Pepe the Frog

Based on Wikipedia: Pepe the Frog

In 2005, a cartoonist named Matt Furie drew a laid-back green frog in a crude Microsoft Paint comic and accidentally created one of the most consequential images of the twenty-first century. That frog—Pepe—would become a global phenomenon, a hate symbol, a resistance icon, a legal battleground, and eventually the face of a mock religion. His journey says something profound about how meaning works in the internet age: the creator of an image has remarkably little control over what it becomes.

The Original Pepe

Pepe first appeared in a zine called Playtime, which Furie created using Microsoft Paint. The character migrated to a webcomic called Boy's Club that Furie posted on Myspace in 2005. In one particular strip, Pepe is caught urinating with his pants pulled all the way down to his ankles—an unusual choice for an adult at a urinal. When a roommate asks why, Pepe's response is simple and strangely philosophical.

"Feels good man."

That three-word phrase would echo across the internet for the next two decades. Furie took down those Myspace posts when the printed comic came out in 2006, but by then the frog had already escaped into the wild.

How a Frog Goes Viral

The path from obscure webcomic to global meme followed a predictable route through the early internet's most chaotic spaces. First came Myspace and a forum called Gaia Online, where Pepe became an inside joke. Then, in 2008, someone scanned the "feels good man" page and uploaded it to 4chan's /b/ board—a lawless corner of the internet that would become Pepe's permanent home.

The anonymous users of 4chan did what they do best: they took someone else's creation and transformed it into something new. The original Pepe was a simple black-and-white line drawing. Users added color, making him green with brown lips and often dressing him in a blue shirt. They redrew his face to express every conceivable emotion—sadness, smugness, anger, surprise, existential despair.

"Feels good man" spawned its melancholy opposite: "feels bad man."

Another character entered the picture. "Wojak," also known as "Feels Guy," was originally a completely separate meme—a bald, simply-drawn man typically used to express loneliness or disappointment. Users began pairing Wojak with Pepe in two-character comics, creating a kind of odd-couple dynamic that persists to this day. If you've spent any time on social media, you've probably seen these pairings without knowing their origin.

The Rare Pepe Economy

By 2014, Pepe had become genuinely famous. Katy Perry tweeted a Pepe. Nicki Minaj posted one. The frog had crossed over from internet subculture to mainstream awareness.

This presented a problem for the communities that had nurtured Pepe from the beginning. On 4chan, there's a deep contempt for "normies"—their word for ordinary people who adopt internet culture without understanding its origins or context. When celebrities started posting Pepes, some users felt their inside joke had been stolen.

The response was characteristically creative and absurd: the concept of "Rare Pepes."

Users began treating unusual Pepe variants like trading cards or fine art. They created increasingly elaborate versions—hand-painted Pepes, Pepes in bizarre scenarios, Pepes that referenced obscure jokes within jokes. Some were listed on eBay and Craigslist. A mock economy emerged around the "meme market," complete with its own vocabulary of scarcity and value.

But another faction had a different strategy for reclaiming Pepe from the mainstream. They would make him too offensive for normal people to share.

The Hijacking

Starting around 2015, users associated with the alt-right—a loose coalition of far-right movements united by white nationalist sympathies and a talent for internet manipulation—began creating Pepes designed to shock. They drew the frog in Ku Klux Klan hoods. They put him in Nazi uniforms. They associated him with white power imagery.

This wasn't random trolling. According to contemporaneous reports, there was an explicit strategy to transform Pepe from a goofy cartoon into something that mainstream users would be afraid to touch. If your grandmother wouldn't share it, the logic went, it would remain safely in the hands of those who "understood" it.

The 2016 presidential election accelerated this transformation. In October 2015, Donald Trump retweeted an image depicting himself as Pepe. His son Donald Trump Jr. and advisor Roger Stone later posted a parody movie poster called "The Deplorables"—riffing on Hillary Clinton's controversial description of Trump supporters—that included Pepe's face alongside members of the Trump family and various alt-right figures.

Clinton's campaign responded by publishing an explainer on their website describing Pepe as "a symbol associated with white supremacy." This drew mockery from many quarters. In 2020, researcher Joan Donovan reflected on the tactical error: "If it weren't for Hillary Clinton's campaign trying to name Pepe as a signifier of the Alt-Right, that kind of recognition probably wouldn't have taken hold." By treating a cartoon frog as a serious threat, the Clinton campaign demonstrated what the alt-right characterized as clueless establishment thinking—and gave their movement free publicity.

