Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Sunday July 22 2018, @02:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the Boiling-Frogs-,-seriously dept.

The Daily Beast reports The Creator of Pepe is Winning his War on the Alt-Right:

Matt Furie had no idea a stoned frog he posted on Myspace would be co-opted by Nazis. Now he’s on a mission to reclaim his infamous work.

Matt Furie drew the alt-right’s favorite cartoon frog. Now he is leading one of the most successful legal campaigns against the racist right.

More than a decade has passed since Furie first drew a stoned-looking frog named “Pepe” and uploaded it to Myspace. The frog rose from MySpace in-joke to popular meme, before being taken up as an unofficial mascot of internet neo-Nazis during the 2016 presidential primaries. Since then, Furie has been leading a campaign to reclaim his creation, filing copyright infringement complaints against white nationalist Richard Spencer, conspiracy news site InfoWars,[sic]

This week he won another battle, pressuring neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer into deleting most of their Pepes, as Motherboard reported.

Though a cartoon frog might seem an unlikely mascot for the racist right, a leaked version of The Daily Stormer’s style guide explains the strategy.

“The tone of the site should be light,” reads the style guide, which leaked to HuffPost last year. “Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not … This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes.”

Recognizable memes like Pepe are an easy stand-in for humor.

“We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association,” a white supremacist Twitter user told The Daily Beast in 2016 of the campaign to make Pepe a gateway meme to the alt-right.

Furie was initially casual about the frog’s incorporation into meme culture.

“I get emails pretty regularly, from kids, from high schools, who need my permission to use Pepe in their senior shirts, or their clarinet club, or their photography clubs,” Furie told The Atlantic in 2016. “I tell them to go ahead as long as they sell me a shirt.”

But soon Pepes proliferated across sites like The Daily Stormer, prompting the Anti-Defamation League to designate the cartoon as a hate symbol, and inspiring Furie to lawyer up.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday July 22 2018, @04:11PM (3 children)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Sunday July 22 2018, @04:11PM (#710792) Homepage Journal

    The guy has his Copy Rights. Possibly the most valuable things he has. He told his lawyers to protect them, that's very smart.

    Me, my Trade Marks are the most valuable things I have. And my lawyers work very hard. Like you wouldn't believe. We did Trump Vodka. Which we stopped making. And another guy comes out with Trump Vodka. Doing very well with it, he made a kosher vodka that they love in Israel. Absolutely love. So we made a deal with the guy. He makes the vodka. And we make some money.

    Another one, Trump Escorts. We found out about that one after I decided to run for President. My campaign for President in 2016. Because they did a press release. So we sent the cease and desist. And it worked beautifully. So now we got the Trade Mark in China. For Trump Escorts. And I don't think we've started that one yet. I put the kids in charge of all my businesses. So there's no conflicts, very important. But they may need my help for that one. Because I know the best girls!

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Troll=1, Funny=4, Total=5
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday July 22 2018, @06:22PM (2 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday July 22 2018, @06:22PM (#710828) Homepage

    I had a couple slices of Donald Trump [yelp.com] yesterday, fucking delicious.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Revek on Sunday July 22 2018, @06:26PM (1 child)

      by Revek (5022) on Sunday July 22 2018, @06:26PM (#710832)

      I took a donald and wiped my trump this morning.

      --
      This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 22 2018, @07:41PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 22 2018, @07:41PM (#710851)

        My tRump has inflamed and bleeding Hellaries, so I used Preparation H on them.