Like 99% of Internet headlines, this is misleading. The ADL was actually referring to the times somebody made Pepe look like Hitler or some other pejorative personality and used him for anti-Semitic and racist purposes.
These things bother me:
[ul]
[li]I commit a lot of idle time to internet browsing and I’ve never seen any Pepe memes. How did I miss out?[/li][li]Pepe’s just an unremarkable MS Paint cartoon yet somehow he went viral.[/li][li]Robert D. Raiford, a conservative radio commentator, said our country was the “United States of the Offended” about 25 years ago, and when I read articles like this, he’s still right. How can I be Progressive when I agree with conservatives? Oh, the dilemma![/li][li]This means other stupid and inane memes will be labeled as racist by ACLU knockoffs because* this sets a precedent!*[/li][li]This was just clickbait and I fervently swallowed it. I just helped the clickbait industry succeed by one click. I could have been the deciding vote that would have determined their fate, and I gave them approval to continue existing![/li][li]How come none of the lame cartoons I post to the Internet go viral?[/li][/ul]
Clearly you aren’t surfing the ‘cool’ parts of the internet.
Seriously, he’s on 4chan and /r/adviceanimals. If you are browsing more high brow stuff you’d miss it.
Bad Luck Brian is just a yearbook photo. Good Guy Greg is just a selfie. Insanity Wolf is just a picture over a graphic. It all depends what the internet runs with.
I know this is a joke, but I think it highlights a problem with our culture. Just because someone has another ideology than you, don’t mean they don’t have good ideas. Liberal and Conservative are such broad categories that it’s hard to maintain ideological purity. We should base our goals off whether they are a good idea, not whether the source was ideologically pure.
I predict Sesame Street is next based on the presence of bertstrips.
[li]Robert D. Raiford, a conservative radio commentator, said our country was the “United States of the Offended” about 25 years ago, and when I read articles like this, he’s still right. How can I be Progressive when I agree with conservatives? Oh, the dilemma![/li][/QUOTE]
The quote isn’t particular to the left. Soon enough the NFL will need to start putting trigger warnings before their games.
Pepe started showing up on celebrity twitter/instagram accounts
4chan started attaching [ironic] racist imagery to Pepe to reclaim him from the normies
Actual racists saw all of the racist Pepe imagery and didn’t take it to be ironic
Actual racists started creating their own completely non-ironic Pepe imagery and adopted him as one of their own
If you’re like me, you may have been aware of the first 3 points but not known about the crucial last one because you don’t hang around with white supremacists.
This entertaining NPR piece is also written by someone who does seem to understand the internet and the history of Pepe. Bottom line –
After hearing the guy on the podcast pronounce it wrong (until corrected), I’m actually wondering how I ever learned the proper pronunciation. Why didn’t I think it was “peep”? I wasn’t even all that aware of him, yet I knew the pronunciation.
Is it just that I thought Pepay sounded more like a name? Or is there something about Internet culture that gets into all of us?
At the risk of using an extreme example…
The swastika predates the Nazis. It matters how a symbol gets used.
I only know this image in terms of the alt-right, I never saw it before that.
If someone were to draw graffiti of it on my home (if there were some super-talented artist who could faithfully reproduce the perfectly-proportioned and perspectived frog), I would assume it was racially-motivated.
If the majority of people have that association, then it’s a hate symbol, end of.
What you do about hate symbols, in a country with free speech, is another issue of course.
Yep. Pepe is vastly better known now, in the full alt-right mode, than he ever was as anything else. It could have been different, if the white nationalists hadn’t connected with Trump this year, but an association in US Presidential politics is just too big. My mother knows about “racist frog.” I don’t think the image is recoverable for other purposes now.
It’s a sad, sad, day when young people in our society aren’t familiar with Pepe Le Pew. I really feel sorry for you whippersnappers who missed out on some great Warner Brothers cartoons from the days when cartoons were actually funny. Now get off my lawn.
[li]Robert D. Raiford, a conservative radio commentator, said our country was the “United States of the Offended” about 25 years ago, and when I read articles like this, he’s still right. How can I be Progressive when I agree with conservatives? Oh, the dilemma![/li][/QUOTE]
Conservatives are the ones that most often act as the United States of the Offended. It wasn’t progressives that freaked out over Janet Jackson’s nipple at the superbowl, or who opposed gay marriage or treating transgendered people as humans because ‘how will I explain that to my kids’, or who object to teaching actual science in schools and want ‘equal time’ for creationist nonsense (plus ‘trigger warnings’ on exhibits in museums), and it certainly wasn’t the left that were so offended at black people using the same water fountain as them that they passed a law against it!
It’s probably a generational thing. I regularly share Pepes on my FB and my friends (who are mostly left-leaning) recognize it as a generic meme that can be adapted for practically any context and were generally amused at the media treating it as a “Nazi symbol”. As for me, I refuse to let the Stormfronters appropriate Pepe and thus be unapologetic in promoting the Fount of Dank Memeness against the forces of reaction. Praise Kek.