During one of Clinton's speeches about the alt-right, a 4chan user who was watching live and posting updates to the site shouted "Pepe!" at the request of other users. The shout was audible in broadcast footage. The frog had infiltrated a presidential campaign event.

A Creator's Nightmare

Matt Furie watched his creation become something he never intended. In an interview with Esquire, he captured the helplessness of the situation: "It sucks, but I can't control it more than anyone can control frogs on the Internet."

His publisher, Fantagraphics Books, issued a statement condemning what they called "illegal and repulsive appropriations of the character." But statements don't change meme culture.

The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that monitors hate symbols, added Pepe to their database in September 2016. Their entry included an important caveat: most uses of Pepe had nothing to do with hate. The overwhelming majority of Pepes were still just silly frogs expressing relatable emotions. But the association with extremism was now official.

Furie tried to fight back. He partnered with the ADL on a "#SavePepe" campaign, collecting hundreds of positive Pepe images in what he called a "Peace Pepe Database of Love." He published a satirical comic about the hijacking. He even killed the character off in a 2017 comic published on Free Comic Book Day, depicting Pepe in an open casket being mourned by his Boy's Club friends.

But Pepe's death was as symbolic as his life. In a radio interview, Furie hinted at resurrection: "He's going to rise from the ashes like a phoenix... in a puff of marijuana smoke."

The Legal Battles

Furie discovered that copyright law was his most effective weapon. While he couldn't stop people from drawing their own versions of Pepe, he could sue those who profited from unauthorized uses.

His first major victory came against an unexpected target: a children's book. Someone had written "The Adventures of Pepe and Pede," which according to Furie's lawsuit advanced "racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes." The case settled in August 2017, with the book withdrawn from publication and its profits donated to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The author, who had been a vice-principal at a Texas school, was reassigned after the publicity.

Furie went after bigger targets. He succeeded in having Pepe images removed from The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. In 2019, he reached a $15,000 settlement with InfoWars and Alex Jones over unlicensed use of Pepe on far-right themed posters. "I will continue to enforce my copyrights aggressively," Furie announced, "to make sure nobody else is profiting off associating Pepe the Frog with hateful imagery."

A 2020 documentary called "Feels Good Man"—named after that original catchphrase—chronicled Furie's attempts to reclaim his creation. The film explored both the personal toll on the cartoonist and the broader questions about meaning and ownership in internet culture.

The Cult of Kek

While Furie was fighting in courts, something strange was developing in the corners of the internet where Pepe remained beloved.

To understand it, you need to know about "kek." In Korean, the onomatopoeia for laughter is "ㅋㅋㅋ," which sounds like "kekeke." Gamers playing StarCraft—hugely popular in South Korea—used it the way English speakers use "lol." Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft, included a clever reference: when a player from one faction types "lol," players from the opposing faction see it displayed as "kek."

Through the peculiar alchemy of internet culture, "kek" became associated with Pepe. And then someone noticed something remarkable.

Ancient Egyptian mythology included a deity named Kek—the god of darkness and chaos. Kek was depicted as a frog.

What followed was equal parts absurdist humor and genuine mysticism. Users developed "Esoteric Kekism"—a parody religion that borrowed terminology from "Esoteric Hitlerism," an actual occult belief system developed by fascist writer Savitri Devi. The Cult of Kek treated Pepe as a manifestation of the ancient frog god, capable of influencing reality through memes.

Believers pointed to "meme magic"—the supposedly prophetic quality of certain 4chan posts. The site assigns sequential numbers to every post. When someone's post number contains repeating digits—what users call "dubs," "trips," or "quads"—the post is considered especially significant. Cult of Kek adherents claimed these numerical coincidences were evidence of Pepe's supernatural influence on world events, including the 2016 election.

Is this a joke? Partly. Is it serious? Also partly. That ambiguity is the point.

Kekistan: A Fake Country with Real Consequences

The Cult of Kek spawned an even stranger creation: Kekistan, a fictional nation with its own flag, history, and political grievances.

The name combines "kek" with "-stan," the suffix common to Central Asian nations. Self-described Kekistanis presented themselves as an oppressed ethnic group, satirizing what they saw as excessive identity politics. They created elaborate fictional backstories involving wars against other imaginary countries like "Normistan" and "Cuckistan."

