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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: 2) by BK on Sunday July 22 2018, @11:20PM (3 children)

    by BK (4868) on Sunday July 22 2018, @11:20PM (#710940)

    Most people are getting so very tired of this crap.

    Most people... like to comment about this crap.

    I remember when, in the first year or so that this site was running, we had some discussion about whether political articles belonged here. The decision was made to keep them. Well some of them. I thought the agreement was that aristarchus was banned.

    --
    ...but you HAVE heard of me.
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 23 2018, @05:05AM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 23 2018, @05:05AM (#711063) Journal

    I thought the agreement was that aristarchus was banned.

    There was a formal agreement? Who were the signatories? Was the UN aware of this agreement? And, why didn't MSM carry the proceedings? Was there any chance for appeal? #freearistarchus #freeokrawinnie #freebeer #moarbullshit #freefrog #freeallthenuts

    Oh, wait - we've already done that last. That's why some of us think it would be a good idea to ban ari's submissions.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 23 2018, @10:31AM (1 child)

      Not going to happen. He very rarely submits something worth publishing but he does and he's a useful idiot not a spammer.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 3, Funny) by BK on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:21AM

        by BK (4868) on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:21AM (#711551)

        That word "useful"... I don't think it means what you think it means...

        --
        ...but you HAVE heard of me.