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[CRICKETS CHIRPING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I always first start with the eyeball like this.
And you got to leave a little bit of space there for the goo.
And these little froggy eyelids.
It looks like sex parts a little bit.
I've just always been into drawing.
And it takes tons of time to come up with a character
that you like enough to draw over and over again.
It's just been kind of a slow drip of frogs
throughout my entire life.
It's just one little frog after another
after another after another.
And then, eventually, it was Pepe.
It's a happy little frog.
What do people get wrong about drawing Pepe?
Probably when they put Pepe on the internet saying,
like, kill Jews.
Are you familiar with this meme called Pepe the Frog?
For those who don't, here's a picture.
Here's Pepe the Frog.
Have you seen me on this frog meme?
I forget the name of it.
Many of you may remember Pepe the Frog, the once innocent,
chill frog meme.
(SINGING) Saw a man today, he led a big parade downtown.
Helicopter came.
Staff sergeants all came down.
It sounds like--
I bet 90% of your viewers haven't heard of Pepe the Frog.
1 thought it was a frog in a wig.
The white supremacist movement has taken over Pepe the Frog.
(SINGING) 'Cause I've been living in Hell, living in Hell
with you.
I've been living in hell...Living in Hell with you.
We're here in the Community Thrift store.
And it all started here.
Let's see what's back here.
I do get waves of nostalgia for the youthful time in my 20s
working here, just hanging out with my friends
and just riding a bike around San Francisco.
So I basically just want to be young again.
This is my old office space here.
It used to be the toy department.
This is where I spent my days with--
[GIGGLING]
That tickles.
Guys like that.
1 would have literally a mountain of toys every day,
and it was just really inspiring.
It's like working inside of a brain.
If 1 got caught up with my work, I would just draw.
Every day would be like new toys that would come in,
and I would draw them.
And so it was my ideal job situation.
Matt was always drawing that frog, forever, I swear.
That was his go-to thing to draw.
So I've been seeing that frog's face for as long
as I've known Matt.
[SNEEZING]
Ew.
[GIGGLING]
Excuse you.
Ew, ew, ew.
The first time I actually named him Pepe was for this comic
that I did called Playtime.
I was just messing around on Microsoft Paint
and came up with the Pepe and Brett, two characters.
They did things like go to raves and paint.
It just kind of naturally developed.
And I just thought it'd be fun to have four characters, kind
of like the Ninja Turtles.
It became Boy's Club.
A
Lot of the humor is about post-college zone.
You don't quite know what you're doing,
but you like drinking and hanging out.
The four characters were just reflections of my personality
and the personality of my friends.
Landwolf, the party dog.
Andy was the jokester of the group.
Brett liked to dance.
And then Pepe the Frog was just kind of
like the little brother in the group.
The better ll got to know Matt, the more
the similarities I saw with him and Pepe.
Even the way Pepe looks, he kind of
looks like Matt a little bit.
Matt was a little bit different from what most people would
consider a typical cartoonist.
I think it's more like this.
Button down shirt, nerd glasses.
He seemed like he was like a cool guy.
And Boy's Club, it's one of the funniest comics of, I
don't know, the last 10 years.
What's happening here is Landwolf is passed out,
but that's how he passed out.
He didn't quite make it onto the bed.
I don't know why, I thought he was trying to jerk off
and he passed out while he was--
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
I guess it's open for interpretation.
It is open for interpretation.
Landwolf, I think he represents the kind
of hairy, gross roommate that you have sometimes,
clogging the drains.
It just made me think of our actual roommate, Chris.
It's issues.
We're talking about these because they're
meant to be read in the privacy of your own home.
[LAUGHTER]
I've never actually had to explain any of this shit.
I met Matt at a comics convention
where we were signing next to each other.
I loved Matt's comics.
I grew up with an older brother, so I already
had that sense of humor where I liked boner jokes and barf
and farts.
[FARTING]
To me, it felt very accessible.
It's the sort of masculinity where
you can be in your underwear singing to Shaniah Twain.
[MUSIC - SHANIAH TWAIN, "MAN!
I FEEL LIKE A WOMAN"]
(SINGING) Oh, oh, oh.
Go totally crazy.
Forget I'm a lady.
Men's shirts, short skirts.
When I watched Seinfeld, ll liked Kramer the best.
When I read Boy's Club, ll like Landwolf the best.
I guess Pepe's is more of an Elaine.
Elaine is great, but--
yeah, if Elaine had become a symbol of the alt right,
1 would be like, yeah, that's crazy.
That shouldn't be the case.
It seems incredibly random.
People were like, this is the character
we're going to use for the internet.
This is going to be the mascot for the internet.
One day, he was doing Boy's Club comics at my house.
I remember I was sitting on Ayana's little love
seat in her tiny-ass apartment.
He said, can you stand over there and bend over and make
it look like you're pulling your pants down while you're
bending over so ll can draw you?
Toilets are hard to draw.
People pulling down their pants is hard to draw.
So I kind of hunched over pretended
like I was pulling my pants down,
and he drew a little sketch.
Ended up being Pepe.
So that was my butt, and my toilet.
So is Pepe's body based on Ayanna?
Not the feet.
Whatever kind of weird stuff stuck with me in childhood,
sometimes it ends up in Boy's Club.
I remember when I was in second grade
and I went to the bathroom alongside my cousin David.
And he pulled his pants all the way down
to go pee, underwear and everything.
Seems like it would feel really good.
So I wanted to make a comic about that.
Feels good, man.
That was the frame that started it all.
I just thought it was cool that I can just draw a comic,
scan it in, and put it on Myspace,
and then people would see it instantly.
Back then, it was newer territory.
And I liked the vibe of Myspace a lot.
It was like we're inside somebody's locker room
or something.
At the time, I had some friends that were into exercise.
And they found online a before and after shot
that would say, "Feels good, man."
Thought it was really weird.
A lot of weightlifters would be, like, oh, I just
finished a great workout.
Feels good, man.
And ll remember just thinking, oh, that
can't be because of Pepe.
It's just some random accident.
The catchphrase "Feels good, man"
started becoming more popular.
It would be a photo of a cat or something,
and then it would say, "Feels good, man."
Or there was one version of it that said "Feels Goodman,"
with John Goodman's face.
It was pretty funny at the time.
When I would check my email, every so often somebody
would send me a link to Pepe being
in some kind of weird chatroom or something like that.
I remember specifically my dad sent me
a link to this kid who made a Pepe song.
(SINGING) Hey Pepe, I heard you pull your pants down all
the way to go pee.
Could you show me?
Feels good, man.
It was like this big nerdy thing.
I was kind of interested in it as a internet phenomenon,
but ll didn't really think too much about it.
1 was just like, ha-ha, whatever.
When it started to snowball and Matt didn't seem to mind,
I was a little like, that's weird.
I said, sue them.
Lawyer up.
