Feels Good Man (2020) Movie Script

[CRICKETS CHIRPING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I always first start with

the eyeball like this.

And you got to leave a little

bit of space there for the goo.

And these little froggy eyelids.

It looks like sex

parts a little bit.

I've just always

been into drawing.

And it takes tons of time

to come up with a character

that you like enough to

draw over and over again.

It's just been kind of

a slow drip of frogs

throughout my entire life.

It's just one little

frog after another

after another after another.

And then, eventually,

it was Pepe.

It's a happy little frog.

What do people get wrong

about drawing Pepe?

Probably when they put Pepe

on the internet saying,

like, kill Jews.

Are you familiar with this

meme called Pepe the Frog?

For those who don't,

here's a picture.

Here's Pepe the Frog.

Have you seen me

on this frog meme?

I forget the name of it.

Many of you may remember Pepe

the Frog, the once innocent,

chill frog meme.

(SINGING) Saw a man today,

he led a big parade downtown.

Helicopter came.

Staff sergeants all came down.

It sounds like--

I bet 90% of your viewers

haven't heard of Pepe the Frog.

1 thought it was

a frog in a wig.

The white supremacist movement

has taken over Pepe the Frog.

(SINGING) 'Cause I've been

living in Hell, living in Hell

with you.

I've been living in

hell...Living in Hell with you.

We're here in the

Community Thrift store.

And it all started here.

Let's see what's back here.

I do get waves of nostalgia

for the youthful time in my 20s

working here, just hanging

out with my friends

and just riding a bike

around San Francisco.

So I basically just

want to be young again.

This is my old

office space here.

It used to be the

toy department.

This is where I

spent my days with--

[GIGGLING]

That tickles.

Guys like that.

1 would have literally a

mountain of toys every day,

and it was just

really inspiring.

It's like working

inside of a brain.

If 1 got caught up with my

work, I would just draw.

Every day would be like new

toys that would come in,

and I would draw them.

And so it was my

ideal job situation.

Matt was always drawing

that frog, forever, I swear.

That was his go-to

thing to draw.

So I've been seeing that

frog's face for as long

as I've known Matt.

[SNEEZING]

Ew.

[GIGGLING]

Excuse you.

Ew, ew, ew.

The first time I actually named

him Pepe was for this comic

that I did called Playtime.

I was just messing

around on Microsoft Paint

and came up with the Pepe

and Brett, two characters.

They did things like

go to raves and paint.

It just kind of

naturally developed.

And I just thought it'd be fun

to have four characters, kind

of like the Ninja Turtles.

It became Boy's Club.

A

Lot of the humor is

about post-college zone.

You don't quite know

what you're doing,

but you like drinking

and hanging out.

The four characters were just

reflections of my personality

and the personality

of my friends.

Landwolf, the party dog.

Andy was the jokester

of the group.

Brett liked to dance.

And then Pepe the

Frog was just kind of

like the little

brother in the group.

The better ll got to

know Matt, the more

the similarities I

saw with him and Pepe.

Even the way Pepe

looks, he kind of

looks like Matt a little bit.

Matt was a little bit different

from what most people would

consider a typical cartoonist.

I think it's more like this.

Button down shirt, nerd glasses.

He seemed like he

was like a cool guy.

And Boy's Club, it's one of

the funniest comics of, I

don't know, the last 10 years.

What's happening here is

Landwolf is passed out,

but that's how he passed out.

He didn't quite make

it onto the bed.

I don't know why, I thought

he was trying to jerk off

and he passed out while he was--

Oh, I see.

Yeah.

I guess it's open

for interpretation.

It is open for interpretation.

Landwolf, I think he

represents the kind

of hairy, gross roommate

that you have sometimes,

clogging the drains.

It just made me think of

our actual roommate, Chris.

It's issues.

We're talking about

these because they're

meant to be read in the

privacy of your own home.

[LAUGHTER]

I've never actually had to

explain any of this shit.

I met Matt at a

comics convention

where we were signing

next to each other.

I loved Matt's comics.

I grew up with an older

brother, so I already

had that sense of humor where

I liked boner jokes and barf

and farts.

[FARTING]

To me, it felt very accessible.

It's the sort of

masculinity where

you can be in your underwear

singing to Shaniah Twain.

[MUSIC - SHANIAH TWAIN, "MAN!

I FEEL LIKE A WOMAN"]

(SINGING) Oh, oh, oh.

