I hope you’re not implying I was doing that. I specified that roughly 80% of it was moral panic, which would imply that the other fifth—the proportion that was “the most grounded” and was comprised of “reasoned discourse”—is not moral panic.
Citing the appropriation of Pepe or the hand gesture as moral panics reads as if you're putting those things in the 80% box.
You know, when a kid walks into the house holding a dog turd the details of where they found it or what sort of dog left it there are not very compelling.
You’re also missing the larger point about layered irony. You should find a broader discussion of it in a cousin thread to this one; the broader point is that there is a deliberately cultured ambiguity between actual extremists adopting something as a dog whistle of their own initiative, their opponents having a moral panic about a supposed dog whistle which then leads the extremists to adopt the dog whistle meta-ironically, trolls being trolls, and people somewhere in the middle of the spectrum or outside of it entirely either mocking the controversy or deliberately stoking it for their own amusement.
For example, SPLC seems to entertain the claim that the association of the “ok” gesture with white nationalism originated as a 4chan hoax to “trigger the libs” (eg not as a genuine white nationalist hand gesture but merely as tomfoolery intended to provoke a moral panic), but may have later been appropriated by some white nationalists. (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white...)
