One of the more moronic moral panics of the '10s and '20s―and one that I'm embarrassed to admit to having given some credence to―is the notion that Pepe the Frog has become an icon for racists and fascists. The character does pop up in many places, and it's not hard to see why. Cartoonist Matt Furie has hit on something. While not of the most sophisticated draftsmanship, Pepe has a very expressive face, suggesting a sweet and open personality.
So yes, he appears in many memes and messages, of varying levels of weirdness and irony. Hardly any involve any kind of dark political iconography, and those that do can most likely be explained by the fact that innocence also includes an urge to sully innocence.
Part of the problem is the term "alt right", which turns out to be exceedingly vague, perhaps by design. It's been applied to genuine neo-Nazis, fairly mainstream conservatives, apolitical juveniles, and increasingly to dissident leftists. But again, we're talking about a happy-go-lucky cartoon amphibian here.
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After the part about Donald Trump possiby being the great however many times grandchild of a werewolf, I enjoyed the rest of JMG's article about how the legends related to past realities. It's true there are no longer any rituals of initiation into adulthood for men, or women for that matter, but the requirements for men becoming boys were much more stringent. Hunting, fishing and making war were the duties of men as was the safety of the women and children, so men had to be trained to be efficient - or at least trustworthy and observant.
All that is gone from the modern world and along with initiations to adulthood we now have quite the opposite in today’s America where jobs are few and what used to be the normal route toward an independent adult life has been closed for many young people.
I did notice Pepe the Frog as one of the side images on Greer's post and when you mentioned him I remembered that JMG had written a series of posts back in 2018 called The Kek Wars. I had an enjoyable hour or so rereading them - he's very knowledgable about current affairs and has some relevant insights about the background.
Anyway, they're worth reading if you have the time. The one I'll draw your particular attention to is:
Kek Wars Part III: The Triumph of the Frog God - a couple of paragraphs:
It’s become pretty much de rigueur to denounce the chans as racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic. Is there racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism in /pol/ and its many equivalents? You bet, but that’s far from the whole story. A venue that allows people to say anything anonymously is going to field whatever kinds of speech are most loudly forbidden. What was going on in the chans was considerably broader than those categories suggest: every value, every bias, every presupposition of the cultural mainstream was being shouted down with maximum glee. That’s what you get in outsider culture.
You also get running jokes, strange mascots, and odd little bits of in-group slang. That’s where Pepe the Frog came in. He started out in 2005 as a character in Matt Furie’s comic strip Boy’s Club, an archetypal slacker who just didn’t care about anything. He got splashed across the internet in the usual fashion, and ended up being adopted by /pol/ as its mascot. Then there was the word “kek,” which is what you get due to a software oddity when you try to send the message LOL to one of the factions in the online World of Warcraft game. In the chans, “kek” became the sound of laughter—which oddly enough is what the word means in Korean.
It's interesting that in 2018 racism and sexism were the two disgraceful elements that could get one cancelled from polite society. Trans hadn't yet become an issue.
Here are the four Kek War posts.
'the requirements for men becoming boys'
Ooops! missed this. Please read the other way.
Sheesh..
While America isn't supposed to have aristocrats or ruling families, our centers of power do seem to hold with some families being better than others. Bill Clinton came from a lesser family, but made himself useful to the ruling class. Now the Clintons are, to put it mildly, landed. The Trumps are also something of an outcast family, despite having acquired wealth. Trump wasn't seen as having paid his dues, which accounts for a lot. Anyway, one of his (possible) ancestors being accused of lycanthropy is a fitting retroactive extension of that.
These rites of passage have disappeared in large part because of wealth inequality. In part its a continuation of the logic of the enclosure movement of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, when so much land went from being a common resource to a private holding. More and more resources are taken away, but you're not supposed to notice.
What I've read in that article about the Kek wars is pretty interesting. Well, he's good at putting stuff together like that. A lot of chan culture stuff strikes me as being a big dose of Fantasyland, as well as being almost impossible for an outsider to penetrate. It does seem to spook a lot of respectable people though.
A propos of nothing, a socialist group around here put up fliers for their May Day rally this year. In so many words they said, "Help us fight racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, warmakers, and the banks." Yes, in that order. Like, when socialist rabble rousers take that long to get to the warmongers and the banksters, what are they even doing?
Anyway, I'll keep going back to those posts. They're quite stimulating.
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