Go totally crazy.

Forget I'm a lady.

Men's shirts, short skirts.

When I watched Seinfeld,

ll liked Kramer the best.

When I read Boy's Club,

ll like Landwolf the best.

I guess Pepe's is

more of an Elaine.

Elaine is great, but--

yeah, if Elaine had become

a symbol of the alt right,

1 would be like,

yeah, that's crazy.

That shouldn't be the case.

It seems incredibly random.

People were like,

this is the character

we're going to use

for the internet.

This is going to be the

mascot for the internet.

One day, he was doing Boy's

Club comics at my house.

I remember I was sitting

on Ayana's little love

seat in her tiny-ass apartment.

He said, can you stand over

there and bend over and make

it look like you're pulling

your pants down while you're

bending over so ll can draw you?

Toilets are hard to draw.

People pulling down their

pants is hard to draw.

So I kind of hunched

over pretended

like I was pulling

my pants down,

and he drew a little sketch.

Ended up being Pepe.

So that was my

butt, and my toilet.

So is Pepe's body

based on Ayanna?

Not the feet.

Whatever kind of weird stuff

stuck with me in childhood,

sometimes it ends

up in Boy's Club.

I remember when I

was in second grade

and I went to the bathroom

alongside my cousin David.

And he pulled his

pants all the way down

to go pee, underwear

and everything.

Seems like it would

feel really good.

So I wanted to make

a comic about that.

Feels good, man.

That was the frame

that started it all.

I just thought it was cool

that I can just draw a comic,

scan it in, and

put it on Myspace,

and then people would

see it instantly.

Back then, it was

newer territory.

And I liked the vibe

of Myspace a lot.

It was like we're inside

somebody's locker room

or something.

At the time, I had some friends

that were into exercise.

And they found online

a before and after shot

that would say,

"Feels good, man."

Thought it was really weird.

A lot of weightlifters

would be, like, oh, I just

finished a great workout.

Feels good, man.

And ll remember just

thinking, oh, that

can't be because of Pepe.

It's just some random accident.

The catchphrase

"Feels good, man"

started becoming more popular.

It would be a photo

of a cat or something,

and then it would say,

"Feels good, man."

Or there was one version of

it that said "Feels Goodman,"

with John Goodman's face.

It was pretty funny at the time.

When I would check my email,

every so often somebody

would send me a

link to Pepe being

in some kind of weird chatroom

or something like that.

I remember specifically

my dad sent me

a link to this kid

who made a Pepe song.

(SINGING) Hey Pepe, I heard

you pull your pants down all

the way to go pee.

Could you show me?

Feels good, man.

It was like this

big nerdy thing.

I was kind of interested in

it as a internet phenomenon,

but ll didn't really

think too much about it.

1 was just like,

ha-ha, whatever.

When it started to snowball

and Matt didn't seem to mind,

I was a little

like, that's weird.

I said, sue them.

Lawyer up.

Man, I'm an artist, so ll don't

like suing other artists.

He just was like, oh, yeah, man.

Just let them do what they want.

Using Pepe as a meme.

That's cool.

A meme.

1 didn't even know

what a meme was,

or ll don't even still know

if I'm saying that correctly.

But it was through Pepe that

I learned would have meme was.

It's hard to

remember what I first

thought when I

saw Pepe the Frog,

but I think I imagined

like, in my student days,

these guys hanging out with a

spliff and having a nice time.

And he was just rather

sort of hopeless and sweet,

and I just thought, oh.

Chick, chick, chick,

chick, chickens.

Come on.

The whole idea of memes comes

from Richard Dawkins' 1976

book The Selfish Gene.

Most of the book is about what

he called universal Darwinism,

which said all of biology

is driven by genes,

but culture is driven by memes.

He said, look around you,

and you'll see floating

about in the primeval

soup of culture

is information copied

by imitation from person

to person.

So that would include

chairs, trousers, hairstyles.

All of these things

are only here

because humans have copied

them, and the ones around us

are the winners in an

evolutionary battle.

And then, gradually, came the

concept of internet memes.

And people can easily see that

process happening with Pepe.

Pepe is a wonderful

example of a meme that

escaped out there

into the memosphere

and suffered all the things

you'd expect of a meme.

Pepe is just folds upon folds.

The Pepe technique is

to draw too many lines.

There's another fold and then

another fold, and these lumps.

