Fleapit revisited:Pepe The Frog:Feels Good Man.

"What did people get wrong about Pepe?" - Arthur Jones

"Probably when they put Pepe on the Internet saying 'kill Jews'" - Matt Furie

How did a harmless amphibian slacker who loved eating pizza, hanging out with his buddies, and dancing in his pants to Shania Twain become the poster boy the white supremacist movement, an alt-right icon, and a symbol for incels and NEETs to rally round? How did the mellow green fellow become a meme loaded with such toxicity that he was eventually listed as a hate symbol, the equivalent of a swastika?

Arthur Jones' Pepe the Frog:Feels Good Man (part of the Storyville strand and available on BBC4 and iPlayer) tells the story of how laid back cartoonist Matt Furie lost control of his own creation and had to watch helplessly as Pepe moved to the dark side. A move accessorised by a new wardrobe of MAGA hats, FEMINISM = CANCER t-shirts, and swastika tattoos.

Via interviews with Matt, his girlfriend Ayiana Udesen, their hirsute flatmate Chris Sullivan, psychologists, other cartoonists (including the creator of Bojack Horseman), occultists, lawyers, a director of something called the Network Contagion Research Institute, and some utterly soulless wanker who made a fortune in crypto currency and now drives round in a Lamborghini, Jones plots a story that not only explains how memes take on a life of their own but shows how damage and hatred played out in the supposed safe space of cyber can turn easily, and quickly, into damage and hatred with very real consequences in the real world.

Pepe the Frog's journey began both at the Community Thrift store in San Francisco and in Furie's fertile and - let's be honest - hardly overworked, brain. Pepe hung out with his anthropomorphic buddies Andy, Brett, and Landwolf playing computer games, eating takeaway food, and smoking bongs and when he was discovered peeing with both his trousers and pants all the way down and asked why he was doing that a catchphrase was born. "Feels good man" was Pepe's response.

When Pepe and his catchphrase appeared on Myspace it resonated with many and soon weightlifters started using it to accompany photos of their feats. Later "feels good man" would be attached to photos of cats, dogs, and that one of Kermit the Frog drinking a glass of Lipton iced tea. John Goodman, of course, got co-opted.

Furie, a loving father and happy-go-lucky Californian type dude, didn't even know what a meme was, he somewhat disingenuously claims he's still not sure, and as an artist he wasn't into the whole litigation thing. It seemed pretty uncool to complain that his creation was becoming famous even if it was in ways he'd never imagined.

So he let the use of Pepe continue - and spread. It's hard to know if he could have stopped it even if he'd wanted to. In 2003, the fourteen year old Christoper Poole had launched the anonymous imageboard website 4chan while he was still living with his mum and 4chan's methodology, even more than the algorithms of Twitter and Facebook, rewards offense. The more somebody comments, or shares, content the further up it's pushed on to people's feeds. 

Offensive comments always win so 4chan soon became a hotbed, or cesspit, of abuse and hatred and in Pepe the Frog peeing with his trousers and pants down the NEETs (not in educataion, employment, or training) and incels (involuntary celibates) who made up huge swathes of 4chan's user base found a hero. They loved the idea of Pepe 'owning' his loserdom. 

4chan users, often spending entire days on the Internet in their mother's basements, railed against those who used the Internet to post inspirational quotes and proudly announced that they were doing anything but 'living their best lives' and soon Pepe had made friends with a character named Wojak, or 'feels guy', a crudely drawn outline of wistfulness whose dejected air seeped into Pepe's life and made him a a very sad frog indeed.

Pepe's sadness was the vehicle of expression of grief and sorrow for those without the emotional tool kits to deal with their own issues and those incapable of plotting a map out of their despair. Many of these were 4chan's army of incels but when pop stars Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry shared images of Pepe on Instagram their young female fans became interested in Pepe and jumped over to 4chan to see what he was all about.

Disappointed to find out what Pepe's 4chan fans were really like, some of the new female recruits began to post videos saying they'd like to chop the frog's head off and called the boys of 4chan, reasonably accurately, "virgin losers". The increased popularity and 'normie' adoption of Pepe sparked a backlash that was first directed at women but soon spread out to couples, hilariously dismissed as "sex havers" by one 4chan user, and, soon enough, anybody from a different background. 

Race, religion, and politics were all weaponised in the battle for control of Pepe. In retrospect it was not the best time for Chris Sullivan to get a Pepe tattoo on his arm or for Matt Furie to launch a range of Pepe clothing that included a "sad frog golf shirt" that you could "wear to have a pasta meal with your family". Any right thinking family would struggle to digest their penne if they saw the newly created images of Pepe as a Nazi, Pepe flying a plane into the Twin Towers, and Pepe as a member of ISIS beheading Wojak.

