Americans Finally Unite on One Issue, and It's Murdering an Insurance Puppet

America has spent years looking for one thing everyone can agree on. It turns out to be a yellow puffball with a Statue of Liberty crown, a full set of human teeth and no nose, and the thing everyone agrees on is that it should be dead.

Liberty Biberty, the newest mascot of Liberty Mutual, was introduced in July and built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, which is like learning the Louvre has started making garden gnomes. According to the company, he "embodies the warm, fuzzy feeling of getting great coverage and great savings on car insurance." Viewers report a different fuzzy feeling, the one you get right before the dentist says "hmm."

On Oct. 25, about 100 people gathered outside the company's Boston headquarters. The organizer was Connor Harvey, 19, a YouTuber known as DimesAreTasty, which is the kind of name history never carves on a statue but always puts on a revolution. He led a call-and-response: "Who do we want?" "Liberty Biberty!" "How do we want him?" "Dead!" It was the first protest in Boston history where the tea was safe and the puppet was not.

Signs read "If you give me Biberty, give me death" and "Liberty Biberty is fascism." Somewhere, Patrick Henry is furious he never found the rhyme. "This is a revolution, this is the next Boston Tea Party," Harvey said. The original Tea Party had a tax grievance. This one has a texture grievance.

Harvey was also careful to add, "I am on their property right now, and if they want me to disperse, we'll do so." An uprising with a liability waiver, which, fittingly, Liberty Mutual could probably sell him.

One child at the scene summarized the event better than any columnist: "This has to be the most unemployed thing ever." Another offered, "I am against AI, but this is much worse; this is the worst thing a human can create." That is a review the atomic bomb never got.

There was exactly one counter-protester. Calvin Holmes arrived dressed as Biberty, in yellow face paint and a feathered scarf, and pleaded, "We all need to be body positive, and he's a beautiful freak." Within minutes his sign was ripped to shreds, making it the fastest claim ever settled in the Liberty Mutual universe.

John Oliver had already called the mascot "a fuzzy testicle with teeth" and "Big Bird's sleep paralysis demon." In Phoenix, a tattoo artist inked Biberty going through a meat grinder onto an actual human being, permanently, which is the most loyalty anyone has ever shown an insurance company.

And Liberty Mutual? Chief marketing officer Jenna Lebel said, "We're encouraged by how strongly people are engaging with him, whether they love him or feel differently." "Feel differently" is doing the work of a meat grinder there. The puppet tested above average on attention and brand attribution, meaning the plan is working perfectly: you hate him, and you know exactly whose ad he is.

Not everyone is against him. Six-year-old Finn Walker of Texas wore a handmade Biberty costume and was rewarded with four Biberty plushies, five pairs of Biberty socks and three Biberty T-shirts. The company has finally found its core demographic: people who can't drive yet.

The protesters wanted him dead. The company wanted him remembered. In modern advertising, those turned out to be the same campaign. Liberty Mutual's slogan says you only pay for what you need. Boston got Biberty for nothing, and it still wants a refund.