And he looks really cracked

out, but that's the idea.

It's like steering

into that mistake.

He also symbolizes steering

into the mistake of staying

in your mom's basement.

I saw Boy's Club

around 2007 or so

when he was first posting

it on the internet.

And it just kept appearing

in message boards.

Feels good, man.

In that little story,

he's owning the fact

that he's this weird guy.

That moment of

owning your loserdom,

owning your weirdness,

is perfect 4chan ethics.

Christopher Poole, he

was 14 years old living

with his mom spending all his

time indoors on the internet.

And he created this crazy

monster in his basement.

Now, over seven million people

are using it, contributing over

700,000 posts per day.

And we've gone from

one board to 48 boards.

So 4chan, just the

way that it functioned

was super conducive

to creating memes.

The way 4chan works is that

it's a Darwinian competition

for attention.

So you have a post, and if the

post gets a lot of replies,

it floats to the top.

And if no one replies, it sinks

to the bottom and quickly dies.

It's a winning

and losing system,

and it's a lot

like a video game.

There were all of these

adolescent boys trying to own

each other in the competition.

And so it became this

culture of saying

the most offensive thing.

And so Pepe kind of melts

into that community.

And all of this stuff

that just exploded out

of the culture four

or five years later

were being invented there

by all these clever people.

And they were all anonymous.

On 4chan, you're talking

to another text box,

so you're free to express those

secret ideas that people have

that they don't feel comfortable

expressing in real life.

I posted Pepes all the time.

To not post Pepe would be

strange because it's just--

it's the meme.

Post.

Send.

Boom.

So there I am right there.

It's hard to say why Pepe

gained popularity so fast.

You could say it was just

an easily relatable image.

My own collection, I have

my reaction image folder

filled with Pepe and

all the derivatives.

The term was, "We

feel alone together."

That was their idea.

As it ages, it just

gets more desperate.

They would describe

themselves as NEET.

NEET stands for Not in

Education, Employment,

or Training.

The idea was that

they were trying

to find a word that

described their situation

for these masses of kids

who were just unemployed

or just dropped out of life.

I think the best thing would

be to start with a job.

No.

Yeah, absolutely

she needs a job.

No.

So 4chan really comes

to embody that culture

of checking out and living

in your mom's basement.

It started in 2003,

and it still exists.

So imagine people being

on their 10 years, it

becoming a lifestyle.

A lot of people are

talking that they

have super hot basement layers

where they get to NEET it up.

Well, basically, nobody's really

touching my game right now.

So got the primo couch bed.

And I just kick this

shit all over the place

because I just don't give

a fuck about anything.

And it's a life.

1 think I saw

images of Pepe first

in the fitness board of 4chan.

This frog was so prevalent.

What does Pepe mean to me?

What does he mean to me?

He's a frog.

He's a sad frog.

On 4chan, the

quote-unquote "sad frog"

became the most popular

image for displaying sadness.

There were other images that

would describe that feeling.

You had things like the

picture of Keanu Reeves sitting

on a bench, but maybe

he's just deep in thought.

That sad frog, you

knew what it was about.

Nothing else needed

to be said there.

Pepe the sad frog.

Pepe.

Pepe what?

The sad frog.

The sad frog?

Pepe the sad frog.

What's that?

It wasn't something that was

really circulated heavily

on Facebook or any of

that stuff at the time.

Pepe just felt uniquely 4chan.

Feels bad, man.

1 didn't know about

the Boy's Club

comic or anything like that.

I did not know who

Matt Furie was.

Even after ll learned

about Boy's Club,

I was like, oh, the

making of a Pepe comic.

Oh, that's cool.

That's the story.

It's about somewhere

in the future where

the mutants have taken over.

And they make new children.

I like this style of gun.

Yeah.

Are you actually the

guy that made Pepe?

Yeah, yeah.

But it must suck for you that

he has become hijacked by 4chan.

It definitely sucks, but

nothing's forever, right?

I'm just a spectator

to how things mutate

and evolve on the internet.

You can kind of see

everything as some big joke,

but it's kind of a window

into this dark place.

I'll draw you a little Pepe.

People on the internet

had their own characters

that Pepe was interacting with.

There's one where he's

interacting with this guy,

I think his name was Wojak.

I would see pictures

of Pepe hugging

this stark, white,

sad-looking guy.

And I was like, what is that?

They call him the Feels Guy,

or Wojack is the proper term.