"They're always just jokes all the time and you can't prove otherwise" is how commentator Joel Finkelstein explains how the creators of these hurtful memes justified their doing so. But this get out clause was exposed for the lie it is when, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, twenty-two year old Elliot Rodger killed seven people, four by gunfire, three by stabbing. Rodger had written a 'manifesto', My Twisted World:The Story of Elliot Rodger, in which he described his hatred of women, his inability to get a girlfriend (can't help thinking those two things might be linked), and his contempt for couples, particularly interracial couples.

He also spoke of his desire for 'retribution'. So when he got this supposed retribution (and ended his night of killing by taking his own life as so many do) did those on 4chan condemn, or even disavow, his actions or did they support him? I think you already know the answer to that. They celebrated Rodger as a 'boss' and a 'virgin with rage' and, in the world of memes, Rodger's image lived on, hanging out with his new friend Pepe the Frog.

There was talk of a 'Beta uprising', an idea that Rodger would be the first of many to exact fatal retribution on women, couples, and normies. Online conversations and memes took place under the premise of justifying and normalising violence against vulnerable people. Pepe the Frog's new found love of power and his delight in the suffering of others saw his expression move from sadness to a very sinister and very smug smirk.

In fact he resembled nobody more than Donald Trump, the soon to be 45th President of the United States and now, in his own words, a 'stone cold loser. An old GQ cover showed just how much Pepe's latest iteration owed to Trump and on 4chan, where they loved Trump's message of white nationalism and the idea of hurting libs, they began to see Trump as the human personification of Pepe. 

Pepe made flesh and a Pepe that made your flesh creep. Dank memes flowed like molten lava from the volcanoes of sickness that passed for brains in the heads of people like David Duke (a former grand wizard of the KKK), Alex Jones (chief conspiracy theorist for far right fake news site Infowars), Richard Spencer (a leading American neo-Nazi and white supremacist memorably described by Dave Gahan as a 'cunt' after he branded Depeche Mode the official band of the alt-right) and Steve Bannon of the xenophobic and racist news site Breitbart who went on to become Donald Trump's chief strategist in 2017.

Pepe's friends now included some of the very worst people in the world and soon even the chief turd, Turd of Turd Hall himself, Donald Trump was promoting himself as a cosplay Pepe with his vice president Mike Pence (pre-fly) taking the role of Wojak. Echoed by today's QAnon 'community, Pepe supporters would yell out his name during Hillary Clinton's speeches. Bemusing most political commentators who mistook it for random nonsense but dog-whistling directly to the alt-right movement that they were upping their game.

It became an article of faith that they could make Hillary Clinton collapse in public and when she did do just that the fact she was diagnosed with pneumonia was irrelevant. To Pepe's alt-right fan club, they had willed this into happening and they would will Donald Trump into the White House too. They would use 'meme magic' to meme a man, a monster of a man, into the White House.

Steve Bannon identified the media, not the Democrats, as the opposition (a view the far right share with the far left) and his way to counter them was to flood the zone with so much shit that nobody knew what was real or not. The point was to completely obliterate objective truth and, in the style of Vladimir Putin and the Russian political philosopher and fascist Aleksandr Dugin, to create a new truth. An untrue truth but one that enough people would believe in that a significant minority would support a man who represented that 'truth'.

Those that didn't would be too busy arguing the point or trying to understand why blatant lies were being espoused in public to ever catch up. Lies could be issued far faster than they could be fact checked and dismissed and if the rate of lying was expedited enough then honesty and decency would crumble under the new aurora of Trump and Pepe's golden dawn.

Predictably, conspiracy theories and racist ideas of 'ethnic homelands' and 'blood and soil' prospered in this new landscape of misinformation and, back in San Francisco, an apolitical hippy trying to write children's books, Matt Furie, found his innocent cartoon frog had been so bent out of shape by the alt-right and the Internet that he'd been listed as a hate symbol on a par with the swastika.

Furie, who'd finally wised up to the damage his creation had been weaponised into doing, took on Alex Jones in a legal battle, he killed off Pepe in a cartoon strip, and he launched the Peace Pepe Database of Love to reposition Pepe as a figure of peace and an icon of hope. My favourite is the one that borrows from, and pays homage to, the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington County, Virginia.

But the fight for Pepe's soul didn't end there. Furie may have created Pepe but he didn't own him any more. Pepe had become whatever you wanted him to be. A tabula rasa that could be enngraved with the hatred of Bannon, Duke, and Trump or a symbol of freedom, democracy, and youth protest as he did, along with the equally unlikely umbrella, in Hong Kong.

Society, rather than Matt Furie, chose what Pepe became and what Pepe, and others who find themselves co-opted into the land of memes, will go on to become and, in that, Pepe is an analogue for every child born in this world. We can fill their minds with hate, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny or we can imbue with them love, empathy, compassion, and curiosity and teach them to work with, and not against, others to make the world a better place. Because, as we've seen over the last four years, filling people with hatred simply fills the world with hatred. Those who take Pepe on his next journey need to be better than those on 4chan who corrupted him and those who are taking over, and will soon take over, the running of the world need to do the same. That really would feel good, man.