I endorse this information.
Also was fun explaining what Pepe was to a bunch (which means 10, obviously) what a meme is, what Pepe is and how it was appropriated by the american Alt-Right and is now racist.
So....is the OK hand sign racist now? Because that's something floating around nowadays too
I haven't studied it specifically, but... even if its currently not, it could become if people insist that it is. I imagine that appropriation of it will actually be harder since it's not a random internet meme, but something far older. Also what you call the OK sign is the "get fucked in the arsehole" sign here.
I'm still confused how a benign frog cartoon got to be racist shorthand.
It was a combination of factors. Trump supporters and the alt-right in general started using Pepe memes and making their own variations; some obviously racist or xenophobic. The first depiction of Trump as Pepe was of a Trump-toupee'd Pepe standing in front of the US border with sad mexicans on the other side back in 2015 (am having lunch, so can't grab the picture right now). During the US presidential race, the meme was brought into the mainstream by both Trump and Clinton. Him posting depictions of Pepe as himself and Clinton with her "Basket of Deplorables" speech. Once she made that speech and a post on her presidential race blog was made denouncing Pepe as a meme of racists and white supremacists, the mass media started to echo that. So people that never saw Pepe before now saw him... as a symbol of prejudice. And the members of the Alt-Right weren't offended. They celebrated it, for Pepe was now reclaimed from the "Libtards", from the "Cucks", from the "Normies". And so it went.
tl;dr: That was the tl;dr. The article is 9 pages long.