Pepe A Hate Symbol? No

Despite what most far left news sources would have you believe Pepe is not a hate symbol.

Pepe the frog first appeared in 2005 in an internet comic on MySpace entitled "boys club" written by Matt Furie. The comic was a comedy about four stoner friends. Andy the wise guy, Landwolf the party animal, Brett the fashionable dancer, and Pepe the chill frog. The first Pepe meme to go viral was "feels good man".

This comes from a comic strip from Boys Club where Pepe is shown lowering his pants all the way to the floor when urinating with the caption "feels good man" which was inspired by a childhood memory of Matt's cousin who did the same when using the bathroom and Matt found it hilarious .

"When we were kids we went to elementary school together and we would go into the public restroom and he would pull his pants all the way down to go pee and I thought it was hilarious."

The meme first became a popular on Gaia in 2006 and spread to 4Chan around 2008. Then came Pepe's second form "feels bad man" from a user on the body building forum in 2009. This was a version of Pepe's feels good man but with Pepe's smile photoshoped upside down and the text changed to feels bad man.

It would become known as "sad Pepe" which then evolved into the "you will never (blank)" meme as well as the "that feel when" meme of may 2010.

It's around this time the term "rare Pepe" was coined. Due to the wealth of new Pepe images being created it soon became a challenge to create the funniest or most original Pepes. 4Chan users would award eachother GBP (Good Boy Points) as a form of reward for creating the funniest Pepes. This capitalist Pepe Mark eventually evolved into a full blown Pepe economy.

In June of 2011 Pepe was changed forever with the emergents of "Smug Pepe" on 4Chan's TV board as a way to mock the humour on the show "The Big Bang Theory". This Smug Pepe was perceive to be an antagonist to the previously good natured stoner Pepe. Despite this Pepe still largely remained viewed as a fairly positive and wholesome meme. In 2014 Pepe got his own official Tumblr blog, subreddit and Instagram all created by Matt Furie.

Oh, and remember that Pepe economy mentioned earlier? By October 2014 people were actually selling their rare Pepes on Craigslist for real money and people would actually buy them.

Pretty soon after, Angry Pepe was created which was another small step towards a more aggressive image for the once loveable stoner.

This Pepe had a burning hatred for normies (Normies are what 4Chan calls those not yet familiar with meme culture) and in December 2014 became synonymous with the controversial /r9k or "ROBOT" board on 4Chan.

On April 7th 2015 a bulk collection of rare Pepes sold for $99,166.00. By now Pepe trading had expanded beyond 4Chan and became more a mainstream phenomenon appearing on sites like Reddit and Tumblr (4Chan's polar opposite). It's around this time when Pepe got his own cryptocurrency, Pepe Cash, which was to be used as a currency on the website rarepepedirectory.com where you could purchase Pepes. When you purchase a rare Pepe with Pepe Cash in the Pepe Sphere the card will be placed in your virtual wallet. The current exchange rate is $1 = 181pc. Similarly to Pokémon cards, rare Pepe cards have only a certain number released with a certain value and rareness attached to them. The rarest rare Pepe of them all is My Little PEPE which sold for 1,000,000.00pc or around $3,300.00.

While all this was happening in the more secluded areas of the internet on November 8th 2014 Pepe had become a worldwide sensation after Katie Perry posted a rare Pepe to her Twitter and Nicki Minaj posted a Pepe to her Instagram account.

4Chan were not happy with normies taking their Pepe from them so in Autumn of 2015 they decided to make Pepe into everything mainstream media hated so no one would want to associate themselves with it. What followed was a wave of Nazi Pepes, terrorist Pepes and other offensive material. Soon after, mentally ill individual posted on 4Chan of how he was going to shoot up a college. The attached image was Pepe with a gun. Many news sites such as the one linked below took this as a representation of all of 4Chan .

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/26808/1/4chan-users-encouraged-the-oregon-school-shooter-to-kill

Around the same time we see the first mainstream case of a political Pepe. Donald Trump posted a Pepe in his likeness with the caption, "You can't stump the Trump" . After Hilary Clinton called Trump and many others a, "basket of deplorables," Donald Trump JR posted an expendables parody photoshoped as "The deplorables" featuring such figures as Trump, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and of course Pepe Trump.

But while the mainstream media was making Pepe political, 4Chan was making Pepe a god. The whole thing was due to multiple coincidences that may even convince you that Pepe is a god due to just how strange they are. 4Chan used the Korean laughter abbreviation KEK as their version of LOL. By coincidence it turned out the Korean god of darkness was not only a frog like Pepe but also named Kek. And so they created their own joke religion known as "The Cult Of kek" and used it as yet another way to reclaim Pepe. Kek became a lucifarian deity hellbent on hexing Hillary Clinton and bringing Donald Trump into the position of president.

On September 27th 2016 Pepe was classified a hate symbol on the Anti-defamation League's list of hate symbols due to 4Chan's persistence. A month later Matt Furie wrote an article for Time.com entitled "Pepe the Frog's Creator: I'm Reclaiming Him. He Was Never About Hate." Furie ends the article by saying, "It's completely insane that Pepe has been labelled a symbol of hate... It's a nightmare, and the only thing I can do is see this as an opportunity to speak out against hate... I understand that it's out of my control, but in the end, Pepe is whatever you say he is, and I, the creator, say that Pepe is love,"

Sadly Pepe was now permanently linked with Nazis, misogyny, racism and just about everything else negative. So, there was only one way Matt Furie saw he could end it. In May of 2017 Matt killed Pepe off in the Boys Club comic.

This however, did not kill Pepe and he is still around today. Maybe not in the Boys Club comic but he appears to have transcended that form and now lives on solely in memes, 4Chan posts and in the hearts of memers around the world. On February 21st 2017 Django Bates, a rare Pepe collector, said in an interview that, "Some (like me) think that we should Make Pepe Great Again... you have to be aware that Pepe as a symbol of hate and racism is a merely North American thing... Our Rare Pepe trading community is global... Pepe is a mirror. And a mirror is not racist, just because a racist is using it."

I could not agree more with that quote.