Furie lawyered up, trying to wrench his creation back to its original status, but the alt-right fought back. Pepe is now listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. The frog had long since lost its aura of childlike enchantment and had donned MAGA hats and SS insignia.
Pepe became an unofficial mascot of a racist and anti-Semitic campaign in support of the candidacy of Donald Trump. Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the frog was co-opted by the so-called alt-right, a loose collection of conservative, populist, white supremacist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups. He became so broadly popular that he even started showing up in celebrities’ Twitter feeds.īut soon those remixes included hateful messages.
Users depicted Pepe as a crudely drawn, bright-green frog with enormous eyes and a wide mouth, often shown looking vaguely sad or slightly sly. The image board - a sort of twisted, anarchic incubator for memes ranging from wholesome to hateful - adopted Pepe and relentlessly remixed and repurposed him for far different purposes than the character’s creator, Matt Furie, had intended. Pepe soon took on a life of his own, and his mischief became much less impish.
Rare pepe the frogs series#
Pepe the Frog started as just a chilled-out amphibian with a chilled-out catchphrase: “Feels good man.” That was back in 2005, when he first appeared in a comic series called “Boy’s Club.” When the comic debuted, Pepe and his cartoon roommates dabbled in “laconic psychedelia, childlike enchantment, drug-fueled hedonism, and impish mischief,” according the publisher of a book compiling the strip.īut even cartoon amphibians can go through a metamorphosis.
Some links in this story lead to offensive material. Editor’s note: This article includes depictions of a cartoon character that many deem offensive due to its association with white supremacist groups.
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