https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/25/memes-politics-pepe-frong-wojak
The meme-fication of US politics: two films reveal the faces behind the posts
On 13 October 2015, Donald Trump, who had recently announced his run for president, tweeted an image of himself standing at the presidential lectern, his face transmogrified into a green, smug-looking frog, known to certain corners of the internet as Pepe. With hindsight, this strange moment offers a stake in the ground, marking out the point when the meme was invited into mainstream political culture.
This collapse of the virtual and the real seems to have only accelerated since then. Online phenomena are no longer cordoned off in their virtual barriers but regularly pass through the screen to play mischief in the so-called “real world”. Two recent documentaries attempt to explain how this all happened – from two very different perspectives.
The first one, Feels Good Man, aims to dissect how the Pepe meme was hijacked by extremist groups to turn the comic character into a symbol of far right bigotry. By comparison the second documentary, TFW No GF, allows a handful of trolls to speak for themselves with little critical pushback. The film was partially funded by Cody Wilson, who was described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as someone who “exists in the world of antigovernment extremists, as a product of a sort of extreme post-libertarianism”. In 2017 he launched Hatreon, a site aimed at crowdfunding for white nationalists who had been banned from sites such as Kickstarter and Patreon.
Feels Good Man tracks Pepe’s journey to notoriety from the point of view of its creator, Matt Furie, a sweet-tempered, somewhat credulous California-based illustrator. We learn that Furie first created Pepe for his 2005 comic Boy’s Club, which tracked the lives of four human-like animal friends living in the languid state between college and adult life. Quintessential 90s slackers, they drink, smoke, fart, and say things like “got milk?” and “as if”. The comic is crude, light-hearted, funny, portraying a type of masculinity in which, as one fan of the comic explains, “you can be in your underwear singing Shania Twain”.
On a whim, Furie uploads a few frames from the comic to his Myspace page. Soon, a wide array of Pepe memes start to take over. People make their own versions of the frog and post him on obscure forums and bulletin boards, including on 4chan, where Pepe undergoes the first of several major mutations. By 2008, he is no longer Furie’s “happy little frog” but a sad, alienated creature, an avatar for disgruntled dropouts who live in their mothers’ basements – or in 4chan language, Neets (Not in Education or Training).
As Pepe breaks out on to more mainstream social media platforms, his image changes once again into a more palatable, funny, feminized frog – shared by the likes of Nicki Minaj and Katie Perry. The 4chaners, who feel their mascot is being stolen by “normies”, react by metamorphizing Pepe into the most “problematic” creature imaginable. They generate versions of Pepe emblazoned with swastikas, Pepe gassing Jewish people, Pepe in a KKK hood. The idea is that if they make the frog politically incorrect, normies will back off.
The ploy worked, perhaps better than expected. By 2015, Pepe had become a symbol for a broad coalition of self-styled transgressive rightwingers, all the way from anti-PC “activists” to full-blown “alt-right” white nationalists to Donald Trump.
For a long time, Furie remains somewhat nonplussed about Pepe’s increasingly toxic online mutations. “I am just a spectator,” he tells a friend. It is only when his design is designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in September 2016 that he finally confronts how out of hand his Golem-like creature has become. He teams up with the ADL to launch #SavePepe, inviting people to draw and upload their own, peace-loving version of the frog, to drown out the hate.
Of course, the plan fails. 4chan users continue to post racist and pro-Trump memes by the tens of thousands. When Trump wins the election, 4chaners declare that they memed their candidate all the way to the White House.