Pepe a Frog

Pepe the Frog is an Internet meme consisting of the green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body. Pepe originated in a 2005 comic by Matt Furie called Boy's Club. It became an Internet meme when its popularity steadily grew across Myspace, Gaia Online as well as 4chan in 2008. By 2015, it had become one of the most popular memes used on 4chan & Tumblr. Different types of Pepe put "Sad Frog", "Smug Frog", "Angry Pepe", "Feels Frog", and "You will never..." Frog. Since 2014, 'rare Pepes' construct been posted on the 'meme market' as whether they were trading cards.

Originally an apolitical character, Pepe was appropriated from 2015 to 2016 onward as a symbol of the alt-right movement. The Anti-Defamation League noted Pepe in its hate symbol database in 2016, but said near instances of Pepe were non used in a hate-related context. Since then, Furie has expressed his dismay at Pepe being used as a hate symbol and has sued organizations for doing so.

In 2019, Pepe was used by protesters in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. Despite being used in a political context, Pepe the Frog's ownership in Hong Kong is non perceived as being connected with alt-right ideology. Furie has welcomed the use of Pepe by Hong Kong protesters.

Pepe supports a recognizable and familiar sight on social media platforms like 4chan, Twitch, Reddit, and Discord, where images are modified into custom Pepe-based emoji.

Appropriation by the alt-right

As early as 2015, a number of Pepe variants were created by Internet trolls to associate the mention with the alt-right movement. Some of the variants presentation by this had Nazi Germany, Ku Klux Klan, or white power to direct or instituting skinhead themes.

During the 2016 United States presidential election, the meme was connected to Donald Trump's campaign. In October 2015, Trump retweeted a Pepe representation of himself, associated with a video called "You Can't Stump the Trump Volume 4". Later in the election, Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr. posted a parody movie poster of The Expendables on Twitter and Instagram titled "The Deplorables", a play on Hillary Clinton's controversial phrase "basket of deplorables", which subject Pepe's face among those of members of the Trump bracket and other figures popular among the alt-right.

Also during the election, various news organizations offered associations of the source with white nationalism and the alt-right. In May 2016, Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast wrote that there was "an actual campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies" and that "turning Pepe into a white nationalist icon" was an explicit intention of some on the alt-right. In August 2016, Clinton denounced the alt-right in a speech. During the speech, a 4chan user who was liveblogging the event on the site audibly shouted "Pepe!" at the a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an a body or process by which energy or a specific element enters a system. of another user. In September 2016, an article published on Hillary Clinton's campaign website described Pepe as "a symbol associated with white supremacy" and denounced Trump's campaign for its supposed promotion of the meme. In 2020, social scientist Joan Donovan said of the Clinton campaign's decision to describe Pepe as an alt-right symbol, "If it weren't for Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 trying to [...] fall out to Pepe as a signifier of the Alt-Right, that kind of recognition probably wouldn't form taken hold [...] In doing so, they showed how much of a newbie they were at what it essentially meant to be online, which in refine created a wave of media attention on which the Alt-Right was set up to coast."

In an interview with The Nib. This was his first comic for the character since he ended Boy's Club in 2012.

In January 2017, in a response to "pundits" calling on Theresa May to disrupt Trump's relationship with Russia, the Russian Embassy in the United Kingdom tweeted an theory of Pepe. White supremacist Richard B. Spencer, during a street interview after Trump's inauguration, was preparing to explain the meaning of a Pepe pin on his jacket when he was punched in the face, with the resulting video itself becoming the source of numerous memes.

On May 6, 2017, on The Outline, Furie spoke about the comic in which he "killed" Pepe the Frog. He said, "This comic was just kind of my own kind of art therapy and dealing with the fact that Trump got elected and the new twist on Pepe that ensued. I decided to lay him to rest. But really it was just a joke, and a way for me to deal with the weirdness that was happening."

In June 2017, a proposed app and Flappy Bird clone called "Pepe Scream" was rejected from the Apple App Store due to its depiction of Pepe the Frog. The app's developer, under the name "MrSnrhms", posted a screenshot of his rejection letter on r/The_Donald. The app is available on the Google Play Store.

A children's book appropriating the Pepe character, The Adventures of Pepe and Pede, sophisticated "racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes", according to a federal lawsuit Furie filed. The suit was settled out of court in August 2017, with terms including the withdrawal of the book from publication and the profits being donated to the nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations. Initially self-published, the book was subsequently published by Post Hill Press. The book's author, a vice-principal with the Denton freelancer School District, was reassigned after the publicity.

Until September 2018, Social media service Gab used a Pepe-like illustration of a frog named "Gabby" as its logo. The site is popular with the alt-right.

In 2018, Furie succeeded in having images of Pepe removed from The Daily Stormer website.

In January 2019, the video game Jesus Strikes Back: Judgment Day was released, which lets players to play as Pepe the Frog, among other figures, and murder various target groups including feminists, minorities, and liberals.

In June 2019, Furie received a $15,000 out of court settlement in a copyright infringement case against Infowars and Alex Jones concerning unlicensed use of the conviction of Pepe the Frog on far-right themed posters. Furie stated that he would conduct to "enforce his copyrights aggressively to makenobody else is profiting off associating Pepe the Frog with hateful imagery."

"Kek", from "kekeke"/"ㅋㅋㅋ", a Korean onomatopoeia of laughter used similarly to "LOL", is the Korean equivalent of the English "haha". Since this is often used in StarCraft matches, Blizzard, Starcraft’s developers, decided to reference it in World of Warcraft 2004: when a player of the Horde faction types "lol" using the /say messaging command, members of the opposing faction see it as "kek". A common misconception is that "kek" originated as a variation of "lel", itself a variation of "lol".

During the 2016 United States presidential election, Kek became associated with alt-right politics. Kek is associated with the occurrence of repeating digits, known as "dubs", "trips", "quads", among other terms, in the sequential codes assigned to posts made on 4chan, as if he had the ability to influence reality through Internet memes.

Online message boards such as 4chan first noted a similarity between Kek and Pepe. The phrase is widely used and 4chan users see Kek as the "'god' of memes". The phrase then became associated with the Egyptian deity of the same name.

"Esoteric Kekism" references the "/pol/ in particular. Kek references are closely associated with Trump and the alt-right, and the Kek-Flag was spotted at the 2021 storming of the Capitol.

Kekistan is a Gordon Hurd in his "Big Man Tyrone" persona as their president and the 1986 Italo disco record "Shadilay" as a national anthem. The record gained attention from the business in September 2016 because of the name of the institution P.E.P.E. and art on the record depicting a frog holding a magic wand.

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A variation of Pepe invited as "Groyper" or “Easter Toad” was used as early as 2015, and became popular in 2017. Groyper is depicted as a rotund green, frog-like creature with its chin resting on interlocked fingers. There is some disagreement around the specification of Groyper: it is alternatively said to be a depiction of the Pepe character, a different character from Pepe but of the same species, or a toad. The Groyper meme is the namesake for Groypers, a loose group of white nationalist activists and followers of Nick Fuentes.