# Is X In The Room With Us Right Now Is X In The Room With Us Right Now is a phrasal template that mimics the way a therapist checks a patient for hallucinations, usually paired with a still of the Parkland shooter mid-interrogation. It broke out on Twitter in May 2021 and has been a go-to way to mock conspiracy theorists and catastrophizers ever since. ## Overview Is X In The Room With Us Right Now is a phrasal template that riffs on the kind of question a therapist might ask a patient reporting delusions[3]. The joke works by swapping the X for something absurd (demons, tankies, communism, an ex) so that the person being addressed sounds like they are losing touch with reality. Since mid-2021, the format has been welded to a screenshot of the Parkland school shooter sitting slack-faced during a police interview, which gives the meme its instantly recognizable visual half. An earlier version of the template used a stock photo of a bald, bespectacled man dressed as a therapist, which is still in rotation. ## How It Spread On May 26, 2021, a YouTube clip titled What Pretending to Be Crazy Looks Like, footage of the Parkland shooter being questioned by investigators, gathered more than 30 million views in its first week[3]. Within days, users cropped a still of the shooter's blank expression and welded it to the caption "are the demons in the room with us right now," even though those exact words are never spoken in the video[3]. The image plus phrase pairing first went viral on June 1, 2021, through a tweet from @colalover872 asking whether the user's "boywife" was in the room. A week later, on June 9, 2021, an Instagram post from @bandmeme666 pushed the format past 42,000 likes. From there, Is X In The Room With Us Right Now became a standard tool for shutting down conspiracy theorists, doomers, and anyone caught fear-mongering online. The template kept circulating through 2022 on both Twitter and Instagram, usually as a quote-tweet or reply weapon. ## How to Use The common convention is to pick something the target is obviously fixating on, an ideology, a fear, a jealousy, and drop it into "Is [that thing] in the room with us right now?" over either the Parkland interrogation still or the older bald-therapist stock photo. The tone is dismissive rather than clinical: the point is to imply the other person's fixation is a hallucination, not to actually diagnose them. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Is X In The Room With Us Right Now? A phrasal template that mimics a therapist checking a patient for hallucinations, usually paired with a screenshot of the Parkland shooter during a police interview[3]. ### Where did Is X In The Room With Us Right Now come from? The wording echoes a May 14, 2000 Simpsons episode where doctors ask Marge if God is in the room[2], but the modern image macro took off on Twitter in May 2021[3]. ### What does Is X In The Room With Us Right Now mean? It implies the person being addressed is imagining things, and is often used to mock conspiracy theorists and fear-mongers[3]. ### How do you use Is X In The Room With Us Right Now? Swap the X for whatever the target is obsessing over and post it over the Parkland interrogation still or the bald therapist stock photo[3]. ### Is Is X In The Room With Us Right Now still popular? The image-macro format saw heavy use on Twitter and Instagram through 2021 and 2022 and is still recognized as a standard reply template[3]. ## References 1. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjtRBlFun30]() 2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Mad,_Mad,_Mad,_Mad_Marge]() 3. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-x-in-the-room-with-us-right-now]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/is-x-in-the-room-with-us-right-now Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library