Man, I'm an artist, so ll don't like suing other artists.
He just was like, oh, yeah, man.
Just let them do what they want.
Using Pepe as a meme.
That's cool.
A meme.
1 didn't even know what a meme was,
or ll don't even still know if I'm saying that correctly.
But it was through Pepe that I learned would have meme was.
It's hard to remember what I first
thought when I saw Pepe the Frog,
but I think I imagined like, in my student days,
these guys hanging out with a spliff and having a nice time.
And he was just rather sort of hopeless and sweet,
and I just thought, oh.
Chick, chick, chick, chick, chickens.
Come on.
The whole idea of memes comes from Richard Dawkins' 1976
book The Selfish Gene.
Most of the book is about what he called universal Darwinism,
which said all of biology is driven by genes,
but culture is driven by memes.
He said, look around you, and you'll see floating
about in the primeval soup of culture
is information copied by imitation from person
to person.
So that would include chairs, trousers, hairstyles.
All of these things are only here
because humans have copied them, and the ones around us
are the winners in an evolutionary battle.
And then, gradually, came the concept of internet memes.
And people can easily see that process happening with Pepe.
Pepe is a wonderful example of a meme that
escaped out there into the memosphere
and suffered all the things you'd expect of a meme.
Pepe is just folds upon folds.
The Pepe technique is to draw too many lines.
There's another fold and then another fold, and these lumps.
And he looks really cracked out, but that's the idea.
It's like steering into that mistake.
He also symbolizes steering into the mistake of staying
in your mom's basement.
I saw Boy's Club around 2007 or so
when he was first posting it on the internet.
And it just kept appearing in message boards.
Feels good, man.
In that little story, he's owning the fact
that he's this weird guy.
That moment of owning your loserdom,
owning your weirdness, is perfect 4chan ethics.
Christopher Poole, he was 14 years old living
with his mom spending all his time indoors on the internet.
And he created this crazy monster in his basement.
Now, over seven million people are using it, contributing over
700,000 posts per day.
And we've gone from one board to 48 boards.
So 4chan, just the way that it functioned
was super conducive to creating memes.
The way 4chan works is that it's a Darwinian competition
for attention.
So you have a post, and if the post gets a lot of replies,
it floats to the top.
And if no one replies, it sinks to the bottom and quickly dies.
It's a winning and losing system,
and it's a lot like a video game.
There were all of these adolescent boys trying to own
each other in the competition.
And so it became this culture of saying
the most offensive thing.
And so Pepe kind of melts into that community.
And all of this stuff that just exploded out
of the culture four or five years later
were being invented there by all these clever people.
And they were all anonymous.
On 4chan, you're talking to another text box,
so you're free to express those secret ideas that people have
that they don't feel comfortable expressing in real life.
I posted Pepes all the time.
To not post Pepe would be strange because it's just--
it's the meme.
Post.
Send.
Boom.
So there I am right there.
It's hard to say why Pepe gained popularity so fast.
You could say it was just an easily relatable image.
My own collection, I have my reaction image folder
filled with Pepe and all the derivatives.
The term was, "We feel alone together."
That was their idea.
As it ages, it just gets more desperate.
They would describe themselves as NEET.
NEET stands for Not in Education, Employment,
or Training.
The idea was that they were trying
to find a word that described their situation
for these masses of kids who were just unemployed
or just dropped out of life.
I think the best thing would be to start with a job.
No.
Yeah, absolutely she needs a job.
No.
So 4chan really comes to embody that culture
of checking out and living in your mom's basement.
It started in 2003, and it still exists.
So imagine people being on their 10 years, it
becoming a lifestyle.
A lot of people are talking that they
have super hot basement layers where they get to NEET it up.
Well, basically, nobody's really touching my game right now.
So got the primo couch bed.
And I just kick this shit all over the place
because I just don't give a fuck about anything.
And it's a life.
1 think I saw images of Pepe first
in the fitness board of 4chan.
This frog was so prevalent.
What does Pepe mean to me?
What does he mean to me?
He's a frog.
He's a sad frog.
On 4chan, the quote-unquote "sad frog"
became the most popular image for displaying sadness.
There were other images that would describe that feeling.
You had things like the picture of Keanu Reeves sitting
on a bench, but maybe he's just deep in thought.
That sad frog, you knew what it was about.
Nothing else needed to be said there.
Pepe the sad frog.
Pepe.
Pepe what?
The sad frog.
The sad frog?
Pepe the sad frog.
What's that?
It wasn't something that was really circulated heavily
on Facebook or any of that stuff at the time.
Pepe just felt uniquely 4chan.
Feels bad, man.
1 didn't know about the Boy's Club
comic or anything like that.
I did not know who Matt Furie was.
Even after ll learned about Boy's Club,
I was like, oh, the making of a Pepe comic.
Oh, that's cool.
That's the story.
It's about somewhere in the future where
the mutants have taken over.
And they make new children.
I like this style of gun.
Yeah.
Are you actually the guy that made Pepe?
Yeah, yeah.
But it must suck for you that he has become hijacked by 4chan.
It definitely sucks, but nothing's forever, right?
I'm just a spectator to how things mutate
and evolve on the internet.
You can kind of see everything as some big joke,
but it's kind of a window into this dark place.
I'll draw you a little Pepe.
People on the internet had their own characters
that Pepe was interacting with.
There's one where he's interacting with this guy,
I think his name was Wojak.
I would see pictures of Pepe hugging
this stark, white, sad-looking guy.
And I was like, what is that?
They call him the Feels Guy, or Wojack is the proper term.
He was for expressing an unpleasant feeling.
I'd be sitting there and I'd be tense from anxiety and like--
and being like that.
And then I'd go on the board a bit
like, OK, these are my people.
We're all over the world, but we all
have these feelings of anxiety and everything together.
It's like a group therapy on the internet.
Even when I was at work, we had these security cameras.
I'd duck behind stack of crates, quick just be like,
you dumb idiots.
Then I'd checked like 10, 15 minutes later,
and I'd see who's replying to me.
And I would face an onslaught of people just saying how I
was the most hideous man alive.
1 would wear that as a badge of honor.
I'd be like, yes, I'm a true 4chan guy.
I'm a true social reject.
I'm a true freak.
Yeah, you're darn tootin'.
I'm a latecomer to Pepe, probably
because he's not my type.
I came to Pepe after he had gone dark.
Pepe is a sad frog.
He's never happy.
He's just sort of miserable.
And I think for a huge population, online and offline,
we're not really allowed to express sorrow or sadness
or grief.
And this sad little frog arrives online in the midst of the push
to commodify the internet.
What was going on at that point is that everybody
was super damn positive.
People were suddenly able to make cash money out
of their image, which meant that they
had to be totally rad, happy, fitspo, my best self thing.
Then in drops Pepe, ripe for the taking.
Hey, guys.
It's me, Louie.
