Before the Squirrel Story I Was Kind of Holding it Together

"The meme squirrel's daddy is a porn star," I shouted at confused passersby.

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Photo by Shashank Hudkar on Unsplash

Considering that tomorrow is election day, a thing we’ve been talking about non-stop for what feels like 18 months now, I thought I had been holding it together pretty well. I’d been avoiding looking at polls, dodging the flood of breathless microstories about whatever which campaign did what in the last four days, and generally trying to take deep breaths and convince myself to pre-accept whatever outcome should come to pass. “Is the Earth round or flat? I honestly never thought about it, Whoopi, I’m just trying to raise my kids.”

And yet it feels like things have gotten truly deranged in the last few hours.

Yes, I’m talking about the squirrel story. I was trying to avoid the squirrel story. At first I didn’t even know there was a squirrel story. The first I heard about it was when someone sent me this James Woods post:

It starts with a riff on “the Newtonian model of the universe” and ends with “this event where armed officers took a pet squirrel from an individual in New York opens a Pandora’s box of the horrors of leftist tyranny. The…”

The post, which is real, by the way (which is to say, not Photoshopped) feels like a perfect encapsulation of rightwing Boomer posting. In which pretty much anything (such as, say, the confiscation of a pet squirrel) can be held up as the key to understanding “leftist tyranny.” (One of the conservative movement’s wildest beliefs is the idea that leftists have any power here, but I digress). That the screencap of the post cuts off mid-sentence seemed to be the only commentary necessary. One truly didn’t have to read more to understand the gist of it. Some nut was Going On About A Thing.

Anyway, I mostly glossed over the squirrel part at first. My initial response was to think it was funny to acknowledge that James Woods has apparently been his character in Casino all along, and we just didn’t notice it before social media.

Then a different person sent me a cartoon by Ben Garrison, who is famous for drawing unhinged rightwing cartoons. I won’t go into his backstory too much for people who’ve never heard of him, but suffice it to say, any one of his cartoons could keep a future archaeologist busy for an entire career. Ben Garrison is the Thomas Nast of Facebook-poisoned MAGA aunts who have been banned from their local Applebee’s. This particular cartoon that someone had sent me depicted a crying squirrel in a cowboy hat that said “Peanut” holding a sign reading “Vote Trump!”

The obvious question was, “why is the Trump squirrel crying?” to paraphrase an Al Madrigal bit. Also, there was that squirrel again. What was the connection? Dammit, I thought. Am I going to have to look up what this is about?

Few things are more exhausting than realizing that you’re going to have to research the backstory of a political meme (perhaps you’ve heard of the Bullshit Assymetry Principle?), but this one got even weirder than I imagined.

Yes, there was a pet squirrel, who was allegedly euthanized by the state. And this event has turned the squirrel into a rightwing meme, supposedly symbolizing “government overreach.” I would’ve known all this, had I only read the rest of the original James Woods tweet, but in my defense, a good rule of thumb is to never do that. Ignoring that rule just this once, here’s a bit more of it:

“The facts of the incident are disturbing enough: an anonymous instigator over 1000 miles away reported a humble man who had rescued a wounded squirrel and made a pet of him for years. The informer’s motives in doing so can only be guessed, but the owner of the pet had made the horrific mistake in today’s America of supporting conservative thought. A cadre of armed officials got a search warrant, rummaged through the man’s property for five hours, illegally questioned his wife about her immigrant status, ultimately seizing the pet and killing it without giving the owner any recourse to save its life.”

So much language in here to unpack, from “a humble man” to “supporting conservative thought,” but we’ll get to that. Because apparently this story goes back much further, to before this squirrel had become a martyr. Back to when Peanut the Squirrel’s owner, Mark Longo, an engineer from New York, had been using him as a co-star in OnlyFans masturbation videos.

Writes Jonathan Poletti on Medium:

Longo had an idea for a business. He’d film himself masturbating and sell it on OnlyFans, packaged with scenes with his squirrel.

