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A legal fight involving the alt-right, Trump voters, one of Washington, D.C.’s most powerful law firms, and the website 4chan is brewing.
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Is Pepe the Frog a symbol of free speech or artwork hijacked by racist hate groups? Pepe, as he's known, has been labeled a Nazi, condemned by a presidential candidate, and now is at the center of an important legal battle over the First Amendment in this era of unlimited replication, imitation, and mutation. It's a fight that involves the alt-right, Trump voters, one of Washington, D.C.'s most powerful law firms, and the website 4chan, aka, the "asshole of the internet."
Pepe the Frog is the creation of a 38-year-old cartoonist from Ohio named Matt Furie, who declined to be interviewed for this story. The anthropomorphic frog first appeared twelve years ago in Furie's webcomic Boy's Club. In the series' most famous sequence, Pepe is caugh tstanding at a toilet with his pants around his ankles. As he later explains, "Feels good man."
It wasn't until a few years later, when someone posted the "feels good man" image to the anonymous online image board 4chan, that Pepe became a global phenomenon. The "feels bad man" and "sad frog" versions of Pepe emerged, and the meme spread from there.
Pepe entered the mainstream as celebrities like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj posted his image to their social media. Matt Furie told the Daily Dot in 2015 that he supported the "anonymous people on the internet" who had turned his creation into an unstoppable meme, even going so far as to voice support for "people's decisions to profit off of Pepe."
But that was before Pepe became something else entirely.
Intellectual Property attorney Louis Tompros says Matt Furie contacted his firm WilmerHale after Pepe appeared in what he describes as an Islamophobic children's book in which Pepe does battle with a bearded alligator and what appear to be his burqa-clad minions. That was just the beginning.
Pepe's most recent evolution into a right-wing symbol most likely started on 4chan's /pol/ page, a board devoted to facilitating "politically incorrect" conversation that became a haven for Donald Trump supporters in 2016. Images of Pepe wearing red MAGA hats proliferated, and Donald Trump, Jr. even posted an image that included a Trumpified version of Pepe to social media.
The Clinton campaign responded by branding Pepe a "symbol associated with White Supremacy." The Anti-Defamation League lists the frog as a hate symbol.
Furie and his legal team began sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices to people they believed were using Pepe to "promote hate."
One recipient of a WilmerHale takedown notice was Mike Cernovich, a popular writer and vocal Trump supporter who describes himself as part of the "New Right."
"We're not alt-right, and we're not old school, National Review, boring right. We're aggressive," says Cernovich. "We're in a meme world. We're in a world where you have to be catchy, punchy... That's how you actually are persuading people to accept your ideas as true."
Watch the documentary on this case above.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Brett Raney.
Music by Elvis Herod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/elvisherod
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