The flag of Kekistan is deliberately provocative. It's modeled directly on the Nazi war flag, with the red replaced by green, the swastika replaced by a stylized "KEK," and the Iron Cross replaced by the 4chan logo. The design makes its inspiration unmistakable.

Supporters argued this was obvious satire—a way of highlighting what they considered the absurdity of treating every symbol as potentially hateful. Critics pointed out that wrapping Nazi iconography in irony doesn't make it less Nazi. The flag appeared at the 2017 Berkeley protests, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the January 6th Capitol attack.

Kekistan even acquired a president and a national anthem. Internet personality Gordon Hurd, known by his stage name "Big Man Tyrone," was adopted as the nation's leader. A 1986 Italo disco record called "Shadilay" became the national song—chosen because the group that performed it was named P.E.P.E. and the album art featured a frog holding a wand.

These coincidences were treated as further evidence of meme magic.

Groypers: The Next Generation

A variant of Pepe called "Groyper" emerged around 2015 and grew popular by 2017. The image depicts a frog-like creature—greener and more rotund than classic Pepe—resting its chin on interlocked fingers in a pose of smug contemplation.

There's ongoing debate about whether Groyper is Pepe, a relative of Pepe, or an entirely different character who happens to be a green amphibian. Some insist it's a toad, not a frog. These taxonomic disputes may seem trivial, but they matter for the same reason species classification matters in biology: precision affects meaning.

Groyper became associated with a new movement. Nick Fuentes, a far-right political commentator, cultivated a following of young activists who adopted Groyper as their symbol. The "Groypers" or "Groyper Army" crashed conservative events in 2019 and 2020, challenging mainstream Republican figures on immigration and other issues from a more extreme position.

This is the direct connection to the Substack article about Nick Fuentes that prompted this exploration. The frog on his banner isn't random—it's a deliberate signal to a specific online subculture with its own language, mythology, and political commitments.

Hong Kong: A Different Meaning

In 2019, Pepe appeared in a context that would have seemed impossible a few years earlier. Protesters in Hong Kong, demonstrating against a proposed extradition bill and police brutality, adopted the frog as their symbol.

For these demonstrators, Pepe represented resistance and liberty. They created new images showing Pepe wearing gas masks, hard hats, and protective gear. One widely circulated image depicted Pepe with an injured eye—a reference to a protester who lost an eye to a police projectile.

Matt Furie welcomed this use. The Hong Kong Pepe had no connection to alt-right ideology. The protesters had presumably encountered the meme through its apolitical variants circulating on Chinese social media, where Pepe had been popular since at least 2014 under the name "shangxin qingwa"—sad frog.

The Hong Kong adoption demonstrated something important: symbols mean what communities make them mean. The same image can signify white nationalism in America and democratic resistance in Asia. Context is everything.

The Frog Persists

Pepe refuses to die or fade away. In January 2025—twenty years after his creation—Elon Musk briefly changed his username on X (formerly Twitter) to "Kekius Maximus" and used an image of Pepe dressed as a Roman soldier as his profile picture. The move caused a cryptocurrency named after the character to spike in value.

This is perhaps the strangest aspect of Pepe's journey: he has become a financial asset. Memecoins—cryptocurrencies based on internet jokes—trade on his image. The speculation is real even when the underlying value proposition is purely absurdist.

Matt Furie is still out there, still drawing, still occasionally litigating. His creation has been through phases he never imagined: beloved mascot, hate symbol, resistance icon, deity of a parody religion, financial instrument. Through it all, the original Boy's Club comics remain—gentle, stoner-friendly humor about four animal roommates hanging out.

"Feels good man" started as a joke about urinating with your pants around your ankles. It became a catchphrase for expressing simple contentment. Then it became the opposite: "feels bad man," the lament of the chronically online. Then it became a battle cry for internet extremists, a rallying point for democracy protesters, and a mantra for meme mystics who believe a cartoon frog can reshape reality.

What will Pepe mean tomorrow? No one knows. That's precisely the point. In the internet age, meaning is radically unstable. A creator can set something loose and watch it transform into things they never imagined and might actively despise. The frog belongs to everyone now—or perhaps to no one.

Feels uncertain, man.