Today, I'm going to be doing a Pepe transformation.
Pepe starts to percolate into another population we've got,
a lot more women, a lot of girls.
And they're starting to own Pepe.
Hey, guys.
I just googled what a meme was, and I
think I'm in love with memes.
Pepe is the best.
You draw the head, which is just like a butt.
Things began to spiral really out of control.
A couple of celebrities, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry,
they had posted on Instagram a couple of Pepe images.
A lot of people see it for the first time.
They're wondering, who is this frog?
What is this frog?
What is this?
I want to see some more of that.
They start making a migration over to 4chan.
Young women in particular download Pepe images,
using them for their own likes.
And that was seen is despicable.
I love Pepe so much.
The true Pepe is this Pepe.
Pepe's green skin is so beautiful.
It's different from frog.
Pepe green is special.
It seemed to me like invasion.
You had people that would come on and say,
why are you virgin losers here?
Where is the Pepe pictures at?
Where they at?
I strive to be Pepe.
Just kidding.
1 hate Pepe the frog, whatever his name is.
Pe-- Pepe.
Either way, he's stupid.
And I don't really know why I made
my face green to prove the point that I hate Pepe,
but let me prove it by saying, I hate you, Pepe.
I'm going to chop your head off, your little froggy
head off, like this.
It was serious to a lot of people.
This is the symbol of our culture.
And it really was turning into a total Pepe fest.
Nice.
Pepe was just really turning into a thing.
And my buddy Skinner was like, hey,
you should do a clothing line.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WORDLESS SINGING]
It was just kind of funny to make something official
out of something that's so bootlegged on the internet.
I drew all these goofy-ass Pepes that were based on just
whatever random nonsense was out there on the internet.
I like this one with the little cigarette.
This one is particularly weird.
And this one is just--
I like that.
That's a very stripped down Pepe.
It's a sad frog golf shirt.
You can have a pasta meal with your family wearing this one.
Pepe was a famous meme.
And my friend Jay, he got a tattoo gun he just
had set up in his kitchen.
And so one night, I think was just completely spontaneous,
we were just like, oh, let's get Pepe tattoos.
Just very little thought goes into this at all.
Because we just thought it was funny to have a Pepe tattoo.
And Matt was there, so it was like a tribute to my friend.
1 didn't know at the time, but I got like below my sleeve here.
That would come back to bite me.
As the Pepe defense was building to try and steer people
away from using Pepe for their own normie usage,
that spawned a lot of angry, raging Pepes.
But then that fateful day occurred
where there was a YouTube video of screaming frogs.
Say something for the camera.
Look at that thing blow up like a balloon.
[SCREECHING]
They have a high-pitched scream, which sounded a lot like,
"Ree!"
[SCREECHING]
And it became this battle cry.
There'd be somebody who would be coming in from Instagram,
out themselves as maybe a sex-haver or a woman,
neurotypical, socially well-adjusted person.
Once you get that seed planted in the head of, like,
the popular kids and look how they're living
and look at you--
you're this slug.
All you normies have been bullying us our whole lives.
I'll never be one of you disgusting normies.
Fuck normies.
[SCREAMING]
These were a group of disempowered men
who had retreated into fantasy worlds.
[GROWLING]
That was their last place of retreat, in a sense.
And so having women there was what
they didn't want, because that was a symbol
of their defeat in real life.
Ursula.
Hey.
Is that Twilight Sparkle?
Mm-hmm.
Is that her name?
Yeah.
She's like, Ursula, I'm going to help you.
Aww.
That's so cute.
That one says, a pocket mouse sleeps safely in its nest.
That's so cute.
It's a little mouse.
People would just email me fucked up pictures of Pepe.
And it didn't really shock me.
I would be more shocked by people actually expressing
some form of cuteness or love.
This other stuff is just garbage.
I think a weird thing about American culture in general
is we do kind of celebrate garbage,
and we also produce a hell of a lot of physical garbage.
So it's just like fucking garbage world.
I was definitely conscious of not wanting
to be remembered as the artist that did Boy's Club,
so I just wanted to keep doing other stuff.
There's no connection between this frog and Pepe
other than they kind of look like one another.
But this is just another frog in a different place.
I decided to do a whole kids book that was totally wordless.
It follows the life of this frog and his pet rat.
Live in their little mushroom house.
Their travels on the back of a bike.
They wake up at nighttime and go exploring through the forest
and end up surfing on some dolphins
and swimming and going underground.
I just really went for that childlike wonder with this one.
The Night Riders, it's a work of highly skilled craftsmanship.
Took him almost a year to make it.
1 told him I saw that he had that in him,
he had a Where the Wild Things Are in him.
I just knew it.
We were working on The Night Riders
before all this insane Pepe stuff started to happen.
Pepe is really just the tip of the iceberg for the kind of art
that Matt's capable of making.
How come the dragon doesn't have wings?
It's more of a land dragon than a dragon of the air
or a dragon of the sea.
So he's a land dragon.
The characters are of different species,
but they seem like friends from a neighborhood.
We can tell they love each other,
and the book is build toward a bunch of nocturnal animals
experiencing a sunrise.
The end.
Pepe had escaped, and he was roaming around.
And it was fun for a while, until it wasn't any more.
On 4chan, whenever they thought, quote-unquote,
"normies"” or outsiders, other sites,
were stealing their memes, they would try and make them
as offensive as possible.
It's like a classic punk response.
You're literally armored, like a punk.
And you're like, it's so offensive,
it can't be co-opted.
So they put him next to the trade towers disintegrating.
They put swastikas all over him and Nazify Pepe.
And it snowballs.
Back then, it was just the most offensive thing you could do.
But it now reads as a weird prologue
to when the irony kind of melted away.
There are people on these platforms who
believe that because you've couched
your intention in a joke that you can disavow it--
That's right.
--When people come asking.
That's exactly right.
So you create this ambiguity so there's
no way for you to mean what you really mean ever.
Yeah.
1 think what's appealing about Pepe
is that he combines this impossible mixture of innocence
and evil.
He has this kind of knowing smile
while he's performing acts that are really atrocious.
It sort of fulfills the idea that we
can say these terrible things and just mean them
as jokes all the time.
They're always just jokes all the time,
and you can't prove otherwise.
We're just a bunch of kids in our underwear.
It's harmless.
No one really means it.
The problem, I think, is that it's
really demonstrable in the worst cases that this isn't funny.
It's not funny when people die.
[INAUDIBLE] in progress.
We got another gun shot victim at [INAUDIBLE] shots fired.
Shots fired.
A black car pulls up and stops, and he rolls down the window.
I just saw four gunshots.
A Friday night rampage in this bustling college town.
After two gun battles with police and a chase,
seven people were dead.
22-year-old Elliot Rodger believed to be the gunman.
Tonight, investigators are poring over videos Rodger
posted online.
