So I’m sitting here browsing Facebook, right? It’s 2016, the country is in a time of social turmoil less outrageous than a civil war but not by any means insignificant, and so I’m expecting to see a lot of posts on the issues reflected in this communal strife. What I’m not expecting, but what I see, is that Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character from the Internet, has been officially labeled a symbol of hatred by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
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I stop, take a sip of my coffee. Must’ve seen that wrong, that can’t be right. Pepe, the cartoon frog who originally came from a webcomic called Boy’s Club about some roommates who did silly things together? Pepe, the relatively longtime Internet meme who never had anything to do with politics? Come on, no way.
I do a double take, but there it is, plain as day: Pepe has officially joined the swastika and the burning cross as a symbol of racial hatred. Huh. At this point, I take another swig of brain juice as my eyes gloss over and I stare at my screen, dumbfounded. I’m still half-convinced this is a bad hoax, and so I do a quick Google search. Nope, this is an actual thing. Turns out that Pepe the cartoon frog has been co-opted by the alt-right, and what was once an innocent in-joke amongst kids fooling around on the net has now been made into a vehicle for racist Nazi propaganda.
Some more searching, this time on Google images. I pray to the meme lords that nothing too disgusting comes up in the results, and while luckily nothing I find is particularly lewd or graphic in nature, my actual findings are roughly as concerning, if not more so. Picture after picture of Pepe the goofy comic strip character dressed as a Nazi grunt, fashioned after Hitler, portrayed as a gross Jewish stereotype watching the twin towers burn...
...and modeled to look more like Donald Trump has popped up on my feed, though I’m sure that last one is just a coincidence. It’s not like he himself retweeted the original image knowing about the connection.
So what are people doing in response to this? Well, turns out there’s a lot of complaining and a lot of arguing on social network sites and the blogosphere. Plenty of trolling. The original creator of Pepe has urged people to try and take him back as a positive symbol of fun. The ADL has said this might pass.
I go to take another sip of my coffee, but it’s all gone. It hits me that like people of 2016 in general, I’ve lost control over my life. Might be a two-cup kinda day.
