#PEPE ANTI GAY MEME FULL#
Mensch is now putting the full force of her editorial authority behind that left-wing narrative. This article was likely pushing back on the political left’s claim that Donald Trump’s son is a racist for posting a Pepe on his Instagram. Last week, contributor William Hicks posted a piece sarcastically calling pop stars Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj white supremacists for spreading Pepes on their social media accounts. Mensch has not yet added an editor’s note to another Heat Street article contradicting the far left’s “white nationalism” narrative. She makes no case for the implicit suggestion that using a Pepe meme without Nazi or anti-Semitic imagery (i.e., the vast majority of Pepe memes) is automatically an embrace of Nazism and anti-Semitism.Ĭheong, the managing editor of Gameranx and a prominent player in the GamerGate controversy, has since retracted the claims of his original piece, stating that he was “wrong about Pepe.” Cheong reiterates Mensch’s claims that “It has, in fact, become an anti-semitic meme.” “Below I show some handful of antisemitic Pepe / Trump memes, they are everywhere,” she writes, before linking to the Drive folder again. That is the entirety of her argument: one dozen Nazi variants out of thousands of Pepes across the Web. Nine of the 22 images in the folder do not feature Pepe illustrations at all. A “Trump/Pepe” image, with no Nazi imagery, is included. Her hyperlinked evidence of this blanket statement is… a Google Drive folder titled “Pepe” that contains a dozen Nazi-themed Pepe alterations. While Pepe, once a harmless frog meme, may have started out as a widely used meme, the frog is now a symbol of the Nazi Jew-baiting of the alt-right.”
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Quoting Cheong’s claims that “no single group or ideology has ownership of the meme,” Mensch argues: “That is untrue. Heat Street, backed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, boasts in its motto: “Free speech celebrated. “We apologize for publishing it,” she wrote, adding an editor’s note on Cheong’s story: “This article was wrong and we should never have published it. Pepe the Frog is antisemitic.”
![pepe anti gay meme pepe anti gay meme](https://dazedimg-dazedgroup.netdna-ssl.com/1244/azure/dazed-prod/1180/9/1189842.jpg)
Most people, forced into this environment, will end up longing for a place where they can say absolutely anything.Under the title “Hillary Clinton Is Absolutely Right, ‘Pepe’ Meme Is Antisemitic – An Apology,” Mensch apologized for Cheong’s defence of the cartoon frog, claiming that the piece was “inaccurate.” Online cancel culture has that same effect in today’s America. “As demonstrated by the policing of morality in Victorian England and during Prohibition in the United States, the more you repress something, the more desperately people want to do it. Her documentary follows an inviting essay format, where she mixes background with her own opinions, including this one: Garrigus, making her feature-length debut, seems to believe that trying to police what people can will only push them to fiercer and more emotionally driven extremes. Is it possible that whole thing is just another troll?Ĭonfirmation bias abounds among Garribus’ interview subjects, like it does in so many corners of the internet. Still, it’s helpful to have so many of the theories behind memetic magic laid out in one ambitious 80-minute documentary, where viewers can assess them fairly quickly instead of losing hours (or more) going down internet rabbit holes. We meet lots of people who believe in magic - those light workers and shamans, for example - and not enough of the people who supposedly think they made Clinton fall.
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The main weakness of the documentary, which just debuted at the Fantasia Film Festival, is that we hear so little from the pro-Trump chaos magicians themselves. This is good journalistic restraint, but it can be exhausting for viewers who, like myself, don’t find them at all persuasive. She lets her subjects talk and talk, without judging them. If not, you may not be convinced by Garrigus’ talks with authors and self-proclaimed shamans, light workers, and chaos magicians. There is lots of evidence in the film that memetic magic is real- if you believed in it already. The new documentary You Can’t Kill Meme, by director Hayley Garrigus, explains the complicated and unconvincing idea that online “memetic magic” harnessed the power of the Egyptian frog-god Kek and the hijacked comic-strip character Pepe the Frog to sow chaos in the 2016 election, willing Hillary Clinton to fall and Donald Trump to rise to the presidency.