Jorts

Jorts is an orange tabby office cat who shot to fame in late 2021 through a viral thread on Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" forum. In it, an anonymous coworker recounted an escalating workplace dispute over Jorts and a second office cat, a clever tortoiseshell named Jean. A colleague had decided that Jorts — who could not open doors and seemed generally hapless — needed "training", even smearing him with margarine in a misguided attempt to make him groom himself. When another staff member remarked that "you can't expect Jean's tortoiseshell smarts from an orange cat", the coworker accused them of perpetuating ethnic stereotypes about orange cats, and the whole absurd saga ended up in a meeting with HR. The story was so gloriously ridiculous that it exploded across the internet, and a Twitter account voicing Jorts quickly gathered hundreds of thousands of followers. From there Jorts took an unexpected turn: the account began posting pro-union, pro-worker messages, and Jorts became an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek mascot for the American labour movement, earning shout-outs from journalists, cartoonists and even Senator Elizabeth Warren. Behind the memes runs a gentle message the account returns to again and again — that maybe we should all be a little easier on ourselves, and on the "himbo" orange cats of the world.