• newfie@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    The bear metaphor was obviously thinly veiled racism/xenophobia from the start. Lots of conservative/moderate women who are terrified of anyone who isn’t white or who is “illegal”

    • ExtantHuman@lemm.ee
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      21 hours ago

      That’s…just no. Wtf? No.

      Source: I’ve actually listened to women, in person, describe their reasoning, instead of making up my own justification for something like the incel community decided to do.

      • newfie@lemmy.ml
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        17 hours ago

        The goal was to increase fear of the “other” - which is a classic right wing tactic.

        The bear meme was a conservative astroturfed campaign to push people right - which is why it appeared shortly before the 2024 US elections

          • newfie@lemmy.ml
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            15 hours ago

            No it isn’t, it’s literally what astroturfing is and how public relations campaigns are run. I know people who literally do shit like this for a living

            Doesn’t mean the original meme was created by an agency necessarily, but it certainly was boosted and amplified by conservatives to spark anger against PoCs/immigrants, and to build intergender resentment amongst men. Which worked wonderfully for Trump, as is evidenced by his strong performance with Gen Z men

            • ExtantHuman@lemm.ee
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              6 hours ago

              No, the uniformed idiotic women hating fake rationalization you can see continuing throughout this very thread may have been spread to the Andrew Tate following incel crowd to further stoke their anger. But that’s them capitalizing on their gullibility and refusal to speak to actual women about why they feel that way.

              You probably said this thing was STARTED as a racist othering campaign. That’s very different from someone trying to CHANGE an already existing narrative to suit their own ends. And none of those narratives were ever about race, it was always a gender thing.

              • newfie@lemmy.ml
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                4 hours ago

                If you asked people to describe the skin color of the “man”, i very much doubt most of them were thinking of a white man.

                A white male Connecticut suburbanite isn’t what is being thought of in their minds eye - it’s a “thug” or an “illegal”. Because the meme is racist, and anti-male sentiments manifest via violence against black and brown men

      • newfie@lemmy.ml
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        17 hours ago

        The goal was to increase fear of the “other” - which is a classic right wing tactic.

        The bear meme was a conservative astroturfed campaign to push people right - which is why it appeared shortly before the 2024 US elections