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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.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday July 22 2018, @04:13PM (2 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday July 22 2018, @04:13PM (#710793) Journal

    Suppose Pepe's creator wins every court fight, gets rewarded huge punitive judgments. It won't stop the alt-right. Doubtless they'll spin it as another case of the evil liberal court system and lawyers victimizing them.

    To really win would take ... ? Evolving humanity so everyone is smarter and no one would want to join up with such stupidity? Might already have been happening naturally over thousands of years, through the use of near endless war to solve problems. The Crusades was great bait for alt-right types in Europe. But we can't use total war anymore, not since the invention of nuclear weapons. Let's hope that the past thousands of years was enough time to reduce their numbers and power to the point they can't drag the rest of us into another idiotic war.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by crafoo on Sunday July 22 2018, @11:21PM

    by crafoo (6639) on Sunday July 22 2018, @11:21PM (#710942)

    Evolving humanity so everyone is smarter and no one would want to join up with such stupidity?
    I don't think you know what evolution means. You seem to use it in the sense that "your side" will apply external pressures to humanity to force it to evolve down a particular path (smarter people that wouldn't join up with such stupidity). What will actually happen is that evolutionary pressures outside your control will evolve humanity to best survive and sexually reproduce in their current environment. This might mean smarter people, it might mean dumber people. It might mean more vicious, aggressive people. You know, you're also assuming the regressive left are the more intelligent, well-meaning bunch that has the plan for the right evolutionary pressures to proceed to a more favourable outcome. Given the evidence, that's clearly not the case. If there is one thing that you can use to pick out a regressive globalist, it's their comically fabricated worldview and understanding of human nature.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @02:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @02:59AM (#711032)

    Pepe's creator got his 15 minutes of fame. Now he's hitting the 'Play Again' button.