It’s been nearly a month since 21-year-old Mads Mikkelsen was denied entry into the United States after border agents discovered a bloated JD Vance meme and a photo of a pipe on his cell phone. Though Mikkelsen is back at home in Norway instead of visiting his friends and exploring US national parks with his mother, the viral meme continues to propagate. Its most recent progeny is a boarding pass template that anyone can download, allowing users to confront the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) with a pinkish, engorged JD Vance.
Dubbed “BIG BEAUTIFUL BALD,” the boarding pass template swaps out the standard backgrounds on Apple Wallet boarding passes and replaces them with the vice president’s exaggerated likeness.
The idea of transforming digital airline tickets into JD Vance memes was hatched by James Steinberg, a Manhattan-based tech entrepreneur. And the doctored boarding passes, first reported by the Rolling Stone, are apparently flying through TSA security checkpoints. On social media, one user filmed themselves scanning into their flight with a rounded JD Vance.
In an interview with Hyperallergic, Steinberg described his objective for creating the generator as a way to prolong the conversation about Mikkelsen’s case.
“I don’t know how many people are going to care about this in a week,” Steinberg said. “As a country, we have to decide if we’re okay with bald memes of our vice president in our airports or not; this was one way I saw to force that.”
Reached by WhatsApp, Mikkelsen said Steinberg’s ticket generator was “extremely funny and well thought out [and] executed.” Mikkelsen told Hyperallergic that he has been inundated with media inquiries since his story first broke last month, but that the attention has finally subsided.
“Of course, there might be a small risk of involved in using [the boarding pass] because of certain people having negative reactions to it,” Mikkelsen said, echoing his own experience with US border patrol agents. “Otherwise, it’s great.”
Mikkelsen said he was denied entry into the United States after officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection accused him of maintaining propaganda (the meme) and possessing drug paraphernalia (a photo of a pipe). On documents handed to Mikkelsen at the time of his interview, officers told him he was being denied entry because he appeared to be looking for work in the US. The Department of Homeland Security said that he was denied due to admitted drug use.
Now, anyone can input their flight information on Steinberg’s website, Dare Fail, and download their functional meme ticket directly to their Apple Wallet. The generator does not appear to alter the barcode scanned at checkpoints, Steinberg said. It adjusts the background of the ticket to a blurred version of the meme that border agents questioned Mikkelsen over. It is unclear whether using Steinberg’s boarding pass is completely legal, but federal law prohibits alterations to “access mediums” for fraudulent purposes. The TSA has not responded to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.
In 2006, informatics student Christopher Soghoian pulled a boarding pass generator stunt that led the Federal Bureau of Investigation right to his door. Soghoian had created a website that churned out fake boarding passes to highlight gaps in aviation security, but told NBC News that the boarding passes likely stopped short of allowing a dangerous passenger to board a plane.
If he’s asked to stop producing JD Vance meme tickets, Steinberg told Hyperallergic he plans to create a legitimate third-party airline ticket vending platform, like Expedia or Priceline, that will uniformly issue JD Vance boarding passes as a workaround.
Steinberg reports that as of Tuesday afternoon, 431 people have uploaded their boarding passes to his generator, and zero have been deported, to his knowledge. He is unsure how many of those people have actually attempted to board a flight with the meme ticket.
Bloated JD Vance tickets aren’t Steinberg’s first gimmick; he also uses AI to drop baseball caps on strangers’ heads outside his apartment and has compiled a database of “public” cats that anyone can pet in New York City. Anytime he sees a gap “in the market,” Steinberg told Hyperallergic, he tries to design a product to fill it.
Reacting to Steinberg’s project and the virality of his story, Mikkelsen said: “[It’s funny] how you can observe yourself in a situation directly related to you being discussed in such a great volume, and practically speaking, being completely disconnected from it.”
