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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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Sulla on Sunday July 22 2018, @06:09PM (14 children)
If you create an internet meme and it catches on you lose all control of your creation and it becomes property of the internet. Before the 2016 election a bunch of normies started using pepe and it pissed off (in particular) robot9k to see "their" sadfrog being posted by chads, tyrones, and stacys for not the traditional purpose. 4chan responded with the poo poo pee pee pepes smearing him with shit and piss and posting it everywhere to make normies leave it alone. They did.
In the 2016 election a few rare pepes showed up on /pol/ but it was pretty tame. Libs threw total fits over literaly nothing (pepe in a maga hat) and said he was a nazi pepe, so 4chan made nazi pepes to piss off the complainers. Thus began the spiral.
The ones that interested me the most were the ones posted by cnn as "from alt-right websites" like kkk pepe that never once had been posted before on 4chan. So naturally if someone is making something and claiming you did it, you run with it, dig in, and double down.
Then the creater comes along to sue the internet to stop using memes. Well f him, he shouldn't have made a meme. You can't take memes away once they are out there, for better or worse. What if the guy who made that first troll face didn't like gangly armed troll face? Should he sue because he is butthurt?
Arist's submissions are him reading a headline, spewing coffee all over his keyboard in anger, and twitching as he submits it to soylent as fast as possible.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 5, Informative) by unauthorized on Sunday July 22 2018, @08:06PM (9 children)
IDK why you are getting so many downmods, but this is exactly what happened.
Pepe exploded in popularity as a middle finger to manufactured outrage over a completely fabricated relationship between the meme and the alt right, it used to just be another generic chan meme until the incompetent yellow press invoked the Streisand effect in full force.
Know your meme [knowyourmeme.com] has a pretty accurate summary of the events. It's rather hilarious that a website dedicated to documenting Internet memes somehow is capable of better journalism than the entire MSM.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by unauthorized on Sunday July 22 2018, @08:54PM (5 children)
Surprise surprise, calling out moderation abuse gets you modded troll. This is why SN is in the state it is in, you are driving away reasonable people with your intellectually intolerant ways.
Go ahead censor me more, I have the karma to burn.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Sunday July 22 2018, @10:01PM
It's literally 1 modder who downmodded you, and you were modded back up. Not enough to extrapolate anything.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Monday July 23 2018, @02:39AM (1 child)
The state that SN is in is 'contested.'. It's how every space ought to be. That's the mark of health, of vigor. Wear a downmod as the badge of honor it is. It means you said something that scared someone, that shocked him, that effected him so strongly that he reflexively lashed out. It means you cut him to the bone, and that is exactly how a keen mind should aspire to strike.
Fence. Counter. Hone your point. But don't cry when your interlocutors take the coward's way out and downmod you instead of daring to reply. Smile to yourself.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 23 2018, @02:57AM
Well fucking said. You're ever out in west TN, I've got a beer with your name on it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 23 2018, @02:54AM
That's why everyone gets mod points every day, to be able to self correct. Don't look for us admins to gainsay anyone except in the cases of mod-bombs or Spam abuse; not going to happen. Ditto creating a ruling class and only letting them moderate.
I like to think I've done a pretty good job of getting people used to the idea that staff are just people and not special or better than anyone else. I can step it up if you think I need to though. The price of this, of course, is that we won't ever help you win an argument except as any other community member might.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @03:01AM
This soylentil is "unauthorized". That can only mean one thing: Illegal immigrant to SoylentNews! Mod him down! Mod him back across the boarder! Mod him to make American grate again! And Mod him to keep America White, and stupid.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Sulla on Sunday July 22 2018, @08:56PM (2 children)
As you can see from how you are also getting modded this is just how insane some on the left are becoming. Questioning the narrative they are putting out, inquiring about it, validating the truth of the claims, all proof positive that you are a Nazi. Pepe exists now as an easy way to tell who is and who is not a Nazi. Post a sadfrog back in '12? Thats because you were a Nazi and were just covering it up.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 22 2018, @09:24PM (1 child)
Nah its more about you being wrong and a troll.
So the Pepe meme was specifically used as subterfuge and dog whistling.
Don't get angry when people take your trolling bullshit seriously, over the internet you have zero expectation of someone realizing "it's just a prank brah!" Don't want to be down modded? Don't trivialize neo nazi bullshit! Someone calling you a nazi and your widdle feewings got hurt? Explain that you posted that shit as a joke / taunt about excessive political correctness and you have no connections with neo-nazi groups.
Maybe you just thought shitty behavior over the net would never bite you in the ass? Be better people, don't try and force other people to coddle you for your bad decisions.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Sulla on Sunday July 22 2018, @09:45PM
4chan is a bunch of kids rebelling against authority who will do whatever it is that they are told not to do. The same people that were far left athiests are now far right christians because the loudest complainers are the ones who will get the most attention. /pol/ in particular supported Trump early because Hillary supporters got far more buttmad when you disagreed with them than Trumps did, and /pol/ went fully in the tank when they got leaked docs showing David Brock's Correct the Record was paying people to post pro-Hillary memes. I remember the first Trump pepe pretty good because it was made by a malaysian dude and i thought it was weird because i don't like the non-standard pepes. I can't remember when the Nazi pepes showed up but i know it was after /pol/ started getting called a Nazi place for not supporting Hillary. Naturally the average poster found where the new salt was and decided to mine it. I have never made or saved a pepe, but to me this whole thing reeks of people who dont understand memes trying to understand memes.
Here is what white supremacy is on 4chan/pol
If someone is Russian/Eastern European and you are not you shit on them as a slav and therefor not white
If someone is Finnish and you are not you shit on them as asian and therefor not white
If someone is German or French and you are not you shit on them for being not white for various reasons
The Irish are not white, they are Irish
The British are not white, they are anglo-saxon trash
The Americans are not white because they are only 56% "white" even though you dont accept German as white thats okay
The Canadian are not white because they are leafs (canadian flag) and their PM is the illegitimate child of castro
The Australians are not white because whites don't commit crimes and they are all convicts
If you are a Japan poster you say you are white because the portugese said the japanese were whiter than they are
If you are Argentinian you claim you are right because of Spanish and German blood but argue that both Spain and Germany are not white
Its a bunch of people being as biased as they can for absolutely no reason because they think its fun. And as soon as they are ignored they will find a new way to piss people off and do that. The left who want to piss off their parents go out and block traffic and attack mailboxes, thr right make pictures of cartoon frogs in their mom's basement.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @05:45AM (1 child)
Found the Nazi, or is it the Russian bot? Either way it only wants to mess with weak people's minds.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 23 2018, @10:44AM
Horny Jedi then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday July 23 2018, @05:50AM (1 child)
Based on the KYM article, the guy didn't create a meme — he created a multi-character comic book, as he's apparently a comic book artist, then other people began using one image from it as a reaction-gif, which then became a meme.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Monday July 23 2018, @01:33PM
Sorry, what i wrote was poorly said. My intention was if you create something and it ends up being a meme. I guess dubs guy and costanza should sue the internet about how their likeless is used. I have seen several of each in Maga hats and worse.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam