So I took a look at the Donald Trump Pepe blog today, for the first time in a long time, and the memes on display there seem to be getting darker and cruder and more violent as election day draws closer.
It’s not as if the blog — a storehouse of sorts for, well, Donald Trump Pepe memes — had been lacking in crudeness before. Donald Trump meme-makers, after all, are the sort of people who think that it’s just plain hilarious to joke about throwing enemies out of helicopters and gassing the 7-year-old daughter of a writer they don’t like in a Nazi death camp.
But the newest memes are, if anything, worse — more graphic, more personal, more threatening than even the Holocaust memes that have been a staple of Trump’s volunteer mememakers for the last year. The newer memes, which seem more openly sadistic than those from months past, show Hillary being raped, being led to the guillotine, killing herself with a gunshot to the head.
There’s blood. And diarrhea. Lots of diarrhea.
Here’s a sampling from the memes posted recently on the Pepe Trump blog; I’ve censored the most graphic parts, but, seriously, if your day is going well and you want to keep it that way, you may want to stop reading here.
If not, let’s start with the murder-themed memes.
While their fellow Trump fans chant “lock her up” at Trump’s rallies, the mememakers fantasize about Hillary’s execution at the hands of a triumphant Trump.
Others fantasize about alternate ways she could be killed.
There are memes in which Pepe goads Hillary into killing herself.
And others (too violent to post here) imagining the same fate for Hillary’s “shills.”
There are numerous animated gifs depicting The Donald violently raping Hillary. Here’s a censored, non-animated version of one of them.
And then there are the scatological memes. This is the most presentable one of the bunch.
I guess the, er, joke here is that evil SJW Hillary fans are always complaining about racism. How a frog pooping on a poster for Hillary is supposed to relate to this I have no idea.
Another even more crudely scatological meme depicts a nude Hillary lying on the floor shitting herself while watching Trump’s victory on TV. I’m not going to post that one here, but if you have the stomach for it, take a look at it on the Trump Pepe blog.
And there’s a weirdly elaborate meme depicting Clinton diving into a big pit of money a la Scrooge McDuck, only to find that most of the money has been replaced with shit by a sneaky Trump fan.
After all these, it’s almost a relief to find a meme featuring a Pepe who’s merely peeing.
I mean, sure, “globalism” is a dogwhistle for “the Jews,” but at least there’s no blood or poo.
Dalillama:
Let’s not be unreasonable. Three-fifths of a vote.
Hm, regarding empathy: I do wonder about it’s literal and colloquial meaning, because while I do feel empathy towards privileged people living in a nightmare of their own creation, I can also accept that one should prioritize help to more marginalized people when conflicts of interest are predominant. However, the word “empathy” seems to imply that one should prioritize privileged people instead. I think gender analysis would be very relevant to this.
Yeah, it’s logically consistent with their definition of rape. If you were to say “He raped her,” what you would mean is “He had sex with her without her consent.” If an alt-righter said “He raped her,” what he would mean is “He had sex with my property without my consent.” This is why it’s only rape when people of colour do it. Because they’re doing it to “their” (i.e. white men’s) women.
Right –
if that’s what you’re meaning, then no I don’t empathise with Trump supporters over others. However, that’s not what I mean and I think there are some public policy issues – including equity issues – that need to be addressed around some of the people who are typically thought of as being Trump supporters.
I’m from the very-white rural South (there are black people in the rural South, just not so many where I’m from) so I have a lot of people – acquaintances to friends to relatives who are Trump supporters. For friends and relations – it breaks my heart, it really does. But there are some real issues of class – and yes, even discrimination – that white folk from the South experience. I still get shit from Americans even over here about my cultural heritage. But never mind the insult, what about the injury? If you look at any kind of outcome measure, Southerners fare less well. Saying “Well, it’s your own fault – why do you keep voting for people who don’t help you, etc etc” is the exact same argument people use about black people and taking responsibility. Jobs, education, addiction, health measures – it’s all shit frankly. There are people who are in real pain with little hope of a way out. They do have white privilege, but frankly it’s not much help to them when they’re in a mostly-white environment anyway. And there are public policy issues that need to be addressed. Guess who has had experience of dealing with those very issues with that very demographic and has tried to and often successfully done something about it? Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The genuinely poor aren’t the people who get my condemnation for a Trump vote. It’s middle to upper income haters who deserve our ire. Shit-stirring assholes who are deliberately out to maintain their privileges or middle class alt-righters who ought to know better but wallow in hate (my ex, for example).
