, and have gained in popularity as gas prices continue to surge. The Biden administration banned Russian oil imports in response to the country’s war on Ukraine, but some critics say he was already sabotaging gas prices with his energy policies.
Gas station managers are not fans of the stickers.
«Put it on your car, put it on your house. Don’t vandalize private property,» one Alabama attendant told ABC.
Javier Estrada Ovalles, who sells his own Biden stickers through his company, Automotive Anarchy, told Slate that he’s benefiting from the oil shock, filling nearly 80 orders a day for the cheeky political statements.
«Me personally, I’m not either left or right or Democrat or Republican, nothing like that,» he said. «It’s just whatever sells is pretty much what’s gonna go on the shelf.»
MAGA’s most successful piece of propaganda
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On the final blustery afternoon of March, police responded to a call from a Turkey Hill gas station and convenience store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A middle-aged white man was menacing a young female clerk who had asked him to remove some stickers he had slapped on the gas pumps, with an extra coating of adhesive to make them harder to get off. The stickers, which depicted President Joe Biden pointing at the price on the pump, were captioned «I Did That!» — the implication being that Biden was somehow responsible for driving gas up to five bucks a gallon.
According to the police report, officers tried to «de-escalate» the situation, but the 54-year-old suspect «ran toward a store employee in an aggressive manner.» In a video shot by a bystander and shared on Facebook, a large, gray-haired man can be seen struggling with two cops and shouting, in a meta reference to the stickers themselves, «I did that! That’s what I did!» The protestor, one Thomas Richard Glazewski, was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, harassment, and criminal mischief.
The «I Did That» stickers are perhaps the most ubiquitous and successful piece of political propaganda that the counterculture right has produced in its semi-deranged campaign to blame Biden for everything from inflation to his son Hunter’s «bio labs» in Ukraine to setting up a communist regime in the White House. As with «Let’s Go Brandon» and those «Fuck Biden» flags, the style is occasionally clever, frequently profane (there’s often a junior-high bully, fart-joke vibe), and always infused with what used to be the province of the left — a kind of joyful, Yippiesque delight in causing public mischief on behalf of a greater cause.
But in the midst of this onslaught of weaponized merch, one question has remained unanswered: who created the «I Did That» stickers, and why? Was it a MAGA truck driver outraged at soaring gas prices? A right-wing operative looking to stoke the flames of conservative discontent? Marjorie Taylor Greene, with a stack of blank stickers and a few hours to kill at a Kinko’s?
No one knows. So I set out to locate the source of Sticker Zero.
«This is like a game wheel at a carnival, spinning,» Schmidt told me. «Both parties have ended up on the wrong side of the gas wheel. There is a price for gas at which, when it goes over that amount, people get extremely pissed very fast.»
The truth is, presidents have almost no control over gas prices, which fluctuate according to the laws of supply and demand, plus a dash of corporate greed. In the spring of 2020, as pandemic lockdowns caused demand to crater, the price of gasoline plunged. But what was good for consumers was bad for business. So in April 2020, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other oil-rich nations slashed production to drive down the supply and drive up prices. The move worked — and prices at the pump crept even higher as the world began to emerge from the pandemic, fueling energy demand.
Then came the war in Ukraine. «You had an exceedingly tight supply-and-demand picture before the Russian invasion,» says Helima Croft, an oil and gas analyst at RBC Capital Markets. «And now you’re looking at losing millions of additional barrels from the world’s third-largest oil producer. This is not rocket science. We have not built major refineries in years and now have shortages of diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel. Supply could not keep pace with resurgent demand as countries lifted COVID lockdown restrictions. Add in sanctions on Russia, and you get triple-digit oil prices.»
The bottom line: Biden didn’t do it. Or at least not any more than Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump or Mohammed bin Salman did. But political finger-pointing is a lot like gas prices — the higher the demand, the higher the blame rises. You really don’t want to be president in the middle of a gas crisis. Just ask Jimmy Carter.
«A buddy sent this to me from Pennsylvania», Posobiec wrote.
«Where can I get some?» his followers posted in the comments.
In late October, a TikTok account from a man named Matt Champion («soulharvester87») posted what he said was a photo from a gas station in Utah. «I saw my first Biden ‘I did that’ sticker today», he wrote, adding a laughing emoji. The post generated more than 200 replies, as followers reported sightings of the stickers across Western states. «I did it across the US last month!» one woman posted, boasting of her own sticker rampage. To which Champion replied, «Not all heroes wear capes.»
