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The man whose befuddled facial expression on a recorded video live stream in 2013 birthed what the internet collectively dubbed the Blinking White Guy meme has managed to convert his online notoriety into more than $300,000 for multiple sclerosis research, he said in a new interview.
Drew Scanlon explained to ABC News that donating to the US’s National Multiple Sclerosis Society is important to him because a friend of his and her mother both have the chronic, autoimmune disease that attacks people’s central nervous systems.
Scanlon, a San Francisco resident and video producer for the streaming platform Twitch, participates annually in a fundraising bicycle race supporting the MS Society. And once a year, on his rarely used X account, he posts the oft-deployed meme, writes “THIS IS MY FACE”, and requests that his more than 81,000 followers donate to the bicycle race at the online domain BlinkingGuy.com.
The strategy had helped him raise about $70,000 for the 2025 ride in late September, according to figures on the website. In prior years, he said, donors who were sympathetic to the cause had contributed more than $270,000.
“I’m continually floored by how many people still react so generously to it,” Scanlon, 39, recently told SFGate.com. He separately said to ABC that he viewed his having starred in one of the most recurrently deployed memes as “a gift” that he should “just … pay forward”.
Scanlon suggested that it was still hard for him to fathom how the meme materialized. As ABC, SFGate and KnowYourMeme.com recount, Scanlon was working for a website covering the video game industry and was on a weekly live stream on 6 December 2013 when a colleague invoked a double entendre involving a particular farming tool.
He responded with an incredulous double look and a series of blinks that initially few noted. But then a gaming forum user posted a gif of Scanlon’s reaction in response to a comment about an upcoming comic in 2015, as KnowYourMeme.com noted.
And then the gif’s popularity exploded in 2017 on what is now X after a user posted it to describe reacting to more difficult than expected material in a biology class. Several other posts featuring the gif subsequently began circulating broadly until cementing itself as what is now known as the Blinking White Guy meme.
As ABC said, Scanlon’s meme became so popular that the news and opinion website Vox at one point ranked it as the 11th greatest gif ever, out-placing others featuring the actor Leonardo DiCaprio and the two-term US president Barack Obama.
“A lot of times it doesn’t feel like me,” Scanlon said to ABC.
So much so that many people who learn Scanlon’s link to the meme tell him they thought the gif featured an actor whom he resembles: Cary Elwes.
He said even his wife thought the man in the infamous gif was Elwes – until she met Scanlon, who later became her husband.
Citing a 2019 study, SFGate.com reported nearly 1 million people in the US had been diagnosed with MS.
“It can be a really difficult disease, and it’s one that not a lot of people know but does affect many people,” Scanlon said to the outlet.
So many have been delighted to see Scanlon strive to champion financial support for MS research rather than rest on whatever laurels may come with starring in a gif that in the internet’s vernacular conveys subtle disbelief.
“Not all heroes wear capes,” one X user replying to Scanlon’s post promoting the bike race fundraiser in September wrote. “Some just blink confusedly over the years.”
Scanlon told SFGate.com that he hopes his philanthropic efforts become as synonymous with the meme as his immortalized, puzzled glance.
“I would be pleased,” he said to the outlet, “if the legacy of the meme was that it was used for good.”