@rugbyyogi
As someone who lives here (Murica, the South), distinction without a difference. One vote counts exactly like the other. By supporting Trump, they’re accepting and normalizing bigotry as a matter of policy. Ya don’t get a pass on that, cos you’re poor. Not saying you hafta have them, but both groups deserve my ire
OK, maybe I stated that wrong. There are no passes for choosing evil (and I do think Trump is evil). I can still be annoyed, I can still think they’re wrong, but I can still have empathy for their situation. I mean there were so many Germans who were in a dire economic situation and voted for Hitler and the National Socialist Party out of desperation and while I can feel sorry for their plight and understand why they might have been striking out or feeling desperate for change – there was genuine hardship for them after the WWI – but they don’t get a pass for voting for hate or voting for Hitler.
I know, I know that once you’ve used Hitler as a comparison… etc but dang it just seems so similar.
Except to be honest I actually think the average German was probably worse off in the 30s than the average American is now. I could be wrong on that… but I don’t think so.
But empathy is about understanding and I guess I can understand a lashing out from some more than others.
I made that decision when I was 19-20, minus the drinking problem (or drugs) both of which would have been oh so easy to fall in to to try to cope. Apparently the therapist who wrote my surgery letter picked up on it, She included a diagnoses of agoraphobia. I can handle small groups (especially if there are no males), but crowds make me want to die. No idea why I’m rambling on about this so umm..back to your regularly scheduled thread.
Isn’t it patronizing to say poor people get a pass to do stupid bigoted shit (vote for trump) just cause they’re poor and thus don’t know any better?
I don’t think the poor assholes are dumber than the richer ones (and i dont equate inteligence with formal education, but even if you do, we learn fuck all about politics/social responsibility in school so that shouldnt make a difference either. The only thing that might is that the richer assholes might have more time to educate themselves but i don’t think that makes a difference either.)
(EH forgive my super late comment)
For what it’s worth, Matt Furie (Pepe’s creator) said he’s hands down voting for Hillary. He’s also an awesome artist, by the way
@Rugby
Precise! And they all relinquished my understanding by refusing to understand the plight of others. Regardless of the ‘economic anxiety’ they might be under, it manifests as bigotry. The hatred Trump spews isn’t an inconvenience for them. It’s the point. They don’t want jobs by way of government investment, they want the jobs they think they’ll get if they kick all the Mexicans out. I understand it just fine. Do I care about these people tho? In short, fuck em
Like, empathy is a finite resource. I only have so much to go around. If they can have a seat and shut the fuck up for 4-8 years, then maybe I’ll listen to their problems (spoiler alert, they won’t). Should we help those people? Sure. Eventually. Until then, the ‘white working class’ goes to the back of the line while we fix the problems of the nondeplorables 1st. Besides, a minimum wage increase helps everyone
The thing about empathy for people who make loathsome political choices, as I see it, is that when so many people are preaching hate, SOMETHING is wrong. It’s not the things THEY think are wrong, but for almost half of the American people to throw their weight behind literal fascism implies that there’s something very rotten in the state of Denmark (or rather the states of America). It doesn’t mean forgiving or excusing their decisions, and individually it’s fair to just disengage from those people (especially if you’re queer, or a PoC, or female, or Muslim, or a member of any of the other groups at serious risk), but to fix the problem and engage with the issue in a way which will be productive, there needs to be an understanding of how these people are experiencing their reality.
I don’t know, when it’s a minority of people holding disgusting, regressive views, I can accept that they’re just horrible, deeply fucked up, toxic people and write off any hope of them being not shitty. But when it’s such a broad trend, there HAS to be a societal reason. Maybe it’s a transitional phase and part of the price we pay for moving forwards, and the mindset will die off as we go, but maybe it’s like 1930s Germany and we can trace the underlying causes to addressable problems like economic decline or poor education. Either way, empathy doesn’t mean justification. Understanding why someone feels a certain way doesn’t mean you have to agree with or even tolerate it.