There was this intense pain that you
could see where he was really divorced from reality.
He did the shooting spree in a car, a fancy car
that his parents had bought for him to boost his confidence.
Didn't even make an effort to talk to anybody.
He was so closed off.
And it was like, when he's sitting there,
you can just tell he's just thinking these thoughts
in his head the entire time.
He's just talking to himself.
I came onto 4chan that day.
People in this environment were starting get whipped up.
And they were like, yeah, that's right.
You showed them who's boss.
He went out there, he stood up for being the virgin with rage.
The very first picture of Elliot Rodger that I saved
was a picture of this sort of semi transparent sobbing
woman, and then three or four Pepes with guns.
It was one of the very first ones
that took Elliot and put it into sort of like a context.
People started drawing Pepes riding around in a BMWs
with Elliot Rodger.
Yeah, I did get a little bit energized by it.
It was just like, maybe society does need
to get flipped on its head.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi.
Elliot Rodger here.
I don't condone violence.
I'm not a violence condoner.
But he set me off in the path that made me who I am today,
and I have to acknowledge that.
On 4chan, you see something totally new
called the beta male uprising, the beta uprising.
The idea would be that all of them
would run out of their mom's basements
and start shooting people.
And of course, it's a way of making fun of themselves.
It's always coded in guarded irony.
But of course, behind the irony is the seriousness.
Why are you talking about that?
It's because that's an issue that resonates with you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Uprise.
Welcome to your demise.
Pepe then becomes the symbol.
You see him holding the gun.
It's the classic response from 4chan,
which is the most nihilistic and despairing and cynical,
where anyone wants to kill themselves or do something
awful or do something anti-social,
making that screen illusion real in some way,
they're like, yeah, go for it.
Philadelphia area colleges have all warned students
to be extra cautious tomorrow.
This is the thread that was posted
on 4chan, a message board where everyone is anonymous.
It was posted last Friday, the day
after the shooting in Oregon.
It phrases the gunman as a fellow member
of the beta rebellion.
The post on 4chan uses a profile picture
of what appears to be the Grinch in a mask holding a gun.
That same picture was used in a post the day
before the Oregon massacre.
We see it's not just the memes generate the violence.
It's that the violence becomes a meme.
But it's just a joke, right?
It's just a stupid frog.
If you had had a victory over the normies,
striking back at the oppressors, it
was seen as too enthusiastic to post a big grinning, laughing,
ha-ha-ha.
So when the smug Pepe came out, it
was groundbreaking in a way that is maybe hard to explain.
It was the most succinct, perfect face.
Then the hand up.
It had the perfect silly look to it, crude,
like holding back laughter but enjoying
the suffering of others.
It was the perfect trolling accessory.
The way he's redrawn with his thumb
up like this like really smug--
Yeah.
That tone is so ugly.
It's used to imply being above a conversation
that people are trying to have about kindness.
Trump was seen as the personification
of the smug Pepe meme.
When he was announcing that he was going to run,
every news story is they don't like him.
People in his own party, they don't like him.
And people in the other party, they really don't like him.
It was like, oh, this is perfect.
He's making everybody upset.
A really interesting time in 4chan
is Trump's initial announcement that he
is running for president.
If you look at the 4chan threads, before Trump's speech,
it was fairly skeptical.
But then they saw a lot of these things in his rhetoric
that they liked.
They saw nationalism.
They saw white nationalism.
And almost immediately, you'll see people being like,
can we get a Pepe with Donald Trump hair?
I want to start circulating this.
And that happened-- that's within hours.
I think that President Trump is a real-life version of Pepe
in the ability to elicit a reaction
and to get attention, to express and to capture people's hopes
and fears.
I was formerly the director of strategy and data
for the Trump campaign, so I know as much if not more
about how to use voter data than anybody else in the country.
During the campaign, there was an effort by 4chan
to get other people to support the president by creating
memes, and then sharing them to, say,
normies to try to motivate them to support President Trump.
The inside terminology for this was the great meme war.
It gave people who had never really been
involved in politics before a way in.
The best memes that you see, the most effective ones,
are just some person who has no power at all.
They have no influence.
They have no money.
They have no connections.
But if they can make one good meme,
they can take off and go viral.
And then when you hyper charge it
by having the President retweet it,
you felt like you were part of this rebel group,
this insurgency that was completely
unpredictable and from--
where no one would have ever expected it.
How does an image like this end up on Donald Trump's Twitter
account?
4chan supported Trump for a mix of reasons.
Some of it I think was this nihilistic idea
that Trump was a wrecking ball and that they
wanted to embarrass people by electing him.
And so when Trump retweeted himself depicted as Pepe,
it was like this watershed moment.
This is Donald Trump a co-opting the idea of himself
substituted as Pepe.
It was so transgressive, so anti-PC.
To most of the voters out there, it just seem kind of odd.
But if you were part of the community that
has been spending years and years and years using Pepe,
suddenly a little antenna goes up and you pick up a signal
and say, wow, maybe this guy's right for us.
There was always magic going on in any political campaign.
And so what happened when Pepe the Frog suddenly
became, in effect, Donald Trump's invisible running mate
was that a magical force had entered the picture.
And it was a wild card.
A meme can become the anchor, the seed, if you will,
around which a group of like-minded people can gather
and toward which they can focus their energy.
That's a basic tool of meme magic.
And that's one of the things we saw during the 2016 election.
The way that magic was used on the chans
was they focused on building up a series of hyper-sigils
of images like Pepe the Frog, and piled
into those images all of their hopes and all of their energy,
their emotional focus of seeing Donald Trump in the White
House.
You ended up with a lot of people on the chans
just going, wow, 1 could do this.
This is not Republicanism as we have known it.
These are racist ideas, race-baiting ideas,
anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women, all key tenets
making up an emerging racist ideology
known as the alt-right.
Pepe!
Now, alt-right is short for alternative right.
The Wall Street Journal describes it
as a loose racist ideology known as the alt-right.
Pepe!
And to most people, that was a totally inexplicable thing
at the moment.
Must be totally random.
To the white supremacist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi right
in this country, that was a moment of triumph.
Suddenly, Pepe the meme, the most silliest piece
of meaningless culture, was sort of passing through the screen.
It was like the dream of the troll,
making the internet real.
It was becoming weird to have this tattoo.
Here to get me involved in your nightmare world?
Mm-hmm.
That's good.
We're here to exploit you.
Is this-- this better be about Landwolf.
Watch your head.
Please don't kick my cat, if you can help it.
I think it's funny that Chris got the Pepe
tattooed on his arm, and he's like, I have to hide it now.
Somebody at Subway thought I was a white power dude.
[LAUGHTER]
Everybody's actually very-- everybody
was very excited about Pepe.
They were like, oh, wow, Pepe's this awesome meme, dude.
Pepe rules.
Wow, you made Pepe?
I was all proud of myself, strutting down the street.
