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Ill cut right to the chase:

Pepe the Frog isnt a white nationalist symbol.

Pepe the Frog isnt a harmless meme propagated by teenagers on the internet.

Pepe the Frog is, in fact, the modern-day avatar ofan ancient Egyptian deity accidentallyresurrectedby online imageboard culture.

Does that sound like the most b@tsh#t crazy thing youve ever heard?

Strap in, friendo. Youre in for one hell of a ride.

(UPDATE 11/9/16: Well memed, America, well memed. A post-election follow-up to this article has been added here.)

The precise origins of Pepe the Frog are, like all imageboards memes, obscure and unimportant.

All you really need to know is that sometime around 2010, a sad-looking cartoon frog began to trend among posters on 4chan.org and similar underground imageboards.

Shortly after, the age-old piece of online vernacular used to express laughterLOLfell out of favor on these sites.

In its place a new slang term of synonymous meaning rose to common use: KEK.

The origins of this trend are much more important. It comes froman odd technicality involving the Korean language and the popular video game World of Warcraft.

Keep that in mind for later.

And so, just like that, twoseemingly unrelatedelements that would later give life to a deity were arranged in piecemeal fashion. But they remained dormant for several years, up until

By this time, Pepe the Frog had become the unofficial mascot for 4chans political discussion board (a highly despised corner of the Internet fittingly entitled Politically Incorrect).

/Pol/ is a place where the unspoken outsiders of Millennial culture gather en masse. Here youll find the lonely and depressed, the socially inept, the generational dropouts, and all shades of disenfranchised youthevery one of them united with an unshakable underdog mentality that pervades the forums every kilobyte.

To call this place a white nationalist or alt-right message board is categorically incorrect. /Pol/, above all else, is place where our societys status quo is mercilessly challenged. Its a melting pot for well-meaning free thinkers and misguided mad men alike.

It isa place of chaos.

So when Donald J. Trump strolled onto the political scene in 2015, it was a match made in heaven. He immediately became /pol/s candidate of choice.

And it wasnt long before Trump was mated with /pol/s beloved mascot, in typical imageboard fashion:

And then, something very strange began to happen

One last thing you need to understand about imageboard culture: dubs.

Every post on 4chan and similar venues comes with an 8-digit numerical stamp. This number represents that posts entry position in the entire posting lineage of the imageboard.

With the amount of traffic these sites get, the last couple digits of this number are essentially a random roll. When a poster gets repeated digits, its called dubs, trips, quads, and so on.

Since a poster cant know their post number until after theyve submitted the post, its common for people to bet the contents of their message on the occurrence of repeating digits, like so:

When that endeavor proves a successful, a GET has been made and the stroke of luck is celebrated.

Out ofthis practice, a strange phenomenon began to take place on /pol/:discussion threads associatedwithTrump displayed noticeably frequent GETs.

It wasnt long before all of these seemingly random elements discussed so far became irreparably tied together within imageboard culture:

and a god was born.

Soon, it became all the rage on /pol/ to hail Trump as nothing less than gods chosen candidate.

Butwhichgods chosen candidate exactly?

The answer is obvious: Kek.

Remember how we learned that kek the meme came about from an obscure Korean languageonomatopoeia, completely independently from Pepe the Frog?

Well, it turns out Kek is alsoand always has beenan ancient Egyptian deity

A frog-headed one.

Quite the coincidence, wouldnt you say? A little, perhaps you reply.

A little indeed, but thats just the verytip of the synchronicityiceberg. Thats just where this unfathomable string of coincidences begins. And where it ends? We just dont know. Day by day this all getting stranger

The second major (little) coincidence can be foundwhen one looks into whatKek stood for among the ancient Egyptian pantheon:

Kuk(also spelled asKekorKeku) is the deification of the primordial concept of darkness in ancient Egyptian religion

Like all four dualistic concepts in the Ogdoad, Kuks male form was depicted as a frog, or as a frog-headed man, and the female form as a snake, or a snake-headed woman. As a symbol of darkness, Kuk also represented obscurity and the unknown, and thus chaos. Also, Kuk was seen as that which occurred before light, thus was known as thebringer-in of light.

And who else, at this point, had been declared a bringer of light into the world by enthusiastic supporters (mainstream and imageboard alike)?

It gets even weirder.

