The source image comes from a Lipton Tea advertising campaign featuring Kermit the Frog. The campaign first aired during the 2014 Academy Awards and encouraged people to "be more tea," meaning more kind5. The irony of Kermit's tea-drinking image being repurposed for maximum shade was apparently lost on no one.

As early as January 2014, Instagram users began posting captioned images of Kermit with the hashtag #kermitmemes4. But the meme didn't find its true form until June 2014. On June 17th, the Instagram account @kermitbelike posted what appears to be the earliest known image macro pairing Kermit with the phrase "that's none of my business"4. Three days later, on June 20th, the dedicated Instagram feed @thatsnoneofmybusinesstho launched, posting nothing but Kermit images with "none of my business" captions2. In its first four days, the account pulled in over 130,000 followers4.

The LeBron James hat moment in June 2016 gave the meme a mainstream visibility boost that few internet formats ever achieve. Over a thousand Kermit sipping tea hats sold on eBay within days, manufactured by small entrepreneurs with what The Verge described as "the production speed of first responders"1. Major sports outlets covered the hat as a legitimate story, not just an internet curiosity8910.

The Good Morning America #tealizard incident became a case study in how mainstream media struggles with meme culture. The story was covered by The Verge, Mashable, Mediaite, and AOL, turning a single bad tweet into a days-long news cycle about the gap between internet natives and traditional media117.

The meme also connects to the broader "tea" slang ecosystem, where "spilling tea" means sharing gossip and "sipping tea" means watching drama without getting involved. Kermit's image became the default visual shorthand for both meanings5.

The Kermit Sipping Tea meme represents one of the cleanest examples of corporate imagery being completely hijacked by internet culture. Lipton spent money putting Kermit in a tea commercial meant to promote kindness. The internet took that same image and turned it into the universal symbol for talking trash while pretending not to care5.

The meme's June 2014 breakout wasn't random. Instagram was becoming the dominant platform for image macros, and the Kermit format arrived at exactly the right moment. The @thatsnoneofmybusinesstho feed functioned as a centralized hub, giving the meme a home base that accelerated its spread2. Bustle noted that the format gave people "a new way to brutally undercut someone while still maintaining an air of detached superiority," replacing older forms of passive aggression with something shareable2.

The cultural context mattered too. The phrase "spill the tea," meaning to gossip, had roots in Southern tea party culture and was later adopted by the drag community5. Lady Chablis, a transgender cabaret performer featured in the book *Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil*, used "my T, my truth" to refer to her gender identity, and the slang eventually crossed into mainstream internet usage5. Having Kermit literally drink tea while delivering gossip-adjacent commentary created a visual pun that worked on multiple levels.

The meme's 2015 decline followed a predictable pattern. Formats burn hot and fade as people exhaust the possible variations. But what happened in June 2016 was unusual. LeBron James didn't just reference the meme. He wore it. Before Game 7 of the NBA Finals, James showed up to his press conference in the Kermit hat, creating what Bleacher Report called "a subtle, but potent, mic drop"8. The Cavaliers hadn't even won Game 7 yet, and James was already deploying meme warfare against doubters.

After Cleveland won the championship, James went full victory lap. GQ reported that he boarded the team plane wearing both the Kermit hat and an Ultimate Warrior t-shirt, calling him "the king of petty"9. The hat became the story. USA Today, the New York Daily News, and Bleacher Report all ran pieces explaining the meme to audiences who may not have encountered it during its 2014 peak1.

Then Good Morning America stepped in and everything went sideways. On June 21, 2016, GMA's Twitter account posted a tweet asking whether a photo of LeBron crying would join "other meme greats like #tealizard, #CryingJordan and #smockin"7. They called Kermit the Frog "Tea Lizard." The internet reacted with a mix of disbelief and joy11.

According to a Mediaite investigation, an ABC insider explained that the GMA social media team had been searching for memes to reference and stumbled across a January 2016 tweet from a Weird Twitter parody account that had offhandedly used "tea lizard" as a joke11. GMA didn't invent the name. They just amplified it to a national audience. Twitter users immediately began renaming other famous memes in the same clueless style. Perez Hilton called Crying Jordan "#happygirlwithbigeyes"11. Others demanded biological accuracy, pointing out that a frog is an amphibian, not a lizard, and that ABC's parent company Disney literally owned the Muppets franchise7.

The #tealizard incident became its own mini-meme, spawning parody accounts and hundreds of jokes about mainstream media's inability to grasp internet culture1. GMA eventually deleted the original tweet and apologized to Kermit directly7. As Mashable put it: "Today, we learned just how hard memes, and muppets, can be"7.

The meme's dual meanings solidified over time. It works both as a closer after delivering shade and as a signal that you're content to sit back and watch drama unfold, sipping your metaphorical tea5. Both uses tap into the same energy: detached amusement at other people's problems.