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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 23 2018, @10:10AM (3 children)
SJW's are pretty easy to identify, in contrast to this nebulous "alt right". Reparations is part of it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEanCzEOg5o [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @06:14PM (2 children)
Apparently the NY times disagrees with you https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/alt-left-alt-right-glossary.html/ [nytimes.com].
But for kicks and giggles,
If you believe the 'white' race is superior, you may just be alt-right.*
If you have a fixation on white identity as central to your ideology, you may just be alt-right.*
If you're a big fan of Nazi symbols and memorabilia, you may just be alt-right.
If you think there is a big conspiracy involving Jews, you may just be alt-right.
If you think Breitbart is an excellent journalist, you may just be alt-right.
If you think Alex Jones is anything other than seriously mentally disturbed, poor guy, you may just be alt-right.
If you believe in “identity politics for white people”, you may just be alt-right.*
If you believe that higher education is “only appropriate for a cognitive elite” and that most citizens should be educated in trade schools or apprenticeships, you may just be alt-right.
If you believe paying $13/day per adult for asylum seekers going through the process is a worse solution than separating children from their families, apparently permanently, and paying $130/day per person (i.e. including children) to go through the process, you may just be alt-right.
If you believe that legal marriage should be defined by some specific religion (your personal religion apparently), you may just be alt-right.
If you like 'you may just be a red neck' jokes, you may just be alt-right.
* Ironically, these also apply to far left beliefs.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 23 2018, @06:37PM (1 child)
Well, lemme just summarize all that nonsense.
If you're not far left, then you may just be alt-right. There isn't room for anyone in between control-left and alt-right. And, for those who have tried to stay out of both camps, we've moved the perimeters of the camps to include the entire face of the earth - you can't get out!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23 2018, @11:01PM
Well, some of it is nonsense: using the 'you may be a red neck' as a relationship to the alt right is a bit of nonsense (although meant to be funny not fair, and of course, apologies to Jeff Foxworthy). But a number of those descriptions are from people who consider themselves in the forefront of the alt-right. It would be hard to consider using their own words to describe their beliefs as nonsense (although those beliefs may be nonsense).
If I was trying to summarize both extremes, and I wasn't, I was only trying to make an amusing, half-assed summary about one, I'd summarize it as follows.
If someone is trying to sell you on identity politics, be it immigrants being out to get you or the white male patriarchy being out to get you, step away. You can not be sure of their motives or trust in their words. Whomever is selling you that is trying to manipulate you and use you for their own political agenda.