transhumanist-viking:

yknow i’ve been thinking about the Alt-Right. 

A big thing with them seems to be obfuscating language to make something that sounds stupid from an outsider perspective. For example, you have that whole debacle a while back about “pepe being declared a hate symbol.” 

Wasn’t that played up to all hell, eh? A frog comic is racist now! Political correctness gone mad! They call us Nazis just for using a meme!

Of course, anyone with half a brain and googling skills could look into it, and see that the pepe meme was actually insanely popular among the Alt-right, with numerous edits of the frog into a Wehrmacht/SS soldier, a Klansman, suicide bombers, nationalists of just about every stripe, and that the frog had been co-opted as a symbol and “wink wink nudge nudge” towards each other. So, saying Pepe was, as the Anti-Defamation League said, being used by racists, despite not being inherently bigoted, isn’t unreasonable. 

But by continually breaking down the rather nuanced view of “Pepe is not a hate symbol, but it is a symbol often appropriated and used by bigots” into “wow they say a meme’s a hate symbol,” the alt-right was able to make the left seem, at least to some people, like slavering morons always looking to be offended. 

They’ve done this with more than just pepe, too. You have a veritable cornucopia of symbols, emojis, dog-whistles, all of which are fairly innocuous by themselves, ranging from the 👌🏻 to the Deus Vult meme, or even the goddamn phrase “our guy” becoming a dogwhistle of sorts. Each time someone tries to point out that those are symbols used to signal to those ‘in the know’ by the alt-right, no matter how laborious the explanation is, and how much ground they concede to the idea that not everyone who uses it is intentionally trying to signal to the alt-right, it can always be reduced down to and made fun of as just another example of the Left Being Offended All the Time. 

That’s partially why it’s so hard to talk about the Alt-Right’s symbols and identifiers, because you could just as easily have on your hands someone who plain just likes a meme and has no idea what the implications are, or you could have someone who’s constantly going on about the ‘JQ’ when no one’s watching. 

I know a lot of people have said this sort of thing before, but it’s one of those things that I feel really does bear repeating, because it’s vitally important to understanding the main tactic that they use to operate. Confusion. They want to create confusion and make sure people outside their circle don’t know what their symbols and identifiers are. If they can wink to each other with no one noticing, then they can go around spreading their ideas in cloaked language and codewords, and through that, start drawing people in.