¯_(ツ)_/¯ Is Dead Because This Senator Killed Him

Shruggie Guy, also known distastefully as the smugshrug or kaomoji, died on Wednesday after being beaten to death by a generation of overeager Internet users and their parents.

The final death blows were inflicted by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and his team, when they realized that incorporating the innocent line man into their presentations could push agendas and win attention for being a bunch of meme-regurgitating robots.

“It’s a graphic that we worked with the Senate Democratic leadership to put together to highlight the fact that the Republicans call the clean power plan a war on coal, but at the end of the day they try changing the subject or ignoring the reality,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s spokesperson Seth Larson. “We wanted to drive the point home: the Republicans have no credibility, have no plan of their own.”

We’re hope you’re happy, Whitehouse et al, because you’ve killed an icon.

The emoticon (once an incisive way of saying the visual equivalent of welp) rapidly spread across the Internet, soon becoming a kind of badge someone could use for valueless cool points.

Shruggie’s swift ascent to stardom was as much of a gift to Twitter users as it was a curse to its own longevity. Soon, think pieces on its meaning and origin began to appear, empowering the series of dashes and dots with a super-typographical importance. Then, devastatingly, Shruggie became infected with a bad case of BuzzFeed, a debilitating condition that served as a harbinger of its tragic end.

He is survived by his partner, the yellow M&M, and three children: tweets that look like scripts, the acronym MRW and Kanye’s face.