As a Brit, I understand why many people I know voted for Brexit. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a stupid, irresponsible, xenophobic decision. I try to understand why politicians and people I know are trying to fucking kill me and other disabled and unemployed people through neglect and removal of services, but that doesn’t mean I’m ok with it. I know I’m kind of coming off as holier-than-thou, which isn’t what I mean at all. I’m just scared of admitting the possibility that this many people, including people I know and care about, could be irredeemably bad people for no reason. If we write them off as wholly evil when they make a really fucked up decision, that has some implications that scare me. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong, it’s just a difficult thing for me to reconcile with my faith and the way I was raised, to believe in “that of Go(o)d in everyone”.
The Germans were using wheelbarrows of marks to buy bread, and were burning the bills for heat. The average rural southern American family isn’t quite that desperate.
I’m from a rural area – in Canada, mind you. Being rural doesn’t make you any more or less smart, and to be honest? Being smart doesn’t make you more or less moral, or gullible. Smart people can be just as naive, just as gullible. It’s always been a hang-up of people who are smart (in a number of ways) to think that it makes them better, or somehow immune to being wrong. That’s where all the MRA-and-adjacent proto-rationalists come from.
They don’t think that Trump is the answer because they’re dumb, or because they’re gullible, or because they’re rural. They think he’s the answer because they’re racist. Education is the answer, but the education they need is the education of exposure.
@OoglyBoggles, I’m super jealous. I need myself some exposure education to some Noh plays. Your work lines right up with what I know about the introduction of Buddhism to Japan, too – multiple layers of interesting. I hope that your paper does well!
That was a whole lot of stream of consciousness blather and all I’m really trying to say is that empathy for Trumplings isn’t really about them, it’s about understanding why they are the way they are enough to deal with the issue and minimise the impact of bigoted rhetoric by understanding why people have STARTED frothing at the mouth in fascist rage where they previously weren’t. Were they always secretly racist xenophobic bigots and have now been given free rein to express it? If so, why now and what was stopping them being such a dominant voice before? Have they been suckered in by some shared views and pumped up to full on neonazi level? If so, what drew them in and what was the source of their original dissatisfaction? It’s a sort of political anthropology, and to assess it properly and understand it, you have to start from a baseline that people have reasons for what they do and aren’t just inherently assholes. Their end point is asshole, but they got there somehow and for some reason.
But again, that’s an overview and I think it’s silly and harmful to insist that everyone be sympathetic all the time to people who are trying to actively hurt them. There’s value in empathising but there’s also value in allowing yourself to be angry and sickened and hurt and to prioritise the victims over the aggressor.
@Vampy
I wish it were a decision. A one off fancy that’s being indulged. My problem isn’t that they’ve decided to vote Trump. This is the culmination of 40 years of this nonsense. They scapegoated Muslims long before Trump proposed his ban. They’ve dreamed of a return to ‘law and order’ since Nixon. Abortion has been under attack nonstop forever. It’s never just 1 decision, it’s a harmful worldview. That’s the problem. Trump just makes the contrast between deplorable and not more stark. He didn’t start this, he’s just taking advantage
How you reconcile that is up to you, I’m sorry it’s something you’re being made to do, but I can’t help. I do hope you find some peace. That said, I think you’re maybe looking for reasons that aren’t there. Bigotry has never required a cause or a trigger. It just is, I’m afraid…
@Axecalibur Yeah, you’re right, referring to it as a single decision was a gross oversimplification. But I don’t believe that bigotry ‘just is’. We’ve come a long way in terms of what is and isn’t acceptable – a lot of the shocking things being said now were uncontroversial accepted wisdom (at least among cishet white people) fifty or sixty years ago. I don’t think we’re unilaterally doing better but obviously ingrained bigotries CAN be challenged on a general scale, if not individually. There are reasons for why people act and feel the way they do, and whether that’s social messages or parenting or lack of experience of people outside their bubble or what, it’s THERE, we don’t do anything just because, we’re formed by external experiences.