The pot really started to boil when this bizarre misprint statuette was dug up from a mysterious vendor called Ancient Treasures on Amazon. For years the product had been coincidentally mislabeled a KEK statue,despite actually bearing the hieroglyphics for the frog goddess HEQET.

And ya know, the thing about this ONEunique arrangement of hieroglyphicsthey bear an undeniable resemblance to a certain special something:

Do you see it?

A person sitting down. In front of a computer.

Like say, to post on an imageboard?

And whats that on the other side of the computer?

With this holy talismans discovery, The Cult of Kek suddenly took on a concrete form. This new digital faith is summed up neatly in this image passed around on all the major imageboards of the day:

It Gets Weirder: Pepe/Keke Emerges in Plain Sight on September 11th, 2016

Soon, /pol/s users werequite ironically, at firstattributing all strokes of luck for the Trump campaign (and likewise, all strokes of misfortune for the Hillary campaign) to their benevolent frog-headed deity that spoke to them in dubs.

But all of that came to a head on September 11th, 2016, when three major, mind-blowing events transpired within 48 hours of each other. Three events that would change the face of Kek worship forever:

(Note this persons post number)

Heres the short version: Pepe is a cartoon frog who began his internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike.

But in recent months, Pepes been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the alt-right. Theyve decided to take back Pepe by adding swastikas and other symbols of anti-semitism and white supremacy.

What can I or anyone else hope to add here? How bizarre does reality get? How deep does the rabbit hole go?

Oh, I see how deep

Now get a load of this one.

While all of this was happening, one or a few anonymous 4chan contributors discovered an old track from the 80s on YouTube. A track stamped all over with a very familiar face:

Thats right folks. A B-side vinyl by performer P. E. P. E., sporting a frog with a magic wand.

A frog.

And whats P. E. P. E. stand for?

Probably. What are sweet repeating digit GETs all about? Probability.

What is this gist of Kekism on /pol/? He speaks to them through dubs. Their ancient egyptian god of obscurity and chaos emerges/enters at points of probability.

Feel like thats a stretch? Check out what the full-length vocal versions album artwork is adorned with:

Dont see the significance? Let 4chan help you:

(Again, note the posts number)

Andheywhos that fair-haired man pointed towards Trump Towers clock in the artwork?

Gee, I wonder who.

Most likely?Chaos Magick.

You see, one of the core tenets of Chaos Magick practice (the only mainstay, really) is the creation of magic sigils (also called glyphs) to codify and project ones Will into the Universe.

Basically, you make an image that represents your will (desire fueled by powerful emotions or altered states) and the universe will take care of the rest.

When a lot of people pool their united willpower towards a single sigil, its called a Hypersigil, and its exponentially more potent.

Pepe/Kek is 4chans hypersigil.

Millions of the little people that browse 4chan have embedded the image of Pepe with their hatred for Hillarys alleged corruption, and their hope for Trumps victory over her in November. Whether they did this consciously or not, its exactly what has happened.

And so far, their hypersigil seems to be working.

Absolutely I am. But you must understand, magic probably isnt what you think it is. Its not about wand-waving or pentagrams or sacrificing babies.

Magick is actually much less involved than that. As a matter of fact, youre casting magick right now. You pretty much always are, whether you like it or not.

Thats because the REAL magic comes from plain and simple human attention. How you look at reality shapes it in ways that were only now beginning to fully understand. Ironically, the science of quantum physics is rapidly bringing the reality of magick to light (shadilay).

In my bookYoure Imagining Things, Ill tell you how it worksand WHY it worksin plain-spoken English. Ill also explain how you can use your attentionto alter your own little pocket of reality in extraordinary ways. Click here to check outYoure Imagining Thingson Amazon.

Most likely? Kek will continue to grow in power and continue to oppose Hillary Clinton and the corrupt political establishment. Will the Lord of Light win out over the powers that be? We shall find out very soon. (UPDATE 11/9/16: We found out what happened, didnt we?)

Yes.

Meme.

(And spread this around on social media.)

(And keep an eye on TheCultofKek.com for big things on the horizon.)

Read the rest here:
The Truth About Pepe The Frog And The Cult Of Kek

Andrew Knight holds a sign of Pepe the frog, an alt-right icon, during a rally in Berkeley, Calif., on April 27. Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Andrew Knight holds a sign of Pepe the frog, an alt-right icon, during a rally in Berkeley, Calif., on April 27.

