Anti-Defamation League and Pepe the Frog's Creator Are Teaming Up To Save Pepe From Hate-Symbol Status (businessinsider.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Matt Furie, the creator of the widely known "Pepe the Frog" meme, is joining forces with the Anti-Defamation League to reclaim the symbol from the alt-right and make it a "force for good," according to a press release. Furie and the ADL plan to start a social-media campaign by creating "a series of positive Pepe memes and messages" and promoting them with the hashtag #SavePepe, according to the release. The ADL declared "Pepe the Frog" to be a hate symbol in late September. "It's completely insane that Pepe has been labeled a symbol of hate, and that racists and anti-Semites are using a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book as an icon of hate," Furie said in a column for Time magazine. While fiercely condemning the "racist and fringe groups" that use Pepe to propagate divisive views, Furie said Pepe was meant to "celebrate peace, togetherness, and fun." The meme, which originated from a 2005 cartoon, has been hijacked by the alt-right movement in the past several months. Members of the movement have used the meme to convey often racist and anti-Semitic messages. The messages prompted the ADL to add Pepe to its "Hate on Display" database, which documents anti-Semitic hate symbols. According to the ADL's press release on the #SavePepe campaign, Furie will speak at its "Never Is Now" summit against anti-Semitism on November 17 in New York City. The panel will focus specifically on online hate campaigns. Furie published a new Pepe cartoon on Monday detailing his "alt-right election nightmare," which depicts a sad Pepe morphing into a frog that resembles Donald Trump and then a monster. Pepe appears trapped in the mouth of the monster. The next panel depicts a nuclear explosion. Pepe then awakes and hides under his mattress.

Comments

The Comic

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone who sees that comic is just going to laugh harder than they were before.

It's fucking hilarious seeing these losers take a stupid meme so seriously.

Re:The Comic

[Anonymous Coward]

What the actual fuck does the misuse of the Pepe the frog meme by the alt-right as a symbol of racism have to do with the fact that there are people who oppose the Democrats from the left? How rubbish at logic can you be?

What's wrong with hate symbols?

[Anonymous Coward]

If speech doesn't offend anyone, nobody will try to ban it. The only type of speech in need of protection is that which someone considers offensive and wants to ban. I consider hate speech a good thing because it's indicative of a free society. One of the first things to go in a society that isn't free is hate speech, a fact that has been documented throughout history. Regimes that aren't free tend to restrict speech, and we need to promote free thought and free speech. In a free society, you should speak against hate speech rather than attempt to ban it.

Re: What's wrong with hate symbols?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a truly free society, people could just murder, assault, rape, and steal with no consequences, except for vigilante justice. That's why we make these crimes illegal. It's a trade off of some freedom for some safety, and that's the right thing to do.

Hate speech itself may not kill people, but it has harmful effects on society. It creates groups of people that are scared to speak up, scared to do things, and in some cases, people do kill or commit crimes based on it. Hate speech must be controlled as part of a harmonious society. I understand that people have the right to speak their minds, but people also have the right to be free to do what they want in life, and being intimidated by hateful speech infringes on that.

Re: What's wrong with hate symbols?

[MightyMartian]

The use of Federal hate crime legislation was the only way the stranglehold of White Supremacist Jim Crow laws were finally loosed in the former slave states, a hundred years after the Thirteenth Amendment was supposed to have guaranteed freedom for African Americans. You may dislike them, and in some ways I might even agree that they have been a blunt instrument, but the fact remains that if Congress had not passed the Civil Rights acts, and the Executive had not been willing to use them to target the purveyors of systemic inequity in the South, it's almost certain that it would have been decades longer before something approaching equal rights would have been achieved.

And no one is getting arrested for this appropriation of a damned frog symbol, but the creator and others are trying to "de-meme" it. Isn't that what a free society does? Where a group believes there is some injustice, it puts for the argument, perhaps even vigorously, that the injustice needs to be righted? It almost seems to me that some peoples' ideal free society is where certain people can literally say anything they want, and no one is ever allowed to call what they say into question. Again and again, what I see from the Trump camp and the Alt-right isn't the notion of freedom of speech, but rather freedom from consequences. Whether it's Milos concocting fake tweets to go after a black actress because he didn't like the movie she was in, or guys running around spouting thinly veiled (or sometimes not even veiled) racism, and the expectation always is "If you try to shame me, you're a fascist!"

Re: What's wrong with hate symbols?

[Dutch Gun]

It almost seems to me that some peoples' ideal free society is where certain people can literally say anything they want, and no one is ever allowed to call what they say into question. Again and again, what I see from the Trump camp and the Alt-right isn't the notion of freedom of speech, but rather freedom from consequences.

In another article on Slashdot, we have people boycotting a Silicon Valley business associated with a CEO who has dared to donate to Trump. And we have a GOP office being firebombed just the other day. But hey, it's all good because those are evil Republicans, right?

Don't you dare pin this all on the right. I've seen more than plenty from the left as well. Fascist assholes who simply want to silence their opposition are all over the spectrum, sadly.

Re: What's wrong with hate symbols?

