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Hillary Clinton exposing Pepe the Frog is the death of explainers

Hillary Clinton exposing Pepe the Frog is the death of explainers

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'That cartoon frog is more sinister than you might realize'

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Hillary Clinton is here to tell you about racist memes.

Earlier this week, the Clinton campaign posted an explainer of Pepe, an anthropomorphic frog who has become an unofficial mascot for Trump and the alt-right. It’s responding to a photoshopped riff on The Expendables posted by Donald Trump, Jr. and former Trump advisor Roger Stone on Facebook and Twitter, featuring a band of Trumpian "deplorables" that included Pepe, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos. "That’s Pepe. He’s a symbol associated with white supremacy," the campaign site observes.

It proceeds with an after-school special version of Pepe’s history, in which "an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike" finds himself corrupted by white supremacists. This isn’t quite accurate — as the Daily Beast article that Clinton links summarizes, Pepe was a character in the comic Boy’s Club who became popular on the decidedly non-family-friendly site 4chan, expanded into the popular consciousness, and was then "reclaimed" by white supremacists (again, on 4chan). But it’s close enough, and more importantly, it doesn’t matter. Nothing this explainer could possibly say would matter.

Posting white supremacist memes is now well within the Overton Window

If one thing drives this home, it’s what the Clinton campaign clearly hopes will be its wham line. "Let me get this straight: Trump’s presidential campaign is posting memes associated with white supremacy online?" asks the explainer’s reader stand-in. Unfortunately, the stand-in clearly hasn’t been paying much attention to this year’s election, because you could have asked this question at basically any point in the last six months and gotten a yes. In the long list of things you could accuse Trump of — fraud, racial discrimination, massive conflicts of interest — it barely even registers any more. "This is horrifying," the hypothetical reader exclaims. Okay, fine. What else is new?

For people who write about the dark corners of the internet, there’s an unspoken hope that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing terrible things will get people to look up, pay attention, and bring the weight of social norms down on racists, misogynists, and miscellaneous sociopaths. As a quote in one recent Wired piece about rapidly growing — but still negligibly small — right-wing social network Gab puts it, "not knowing about negative behavior online doesn’t make that behavior any better."

But the opposite is also true: knowing about negative behavior doesn’t make it any better, either. Making sure everyone knows about the ridiculous, blatantly terrible ideology that Trump condones in his supporters isn’t even bringing a knife to a gunfight at this point. It’s bringing nothing at all and calmly observing that your opponent has a gun. I’m far from the first person to say this about the election, or about internet culture in general. But I’ve never seen a better example of it than the Clinton campaign’s shocked, toothless condemnation of a frog.