With barely an Internet whimper, Pepe the Frog, the anthropomorphic cartoon character turned symbol of hate, was put down by his creator, Matt Furie, over the weekend, in a single-page comic strip. The final images were of Pepe dead in a casket, with three former roommates paying tribute by pouring some liquor on Pepe's face and drinking the rest.

The demise of Pepe who had become a symbol of the alt-right, neo-Nazis and white nationalists was as sad as it was unlikely. Pepe, from the start, was supposed to be a good guy. But in the story of his rise and fall, some universal truths about the nature of modern Internet can be found.

But first, let's look back at just how Pepe came to be.

When Furie created the character in 2005 and later featured him in the comic Boy's Club, he was just trying to make a chill bro who happened to be an animal. "He's a 20-something post-college roommate," Furie told NPR. "He's an anthropomorphic frog that lives with a party wolf, a bear-like creature, and then kind of a muppety, dog-like creature ... in a one-room apartment. And [they] kinda just party together and pull pranks on one another and hug each other and that kind of thing."

Furie said the characters were loosely based on his life, "living with a bunch of guys," and that "Pepe the Frog's more of just the Everyman. He likes to take naps and smoke weed, play video games."

Pepe really took off with one particular comic strip, depicting the frog pulling his pants down all the way to his ankles to urinate. After one of his roommates called him out, Pepe replied, "Feels good man." A star was born.

Denouncement as endorsement

And then, that same star was coopted, stolen by a 4chan fringe. In an effort described to the Daily Beast as a push to "reclaim Pepe from normies," a dedicated group of 4chan users began to tie Pepe to white nationalism beginning around 2015. "We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association," one user told Daily Beast reporter Olivia Nuzzi.

And during the 2016 election, that fringe ended up successfully tying Pepe to Donald Trump.

"Eventually, a popular meme of the smug frog with Donald Trump's hair started circulating online and then eventually got retweeted by the Donald Trump campaign," said Matthew Schimkowitz, an editor at Know Your Meme. "When that happened, the meaning of Pepe as kind of a white nationalist or alt-right symbol kind of exploded. It was considered by many to be a tactic of dog-whistling from the Trump campaign to that sect of white nationalists online, and it became a new symbol for white nationalists maybe not online. It essentially amplified that specific meaning of Pepe."

But what happened next was telling. Donald Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, publicly denounced Pepe, and that only strengthened Pepe's connection to white nationalists, proving that a lot of times online, denouncing something can function as an amplifier.

"I didn't notice anything until there was a Hillary [Clinton] explainer," Furie said.

Schimkowitz added: "Because such high-profile people perhaps the two most famous people on the planet were saying in so much that Pepe is a symbol of the alt-right, that became the kind of meaning for the meme entirely. It's what we call here the Pepe effect. When everyone starts using a meme to mean one specific thing, that essentially becomes the meaning of it."

Furie fought hard to change it. He wrote an essay in Time magazine, to reclaim Pepe. There was a Save Pepe campaign, complete with links to a Save Pepe online shop on Furie's Tumblr. Furie even partnered with the Anti-Defamation League to get Pepe back from white nationalists. Clearly, none of this worked.

"These trolls, or whatever you wanna call them, they're kinda like the loudest voice on the Internet," Furie told NPR, a few days before he killed off Pepe.

Strangely enough, Furie said he made the comic that killed Pepe off just a few weeks after the election, even though it just published online this past weekend. Furie said he had thought about killing Pepe long before the alt-right stole him.

"Honestly, I thought about killing off Pepe just simply when he became a meme, before it was even associated with hate speech," Furie told NPR. "When an artist loses control of their creation, it's never that great." But he said he's not sad about the trajectory of Pepe's life.

Kermit vs. Pepe

The demise of Pepe the frog is particularly sad when compared to the fate of the Internet's other famous amphibian: Kermit. That Muppet character has blossomed over the last year as a tea-sipping, real-talk-providing voice of humor and reason, with a good heart. Perhaps part of why Kermit lived while Pepe died is that Kermit was defined in the culture long before the Internet.

From the start, Jim Henson made him lovable. Not so with Pepe. This frog wasn't etched in the public consciousness before the alt-right got a hold of him. "It basically says that things without very specific meaning can be changed pretty much in an instant," Schimkowitz said. "If a word isn't clearly defined, it can then kind of morph. Memes kind of work the same way."

