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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Politico: ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat

This is apparently the context of the headline "I love Hitler" comment:

AD: Yea I had some back and forth with the VC in Michigan, current chair is a deer in headlights

AD: We have a call Wednesday

PG: Many agree

AD: He did say "My delegates I bring will vote for the most right wing person"

PG: Great. I love Hitler

This is obvious sarcasm mocking the idea of automatically voting for whoever is most right-wing.

Skimming the article seems to indicate this dishonesty is a systematic issue. For instance it specifically claims "the watermelon people" was referring to black people without providing context, when it very likely refers to Gaza supporters in reference to their use of the watermelon emoji as a symbol. If you search "watermelon people" on Twitter every usage I can find before this article is about Gaza, it seems to be an established term.

"Watermelon" means using the environment (green) to mask advocacy for communism (red). It's been a term since at least 1980. The newspaper pretending not to know this and hieing to the fainting couch is classing pearl-clutching.

While this is true, amongst the young it’s mostly used to describe pro-Hamas types on social media who use the watermelon emoji because it has the same colors as the flag of Palestine (🇵🇸 🍉)

When I think of a watermelon in a political sense I think of what you’re describing, a commie using (often fake) concern for the environment but only when it pits them against their favored enemies.

I've literally never heard of this interpretation as a fairly lively culture war reader. Either Palestinian watermelon emojis or 'black people like watermelon' feel overwhelmingly more likely

Green on the outside but red within — pretty common

It's somewhat older but had a resurgence when AOC was doing her Green New Deal schtick, which was called green but was mostly about wealth redistribution and spoils for the preferred groups.

Used to be common, maybe these days a bit less so as ‘Reds’ stopped being a thing 95% of people could agree are bad.

I had heard of it before, but using "watermelon" in reference to pro-Palestine types seems overwhelmingly more likely.

Ironically, the usage of watermelon by the pro Palestinian crowd is fitting because they seem to be influenced into sympathy for them through a misguided perception of the Muslims being the "brown", non-white party in the conflict, despite them being more of less ethnically identical to most Jews.

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