Gwen

Dumbass in a dumb land

  • She/Her

I was born in the late Holocene and I've seen some shit



osedax
@osedax

the way dogwhistles work is due to their element of plausible deniability, the fact that a lot of people wouldn't pick up on things, the fact that the connections can be opaque, the fact that they maintain acceptable to post, engage with, and circulate.
the fact that they are so widespread & so innocent-seeming that people calling that shit out seem paranoid or getting worked up over nothing.

all this allows for racists, alt-right, neo-nazis, what-have-you dangerous bigots, to make posts very much about their beliefs and the way they see the world,
& people who should, people who would usually, fight back and try and shut it down, see it and go
Haha. pepehands


vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

The thing right wing Pepe guys most want for their weird little mascot is to see it normalized and ubiquitous - something that "normies"1 post without knowing or caring about its context, facebook moms posting minion + pepe memes, identity groups claiming a particular pepe for their own, etc. They love that that shit is basically built into Twitch and Discord. This doesn't actually hurt the value of pepe as Secret Hyper Racist Guy Handshake - it adds to it, in a similar way to how the core right wing framing of "everybody is as virulently racist as me, actually" helps them exist and spread their shit. They want who they are to be broad-daylight normal and acceptable and our job is to deny them that.

Besides all that, if you were to do a big trawl of twitter, reddit etc, the overall % usage of Pepe as a racist/fascist ingroup signal still far outweighs its "innocent" uses. The most likely random usage you'd come across, especially on twitter as it plunges deeper into the abyss, is 50/50 the most racist shit you've ever seen, or some shitcoin a few dozen losers are still trying to pump. Why would anyone willingly associate themselves with that, even distantly? So education is needed for those who just don't know any better.


  1. hate this 4chan "i'm so not normal, i'm soooo far outside normal and apart from society (whispers: and better than)" bullshit, love yourself enough to build an identity around something other than this.