When did Pepe the frog become a hate symbol for the Alt-right, the KKK, and white supremacists?
Pepe the frog is a fictional character from Matt Furie's comic series Boy's Club in 2005. Now these hate groups have adopted the figure, without the permission of its creator.
You can't blame the Internet, just a very small number of its users.
I don't know the character or why political extremists would high-jack it, but such action is self-defeating by showing only contempt for its creator and indeed anyone else, and a lack of any flair for creating their own symbols.
We've had similar irritations in the UK from fool-herds abusing others' images for their own ends. At the serious end of the scale, far-Right clots like the National Front or British National Party tried to use the national flag as their own. To be fair the NF did form its own symbol from its initials. Politically these organisations were nasty, but little more. The far-Left were more dangerous, as they usually behaved well but were being discreetly groomed by the USSR during the Cold War. At the silly end, a few homosexuals in the late-1990s tried to claim one of the Teletubbies, a quartet of utterly-innocent TV characters for toddlers, as what they called a "gay icon", whatever that meant.
I wonder which is dafter: the latter claim or a contemporary Warner Bros senior manager quoted in the Press for describing The Teletubbies as "evil" simply for being always gay by the proper definition of the word: happy and cheerful! (He may have been trying to stop his company buying broadcasting rights to a show made by the BBC.)