Now people just throw rocks at you.
That's the guy who created Pepe.
You're not strutting anymore, are you, sicko?
Now I'm like just slithering down
the street in a pool of my own waste or something.
Whoa.
Like a slug lord.
Like just a slurping slimeball.
But I really do feel like this would only happen to you.
I interviewed Matt Furie in September 2016
for the Atlantic.
My impression of Furie was that he was very well-intentioned
but somewhat naive about the extent to which this symbol had
been appropriated by the far right.
Pepe is a white nationalist symbol.
Increasingly being used by white supremacists.
Something of a mascot of the alt-right.
Defining the alt-right is somewhat easier these days.
But in around 2016, it encompassed a lot
of people who were ideologically opposed to the left,
but not necessarily united on every issue.
And then you had people like Richard Spencer, who
were overt white nationalists.
It's going to involve Pepe.
It's going to involve unleashing a little chaos.
For the alt-right, Pepe allows them to pretend
that they're kidding.
They're not kidding.
What they want is for you to be both scared by the threat
and be mocked for being scared in the first place.
The point is to cause that kind of psychic anguish,
and they draw a great deal of pleasure from that.
Basically, alt-right is a big tent,
or rather a big rock under which creeps a diverse assortment
of paleoconservatives, men's rights misogynists--
I remember I went to a taping of Sam Bee,
and she had a segment about Pepe the Frog.
And I got to meet her after the taping.
--Cyber-bullies, and good old-fashion neo-Nazis.
And I was like, you know, Pepe was actually
created by a friend of mine, and he's a really sweet artist.
And it doesn't mean this thing that it transformed into.
And she was just like, OK.
The alt-right's use of Pepe just drowned out
any other visual interpretation.
Trump's former campaign chair, Steve Bannon,
said the Democrats are not the opposition party,
the media is the opposition party.
And how do you beat the media?
You flood the zone with shit.
Well, these people are flooding the zone with shit
so that you don't know what's real or what's not.
Quite frankly, I've been to these events.
Wasn't even real.
Oh, no.
They're just Jewish actors, a lot of the KKK guys
with their hats off.
Literally looks like the cast of Seinfeld.
A conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones
appeals to Trump because one of Trump's major political tools
is forcing people to reject objective reality in favor
of his version of reality.
Well, Donald Trump, let me say this,
you are the leading presidential front
runner with the Republicans, gaining a huge lead
as you don't back down.
But I've got to just--
And the point of it is to obliterate objective truth.
Fake news!
Fuck CNN!
Trump frames his language in terms of winners and losers.
Are you sick of fucking winning?
No!
What happens when that mindset is adopted
by people on the bottom?
Instead of thinking of society as where everyone's equal
and we're all lifting ourselves up together,
you think the world is a hierarchy.
And the only way you're going to get to the top
is by displacing someone else.
Then you start getting these ideas like,
well, maybe I'm at the bottom because this group of people
has snuck their way to the top.
They probably cheated their way up there.
And so then you get these elaborate conspiracies about,
like, oh, well, the Jews run the media.
Immigrants, they're the problem.
Build the wall!
Fuck those dirty beaners.
Build the wall.
We're not giving in.
We're not going away.
And we're giving them a big, giant, red, white, and blue
middle finger!
[CHEERING]
So then it started to get strange.
Somebody on the chans, nobody knows who,
found an ancient Egyptian frog god whose name was Kek.
He looked like an anthropomorphic figure
with a frog's head, rather like Pepe.
Obviously, that had to be shared.
And the chans went ape.
The reason why this caught on is that Kek
is a bit of gamer slang.
For complicated reasons, where we say, ha-ha-ha,
in certain gaming circles, you say, kek-kek-kek.
Trumpeter is taking the Hill.
The nation of Kek, Kekistan taking the Hill.
They come up with this idea of Kekistan,
of a kind of promised land for Pepes.
And any time you have these ideas
of ethnic homelands and tribalist blood and soil,
it automatically seems to cluster
in with the worst exercises in human depravity.
So all I need to do is just put on the mask.
Put on the mask.
There had been rumors flying on the chans
that Hillary Clinton was actually seriously ill.
And a great many chaos magicians magicians
were focusing their magical work on one goal, which was
making her collapse in public.
There's a thing that people talk about in occult circles called
the TSW moment.
TSW-- the polite version is This Stuff Works.
The chans went through their TSW moment.
Hillary Clinton collapsed and had to be hauled into the SUV
by other people.
1 honestly think, at that point, if Donald Trump had
asked the habitues of the chans to walk into the ocean,
they would have done it.
To just be grossly generalistic, you
could put half of Trump supporters
into what I call the basket of deplorables.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,
Islamophobic.
Hillary Clinton then released an explainer
explaining that Pepe was a hate symbol
and that he symbolized the alt-right.
And through these associations, it really
made Trump look like a neo-Nazi.
But it made her also look a little clueless.
The idea that she was denouncing a cartoon frog
was delightful to 4chan, delightful to the alt-right.
It was the best thing that could have happened for them.
It certainly galvanized people who thought, hey, I really
dig Pepe, and she just launched an attack on me
and called me a Nazi.
Ladies and gentlemen, the battle has just begun,
and we are ready.
I think that that just solidified it.
Once you start deeming something as a hate symbol,
it does kind of become that.
A popular cartoon character turned
internet meme, Pepe the Frog, has
been added to the Anti-Defamation League's
database of hate symbols.
In a press release, the organization
wrote the character had been, quote,
"used by haters on social media to suggest
racist, anti-Semitic, or other bigoted
notions as a hate symbol."
Matt's name was in the description about it
on the website.
It's like a nightmare.
He's thinking, I've worked my whole life as an artist,
and now I'm going to be lumped in
with this weird new swastika?
Matt Furie put out a statement to the Associated Press.
He said he was horrified to see his creation become
a mascot for the alt-right fringe movement.
I don't want to be associated with this.
I'm trying to write children's books.
The nature of media and politics is stuff
that I've been trying to escape from my entire life
as an artist.
I don't give a shit about any of that stuff.
And then I got pulled into it just because I'm
on a hate symbol database list now, and it pissed me off.
As the news was going on that this internet frog has
been marked as a hate symbol, that's
when I got the phone call from our buyer.
They pulled it right away.
So we have about 3,000 items that
were going to go into 580 stores across the US,
and now it's in my garage.
These were probably like $15 each to make.
If you think of $15 times 3,000, it's pretty crazy.
Yeah.
It's $45,000.
We didn't want to give it to Goodwill.
We didn't want to sell it ourselves
because we were afraid white supremacists would wear it.
And then what is that worth versus putting out
a hate symbol?
And I'm sure you feel the same way.
A lot of the merchandise ended up having to be destroyed.
Yeah.
Now that's kind of the least of my worries.
I know.
He was a dummy.
He just let his character get away from him,
and now this shit happen.