Plus, the question when it comes to this, I think, is not just ‘have people always felt this way’ but also ‘why do they feel empowered to express it this way, and why now?’. You can accept that people are inherently bigoted asshats and there’s nothing to be done about that, but there’s still got to be a reason for the uptick in violence and openly violent rhetoric over the past few years, and imo even if people are just inherently dicks, it’s worth looking into their experiences to ask why they feel the way they do. Because if people are inherently assholes I’d still rather work out how to fix things so they’re too embarrassed to be unabashed assholes at people.
@Vampy
Yep! When I said bigotry just is, I meant that there’s no immediate cause. Global warming doesn’t have a single cause, but all the little things add up. It’s just that some people are looking for a smoking gun, thus ‘the economic anxiety of the white working class’ or ‘the divide and conquer techniques of the global elite’. You don’t solve a complex issue with a simple solution. Not that you’re tryna do that, and I’m sorry for implying that about you 🙂
I don’t think people are inherently bigoted asshats. I also don’t think they’re inherently good. Generally speaking, you get out what you put in. It’s just our society’s inputs are pretty gnarly
Ain’t that the dream? I’m not convinced we get there by engaging these people. They’ve made their grievances well known, and I’m far from convinced anything they have to say is worthwhile. I’m fine with dragging them along into the future until they fade into obscurity. Good a plan as any, I think…
TL;DR… crib notes version, don’t feel sorry for white men, they shot THEMSELVES in the foot
Re: empathy for McWASPS… and that’s really who we’re talking about in the main…. P-T-T-T-T-H-H-H-H-H….. (now I gotta go shower ’cause I just raspberried all over myself) I am one. I know how we think. Philosophically, they’re mad because in 1958 they had control over 100% of everything. Then came first black civil rights, then women’s rights, then gay rights, then gay became LGBT rights, then rights for non-Christians, and “we can’t even have a f**king nativity at the f**king city hall”, and we’re being genocided… ded!!! All this activity didn’t take ANYTHING AWAY from them, human rights is not a zero sum game.
In the midst of all this “rights-granting”, we had the “energy crisis” of the early 70’s, then the U.S. manufacturing economy was packed up and sent to Asia, and the family farm vanished and was replaced by corporate agriculture, and what had been (again, for the McWasps, and really just for the men) a “steady march toward the best of all possible worlds” seemed to tailspin into the sea. The union jobs that their fathers had for years, that THEY were supposed to get (yea, were entitled to) were gone, the family farm that had supported several generations was gone, the cottage industries, cabinetmaking, storekeeping, etc. were outsized by WalMart and gone.
The McWasps conflated these two completely separate courses of events and concluded that the reason their utopia had collapsed was because the non-McWasps had been “given” something. What that “something” IS can take several forms; welfare that is draining our national treasury, gay rights that have enraged the perpetually angry god, affirmative action which has taken all the jobs and left whites unemployed….
McWasp men are issued horse-blinders at birth. We learn early and often that those we call “other”, women, non-white people, non-christian people, gays, and on, these aren’t people we need to be concerned with. They are thought of as two-dimensional and resources are only released for their use if there is surplus.
The upshot of all this run-on is, socially, judicially, geographically, white men STILL control 100% (or at worst, 99+%) of everything. Economically, they also control 100%, but that control has shifted radically upward (thanx to Reagan and Bush2) to a very small but VERY wealthy elite.
Which brings us back to Trumpf, and to those horse-blinders. The “Angry White Men” who make up the core of Trumpf’s base grew up learning “three capital C’s” — Country, Christianity, and Capitalism. They are unwilling to place the blame for the disintegration of their “American Dream” where it rightfully belongs, i.e. on the capitalists who DID the damage, because they have been taught that the market economy is infallible. The right-wing politicians who aided those capitalists can’t be at fault, either, because they spoke in market language and portrayed themselves as pro-christian. If you SAY, “God, Country and Money”, they will support you, and what you DO is irrelevant to them, because the horse-blinders prevent them from acknowledging that what you’re doing does not match what you’re saying.
