Hate Symbol
During the 2016 US election Pepe was adopted by the alt-right, deliberately and as a project, the aim being to make a shared joke unusable by anyone else. In October 2015 Donald Trump posted an image of himself as Pepe. On 27 September 2016 the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe to its hate-symbol database, while stating plainly that the majority of Pepe uses were not bigoted. That qualification is part of the record and is carried here every time the listing is mentioned.
Part of Pepe
20 moments in this segment.
- - Trump tweets himself as Pepe. Donald Trump tweeted an illustration of Pepe drawn as himself at a presidential podium on October 13th, 2015. The record traces the Trump-Pepe association to a July 2015 image posted on 4chan's /pol/ board by the Malaysian artist Maldraw, which spread through 4chan and Reddit before the candidate himself retweeted a version of it.
- - MSNBC segment on Pepe and the 2016 campaign. A re-upload of an MSNBC broadcast in which Rachel Maddow explains to a general television audience how a cartoon frog became attached to the 2016 US presidential campaign. Segments like this one were circulated approvingly inside the online communities they described, who read the coverage as proof of reach. The upload is a third-party copy rather than a broadcaster release.
- - CNN reports the ADL hate-symbol listing. On 27 September 2016 the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe the Frog to its online database of hate symbols, citing the character's appropriation by extremists during the election. This CNN report is a same-week record of how that decision reached mainstream television news. The league's entry has always carried the caveat, still published today, that the majority of uses of Pepe have been and remain non-bigoted.
- - CBC asks whether Pepe is a hate symbol. A week after the Anti-Defamation League added the character to its hate-symbol database, CBC News examines the decision and reports the creator's position that the league acted too quickly. The segment sets the institutional judgement against Matt Furie's own account of what he drew and why.
- - "The Deplorables" poster. A photoshopped Expendables poster titled "The Deplorables", posted to Instagram by Donald Trump Jr. on September 10th, 2016, the day after Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark. Pepe stands among the prominent conservatives on it, and the post pulled the frog into the centre of the presidential campaign.
- - The news wave that redefined Pepe. Coverage from September 11th, 2016, when NBC, CNN, The Hill, Vanity Fair and Talking Points Memo described Pepe as a white nationalist symbol and the Clinton campaign published an explainer calling the frog "sinister". The Daily Dot ran the counter-argument the same week: "Pepe the Frog is not a Nazi, no matter what the alt-right says."
- - The first Pepe Le Pen. The earliest known illustration of Pepe Le Pen, posted to Reddit on November 10th, 2016 and drawn in the style of the Trump Pepe images that preceded it.
- - The Russian Embassy's Smug Pepe tweet. The Russian Embassy in the United Kingdom posted a Smug Pepe in reaction to news of a coming meeting between Theresa May and President-elect Donald Trump, gathering over 9,000 likes in a day. The Daily Dot, Vox and IBTimes covered the tweet, describing the Smug Pepe illustration as a "racist meme" and a "white supremacist symbol", the fight over what the frog meant, conducted through an official government account.
- - Pepe de France. A Pepe drawn in the likeness of Marine Le Pen, from the Pepe de France forum launched on January 27th, 2017 as a hub for memes supporting the National Front in the French presidential election.
- - PBS Idea Channel on rare Pepes and the hate-symbol question. A media-studies video essay from PBS examining rare-Pepe collecting, the character's many variants, and whether an image's meaning is fixed by the person who drew it or by the people who use it. It was made months after the Anti-Defamation League listing and treats the argument as unsettled rather than closed.
- - 'Deplorables and Alt-Right Unite' sign at a Saint Paul rally. A supporter at the 'March 4 Trump' rally in Saint Paul, Minnesota holds a sign reading 'Deplorables and Alt-Right Unite', with Pepe the Frog imagery alongside. The photograph documents the period in which part of the American right adopted the character as a political badge; the Anti-Defamation League, which added Pepe to its hate-symbol database in 2016, stated at the time that most uses of the character were not bigoted.
- - The Infowars poster. The poster sold on the Infowars website, tweeted by Alex Jones on May 13th, 2017, which placed Pepe among a group of political media figures. Matt Furie filed a copyright suit over it in March 2018; Infowars settled in June 2019 for $15,000, agreed to destroy the remaining posters and to stop using the character.
- - A Pepe sign confiscated at the Overwatch League. Two spectators at an Overwatch League event had a sign carrying a Pepe illustration taken from them by security, as reported by Kotaku on January 10th, 2018. Blizzard later confirmed it discouraged the meme at its competitions.
- - An Overwatch player deletes a Pepe tweet. San Francisco Shock player Jay Won's follow-up after taking down a Pepe tweet on March 18th, 2018, saying he "had to delete" it. Two days later an Overwatch League spokesperson confirmed the league discouraged "symbols and imagery which are associated with or used by hate groups, including Pepe the Frog".
- - Jordan Peterson on polarisation and Pepe. A CBC interview in which Jordan Peterson is asked about political polarisation and about the online movements that adopted Pepe, and gives his own reading of why the symbol attached itself to them. The exchange is one example of the character entering mainstream broadcast argument about polarisation rather than internet culture coverage.
- - A TEDx talk asks whether Pepe is a hate symbol. A high-school student argues at TEDxYouth@GrandJunction that social media amplifies older patterns of group tribalism, and uses the fight over Pepe as his central example. The talk is a record of how the controversy was being taught and discussed outside internet-culture circles two years on.
- - A German account of Pepe's transformation. A German-language video essay tracing the character from Matt Furie's comic through imageboard culture to its use as a political symbol, sourced in its notes to Know Your Meme and to earlier English-language essays. It is a record of how the story travelled into other language markets by 2019.
- - From Boy's Club to symbol of hope and hate. A produced explainer tracing the character from the comic Boy's Club, about four roommates doing very little, through its adoption by political extremists and the Anti-Defamation League listing, to its later appearance in Hong Kong. It is one of the more carefully assembled overviews made before the documentary.
- - Bernie Sanders mural defaced with a Pepe image. A news item on the defacement of a Bernie Sanders mural in Washington DC with a Pepe image, which police said they were investigating as a hate crime. It is an example of the character's continued political use years after the 2016 campaign.
- - How Pepe's reputation turned. A video essay on how a character drawn for an indie comic came to be treated as a hate symbol, and on the distance between that reputation and the way most people used the image. The Anti-Defamation League's listing has always carried the caveat, still on its entry, that the majority of uses of Pepe the Frog have been, and continue to be, non-bigoted.