Biden and Democrats were caught, as they often are, on the back foot. The White House eventually trotted out the president to reassure Americans that he is on top of it. Biden released 50 million barrels of oil from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve — the largest such release ever. He asked OPEC and other producers to «ramp up supply.» (They declined.) And he asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether suppliers were illegally fixing prices to goose profits. The FTC, for its part, suggested that big retailers were colluding through a tactic called price signaling, in which one chain raises prices in a region, then watches to see if other retailers follow suit. If they don’t, the original chain drops its prices back down.
I started my search for the very first sticker on TikTok and Twitter, which yielded a rough timeline and a working list of the most active retailers. Then I turned to Etsy and Amazon. Scrolling through endless pages of vendors, I zeroed in on a few who were selling the stickers in large packs, at low prices. The mass producers, I reasoned, seemed likeliest to know the origin story. I made some calls, left messages with receptionists, and waited.
I had a promising chat with Ronald Solomon, the investment banker and entrepreneur behind MAGA Mall, who has been called the Jeff Bezos of Trump merchandise. Solomon sells the stickers, but he told me he doesn’t know who created them. «I don’t know if you can ever really know,» he said. I emailed a bunch of other possibilities. No luck.
Just when I was running low on hope, my phone lit up with a call from West Palm Beach. I almost ignored it as spam, but it turned out to be my lucky break. It was Robert «Bobby» Naklicki, president and CEO of the right-wing merch giant Redneck Nation. During a long and friendly conversation, he told me that he runs a number of companies, including a record label and a MAGA-friendly clothing line called Patriots Pledge («clothing of the people by the people for the people shall not perish!»). Nacklicki, who looks like an aging Harley rider with a bushy ZZ Top chin beard, wanted me to know that typical lefty assumptions about his brand of Florida Man conservatism are just wrong. «You don’t get more conservative than me,» he said. «And you know what — I don’t care if you’re gay. If you want to have an LGBT parade, go do it!»
It’s impossible to verify Naklicki’s claims, and he’s certainly got a financial interest in claiming ownership of the idea. But his timeline fits, and I found him to be sincere and credible. He and his team are already on the lookout for the next big wave of political outrage to cash in on. Gas prices won’t stay high forever, but there will always be new ways to own the libs. Anti-Biden merch is now more popular than pro-Trump paraphanalia, according to one seller who spoke with the New Yorker earlier this year.
When Naklicki and I spoke, the meme of the moment was Biden’s use of the term «ultra-MAGA» in his comments decrying the racist mass shooting in Buffalo. «We trademarked ultramaga.com right away,» Naklicki told me. «It’s the new ‘deplorables.’ Everyone is militant and wants to kill people! They think of us as animals. They think we should just go out and buy an electric car. It’s almost as if they’re trying to choke us out. I get that we have to transition, but we need gas right now! My opinion is that Biden deserves every single one of those stickers.»
In the Hollywood version of this story, Naklicki would be a front for some cabal of dark-monied conservative operatives who sit around dreaming up viral phenomena as a way to control the conversation and, ultimately, the country. But Schmidt, the former GOP strategist, says it doesn’t need to be that sophisticated in order to work. «This ecosystem has no rules,» he says. «The gas price issue is no different than replacement theory. Is there causality between the sticker and dark money? A direct line? No.»
Schmidt blames Democrats — not for high gas prices, but for failing to craft an effective message to counter the extremism of the right. «You have this wild-eyed MAGA movement running loose like a cancer that is taking over a party, and the other party is losing to that insanity,» he says. Yet Democrats seem to find it «rhetorically impossible to offer a unifying vision.» And the vision they do promote, he adds, reflects an «unknowing condescension» that infuriates the Naklickis of the world. «If you’re an urban millennial working at the DNC with an electric car and you commute six miles a week, you’re not necessarily at the pump,» Schmidt says. «You’re not paying attention.»
The right, meanwhile, knows exactly how to get its message out. Shortly after Thomas Richard Glazewski was arrested for sticker-bombing the Turkey Hill gas station in Pennsylvania, Fox News turned him into an uncaped crusader. «Don’t you dare make Biden the butt of a joke!» Jesse Watters mock-intoned during his prime-time show over a split-screen image of an «I Did That» sticker and the iPhone video of cops trying to maneuver Glazewski into the back of a squad car. «One man in Pennsylvania is paying the price after he stuck a couple stickers on gas pumps in Pennsylvania!»
If Watters had bothered to do his homework, he would have discovered that Glazewski has a criminal history that goes beyond political agitprop. I can’t say definitively that Glazewski is guilty of the violence against the young gas station clerk with which he is charged, because his hearing is not scheduled until July. But I can say that he has been convicted three times in the last ten years for felony retail theft. So, you know: He Did That.
