“We are Jerome Powell”: Gen Z finds an unlikely hero in the Fed chair via AI songs and fan edits

Jerome Powell, the 72-year-old Chairman of the Federal Reserve, isn’t the kind of guy you’d expect to see on Instagram and Tiktok to the sound of a heavily saturated techno remix. Yet his image has broken confinement in recent days, as Generation Z has made the famously taciturn technocrat a symbol of defiance in the second Trump era, dressed in respectful outfits usually reserved for K-Pop stars.

This was quite a development for the central banker that Trump initially chose to replace Janet Yellen, who would become Joe Biden’s Treasury secretary. It was reported in 2017 that Trump liked the fact that Powell had an air of “central casting,” but the longtime Washingtonian surprised onlookers in subsequent years by maintaining and even expanding Yellen’s focus on the “full employment” aspect of the Fed’s dual mandate.

In August 2020, Powell revealed that the Fed had revised its monetary policy framework to emphasize the “broad and inclusive goal” of maximum employment, running the economy as fast as necessary to put all Americans back to work. Critics quickly rushed in, warning of the risk of higher inflation, and Powell’s series of aggressive rate hikes in 2022 and 2023 made the policy a near but distant memory. Yet during the period known as the “Great Resignation,” when unions had the greatest leverage to impose wage increases in a generation, Jerome Powell was a hero of the millennial era.

It seems Gen Z is discovering what their older siblings did five years ago.

One manifestation of this trend began with a video made by Democratic strategist and popular YouTuber Keith Edwards. Inspired by the song “We are Charlie Kirk” championed by conservatives after the death of the right-wing activist, Edwards decided to flip the script and make it “We are Jerome Powell.”

“We are Jerome Powell, we carry the line“, a man’s voice moaned wistfully. “Not to a man – but to the law and time.

Edwards said he used AI to generate both the lyrics and the video itself.

“Personally, I believe if you look at the memes of 2016, they were very liberally coded,” Edwards said. Fortune. “I think it’s reversed. Conservative ideas now circulate more quickly on the Internet.”

For Edwards, the Powell meme is a tactical necessity in what he describes as a veritable “information war.”

“We are at war,” Edwards said. “When you’re in war, you take the biggest weapon you can and fire it. I’m going to pull out every grenade I can and throw it.”

In this context, Powell is the “grenade.”

After Powell released a rare video statement confirming that the Justice Department had subpoenaed him over renovations to the Federal Reserve office, and explicitly framed the investigation as political pressure related to his refusal to cut interest rates more quickly, he emerged online as an unlikely symbol of resistance.

Edwards explained that, for him, Powell represents a disappearing archetype: the technocratic figure who still believes in institutional norms and does things “by the rules.” This is a Powell boomlet similar and yet different from the pandemic era of “maximum employment,” when the Georgetown figurehead was arguably awakened in his commitment to putting all Americans back to work.

The internet — or more specifically, Gen Z — has decided that Edwards’ video is “harsh,” so to speak. They have now started creating fancams with videos of Powell looking tough; him posing in a smart suit, him giving Trump a dirty look as they both stand in hardware hats. It brings to mind another #resistance hero who faced an almost Marlboro-like American tenacity in the meme world: former FBI chief and special counsel Robert Mueller.

According to Internet culture researcher Aiden Walker, the appeal comes more from the fact that Powell doesn’t seem cool. He suggested that the “alchemy” lies in the contrast: Powell is both “venerable” and “unpretentious”, and placing this character in a fan cam usually reserved for K-Pop idols or action stars has a “gently subversive irony”.

Powell is also very “authentic to himself,” Walker said, and Gen Z likes authenticity (or, like Trump, they like the central aspect of casting the gray-haired politician).

“He’s an old banker, he’s been around the block,” Walker said. As an example, he pointed to the moment when Powell and Trump, in their construction hats, argue over the numbers for the building renovation.

“That’s his posture there,” Walker said. “He’s definitely not a guy who wears construction hats, but that’s what they do, and he’s very true to himself, and I think people online love that in a silhouette.”

But there is also a deeper shift in how the public relates to the Fed. We are no longer in an era where the Federal Reserve is just a black box to everyone except Wall Street. Commission-free apps like Robinhood and the growing popularity of pandemic-era “meme stocks” and spaces like r/WallStreetBets on Reddit have created something of a culture around retail investing in the 2020s.

The figures confirm it. Before the pandemic, retail order flow rarely exceeded 10% of daily trading in U.S. stocks. In contrast, JP Morgan reports that retail activity reached an all-time high of 36% of total order flow on April 29, 2025.

“There are so many more retail investors today,” Walker noted. “Young people in their 20s own a few stocks on Robinhood. They feel much closer to the market.”

The result is a new kind of familiarity with figures like Powell, even among left-leaning Gen Zers who might otherwise distrust the Federal Reserve.

“There’s a logic of fandom now,” Walker said. “And he’s a pretty funny, ironic character, because he clearly doesn’t necessarily want to be famous. It’s just a little forced.”

AI and accelerationism

In 2016, at a time when many people think about the origins of a slower internet culture, a political meme could have taken days or even weeks to saturate the culture. By 2026, AI-generated content has compressed this cycle into hours.

“AI generation makes it much easier and faster to do your edit with Jerome Powell,” Walker said. “You can watch a clip of Powell and, within two hours, your edit will respond to it.” This speed not only accelerates the meme, but it changes its nature and the nature of its subject matter, where current events become absurd spectacles of participation.

In postmodern theory, this is called “accelerationism.” By feeding a heavy-handed institutional figure like Powell into the deluge of AI memes, the Internet is hijacking the image of the Federal Reserve and accelerating it beyond the professional checkpoint. The process of taking a serious person out of their serious context – what French psychoanalysts Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called “deterritorialization»– connects them to a high-speed digital world where they are shaped in a particular atmosphere. In this framework, the meme is what psychoanalysts call a “hyperstition,” a digital fiction that, through the sheer power of speed and repetition, begins to dictate how we perceive the actual stability of our institutions. Philosophers sometimes use the example of cyberspace to explain superstition, emphasizing how the cyberpunk world imagined by science fiction author William Gibson shaped the ethos of what actually became the Internet.

Despite the ultimate one-dimensionality or “frivolity” of Powell’s meme, Walker said he’s glad Gen Z is paying attention.

“I would say there are a lot of people who probably saw a reel like that, and maybe Googled who he was or what he said,” Walker said. “We are Jerome Powell, this surpasses the tongue-in-cheek post because it makes it sincere again, because we appreciate it.”