The images the Anti-Defamation League considers symbols of hate are frequently historically fraught : the swastika, the Confederate flag, the Ku Klux Klan ‘s burning cross. now they have company from a green cartoon frog .
The ADL, a jewish group that fights anti-semitism and other forms of hate, barely added Pepe the Frog to its database of hate symbols .
Pepe the Frog has been around the internet for years. precisely a class ago he was so innocent that celebrities like Katy Perry could tweet him without fear of backfire. But more recently, Pepe has morphed into something more insidious — a symbol embraced by the white patriot alt-right, many of whom hang out on the forums where Pepe inaugural originated years ago .
Pepe made the news program recently when Donald J. Trump Jr. posted a photoshopped visualize of “ The Deplorables ” — featuring his church father, Donald Trump, and his surrogates — he meant to mock Hillary Clinton ’ s comments calling Trump ’ s supporters “ racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. ”

But the inclusion of Pepe the Frog suggested to many people that Trump was throwing his lot in with precisely the supporters Clinton was criticizing, the on-line trolls who, among other things, bombard journalists critical of Trump with anti-semitic frog memes .
“ That cartoon frog is more black than you might realize, ” Clinton ’ s campaign wrote, calling him a “ symbol associated with white domination. ”
Pepe the Frog, in early words, is a andiron whistle for the internet historic period, when the memes candidates post circulate far more broadly than any speech they ever make. Donald Trump Jr. says he didn ’ t have any idea what the frog mean. But his father, more than any other presidential candidate, has embraced the ethos of the rumor swamps of the internet. The trolls who love him back, in turn, have turned Pepe the Frog into his mascot .

How Pepe the Frog became a symbol of white nationalism

Like so many stories on the internet, this narrative begins with 4chan, the huge, anonymous forum that first popularized Pepe and, eight years late, tied him to white patriotism .
The forum — which Vox ’ s Timothy Lee once described as the “ Mos Eisley cantina of the internet ” — spawned the hacker collective Anonymous and hosted leaked fame nude photos. It was one place where Gamergate activists organized. But because 4chan was a message board based around images long before communicating with images on social media was coarse, it ’ second besides been the birthplace for many memes, including LOLCats, Rickrolling, and, yes, Pepe the frog .
Pepe began as a fictional character in Boy ’ randomness Club, a amusing that started on MySpace in 2005 by cartoonist Matt Furie. Boy ’ randomness Club was filled with stoner liquid body substance — Pepe and his three friends, a frank, a bear, and a wolf, are roommates who spend most of their prison term high — and the panels finally began to stand on their own as memes. One in particular, a comedian from 2008 about Pepe dropping his pants to pee and explaining it by saying, “ Feels good man, ” became omnipresent on 4chan .



primitively in black and white, Pepe was colored green. Users created smug frogs and sad frogs and angry frogs .
“ Pepe, with his confront, he ’ second got these large, expressive eyes with bouffant eyelids and big rounded lips, I fair think that people reinvent him in all these different ways, ” Furie told the Atlantic ’ s Adam Serwer. “ It ’ sulfur kind of a blank slate. It ’ second fair out of my control, what people are doing with it. ”
finally, like many infinitely remixable memes, Pepe crossed over to more mainstream corners of the internet. Katy Perry tweeted a Pepe meme to complain about fountain imprison :

By 2015, Pepe was the most reblogged meme on Tumblr, recognizable in all kinds of lowest-common-denominator jokes :

Me Rn. ( @ im6foot5if_you_were_wondering )
A photograph posted by Elliot Tebele ( @ fuckjerry ) on Mar 6, 2016 at 6:43pm pacific time




And even promenade invitations :

then the Pepe course got weirder with the phenomenon of “ rare Pepe sulfur ” — images of Pepe that were newer, weird, and sometimes offensive. The basic estimate was that images of Pepe the Frog had become excessively common. It was a room for the forums where the antic originated to begin to reclaim it :



The “ rare Pepes ” craze is layered in sarcasm and in-jokes and is basically impenetrable, so we ’ rhenium not going to get into it very deeply here. The main consequence was that it revived Pepe on 4chan — and, at times, as partially of unsavory images — at a time when the web site was becoming a hub for Trump support and members of the alt-right .

4chan loves Pepe the frog, Donald Trump, and the “alt-right”

The alt-right movement — a coalition of white supremacists and reactionaries who believe in rejecting democracy — has provided such visible support for Trump that Hillary Clinton devoted an entire manner of speaking to it .
The alt-right is a across-the-board campaign. It includes paleoconservatives, isolationists who were frequently anti-semitic and were generally forced out of the conservative drift in the 1990s. Its intellectual underpinnings are from “ reactionaries ” who argue that democracy is flawed, that black people may well be genetically subscript to whites, and that the present is worse than the past. Those parts of the bowel movement tend to communicate with drawn-out essays, not with memes, and they ’ ra not necessarily Trump supporters, as Vox ’ s Dylan Matthews reported .
But the alt-right besides includes what BuzzFeed ’ sulfur Joseph Bernstein dubbed the “ chanterculture, ” which, he wrote, “ combines age-old racist and male chauvinist rhetoric with bleeding-edge meme culture and engineering, ” mixing opposition to growing racial and sex equality with irony so heavy that it can be hard to tell if they ’ re very unplayful. Milo Yiannopoulos, the rightist agent provocateur and Gamergate garter, is the most big extremity of this outgrowth of the alt-right .
The politics forum on 4chan, /Pol/, is land zero for this palaver. possibly unsurprisingly, /pol/ is besides ablaze with subscribe for Donald Trump. “ It was how much asshurt he causes to others, ” one 4chan bill poster wrote in a post preserved on Reddit :

