Words? Check. Numbers? Check. Punctuation? YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT BABY!!

In 2016, the (((echo))) – three sets of parentheses around someone’s name – was exposed as an online dog whistle for white supremacists to identify people who are Jewish and who, as a result, deserve online harassment.

That year Mic published an article detailing the trend (it somehow failed to mention that ((())) was used in 90s AOL chat rooms to resemble female genitalia, but we assume that’s an error to be corrected in future articles). Most of these ‘echoes’ occurred on Twitter (because of course they did). Also, we will never refer to it as X on here, because we aren't weirdos.

Get ready for a doozy of a sentence. Okay, here we go: The use of three parentheses as a dog whistle began after a podcast called The Daily Shoah, produced by the white supremacist media outlet The Right Stuff, played Jewish people’s names with an echo effect during their “Merchant Minute” (the “happy merchant” is the most popular antisemitic cartoon) to identify people who are Jewish. Phew. That was wild to type. Let's keep going. After that episode, (((echoes))) became the text version of that effect. They got so popular that white supremacists created a Google Chrome extension called “The Coincidence Detector” to add (((echoes))) around Jewish people’s names in web articles. Before the browser was taken down it had identified ten thousand people whose names would appear in echoes in the browser (and the extension itself was downloaded thousands of times). Don't you just love technology?

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Anyway, add punctuation to the list of things being wielded against Jews.

In response, many Jews have put their own names in (((echoes))) to take back the dog whistle (a tactic used by other marginalized communities). In response to that response, many white supremacists began using reverse brackets )))like this((( to brag that they’re proudly not Jewish. Honestly, just avoid Twitter if you can. It's bleak out there folks.

TL;DR – someone’s name (((written like this))) began as an antisemitic dog whistle, became a reclaimed symbol of power, caused a reverse punctuation response, and all of those things are still currently in use. And to think we were told the future involved only fun stuff like flying cars.

‍Not-Fun Fact: According to the editors of The Right Stuff, each parentheses has a separate meaning: "The inner parenthesis represent the Jews' subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy (see Cultural Marxism). The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration (see Great Replacement Theory), and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism." Also, this is unrelated, but their overwritten explanation feels like when a sports team launches a new logo and is like "these three bold stripes represent the three beautiful bridges of our great city." Not everything HAS to represent something. 

‍Not-Fun Fact: In the USSR, Jews would change their names to sound less Jewish (e.g., “Moshe Kagan” might become “Mikhail Kaganovich”) to avoid persecution. In response, antisemites would ‘out’ them by putting their original names in parentheses like “Mikhail Kaganovich (Moshe Kagan)” when identifying them to be discredited or purged. So there’s precedent to this.