Trumpf is anti-“other”, and they believe that “other” is the root of their troubles, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Trumpf is a businessperson, and as such can be trusted to lead an economic boom, despite overwhelming evidence that he’s a very poor and very dishonest businessman.
The horse-blinder mentality explains so much, at least to me it does. The credulousness of his supporters, the willingness to believe the most incredible conspiracies, the complete disregard for their god-king’s past history of ripping off his business partners and refusing to pay his employees, the callous dismissal of his treatment of women (sorry, guys, chivalry IS dead), and really, everything else.
Please, do NOT take this as me saying these white menare merely victims of their upbringing and of their circumstance. I know them, I worked with them for umpteen years. They are selfish and mean as well as victims of circumstance. They can be your friend if the winds are blowing in their favor (and, of course, you don’t do something untoward like move into their neighborhood), but when times turn bad, you become a target for their ire..
To me the most ironic part of this is, their troubles were caused mostly by the white men who torpedoed the manufacturing economy, and TRUMPF WAS RIGHT THERE WHEN THAT HAPPENED. He may or may not have been doing it, though he is certainly doing it now, but I’d bet long odds he was on a first-name basis with the men who were doing it.
So, no, no empathy for the Trumplings… they’ve done this to themselves, and they have only themselves to blame for what he DOES TO THEM if Trumpf becomes President.
… cheezes rice, that last post was long… Sorry about the megabytes!!
@ Kat;
Antonyms for boycott
accept
allow
approve
include
sanction
want
welcome
permit
buy
encourage
support
use
Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.
Cite This Source
@ Moggie;
Touche’
Racial bigotry has a biological foundation, based on how our brains recognize faces. Our brains recognize faces like ours and our kin faster than those that look significantly different. The delay and confusion involved in matching less-similar faces creates an uncertainty which can easily associate with a sense of danger or mistrust. The best way to deal with this is to ensure that our children see and associate with people of different ethnicities starting at an early age, combined with making them comfortable with uncertainty.
It’s not enough, mind you. There’s still and will always be that slight hesitation, leaving the door open for bigotry. That’s why I tell white people that – if you aren’t consciously and explicitly fighting the racism inside you, you’re being racist. It’s also why I can automatically assume anyone who says “I’m not a racist” or “I don’t see colour” is the worst sort of racist.
(Sexism is a very different beast, on the other hand. There’s no biological basis for sexism beyond men having somewhat more testosterone than women. Makes it a more optimistic fight, but at the same time a lot harder to confront since it’s turtles all the way down.)
@Axe, thank you for all of your sharing on race and racism – I can’t say it enough. I can only guess that you face some pretty horrible racism where you life. I’d love to say it’s better here, but I’m really not in a position to say. I do know that Canada has traditionally been more open to other races and has really tilted towards combating racism over the past few decades, and that we’ve got a history of doing so. One of my favourite Albertan heroes is John Ware. He was born a slave in South Carolina, but after the civil war he went west as a ranch hand, then came north with a huge herd of cattle to start the Albertan ranching industry, which became and still is one of the most important industries in the province. He’s one of Canada’s legendary cowboy figures and features prominently in the history of Calgary – there are some schools and the like named after him, too.
I’m not saying this to go all “look how awesome Canada is”, because there’s some awful stuff going on here too. Just wanted to mention it because I love John Ware, and it seemed on topic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNZGfX68XnE
(Sorry for the terrible audio in that video, it’s the best I could find! I like that song though.)
@Vampy
There is. The U.S. is really, really fucking racist. That’s it. That’s the answer that you’re looking for: a huge swathe of the U.S. population are fervent, unrepentant bigots. I don’t like that that’s the answer, but it is the only one that fits with historical evidence.
Because we’ve had 8 years of a black President, and a quite good chance of a fairly liberal woman as President, and a certain amount of public discourse on the topic of maybe oppressing black and LBGT people and women a little bit less, and this is intolerable to these bigoted shitheads. (Also, a lot of them have been frothing like this since Bill Clinton was in office, and the older set since JFK beat Nixon. The Internet’s allowed people who aren’t in their immediate vicinity to hear about it is all.
