As someone with a fairly large rare Pepe collection, and who has been responsible for illustrating some extremely rare Pepes, but is in no way sympathetic to the notion of white supremacy, I find this whole Pepe controversy quite annoying. I've even removed the Pepe patch I had on my backpack in fear that someone would misinterpret my politics.
The clearest indiction I had that the media and the Clinton campaign were completely out of touch with reality came after reading this gem of an article on the Clinton campaign website.
Wow, thanks for posting this. I'm not a US citizen so I had not reviewed the candidate sites but I started to suspect things like this had to come from the democratic campaign. I figured soundbites though, not a page on the website. Unbelievable.
I usually take my civic duty fairly seriously and try to stay on top of the candidates and their campaigns but this year I found the negativity and vitriol displayed by both sides to be so grating that I was just tuning things out these last few months.
This whole issue with Pepe really drove things home for me, as juvenile as that may sound. I first stumbled upon Pepe years ago when I was even less sure of myself than I am now and I found the image of Pepe staring out of a window as the rain poured down outside [1] to be a perfect illustration of angst.
I'm upset that such an innocent meme could be co-opted by literal Nazis, but to be honest, I don't hold neo Nazis in particularly high regard so I'm not really surprised nor disappointed. On the other hand, I'd like to think a major candidate's campaign would put a bit more thought into the issue than simply asserting that Pepe posters are all Nazis.
I think most decent people would be upset and hurt at being called a racist, sexist, homophobe, or Nazis without a concrete reason. Yes, Pepe is just a stupid cartoon frog and it's not the end of the world that I no longer have him adorn my backpack, but still I feel this is a good example of the effect falsely labelling people with certain isms can have.
Despite being a progressive far to the left of Clinton, this whole affair makes me sympathetic to all the Trump supports, many, perhaps the vast majority of whom are not racist and have legitimate anger at the way Washington has neglected their concerns, who now face being lumped in with actual racists by the media.
The clearest indiction I had that the media and the Clinton campaign were completely out of touch with reality came after reading this gem of an article on the Clinton campaign website.
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/donald-trump-pepe-the-fr...