Schimkowitz compares Kermit the Frog to Superman, in that both characters have definitions that existed long before the Internet, personas that will likely never change, and might face backlash if anyone tried. "In the last couple of Superman movies, there's been a lot of outcry about how dark they made the character," he said. "He wasn't necessarily saving anybody, which is pretty much the opposite of what everybody knows about Superman.

"Superman wasn't doing Superman," Schimkowitz said. "Kermit has that, too. People are so familiar with these characters, that they're not just going to suddenly forget their entire lifetime with them and accept something new."

And that's where Pepe failed, if his takeover by the alt-right could be considered his fault. The frog white nationalists wanted him to be was a stronger character than the one Furie did. And if that's the case, the worst version probably always wins.

Even now, the alt-right seems to be having its way with another symbol: the "OK" hand gesture, though the jury's still out on whether it's becoming a hate sign, or just being used to troll mainstream news outlets.

Either way, chances are, given enough time, it too will morph into something bad, not something better. The moral arc of the Internet is long, but it usually bends towards awful.

Excerpt from:
What Pepe The Frog's Death Can Teach Us About ... - NPR.org

A man poses with a sign of Pepe the Frog outside Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., site of Monday's first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters hide caption

A man poses with a sign of Pepe the Frog outside Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., site of Monday's first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Et tu, Pepe?

Pepe the Frog a multivalent green cartoon used in Internet culture as a vehicle for a wide range of emotions and ideas has over recent months become particularly associated with racism, anti-Semitism and the alt-right.

And on Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe to its "Hate on Display" database of symbols used to spread hateful messages.

The anthropomorphic frog, which is based on a 2004 comic by Matt Furie, is frequently shown as smug, sad, angry or rather gross. Like most memes, he's frequently used in variations and remixes. Know Your Meme, a guide to image macros like Pepe, has collected some examples and a short historical summary.

By late 2014, the meme had spread from a handful of Internet communities into mainstream culture, much to the displeasure of groups that were originally using the image. Later, observers began noticing an increase in white supremacist themes in Pepe images or a rise in Pepe usage by white supremacist accounts. Either way, an association was building.

This May, an "anonymous white nationalist" told The Daily Beast that the shift was intentional: a dedicated campaign to "reclaim Pepe from normies," or members of the mainstream, by making Pepe so culturally unacceptable that only the fringe Internet would dare to use him.

Donald Trump had earlier tweeted an image of Pepe-as-Trump, and then his son posted an image on Instagram that included Pepe. This month Hillary Clinton's campaign released a widely mocked "explainer" that featured both those posts and called Pepe the Frog "a symbol associated with white supremacy." Now, the ADL has stepped up to label the frog a hate symbol.

ADL's inclusion of Pepe in its database does not, as some online have suggested, mean that using Pepe memes is a hate crime. It's a designation that carries no legal weight, and the ADL is quick to note that the mere use of Pepe the Frog doesn't, by itself, indicate extremism or hatred.

Furie, the artist who drew the original frog, told The Atlantic he thinks the association with far-right ideology is "just a phase."

"In terms of meme culture, it's people reappropriating things for their own agenda. That's just a product of the internet," he said.

With that, let's pause here to note a few things.

First, if the entire concept of the Pepe the Frog meme makes no sense to you, don't try too hard to crack open the enigma.

Life is short, much of Internet communication is more Dada-esque than denotative, and mastering dank memes has an effort-to-payoff ratio that really, truly is not worth it. Suffice to say he's a character used to express things online, through endless variations on a simple image.

Second, Pepe the frog is not usually racist. There's nothing inherently hateful about the original image. "He's just a chill frog," as Furie told The Atlantic.

And as ADL acknowledges in its hate symbol database, "the majority of uses of Pepe the Frog have been, and continue to be, non-bigoted."

But Pepe is certainly a meme that's popular among racists. Its inclusion in the ADL database isn't meant to make Pepe an amphibia non grata. Identifying whether Pepe is being used in a hateful way requires looking at the context, the ADL says.

In that, it's no different from the many other symbols in the database that appear in innocent forms as well as offensive ones. Take, for instance, the numbers that have been associated with white supremacist movements such as 88 or 14. They can be covert signals of white supremacy or, you know, just numbers, depending on their context. Similarly, the Celtic cross is "one of the most important and commonly used" white supremacist symbols, according to the ADL, but the "overwhelming" use is not extremist.

