[Opinion] Pepe the Frog: Just Memes or Hate?

Pepe the Frog. The internet’s favourite animal meme. The Anti Defamation League (Internet Word Police) has said that the light hearted frog meme is a ‘white supremacist hate symbol’, and has included it in their database of hate symbols. To understand why the organisation would do such a thing we have to explore the history of Pepe.

Pepe the Frog started of in life as a character in the popular comic, Boy’s Club. The comic was published in blog posts on MySpace, in 2005. In 2006, the creator of the comic, Matt Furie (who is now suing Mike Cernovich and InfoWars.com for their use of the character) gave Pepe his catchphrase, “feels good man”.

After Boy’s Club gained in popularity on Internet forums, the charming green character was used by others in different blog posts, becoming an in-joke among members of such forums. In 2008, a Pepe the Frog image was uploaded to 4chan’s /b/board, for the first time. It quickly became a sensation on the site, and both Pepe’s appearance and catchphrase went through many a alterations and improvements.

It was only during the campaign before the 2016 US Presidential Election that Pepe had been used in a political context. The main sharers of pro-Trump were members of the ‘alt-right’ (when it had not been split between the alt-right and alt-lite). In October 2015, then-Presidential Candidate Trump retweeted an image showing a Pepe the Frog, likened to his appearance. In 2016, Rodger Stone and Donald Trump Jr. posted an image showing multiple conservative pundits, Donald Trump Sr. and Pepe the Frog. The image was parody poster of the film, The Expendables, which had been renamed, The Deplorables, borrowing language from Killary Clinton and her ‘Basket of Deplorables’ speech.

When the election was over and Donald Trump had been elected as the 45th President of the United States, the alt-right lost its air of mystery, and the media labelled it a white nationalist movement. The non-Racial Separatist members of the alt-right started to use the labels, ‘new right’ and ‘alt-lite’. Both the alt-right and the alt-lite continued to use Pepe the Frog as symbols of their movements.

When the ADL labelled Pepe as a hate symbol they ignored all of the non-Antisemitic uses of the symbol. It is moronic to call this a hate symbol. If other popular memes were sometimes used in racist contexts, would they be labelled hate symbols. Of course not. The ADL only labelled the fun meme a hate symbol as a way to get at President Trump and his followers, who use it on a regular basis.

So, triggered leftist snowflakes, PEPE THE FROG IS NOT A HATE SYMBOL.