the way dogwhistles work is due to their element of plausible deniability, the fact that a lot of people wouldn't pick up on things, the fact that the connections can be opaque, the fact that they maintain acceptable to post, engage with, and circulate.
the fact that they are so widespread & so innocent-seeming that people calling that shit out seem paranoid or getting worked up over nothing.
all this allows for racists, alt-right, neo-nazis, what-have-you dangerous bigots, to make posts very much about their beliefs and the way they see the world,
& people who should, people who would usually, fight back and try and shut it down, see it and go
Haha. pepehands
they're so fucking ugly too dude. i don't care if you tell me the creator reclaimed them or you think they're funny. these things are all over gaming spaces and i hate looking at them, your chat/discord community/whatever deserves better emotes than the racist frog.
Value neutral statements about how things pick up meaning that the creator doesn't intend withstanding, I find the Pepe story to be sad and extremely easy to replicate. It's frustratingly easy to see how something like Pepe literally had Death of the Author inflicted upon it so hard, the Author killed Pepe off themselves.
So some years back, this one time my friend workshopped a meme format from out of an analogy someone made. This was done to track the movement of particular lines of communication in certain alt right circles they watched. The format involved a picture of a former standalone Pizzahut building (with the little cute roof and everything) and how it transforms into other business (eg, Cafes, etc).
CW's about Transphobia and how things pick up memes.
This was very unacademic, I only found out about it after it'd already jumped from the original forum to a discord they watched with a lurking account. It should've probably been documented with methods and published as a case study, ah well. So the purpose of the meme, simply put, was to identify where certain transphobic rhetoric was spreading for basically recreational academics and to the person I knew, a degree of amusement. The theory was that they could identify bullshit if people knew the meme in question, and it kinda worked where it landed. The thrust of the meme is that a uniquely themed building obviously a former Pizzahut converted into other businesses to outside observers could be summarized as and pardon the trigger warning but trigger warning:
"We'll always know what you used to be."
Tracing how it moved before the momentum fizzled out was curious, where it wound up was from a 'lets blindly guess if this person is trans based on phrenology' area and it briefly moved swiftly through neonazi discords and backwards telegram channels. The spread was very limited, and it doesn't appear to have entered the lexicons of most alt-right jackasses, but if you ever see it in the wild? Yeah. That was a purposeful manipulation to identify movement of information through various channels. The worst part is it was a mild adaptation from a non-transphobic analogy and was simply posted with alteration and context into a transphobic space, and became in limited circles a dogwhistle.
"They're basically a Pizzahut" might be a way to covertly describe a scary, dangerous, potentially transgender person (obviously, the validity of this modality is not high).