Matt's just like most of us, a poor cartooning loser.
I was suggesting that he sue the Anti-Defamation
League for defamation.
I'm just trying to be positive.
Not everybody has a platform to talk about this kind of stuff.
I teamed up with the ADL to just try to offer people
some creative solutions.
[APPLAUSE]
Hi, everybody.
So what we're trying to do now is
to start a save Pepe campaign.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
I invite everybody to draw their own peaceful version of Pepe
and share it on social media with #SavePepe.
Can we turn something that's become a recognized hate symbol
into a recognized love symbol?
It was really funny, but it was also really lovely.
1 tweeted about it.
I tried to help.
Yeah, I drew a Pepe.
Part of the Save Pepe campaign.
I'm like, damn, he's going through a situation that
isn't right, and I want to help him out.
Does that look like Pepe?
[LAUGHTER]
I've never drawn Pepe before, but I
figured I'm going to do whatever ll can to help
because I'm such a big fan.
So I'm butchering Pepe here, but something like that.
In Matt's work, I can feel his love
for nature and the universe.
I was like, oh, yeah, Matt's my buddy, and I like Pepe,
so I just--
I made a peace frog Pepe.
Does that look like Pepe?
[LAUGHTER]
It's getting less and less like Pepe.
I've been working on it for about a month now.
I've gotten about 500 and counting brand-new peace Pepes.
My goal with this is to eventually start something
that I'd like to call the Peace Pepe Database of Love.
My whole thing is just to focus on positive
and just keep being creative.
The attempt by Matt Furie to wrest control over Pepe--
it seems like he understands the internet about as well
as Hillary Clinton does.
Maybe if the original artwork wasn't
so pedestrian and basic that an eight-year-old can draw Pepe,
a scribbling that was improved upon by others, that was given
meaning that it never had before,
I would just encourage Matt to just
be glad to have been a small part of a very big thing.
Art is supposed to be therapeutic.
So before Trump got elected, I just
did this kind of nightmare scenario of Pepe
slowly morphing into Donald Trump and then into a monster,
and then being trapped inside the monster's mouth,
as you can see.
And then the threat of nuclear war.
This is the new American moment.
This is like Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream" speech.
It's like Washington crossing the Delaware.
(SINGING) "We are the champions, my friend"
We were all ecstatic.
Donald Trump, he wasn't supposed to be there.
We all felt like the memeing had played a part in the election.
The internet's joke kind of came to fruition.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The chaotic scene just blocks outside the secure area
of the inauguration and parade route.
Are you the hipster version of the neo-Nazi--
What?
--Movement?
What is your little frog?
It's-- Pepe has become kind of a symbol--
After the election, Matt just came to me
and he said, hey, I'm going to draw
a comic strip with Pepe in it, and I'm going to kill him.
The Pepe thing was so out of control at that point,
and whatever Pepe meant to all these other people
didn't mean the same thing to me.
So ll just killed him.
I just thought it'd be funny to do a comic strip where all
the boys are at his funeral.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Your picture is still on my wall.
On my wall.
The colors are bright, bright as ever.
The red is strong.
The blue is pure.
Some things last a long time.
I didn't think it would get noticed or anything.
I'm sure you recognize the cartoon character Pepe
the Frog.
Well, he won't be around for much longer
because his creator has decided to kill him off.
A cartoon frog died on the internet.
His name was Pepe.
It seemed like every time he drew Pepe,
he would get hounded by reporters.
He just hated it.
When I had first seen Matt's death of Pepe a comic,
I was honestly a bit sad.
But the Pepe we see on 4chan now has been so far
removed from the original that the Pepe
Matt was killing was his own.
The burden of this weird Pepe shit
was starting to make me feel anxious and weird.
Maybe it is whatever people say it is.
I can't control it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) "... harnessing the power that's inside.
RARE PEPE!"
Owning a rare Pepe is about being alpha.
It's about having dank, rare Pepes nobody else has.
And it's about, how do we get to the moon in a Lambo?
OK, let's pull it up.
I'm in these crypto forums, and for the longest time,
these guys would talk about Pepe cash.
Some huge guys, like seven-, eight-figure portfolio crypto
guys.
And I look at the website, and I'm
like, what the fuck are they talking about?
What is it?
Sol actually am a Pepe cash millionaire.
How many million is that?
Is that $363 million?
$363 million internet Pepe, and ll like that.
This has been rechristened the SS Rare
Pepe, which I bought with Pepe cash, and now I live on it.
If you want to explain the rare Pepe economy,
imagine a few dozen geeks on the internet came up with a way
to trade memes off 4chan and lock them into ownership.
There's some Pepes that are in superhero knockoffs,
so Iron Man Pepes, Spiderman Pepes.
Some people's heroes are more political in nature.
Trump Pepe, which is awesome because he's make crypto great
again, whether you like it or not.
It's much different than comic books or even collectible
baseball cards because it exists as math on the internet first,
and then later you can print a physical copy of it.
This is a physical card.
This is worthless.
This is the thing that's worth hundreds of thousands
of dollars.
So I was going to this digital arts conference
called Rare AF, Rare As Fuck.
Luckily for me, they're having the world's
first rare Pepe auction.
Rare Pepe after rare Pepe after beautiful rare Pepe passing by,
and then finally gets to the end.
It's the ultimate rare Pepe, the Homer Pepe.
And I'm like, I'm getting this thing.
Selling for 200.
Homer.
200.
People start placing bids--
20,000, 30,000, 40,000 100,000 Pepe cash.
200,000 Pepe cash.
75.
270.
It starts getting so crazy, and it
gets to 350,000 Pepe cash, which is about $39,000 US.
350 going once, going twice.
Sold.
[CHEERING]
What inspired you to pay $39,000 US for a rare Pepe?
I was really excited about Pepe.
OK.
So this is Homer Pepe, currently the world's most valuable
rare Pepe.
Now, what makes this Pepe worth so much,
it's the only one with a misprint.
Wait a minute.
Wait a mint.
That's value.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) I will Lambo across the land,
searching far and wide.
Each rare Pepe to understand the power that's inside.
Rare Pepe!
You're Matt, right?
Thank you for creating our whole line of work.
You have gainfully employed all of us.
[LAUGHTER]
So what are you guys talking about?
We're all working the general realm of weird online behavior
from a scientific perspective.
We have security people from the US.
We have cryptographers from the UK.
We have systems people from mainland Europe.
And we take a large scale analysis of data,
getting a quantitative understanding of hate speech
throughout the web.
This is [INAUDIBLE]
We had to figure out a way to be able to measure
this stuff at large scale, and we ended up
building a system to measure memes.
Just to give you an idea of the scale, Matt,
so we had over a billion posts from Twitter, Reddit,
Ipol/ and Gab.
And we examined 160 million some odd images.
So obviously, these weren't all Pepes,
but the scale of this data is huge.
