But again like many Pepe or Groyper memes, the core of this is a lonely male figure in sort of an immiserated landscape looking sad, and that's part of the story I wish more people were talking about. Aidan Walker @ aidanetcetera
2:13. The name Groypers originates from this variant of Pepe the Frog, which comes about in the late 2010s and these guys adopted as a kind of collective self portrait. They make it their profile picture. They make it their moniker. There was the Groypers War of 2019 in which Nick Fuentes and his people trolled Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, showing up at these debate events and asking questions that would push Kirk to say things that were even more extreme than Kirk was already saying. So where Charlie Kirk took like one step toward these kind of wider Christian nationalist ideas, the Groypers took two steps. They demanded that he make the subtext text. And one of those people have been citing as proof of the Groyper hypothesis is this one from his mother's Facebook that shows him dressed up as a meme for Halloween. It seems like the meme is Gopnik Pepe, which is a 4chan meme to my understanding but I don't quite associate it with /pol/ which is like the political board on 4chan that most people are talking about it. I see it more as like a /k/ meme sort of like a rare Pepe type thing. But again like many Pepe or Groyper memes, the core of this is a lonely male figure in sort of an immiserated landscape looking sad, and that's part of the story I wish more people were talking about. What's driving our political violence isn't just polarization where one side is getting more radical and kind of undermining democracy. Nor is it algorithms like some have said that are like pickling the brains of young people. It is that feeling which these Pepe memes represent of you're always going to be alone, you're never going to have a future, and you're never going to have a voice. And that feeling which is by no means rare or unusual in our society today, collides with a particular set of circumstances, this long entrenched nihilistic online tradition, the ready availability of firearms and the increasing arrangement of mainstream discourse, this ambient sense of like tension and volatility that exists in the air to produce stuff like this. And we're going to see more and more of it unless those root causes are addressed and unless we find a way to offer a better future to people.