@Scildfreja, re: thx Axe
Sorry to ruin the mood, but….
I don’t think that’s quite how you sentence.
I just want it to be over. But then of course it won’t be. I am not in the US, but I know that the result of the election will have international effects, greater than the usual.
Margaret Thatcher has been determined as the least popular PM in the UK of the last 100 years. I so much do not want this to happen to Hilary – I don’t know enough about her to have an opinion on her leadership, but I do know enough about entrenched misogyny.
Thatcher is MY least popular PM too, but even with her I can see that she was judged differently, more harshly, because she was a woman.
I think Axe can life wherever and however he like to life. It isn’t up to me to tells him how to life! Or word. I can’t tell him hows to word neither! I’m not the best at wording myself after alls.
OK – here’s the thing. I come from a town where big manufacturing is dead, small manufacturing is struggling and agriculture was never really any good. Meth and oxy have taken a toll.
At least one of the small scale factories makes a practice of hiring illegal immigrants from Mexico, all of their employees are Mexican and many if not most/all are illegals. How do I know this? Because I’ve been in the homes of the people who work there – been to christening parties and other big family get-togethers. Some of them have also have been in my mother’s home. I know them. They’re decent people, nice people. But they’re also illegal. I know what their situation was in Mexico, so I’m not judging – I understand why they made the decision they did and I don’t think their failure ‘to follow the rules’ makes them bad people.
My home town has a very low average income, higher unemployment than usual. It’s small, so it’s very easy to see this situation where illegals are preferred and to think ‘they’re taking our jobs’ – and they kinda are. Now, of course, the reason they’re hired over locals is that because they’re in a precarious legal situation, so they’re exploitable as labour force. My preference, of course, is for free movement of labour so that although they might work for less money because they’re escaping even more dire poverty they aren’t as exploitable – they’d have full employment rights.
But I can also see people I went to high school with really struggling with precarious employment and all the other issues that go along with that. I can see why they would be resentful. I think they’re focusing their resentment on the wrong people. I think they’re focusing on the immigrants instead of the employers and lack of labour focused policy. But when Trump says he’ll build a wall… well, that’s got some appeal. And believe it or not a lot of them are really decent people, too. People who I’ve seen act out of kindness and love and do amazing things for their neighbours. Really.
They aren’t people who are reading Breitbart, they’re watching Fox News and they’re talking. They think Trump is an asshole, but they’re going to vote for him anyway because they literally tell themselves that he doesn’t mean that shit (so much for straight talking) and they really have convinced themselves that Trump has been taken the wrong way and isn’t a racist and frankly isn’t any more sexist than anybody else. They justify their vote for Trump by really believing that Clinton is worse. I think Trump is absolutely awful, but I don’t think casting more shit on people is gonna help us heal and move past that.
So if you want to write off these people, feel free, so many people have already written them off for so long. But I won’t and I won’t apologise for that either – any more than I think we should write off the people in brexit voting backwaters of the UK.
@Scildfreja
Outside of the blue moon, pickup truck racists, not really. It’s more of a institutional thing than an overt struggle. Less horror, more tiring frustration *shrugs*
And I like your words. You do words good 🙂
@rugby
I’m not asking for you to apologize for engaging these people or even loving them. Not my place. I’m also not saying these people are inherently, wholly evil. Nobody is
However, nothing you said is news to me. Or anyone really. What I resent is the idea that I just need to get to know them, to understand them. That I’m a bad person for not empathizing with people who want me and mine hurt. I already know the reasons, including straight up hatred, why they think the way they do. Still don’t care
And I’m tired of people telling me to put in effort the other ‘side’ simply isn’t being asked to expend. Literally, in the article I linked, they say that the ‘left’ has more responsibility to reach out to Trump supporters than the other way around. My ass! This is what ‘healing’ always looks like. Obama has to ‘heal the racial divide’ while the Republican Party questions his birthplace. @Oogly said it best: I’ll meet em halfway when they start walking
Also, it’s not cool to call people ‘illegals’. Just pointing that out