Trolls are trying to rebrand David Hogg as a gun-loving woman
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Trolls are trying to rebrand David Hogg as a gun-loving woman

It’s weird.

Youtube/CNN

David Gilmour— | Last updated

Online trolls are editing images of gun control activist and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, reinventing him as an attractive female gun-toting mascot called Daisy-chan.

Oh, and they also openly sexually fantasize about her.

“we ran david hogg through a neural net filter and found out he’s really fucking hot as a chick, hence Daisy-Chan, protector of the 2nd Amendment was born,” wrote one 4channer.

Who is Daisy-chan? Basically, unlike Hogg, she’s an enthusiastic supporter of both the Second Amendment and President Donald Trump—a fictional persona that represents everything Hogg stands or speaks out against.  

Already the meme machine has produced dozens of variations of the Daisy-chan meme. In some images, Daisy-chan is wearing one of the president’s red “Make America Great Again” hats and in others, she can be seen holding a gun.

https://twitter.com/LampBlakk/status/1032608582007644162

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the twisted meme spawned from 4chan’s /pol/ board, or ‘Politically Incorrect’ community, in late August. Users on /pol/ are widely known for their politically motivated trolling campaigns.

The meme appears to have been started by one 4channer who used a filter on FaceApp to change Hogg’s gender.

In the days following what seems to be the first post, which appeared on Aug. 22, whole threads emerged dedicated to the manufacturing of Daisy Hogg memes.

Screengrab/4chan

The images found their way onto gun forums and on Aug. 23 to Reddit’s r/the_Donald, the infamous online Trump supporter community, when user KaliforniaX posted several Daisy Hogg images. The post collected over 800 upvotes within 24 hours, as users celebrated the meme and questioned aloud whether their sexual fantasies about the fictional character were OK.

“Is it wrong that I would fuck xer,” wrote one redditor.

Hogg has been a target of backlash from conservatives since he emerged as a figurehead in a national movement for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

This new campaign against Hogg, however, is really an obvious attempt to disarm his message and to emasculate him by editing his face onto image of a woman. It’s a common tactic already used by those on the right, who in the past referred to Hogg as a “soy boy”—an insult based on the scientifically flawed thinking that soy milk increases estrogen hormone production in men.

The name Daisy-chan also serves to reinforce the feminizing aims of its creators. The -chan suffix is one of several Japanese honorifics that is often deployed after someone’s name within anime subculture. In particular, -chan is used as an endearing and sincere way to refer to a young girl or used ironically to feminize objects and people.

Last year anime-loving redditors created Earth-chan. Earth-chan represented the planet and became a vehicle by which to discuss environmentalism, global warming and flat-Earth conspiracy theories.

Daisy-chan is, by far, more sinister in its aim. For the users at 4chan, which started out in 2003 as a forum to discuss manga and anime, the name conveniently and undoubtedly doubles up as a stamp by which they can claim their new meme creation.

That Hogg continues to be a target of this kind of thing, underlines that the movement he represents, a national conversation on gun control, is still perceived as a real political threat.

And now even his detractors are into him.

David Gilmour

David Gilmour

David Gilmour is a reporter who specializes in national politics, internet culture, and technology.

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