The schadenfreude is so funny story that it digs a hole in you, and soon you can ’ thymine stop laugh — and then, because you ’ ve been laughing with him for a while, he begins to grow on you, and you hear what he actually says, and on the spur of the moment, because you are predisposed to like him because you ’ re both laughing at Jeb Bush, you find yourself supporting him, even if technically your political ideas don ’ t align absolutely with his .

4chan loves remixing Pepe, and besides Donald Trump. So the adjacent footstep was inevitable : an effigy of Donald Trump as Pepe. then in October 2015, Trump himself retweeted the visualize, along with a spoof video compilation called “ Can ’ t Stump the Trump ” made by Donald Trump fans on 4chan :
At the fourth dimension, this got about no attention. Trump was still one of 17 contenders for the Republican nomination, and Pepe was still the most popular meme on Tumblr, not an embodiment of the alt-right. A few publications used Trump ’ mho pinch as an entry detail to writing about his popularity on 4chan : “ Trump ’ s affiliation with the web site might end up hurting the campaigner given that racism is virulent on the message board, ” Vocativ noted, but continued : “ It could besides help him : chitter users responded to Trump ’ s initial chitter post with extra memes offering boost. ”
trump fans, though, kept tweet and posting about Pepe. When Politico ’ s Ben White asked about Pepe in May, he got a barrage of Pepe memes in reaction, many of them very Trumpy :

The Daily Beast ’ s Olivia Nuzzi interviewed two anonymous on-line whiten supremacists and alt-right movement members who said this kind of collective response was a “ campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies. ” By summer, there were batch of “ normies ” out there — political journalists, for exemplar — who weren ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate hanging out on 4chan in 2008 or reblogging memes on Tumblr in 2015, and whose first base exposure to Pepe was as a symbol used chiefly by blank supremacists and alt-right Trump supporters .
That ’ south forget people more familiar with the meme ’ s context scramble to explain the nuance. “ Pepe the Frog is not a Nazi, no matter what the alt-right says, ” read a headline at the Daily Dot : “ He ’ s not a white supremacist, and he ’ s not a Trump voter. Hell, he ‘s not even substantial. He is entirely what we make him, and in this election, the alt-right is trying to make him theirs. ”

Does a Pepe meme mean you’re a white supremacist?

trump himself hasn ’ triiodothyronine addressed the Pepe controversy. His son Donald Jr. said on Good Morning America : “ I ‘ve never even heard of Pepe the Frog. I mean, bet you 90 percentage of your viewers have never heard of Pepe the Frog. … I thought it was a frog in a wig. I thought it was amusing. ”
But the “ Deplorables ” meme wasn ’ t the only meter recently that Donald Trump Jr. has seemed to nod to white supremacists. He referenced “ warming up the boast chamber “ in a holocene consultation ( late saying he was talking about “ corporal punishment ” ), he retweeted a white supremacist, and he appeared on a radio show with a white supremacist who has praised slavery. His tweet comparing syrian refugees to Skittles was widely criticized but backed by the political campaign .
There ’ s a case to be made that thinking this deeply about Pepe memes plays directly into the trolls ’ hands : What trolls, whether Gamergaters, Trump supporters, or both, want is to get a rise out of the hearing, and to get attention. With Pepe, they ’ ve likely succeeded beyond their wildest pipe dream, even if they represent a bantam divide of the electorate — and even if they ’ rhenium in it to troll, not to vote. As Jesse Singal wrote for New York magazine :

Read more: Real Sociedad

The fact that a subset of louder-than-their numbers hyperactive Twitter and image-board users have conscripted the frog for their nauseating purposes doesn ’ thymine actually mean all that much. It international relations and security network ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate any more “ atrocious ” than the fact that there are thus many people passing around Nazi imagination on-line in the first place. This is just how internet culture works, whether the acculturation in question is an innocent Tumblr fan community or an offense-loving chan subset. It iterates and comes up with new eldritch ways to communicate information .

The counterpoint is that while internet trolls have always existed, they ’ re normally something an ordinary campaign would desperately avoid. The Trump campaign, on the other hand, doesn ’ triiodothyronine care whom it ’ mho empowering. The merely reason most of us are even aware of an dark political meme from 4chan is that Trump promoted it in the first place, way back in October .
This was a choice. It ’ second not as if Trump is the only cultural calculate the alt-righters of 4chan have claimed as their own. They ’ re besides very affectionate of Taylor Swift, whom they see as their “ Aryan goddess. ” But Swift ’ s reputation has not suffered, because she doesn ’ triiodothyronine retweet praise from ashen supremacists. The reason Trump ’ sulfur campaign has become associated with racists, xenophobes, and the alt-right is that he ’ south stand by and let it happen .