deniability is the point. as many (or more!) people using it benignly as maliciously, is the point. it sows confusion, lays a fertile bed for DARVO, and greases up the pipeline: wow those reactionary leftists sure are getting unpleasantly aggressive over our harmless little comfort frog.
zero tolerance.
When I was first exposed to that frog, and every time afterwards for several years, it had already been adopted by the worst of the worst so I only associated it with that. It was my assumption that it was created by someone who believed fully in that kind of garbage and that's how it had gained that kind of rapid traction in becoming a blazing icon of intolerance and hatred.
Then I later learned that the creator did not agree with that garbage and that the character and its meaning had been completely hijacked and remade into the hate symbol that it is. My level of fury swelled. As an artist and creator it's sort of like thinking about what it's like to have ones work scraped against ones will to train AI image generation, except those committing the theft aren't just greedy, they're the absolute worst sort of scum the world has ever seen. Bring something into the world that's meant to be positive and it can be hijacked and turned against the people that you love. I feel like the unfairness of that may be why some people even began trying to reclaim that frog. But there's no going back.
zero tolerance.