This was only for a year.
Interesting.
There's a variety of different memes,
but there tends to be a Pepe variant in every single one
of these clusters.
So you pick a random meme, and Pepe has been inserted into it
in some way, shape, or form.
In a lot of ways, Pepe becomes an entry point
to radicalization.
That's a very scary thing to think about.
Do you feel any personal responsibility
for the bad stuff that has come out of this?
You shouldn't, but we're humans.
We feel guilt for things that we shouldn't feel guilt for.
Maybe I could have been more proactive earlier
on to try to control it.
To the question of, can you get Pepe back,
the reality is that there's 160 million memes, essentially,
in a year that we collected.
Not all Pepes, again, but a good chunk of them are.
That's tough genie to put back in the bottle.
1 wish you luck.
I do, sincerely.
Sol try to stay positive.
But to be honest, I've gotten trolled.
Somebody sent me this.
I don't take it personally, even though I'm
having my head decapitated.
It is what it is.
It's not only wearing on my spirit,
but it's wearing on my drive to be creative.
It did manifest anxieties that I have yet to unravel.
He just slept a lot and, honestly, it
was hard to talk to him.
I let them know I was there for him and all that,
but there wasn't anything anyone could really do.
Tonight, a Denton ISD assistant principal
is coming under fire for writing a new children's book,
a book some say is politically motivated.
I'm using Pepe just as a lighthearted way of expressing
maybe some conservative values.
If you love America, you're going
to love this book for sure.
When Matt found out that there was a Islamophobic
racist children's book starring Pepe coming out on Amazon,
he was so upset.
And that's when he kind of freaked out about it.
It was like the last straw.
It's like hell, man.
If you want to escape hell, you can't ignore it.
You almost have to go to the center of it.
It is not very often that nerdy intellectual property lawyers
get asked to fight the alt-right.
But when we do, we're ready.
I have a whole team of lawyers that are working with me pro
bono and have really empowered me
to feel like I do have some say in all this.
He really wanted to prevent the digital release of the book.
He saw it was in fact a not so veiled reference
to a lot of alt-right themes.
We found out who was publishing it
and explained that Matt Furie own the copyright to Pepe
and that we were prepared to enforce his rights in court.
The Adventures of Pepe and Pete, the electronic version
was never published.
But the issue here is, when you shut down one person,
others pop up.
I'm a compassionate guy, and I'm a sensitive guy.
But being able to work with a team of lawyers
has given me strength to shut these assholes up.
You've been sued by frog, bro.
Do you even know this yet?
No.
It's all over--
Surprise.
--The internet.
Surprise, motherfucker.
You got sued by a frog.
You've been sued by a fucking frog, dude,
a conspiracy frog named Pepe.
We did sell a poster that a listener made
titled Make America Great Again that
had a bunch of images of symbols that were
popular during the campaign.
We talked to our trademark lawyers, and they said,
Mr. Jones, this is so outrageous against the First Amendment.
It is insane.
This is cockamamie balderdash.
He was selling a poster with Pepe on it
with a bunch of douche bags, and I just
didn't want him to sell the poster.
The problem isn't the drawing or making of the art.
You can do that.
It's just when you mass produce it and sell it.
That's when it gets into a stickier area.
He's like, yeah, the man's going to stop us.
He just jacked up the price of the poster
and then offered to sign them.
I'm trying to free Pepe the Frog.
And I'm either going to succeed, or I'll
be destroyed in the process.
But that's OK.
I actually don't know many people on here.
Is that Trump too?
Yeah.
There's two Trumps.
So it's like having two Trumps in the same poster?
Is that legal?
Well, there's going to be Joe Armstrong from Green Day.
And there's Marsha from The Brady Bunch.
There's Billy Idol.
Billy Idol.
And there is Courtney Love.
[LAUGHTER]
A lot of times, I'm cutting people's hair for court
where they're in trouble.
Yeah, I'm not in too--
I'm not in any trouble.
It's all just weird situations.
Yeah, about this notorious character named Pepe the Frog.
Have you ever heard of it?
Yeah, I actually have.
My kids have too.
Oh, Yeah?
This the guy, Pepe?
Yeah, that guy right there.
So the guy Matt, do you know him?
That's me.
That who you got to go to court with?
Oh, no, no, no.
That's me.
1 am Matt.
Oh, you're Matt.
Yeah.
Oh.
I don't know what this guy's doing, this Furie fellow.
But I've agreed to be deposed for the Pepe the Frog deal.
Sir, would you raise your right hand to be sworn?
Do you solemnly state the testimony
you're about to give will be the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth?
1 do.
I don't like the frog.
I don't like this whole thing.
But I've got to stand up for the First Amendment.
Let's say this frog is triggering for me now.
1 hate Pepe.
Videotaped deposition of Matt Furie in the matter
of Matt Furie versus Infowars and Free Speech LLC.
So from 2001 to 2007, you had this carefree, part-time,
knucklehead life.
1 still have that.
Excellent.
What did you do to prepare for today's deposition?
Really nothing.
So how did you pick the name Pepe the Frog?
It sounded like pee-pee.
To go pee-pee.
So it is a cartoon frog, right?
Yes, it's a cartoon frog.
It has round lips, right?
1 wouldn't call it round lips.
More tubular.
Tubular lips.
1 thought ll had some Kind of zen-like grip.
He kind of did a good cop, bad cop thing on me.
He was like, so you like Beavis and Butthead?
Do you watch Ren and Stimpy?
Yes.
But then he was like, let's get him.
49,
This is a fun one.
Hold that up.
Tell us what's 49.
It's an allegory on the direction nature's
going from my perspective.
Excuse me, the second to last page, page 20.
Sorry.
I worked out this morning.
It's just coincidental that they look alike?
Absolutely.
An original character that's based on a hot dog man.
Part man, part hot dog.
It's clear what all this is, so people
can say Jones is using a white supremacist symbol,
when it's not.
And it's a way of saying I'm a white supremacist.
So it's a way of defaming me and acting like I stole something
all at the same time.
It's just-- God-- evil.
That is just evil.
Is that Big Bird?
Yes.
31 is not Grimace?
No.
So those aren't derivations of the Hamburgler?
Oh, these guys?
Yes.
Do you mean Mayor McCheese?
And you got no license to put that up?
When I was in sixth grade, 1 did not obtain a license
to draw this, no.
1 went to the bathroom at one point,
and he's taking a piss too.
And he's like, so I guess this is
where all the dicks hang out.
And I was like, ha-ha, that's funny.
So awkward that I got my dick in my hand
and we're talking right now.
And then, shortly after that, he's
just fucking screaming at me.
We're suing Alex Jones because he--
That's not the question I asked.
Answer the question I asked you.
It twisted my noodles for a while.
And I-- you know when you say something
in passing to somebody else, and it's
like you wish you would've said something else.
