"Keep NYC Trash Free" posters have been sighted around New York City, parodying sanitation signs, featuring a caricatured working-class Trump supporter shown with a MAGA hat, a Confederate flag heart tattoo on his arm, and a Chick-fil-a drink in hand.
These are the work of artist Winston Tseng who has made other such signs condemning Kanye West, Sean Hannity, and the Catholic Church.
According to Gothamist's coverage, Tseng has refused to comment on the posters for now, saying "“I’ll let the poster speak for itself."
The article mentions further how Tseng's work has gained fame and infamy before,
Tseng's previous work includes last year's "Your Train is Delayed" MTA parody ads, along with designs commenting on Colin Kaepernick, the Catholic Church, hypebeast culture, and most controversially, the relationship between Sean Hannity and Trump. Tseng told Poster House that he's worked with big brands like Urban Outfitters and Adidas to create prints and apparel, but he viewed these personal projects as an attempt at subverting the cliches of the industry: "Realistically no company is going to hire me to do this kind of work, so I decided to just do it myself."
It should be noted that in a statement to WPIX-TV, Tseng has denied creating the posters. "For the record I did not create or put up these posters," he said.
The troubling aspect about these posters is that it clearly is dehumanizing a large subset of America's founding population as "trash" similar to the slur "white trash" which even some Leftists would consider "classist." Hillary Clinton made similar comments referring to Trump supporters as "deplorables" while Joe Biden referred to them as "dregs of society." Both are still viewed as "presidential" by mainstream news because insulting white people as a group is seen by many as an assertion of progressive values.
Readers should note that many Liberals and Leftist "anti-hate" organizations have attempted to condemn non-racial phrases such as "Illegal-Immigrant," "Globalist," "Criminal," and "Mob" as dehumanizing hate speech, replacing them with misleading/deceptive euphemisms like "undocumented immigrant" or "justice involved individual."
On the other hand, they may argue that dehumanizing Trump supporters is okay because they have "power" and "privilege." But are the white, Christian, working class of poverty-ridden Appalachia, the Rust Belt, California's Central Valley, or unemployed factory workers who voted for Trump out of desperation really "powerful" and "privileged?" They are among the least positively represented in popular culture as anything but a caricatured punchline at best. Many like those at the Guardian have aptly observed that Trump (even as a wealthy New Yorker) gave them a voice. A recent WSJ op-ed stated "He's the average American in exaggerated form—blunt, simple, willing to fight, mistrustful of intellectuals," and then explained that that's the precise reason why so many leftist intellectuals dislike him. Even noted far-left filmmaker Michael Moore gave a famous speech in 2016 on why, even though he hates Trump, he understands why people would soon vote for him,
"I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don't necessarily like him that much, and they don't necessarily agree with him. They're not racist or rednecks, they're actually pretty decent people.
...Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said, 'if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them...'
[Trump supporters] see that the elite who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after they loved him and created him, and now hate him... Trump's election is going to be the biggest 'f*ck you' ever recorded in human history and it will feel good."
If a far-left filmmaker can humanize Trump supporters (even while loathing the man himself) America might benefit from more people doing the same. Many elites in the mainstream media seem far more sympathetic to foreign cultures than they are to people who live in neighboring cities and states.