Nina Burleigh is an author, documentary producer, and journalist. Her latest book is Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic.
Gas Station Stickers / «I Did That!» Meme
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Gas Station Stickers / «I Did That!»
About
Gas Station Stickers are stickers that have been applied to gas pumps next to the gas meter that often contain a certain political or humorous message. Starting in August 2021, a trend of applying stickers with photographs of U.S. President Joe Biden paired with the message «I Did That!» achieved prevalence in the United States as a way of commenting on the rise in fuel prices, with the trend continuing into 2022 as prices rose further due to sanctions imposed on Russian oil.
Origin
In May 2021, right-wing merchandise company Redneck Nation reportedly [14] produced the first batch of stickers of U.S. President Joe Biden pointing paired with the message «I did that!» in Florida, meant primarily to be applied to gas station pumps to imply that Joe Biden was responsible for a rise in gas prices. The company promoted the stickers with videos on TikTok, with other companies later also starting to produce the stickers.
On August 18th, 2021, alt-right political activist Jack Posobiec tweeted [15] a photograph of «I did that» sticker applied to a gas pump in Pennsylvania. The post gained over 1,800 retweets and 9,400 likes.
In late August 2021, stickers of U.S. President Joe Biden pointing paired with the message «I did that!» were filmed and photographed at multiple gas stations across the United States. On August 23rd and 25th, TikTokers [1] [2] @strykernick and @blacklablco posted videos of themselves applying stickers next to gas meters (shown below, left and right).
Spread
Starting in September 2021, multiple videos showing «I Did That» stickers were uploaded to TikTok, including videos of applying stickers and removing them. For example, on October 11th, 2021, TikToker [3] @talburt2121 uploaded a video of himself applying the stickers next to price tags at a supermarket, with the video gaining over 175,000 likes in five months. On October 17th, TikToker [4] hetrick_adison uploaded a video of herself applying the sticker at a gas station in Ohio, with the video gaining over 133,000 likes (shown below, center). On November 12th, TikToker [5] thelaguyinphoenix uploaded a video of removing the sticker from a gas pump. The post received over 1,400 likes (shown below, right).
On October 31st, 2021, Heavy [6] reported on the trend, with multiple TikTok videos of the stickers included in the article.
On January 6th, 2022, TikToker [7] @oreo_cookie_pupper posted a video in which applied a furry sticker to the gas pump and moved a «Biden Did That!» sticker so that it pointed at it. The video received over 20,400 likes in four months (shown below, left). On January 7th, 2022, @oreo_cookie_pupper shared [14] a photograph showing that another person added another sticker to the gas pump (shown below, center). On January 8th, Twitter [8] user @peak_transit shared the photograph, with the post garnering over 1,100 retweets and 13,000 likes in the same period (shown below, right).
The sticker trend experienced a surge in prevalence in early March 2022 after oil sanctions were applied against Russia over its war with Ukraine, which contributed to a rise in oil prices in the United States. On March 12th, 2022, New York Post [9] reported on the trend, with the tweet [10] linking the article gaining over 1,800 retweets and 10,900 likes in one month.
On March 31st, 2022, Facebook [11] user Aaron Philips shared three videos of a person getting arrested after arguing with a gas pump clerk who caught him applying the stickers.
In early April 2022, as the arrest story was reported on by the media, it became a subject of viral discussions on Twitter. [12] [13]
Biden ‘I Did That’ Stickers Are At Gas Pumps Everywhere
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Americans are experiencing a new kind of sticker shock as stickers depicting President Joe Biden pointing and saying “I did that” appear at gas stations across the country.
Biden deserves blame for high gas prices. Not because he banned Russian oil, but because his administration refuses to unleash the full energy potential America has to offer. https://t.co/TQg08vPyCG
“I take off five or six a day from our different pumps,” Perry Cagle, assistant manager of an Exxon station near Athens, Alabama told WAAY-TV.
lol everyone in America saw the Biden “I did that!” stickers on gas pumps as far back as November but okay https://t.co/6Bf6guAGro pic.twitter.com/w8qIo4Q4Ym
“I just know everything he’s been doing since he took office has been going downhill. Bring Trump back,” New York City resident Harold Frost, 29, told The New York Post. “My car has been parked the whole week because of this. I took the train, but it’s dangerous now on the train. You gotta be careful.”
Javier Estrada Ovalles sells his own Biden stickers through his company, Automotive Anarchy. Ovalles told Slate that he’s benefiting from the gas prices and fills about 80 sticker orders a day.