[poity]

The loss of life, bodily integrity, and personal possession are reasons why your listed crimes are harmful. Their causes are the immediate physical actions that precipitate their loss. In contrast, speech precipitates no loss and no harm, and you only deem it "harmful" because they merely have the potential, down the line, to motivate or to lower the mental obstacles for actions that deprive life, bodily integrity, or personal possession. Your view of "harm" is suddenly made so expansive that it would force us to conclude that, for example, socialist slogans and ideas are forms of hate speech in the sense that they have the potential -- proven through historical precedent -- to motivate actions that deprive life, bodily integrity, and personal possession.

Ultimately, your argument would like us to take extra steps up the chain of causality to ban things that aren't directly related to harm. How far up the chain of causality can we really go, or should we go? 2 or 3 steps seem just as arbitrary a demarcation as 20 or 40 steps. If a butterfly flaps its wings and down the line someone is killed, must we then ban the butterfly from flapping its wings?

Re: What's wrong with hate symbols?

[Pseudonym]

In another article on Slashdot, we have people boycotting a Silicon Valley business associated with a CEO who has dared to donate to Trump.

That's freedom of association and it's at least as fundamental a right as free speech. If that's how they choose to stand up for what they believe in, that's their business. You and I, in turn, may use this information to decide whom we want to associate with. I don't see the problem.

And we have a GOP office being firebombed just the other day.

That's a crime. That is a problem. I hope whoever did it is caught and does hard time.

Don't you dare pin this all on the right.

More to the point, don't pretend that "the right" or "the left" is a heterogeneous mass. In both cases, we're talking about a loose association of different individuals and groups with different agendas, some of whom are extremists.

To paraphrase a friend of mine:

It's okay to be a conservative; some values are worth preserving and defending. It's okay to be a progressive; the times they are a-changing. It's okay to be a radical; sometimes the joint needs to be shaken up. It's okay to be all three, perhaps on different issues. But it's never okay to be a fundamentalist.

Re: What's wrong with hate symbols?

[operagost]

You beat me to it. Freedom of association is a wonderful thing to the left when it means boycotts and riots. In business and public schools? Not so much.

Re: What's wrong with hate symbols?

[DRJlaw]

You beat me to it. Freedom of association is a wonderful thing to the left when it means boycotts and riots. In business and public schools? Not so much.

You're free to become a closed-membership baker. The fact that it's commercially infeasible is your own problem. If you want to sell to the public, then you have to sell to the entire public, not just white anglo-saxon protestant straights.

Next thing you know they'll demand that businesses sell to blacks. The nerve of some people...

Effect

[Tablizer]

Just rename it Streisand Frog

How many of these "anti-Semites" are DNC plants?

[mi]

"It's completely insane that Pepe has been labeled a symbol of hate, and that racists and anti-Semites are using a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book as an icon of hate"

How much of that racism and anti-Semitism is actually real, and how much — "false flag" operations by DNC-operatives like these?

“You remember the Iowa state fair thing where Scott Walker grabbed the sign out of the dude’s hand and then the dude kind of gets roughed up right in front of the stage right there on camera?” Foval asks. “That was all us. The guy that got roughed up is my counterpart who works for Bob.”

Foval also references Shirley Teeter, a sixty-nine-year-old lady who claims that she was assaulted at a Trump rally in North Carolina. “She was one of our activists,” he says while introducing the term bird dogging to the political lexicon.

In addition to these thugs on the ground, Clinton's campaign also employs online trolls (like Putin). If her political consultants aren't directing some of these guys to create fake "hate posts" — as their ethics clearly allow them to do — they aren't earning their pay...

They are stopping?

[Orgasmatron]

So, the ADL and the press are going to stop lying about and slandering Pepe? That is good news.

Oh, not that? They are going to try the anti-racist skinhead gambit? What do you mean you've never heard of anti-racist skinheads? Well, crap, I guess there may be a reason for that, and one that doesn't bode well for this nonsense.

So, we're going to pretend Trump is antisemitic?

[Trailer Trash]

Let me get this straight - they're going to try to tie Trump into this? The same Trump who is officially recognizing Jerusalem as the Israeli capitol?

It's sad the lengths the looney left has to go to to pretend the Trump is a racist, antisemite, whatever.

Re: MOD PARENT RACIST

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what's begun here.

First, you're following the polls. The polls aren't even close to accurate on this one.

Second, you're believing the presstitutes. The media has thoroughly disgraced itself in front of the public. Just as it did with Brexit in the UK. NO-ONE trusts them.

Third, the GOP is a gutted corrupted shell. They will be eaten alive by their base after their behaviour.

Fourth, the Democrats are a gutted, corrupted shell that's lost the traditional 'young' vote. They will be eaten alive by their own members after the revelations about how Clinton got the nomination and many, many other things.

Fifth, even if Clinton wins, the information that's coming out will end up with Clinton being impeached.

Finally, I actually think Trump will win with a healthy margin. When he does... the shit will really hit the fan for the party machines.

Either way, the main parties are collapsing. I saw the same thing with Brexit... they are SO disconnected from their leaders it's not even funny, it's just pathetic.