This was like four hours of concentrated me wishing I
would have said something else.
It's not a comfortable situation, dude.
It sucked.
It was hard.
From my point of view, this is a direct copy.
So all of your references before are just references,
but this one is, what, traced, you mean?
Yeah.
Why do you suppose Pepe looks happy in that picture?
Pepe's like a mirror.
So the way that users online would use Pepe
is a reflection of themselves, to an extent.
That's my interpretation of it.
No further questions.
And nothing else here either.
Thank you for your time.
This marks the end of the videotaped deposition
of Alex Jones.
Good luck.
We're going off the record, and the time is 13 even.
Let's try to find a little round--
Oh.
Oh, there it is.
There.
So we need two dark green ones.
OK.
It took me weeks to de-tangle my mind
after all this legal stuff.
And put that in the [INAUDIBLE]
But that's why I signed up for.
It's not going to be easy, but I'm
willing to go the distance with this shit.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Pepe, Pepe come here.
And he hops and hops.
Pepe watch out and he hops and hops.
Pepe, please stop.
And he hops and hops.
You make me dizzy.
I say, Pepe come here.
Yeah.
(SINGING) And he hops and hops.
Pepe [INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
Everybody's saying congratulations.
A sparkle of good news in these troubling times.
This was actually going to trial,
and then Louis was just like, oh, surprisingly,
they want to settle.
We were confident we were going to prevail at trial,
and Infowars gave up.
It just went live on Infowars.com.
Infowars settles Pepe the Frog lawsuit.
Pays tiny settlement to creator Matt Furie.
This amount, that's a bar tab at a topless club for one
good night.
So what the heck.
This is more than I've ever made on the Boy's Club comic book.
So it just-- to put it into context,
Alex Jones is like, we got away with barely paying anything,
but it's all relative.
This is a big deal to show what these bullies are up to
and what happens when you stand up to them.
You are the resistance.
At the end of the day, he's just selling
a bunch of bad ideas, bad supplements,
and a bad attitude.
It's just a business.
Without you buying the videos and the books
and the supplements, we couldn't put
on one hell of a junkyard dog fight against these bastards.
This case against Infowars was the latest
in a string of successes.
We went after Richard Spencer.
We went after Baked Alaska.
We went after The Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website.
We have successfully enforced Matt's copyrights in Pepe
against somewhere between 75 and 100 different entities
in connection with images or language of hate.
And this is beginning to turn the narrative of Pepe
back around.
These guys are kind of messing with reality,
amplifying negativity or normalizing negativity.
I'm doing everything I can in my power
to change the course of this thing.
And I think removing Pepe from the hate symbol list,
it would be a win for peace.
With all these legal steps that I'm taking,
everything that I've been doing up until now,
my goal was to get it off the hate symbol database.
To me, it's not a symbol.
It's a character.
It's the character, but he's adorned with different symbols.
And they're pretty extreme stuff.
Yeah, it's tough.
Having it on the hate symbols database
we have found to be really useful for those
who are trying to understand this barrage of symbols that
is being thrown at them, whether it's a frog, a meme, or a hand
gesture.
It's complicated.
Well yeah, it is complicated, because I think with Pepe
on the list, it's seen more as a win
for the so-called alt-right or these others
because now they have that symbol.
And this is going to be a lifelong journey for me,
because I'm going to be entangled with this character
forever.
But what would be the impact of removing it?
Most of these people are creating these images,
and they're going to keep churning these things out.
Your bottom line request, it's really not
going to solve the issue.
It's not about this cartoon being on the hate symbols.
And it sucks.
All right, man.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah, thank you.
Good luck.
I don't want the narrative to be that I'm victimized here.
People have to deal with horror on a daily level.
Let's work together.
Let's figure this shit out, because it's not
getting any better.
All of the accounts of what happened to me and my family
over the years are enormous in scale
and historically rooted in the legacy of white supremacy.
(SINGING) This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.
Why are you being provocative?
I like trolling people.
It's fun.
You do it for fun?
Yeah.
It's fun.
The aesthetics and ideals that extremists
are promoting online with their use of Pepe the Frog
are now bleeding completely into what you would otherwise
describe as regular people.
Yeah, go ahead and video me.
I'll be doing it too, motherfucker.
You know what's coming to you people, right?
You know Trump is just the beginning.
You bearded monkeys have no place in America.
The ideology is premised on justifying violence
towards vulnerable people.
USA!
When that seeps into the beliefs of regular Americans,
you're heading for some place very bad.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle,
but you can send it somewhere else.
To actually change the narrative,
it would be necessary to take the frog,
to take Pepe, and do something very
different with him, something that could
develop a meme of its own.
[NON-ENGLISH CHANTING]
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Pepe is
being used in Hong Kong as a symbol of freedom, democracy,
and youth protest.
I was surprised as much as anyone.
This is the newer version of him.
He's wearing a hard hat, and he's wearing
the outfit of the protesters.
This is a way to resist authoritarianism.
Oh, he crying from the tear gas.
Pepe is now been spray painted on walls as a symbol of hope.
When has that actually happened in history?
You see it in movies all the time.
They're like, this is the symbol we're all
going to rally behind.
It just never happens in reality,
except now it happened to Pepe.
Pepe beams into everyone's brain this idea of the everyman.
As you grow up, you realize that, in fact, you
can affect the world, and you can use a small lever
to actually move a great amount of weight.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
That's the power that Pepe has.
Like, oh, what's more worthless than cartoons?
But what's more powerful than Mickey Mouse?
It's one of the most powerful things you can do
is create an iconic cartoon.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
In a lot of traditional societies,
it was very standard to look for omens, signs, strange portents,
things that were not expected, that came out of the blue.
Because that was a warning that something was shifting
in society, something had gone wrong,
or there was something building that you needed to know about
before it arrived.
Pepe the Frog is an omen.
We need to listen, because it's not
going to go away until we hear the message that it has to say.
Nowadays, I've just been thinking
about this concept of a spiral, life unfolding in this kind
of spirally nature.
So I have been drawing in more circular ways.
1 think that there is a collective consciousness
of darkness and light.
And the only thing that seems true to me
is that everything's going to change.
Trump's not going to always be the president.
Planet Earth isn't always going to have people on it.
Who knows?
The positive notion of Pepe is the possibility
that we can change again.
Hardcore happy place.
You've got to go hardcore happy.
I still like drawing him.
1 go through waves.
1 think the last time I talked to you,
Arthur, I was sick of him, but now ll like trying him again.
[MUSIC - "LET GO"]
(SINGING) Brother's smile taking on its own.
Identity only to then leave it behind.
Foreign light in the afternoon.
Held by what-be-nots.
Stay until remembered.
Here Pm standing, ripped apart by albatross.
Hanging by a thread.
What's in a name.
Down on the other side.
I'm almost out of sight.
Looking up to let go.
Now I'm letting go.