Third, let's just acknowledge that it's been a long, strange trip for Pepe from the Internet's imageboards to NPR's home page. We have no plans to write explainers on Harambe or Dat Boi anytime soon.

But the intersection of politics and the Internet is more fascinating in this election than ever before. Now that the presidential candidates from both major parties have invoked or criticized Pepe and a major civil rights organization has denounced him, there's no denying that he's news.

And if there is indeed a vast alt-right conspiracy to make Pepe the exclusive property of the Internet fringe, this piece might either be the ultimate case of normies killing the joke or a reinforcement of Pepe's odd status as subversive cultural icon that will actually keep him alive.

Feels bad, man.

See the original post here:
Pepe The Frog: I Guess We Need To Talk About It - NPR.org

Since Pepe the Frog emerged on the internet in 2005, his personality has shifted and evolved.

It's time to take on one of the Internet's most classic memes: Pepe the Frog. Is he the internet's most loveable creation, or its worst symbol of hate? Pepe the Frog was first posted to Gaia Online as "Feels Good Man", and evolved from there becoming "Feels Bad Man", "Sad Pepe", "Angry Pepe", and the list only expands from there.

Around 2016, Pepe's image began to shift, and in 2017, Matt Furie, the original creator of Pepe the Frog, killed his creation in the now infamous comic released on National Free Comic Day.

Because of the controversy surrounding Pepe the Frog, many fans are left at odds, unsure of how to perceive the once beloved frog. What do you think? Is Pepe the Frog just a meme, or a hate symbol? Let us know what you think in the comments below, and dont forget to subscribe.

Follow us on Twitter: @ShotsFiredOFLSubscribe to our Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJfb...

We would also like to give a huge thank you to our great subscribers for spotting errors. If anyone sees something they think is wrong please message us. We'll give you a thank you at the end of our next video. See you next time space cowboy!

See the original post here:
Pepe: The Frog that Broke the Internet - YouTube

Its a bittersweet day for the world of stoner cartoon characters, as comedy meme Pepe The Frogwho had recently been adopted as a mascot for the racist alt-right communityhas died. This comes from Comic Book Resources, which says Pepe was killed by creator Matt Furie in a one-page strip for publisher Fantagraphics Free Comic Book Day special Worlds Greatest Cartoonists.

Pepe was born in 2005 alongside Furies other Boys Club characters in a MySpace blog post, and he was originally depicted as comedically mellow dude who enjoyed getting high with his friends. The characters slightly strange appearance and bizarre sense of humor brought him to the attention of likeminded individuals at sites like 4Chan and Reddit, which turned Pepe into a popular meme thatlike a lot of things that people on 4Chan and Reddit think are funnydidnt make a whole lot of sense to people outside of those circles.

Unfortunately, as the internet goes, so goes the internets memes, and as the alt-right began to infect more and more of the web with its disgusting views, Pepe found himself falling in with a bad crowd. Somehow, Pepe The Frog became like a secret handshake or lapel pin for neo-Nazis who didnt want to call themselves neo-Nazis, and just a few months after mostly being known as a weird meme, the Anti-Defamation League officially classified him as a hate symbol. Even the frog emoji became associated with the darkest corners of the internetand humanity in generalwith Donald Trumps most openly racist and bigoted supporters using it as both a nod to Pepe and a banner proclaiming how proud they were to be miserable assholes.

It was a sudden and dramatic fall for the formerly chill stoner frog, and Furie himself began to try and distance himself from the new life his creation had taken on. As a Hillary Clinton supporter, Furie seemed shocked that Pepe had become something he could no longer control, especially since he was now inadvertently tied to a hate symbol, and he even created comics specifically about Pepe dealing with the sad turn his life had taken. Of course, Furie was never going to reclaim Pepe from the monsters who had corrupted him, which meant that his only recourse was to put the frog out of hisand ourmisery. There might not be a heaven for cartoon frogs, but if there is, hopefully Pepe is up there getting stoned and doing some weird bullshit right now.

Pepe is survived by his Boys Club friends Landwolf, Brett, and Andy, and you might be able to get a copy of Worlds Greatest Cartoonists at your local comic shop.

See original here:
R.I.P. Pepe The Frog - News