By 2022, Longo was the established porn actor known as ‘Squirrel Daddy’. His OnlyFans tagline: “Peanut’s dad, VERY kinky player 😈🔥” Sometimes he listed the squirrel’s name as ‘Pnut’, which seems in this context a sexual reference, i.e. evoking ‘penis’ and ‘nut’, which is slang for ejaculation.

Longo is said to live with his wife, Daniela, on a rural, farm-like property in Pine City, New York. Is she his unseen photographer?—recording her husband out displaying his penis, his asshole, etc., all in a very gay style.

So this is the “humble man” in question. Proudly displaying his tumescent wang. Doesn’t seem very “humble” to me. Checkmate, republicans.

Yes, two years before Mark Longo and Peanut became a political football, they had been making porny videos together. Longo made other social media accounts just for Peanut, without referencing the porny videos. The squirrel went viral even with no help from the nude pics, complete with coverage in USA Today that didn’t even mention that Peanut had kind of started as a mascot for a series of asshole-spreading videos. Imagine making “Tarzan the Gape Man, starring Fido’s Dad!” and then having someone write a puff piece solely about Fido and his cute coats. The mind reels.

As Poletti writes, “These [media] appearances, on reflection, were ads for [Longo’s] porn account. He offered Peanut the squirrel as his fun, sweet pet — while he allured with his body. Maybe you’d pay to see more?”

Longo apparently opened a sketchy-sounding “animal sanctuary” (“The website has no physical address, and visitors are not allowed”) in 2023. Everything seemed to be going great.

And then last week, the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) apparently confiscated and euthanized Peanut. This according to accounts in Fox News and CNN.

In the FoxNews presentation, the state reported that Peanut was euthanized to allow for rabies testing. The problem with this story is that squirrels don’t spread rabies, and Fred the raccoon was also killed.

It seems like the problems with the story go a lot further than that, but sure. Longo cried to TMZ, the NY Post, and Fox News. The rightwing media sphere took interest, and soon it became a story about government overreach. Elon Musk is now sharing shitty Peanut memes.

Mark Longo, the OnlyFans star turned mainstream squirrel dad sensation turned rightwing martyr, has since started a GoFundMe. It has, at the time of this writing, raised more than $167,000. I’m no accountant, but I don’t think it costs that much to replace a dead squirrel.

We are incredibly grateful for our generous community, which has rallied to provide free legal representation to support our cause. This legal support will empower us to demand accountability from the DEC and advocate for a more compassionate approach to wildlife management.

All proceeds from our fundraising efforts will directly benefit the rescue and care of other animals at P’nuts Freedom Farm, ensuring that we can continue to provide a safe haven for those in need. Together, we can make a difference and ensure that no other animals suffer a fate like Peanut and Fred.

Poletti’s Medium write-up of the saga includes many helpful pictures of Longo holding his barely concealed boner. And so to recap, the rightwing meme-o-sphere is all a-buzz over an OnlyFans boner model’s martyred squirrel, who seems to be at the center of a social media supergrift combining gay erotica, cute animal videos, and MAGA baiting. I can’t believe this guy has to take pictures of his hard boner when he’s clearly the best social media manager in the world.

It was a poignant story ready for TMZ—then be framed for right-wing political sentiments. Longo supplied new details along the way, like that the government agents had been so intrusive and overbearing as to check his wife’s immigration status.

I wondered about the real story. Did a gay guy buy a mail-order blonde bride as straight cover, getting her to film his sex show starring a rodent?

The promise of the internet was that it would offer democratized access to a massive repository of information. Think of the connections we could one day make! And yet Mark Longo seems to have figured out how to go viral in several different, almost completely compartmentalized iterations, without anyone making the fairly obvious connections between them all. The connection machine has become the atomizer.

Or something like that. Honestly, I don’t even have the words to tie it all together. It’s the Monday before election day and this is finally what broke me.

“The right wing meme squirrel’s daddy makes OnlyFans jack off videos,” I keep muttering to myself as I rock back and forth.