I should never have needed to type the phrase ‘Fascist Nazi Captain Planet RPer’ with my own two hands.
In light of the whole captain-planet-official nazi dogwhistles thing…
Doesn’t matter if they know what they’re doing or not (but they certainly do) or if they’re doing this ‘ironically’ (a cop out excuse to claim plausible deniability when they get called out) this fascist nazi Captain Planet blog is influencing its readers in a bad way, and you should be aware of how. Because honestly I’ve used some of those techniques too.
“But it’s all a joke!” No it’s not. It’s masquerading as a joke, hiding behind that claim if the heat gets too intense, but it’s not a joke.
Well, except maybe for the fact that the right wingers are laughing at you trying to figure it out, ‘getting confused’ or defending parts of what’s been said.
The short premise is that the more positively you feel about a personality on the internet, the more likely you are to agree with them, and the more likely you are to side with them on issues that you didn’t previously have an opinion on. At some point you file them away in your brain as ‘someone I agree with’ and use them as a shortcut for ‘If they said this, I agree with them’. It’s a very human thing, it’s why advertisers pay so much for celebrity endorsements.
So part of what this Nazi Captain Planet rper is/was doing (I can’t believe I typed that phrase with my own two hands, what even is 2019?) is making you feel attached to them, and partly it’s training your brain to accept and normalise their rhetoric.
So how does a blog set about accomplishing this?
Start with an easy one- giving you a nickname or term of endearment. It makes you feel special, and like you belong to something. They use Planeteers, I used Vetlings. People crave belonging.
Then have an approachable front: a much loved cartoon character. The trusted profession of veterinarian.
Now if you’re trying to do this deliberately, start getting people into a quick habit of agreeing with you. Pick neutral ground that’s hard to criticise - protecting the environment is good, don’t litter, we want good things for our pets, etc.
And once you’ve got people agreeing with you on multiple points in succession, it becomes easier to get them to agree with, or at least tolerate, the next point. Especially if you’re on a relatively unassuming blog about ‘saving the environment’ or animal health.
Did you ever try that trick as a kid where you ask someone to repeat the word ‘silk’ out loud ten times in a row, and then ask ‘what does a cow drink’? A bunch of them will automatically reply ‘milk’ instead of ‘water’ because you primed their brain.
So you can use this repeated behavior to desensitise readers to an idea, get them used to agreeing with you, until you slip some things in which they might normally side-eye.
It’s making the brain practice how you want it to think before the main event. It’s showing your work so that other people can apply it to other situations. I’ve done it too, rather more unintentionally most of the time on this blog, though I use it when communicating directly with clients.
For example, in my writing I can lead you down the garden path of:
“Purebreds have problems because they haven’t had new genes introduced in generations”
> “mixing of breeds is a good thing”
> “breed purity is a bad thing, maybe not immediately but it is bad”.
Then I will often leave readers to make the last step on their own, because I trust they’re intelligent and reasonable, and a conclusion you reach yourself has more sticking power than any I just hand you.
So when you conclude “racial purity is a completely bullshit concept and detrimental to the health of those ‘races’, are Nazis actually trying to make us as screwed over as German Shepherds?” you will hold that opinion more strongly than if I just said it to you.
Similarly, a different blog leading you down the path of “Invasive species are a result of globalism and must be removed” with “there are three types of people: black, Jews and normal” is leading you towards the path of “blacks and Jews are not normal, they are invasive and we should remove them” and then that goes to “but humanely! We can humanely euthanize invasive species!” and I’m sure you can see where that is going. It also co-opts real conservation talk and terms, but it’s glossing over the fact it’s trying to get you to think about people this way, often with as much plausible deniability as they can muster. Throw the thoughts out there, see what sticks, then backtrack if it doesn’t work.
On that note of backtracking, this is where Dogwhistles come in.
A Dogwhistle is a phrase that on its own looks perfectly benign, or even makes sense in context, but has a specific meaning for a particular subgroup of people that change the context. Just like dog whistles are heard by dogs, but not by people.
A classic example is the phrase ‘family values’, which often means anti-LGBT+ in a Christian context even though it sounds like it should mean something supportive.
The Nazi and alt-right ones change periodically. From relatively old school ones like ‘14 words’, the number 88, and ‘final solution’, to more recent ones like putting names in (((brackets))), particular emojis and even ‘Subscribe to Pewdiepie’.
Yes, ‘Subscribe to Pewdiepie’ became a Nazi dogwhistle, regardless of whatever you might think of Pewdiepie. If it was thrown into a context where it didn’t necessarily seem to belong, it changed the meaning of those words. And if that person was called out on it, they’d backtrack and claim they simply liked the content. And the bigger the meme became, the easier it was for them to use.
Ah, you might think by now, but lots of people also use ‘Subscribe to Pewdiepie’, emojis and sentences with 14 words. And 88 is a perfectly ordinary number, a birth year even, there are times when it’s really just being used legitimately?
Of course there are. But when you start to see a lot of them together, it starts to look suspicious.
And if you are a minority regularly targeted by such a hateful group, it starts to look really very intimidating. So if everybody starts reblogging these dogwhistles from a colourful Captain Planet blog, it makes it look like there are far more Nazi supporters than anything else. And it isolates those minorities.
This is why it’s so insidious that they claimed something like Captain Planet - a character with significant nostalgia, a show with a pretty diverse group of main characters and a good message, and co-opted it into spreading these dogwhistles and priming unwary minds to think these rhetorics, these training ideas, are reasonable.
“But it was clearly a troll, lmfao!”
Oh hell no. These are real tactics. They will say it’s a joke, it’s trolling, or that you’re overreacting, but that’s part of the plan to seed these ideas. Don’t defend it. Don’t fall for it.
