So I was watching this video about why being "anti-woke" was sort of a trap that caused many people to take on the attributes that they were anti-woke to protest in the first place. It's a great video with a lot of great points, but a side note in the video really took me off guard and I think it will for you too.
We've all seen this image before. The "TRIGGERED FEMINIST" meme. Of course there are many different people who have been memed similarly, but this is a quite popular one.
Have you seen the material this image is taken from?
She... wasn't even triggered. She was politely debating a topic that she was passionate about. Now... maybe the statistic she's quoting is not correct. The most liberal estimate seems to be 1 in 5, which isn't that far off, but still. Think about how much that one unfortunate screenshot of her has affected her perception.
What about Trigglypuff?
What was she yelling? "Keep your hate speech off of our campus" or something similar? Well what was the event she was protesting?
An event featuring Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder, and Christina Hoff Sommers. A lineup so terrible, that Sommers is somehow the least problematic, and she is part of a right wing thinktank. Milo Yiannopoulos being the worst of the trio, having worked with far-right outlet Breitbart as well as Nick Fuentes on Kanye West's 2024 presidential campaign. Steven Crowder is a bit more independent than the other 2, and he's a political commentator who thought it was appropriate to do this:
He also put out this... interestingly titled video.
What about Milo's opinions on hate speech? Well, the ADL has an entire page on him. It's not sourced, so here are some sources of some of the hateful things he's done:
He called a black woman an ape.
Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter after viciously attacking the actress.
He harassed a trans person at one of his campus events.
He flashed the student’s image onscreen in front of hundreds of people.
Even Christina Hoff Sommers eventually put this out:
Now granted, not all of this happened before the event that Triggly was attending. But Milo Yiannopoulos had already done enough that calling for his hate speech to be silenced was pretty reasonable.
Was Trigglypuff cringey? Undeniably. Was she right? In my opinion, she certainly was. And we crucified her.
So, what exactly am I even getting at here? In DarkMatter2525's video, the one at the top of this thread which spawned this revelation for me, he talks about the traits he disliked in "woke" people.
Obsessive
Easily-offended
Hypocritical
Lacking self-awareness
Did that not apply to the internet's general reaction to these 2 characters in meme history? After all, these are real people, and I'm not sure they've been viewed as such. We obsessively applied a caricature to them, because we were offended by what we thought they represented. That itself is hypocritical, because the whole reason we were offended was that we felt a caricature of an evil hate speech-loving Nazi was being applied to us. And if we had the self-awareness... perhaps these people would not be memes now.
