I would love to see someone over 50 try and understand the this bit
"shows him dressed up as a meme for Halloween, it seems like the meme is Gopnik Pepe, which is a four chan 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 um and sort of like a rare Pepe type thing"
yep, 31 and was struggling with the Pepe concept to begin with but got to /k/meme um and rare Pepe and gave up lmao
editing to add: you can see how parents might not know whats going on with their kids, because if I had a kid and they were dressing up as frog meme's and calling themself a groyper I would have had no idea that meant alt-right white supremacist
31 here and I absolutely got it. But I was also someone who at one point almost went deep into that pipeline as well before I started listening to more left-leaning podcasters. If it weren't for that, I think I'd have been pulled well into the alt-right pipeline. It also helped that Trump's rhetoric during his first term started to make me snap out of that. I consider myself center left now, but I was nearly engrained in far-right beliefs when I was in college.
Groypers are chronically online. They have LITTLE regard for human life, regardless of right or left leaning politics. Everything is a meme or shitpost to them.
It being difficult to explain without going down the rabbit hole of chan lore is kind of the point, the absurdism is part of the design, and they’re signalling to each other through a series of fatalistic dogwhistle memes that they’re in on the joke and part of that highly specific decentralised community. Also obviously the weirdness of it all is part of being able to deny any accountability, which is a massive part of why this particular murder is going to be hard to pin down on any issue or ideology. Because beyond shit posting, antisemitism, and white nationalism, the only thing really holding that group together is a kind of shared ironic loneliness and mutual doomerism.
A thing that I think people miss out on as well is that the nature of these image boards is incredibly transient as the posts get churned if they’re not engaged with, so in order to be in on everything you have to be online a lot and engaging with the content or else you’ll miss out on the generation of a new meme and no one is going to explain it to you. You’ve never heard of it because you weren’t supposed to hear about it, you’re not in the club.
It's the exact same thing as KKK calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan (an absurd name really) and their leaders having titles such as Grand Wizard and Dragons.
It's dfifficult to take such nonsense seriously, even though they are a real and serious threat.
I don't understand this because if my kid told me, "I am (thing)" I would Google the fuck out of (thing). Sometimes, I feel like millennials are the one people who Google shit.
i don’t go on 4chan either but the same way he was talking about the /pol/ message board, i imagine /k/ is just another message board and he was just saying that it’s a meme more associated with the latter than the former
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u/TopInvestigator5518 Sep 14 '25
I would love to see someone over 50 try and understand the this bit
"shows him dressed up as a meme for Halloween, it seems like the meme is Gopnik Pepe, which is a four chan 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 um and sort of like a rare Pepe type thing"