He was for expressing

an unpleasant feeling.

I'd be sitting there and I'd be

tense from anxiety and like--

and being like that.

And then I'd go

on the board a bit

like, OK, these are my people.

We're all over the

world, but we all

have these feelings of anxiety

and everything together.

It's like a group

therapy on the internet.

Even when I was at work, we

had these security cameras.

I'd duck behind stack of

crates, quick just be like,

you dumb idiots.

Then I'd checked like

10, 15 minutes later,

and I'd see who's

replying to me.

And I would face an onslaught

of people just saying how I

was the most hideous man alive.

1 would wear that

as a badge of honor.

I'd be like, yes,

I'm a true 4chan guy.

I'm a true social reject.

I'm a true freak.

Yeah, you're darn tootin'.

I'm a latecomer

to Pepe, probably

because he's not my type.

I came to Pepe after

he had gone dark.

Pepe is a sad frog.

He's never happy.

He's just sort of miserable.

And I think for a huge

population, online and offline,

we're not really allowed to

express sorrow or sadness

or grief.

And this sad little frog arrives

online in the midst of the push

to commodify the internet.

What was going on at that

point is that everybody

was super damn positive.

People were suddenly able

to make cash money out

of their image,

which meant that they

had to be totally rad, happy,

fitspo, my best self thing.

Then in drops Pepe,

ripe for the taking.

Hey, guys.

It's me, Louie.

Today, I'm going to be

doing a Pepe transformation.

Pepe starts to percolate into

another population we've got,

a lot more women,

a lot of girls.

And they're starting

to own Pepe.

Hey, guys.

I just googled what

a meme was, and I

think I'm in love with memes.

Pepe is the best.

You draw the head, which

is just like a butt.

Things began to spiral

really out of control.

A couple of celebrities,

Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry,

they had posted on Instagram

a couple of Pepe images.

A lot of people see

it for the first time.

They're wondering,

who is this frog?

What is this frog?

What is this?

I want to see some more of that.

They start making a

migration over to 4chan.

Young women in particular

download Pepe images,

using them for their own likes.

And that was seen is despicable.

I love Pepe so much.

The true Pepe is this Pepe.

Pepe's green skin

is so beautiful.

It's different from frog.

Pepe green is special.

It seemed to me like invasion.

You had people that

would come on and say,

why are you virgin losers here?

Where is the Pepe pictures at?

Where they at?

I strive to be Pepe.

Just kidding.

1 hate Pepe the frog,

whatever his name is.

Pe-- Pepe.

Either way, he's stupid.

And I don't really

know why I made

my face green to prove the

point that I hate Pepe,

but let me prove it by

saying, I hate you, Pepe.

I'm going to chop your head

off, your little froggy

head off, like this.

It was serious to

a lot of people.

This is the symbol

of our culture.

And it really was turning

into a total Pepe fest.

Nice.

Pepe was just really

turning into a thing.

And my buddy Skinner

was like, hey,

you should do a clothing line.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[WORDLESS SINGING]

It was just kind of funny

to make something official

out of something that's so

bootlegged on the internet.

I drew all these goofy-ass

Pepes that were based on just

whatever random nonsense was

out there on the internet.

I like this one with

the little cigarette.

This one is particularly weird.

And this one is just--

I like that.

That's a very

stripped down Pepe.

It's a sad frog golf shirt.

You can have a pasta meal with

your family wearing this one.

Pepe was a famous meme.

And my friend Jay, he

got a tattoo gun he just

had set up in his kitchen.

And so one night, I think was

just completely spontaneous,

we were just like, oh,

let's get Pepe tattoos.

Just very little thought

goes into this at all.

Because we just thought it was

funny to have a Pepe tattoo.

And Matt was there, so it was

like a tribute to my friend.

1 didn't know at the time, but

I got like below my sleeve here.

That would come back to bite me.

As the Pepe defense was

building to try and steer people

away from using Pepe for

their own normie usage,

that spawned a lot of

angry, raging Pepes.

But then that

fateful day occurred

where there was a YouTube

video of screaming frogs.

Say something for the camera.

Look at that thing

blow up like a balloon.

[SCREECHING]

They have a high-pitched scream,

which sounded a lot like,

"Ree!"

[SCREECHING]

And it became this battle cry.

There'd be somebody who would

be coming in from Instagram,

out themselves as maybe

a sex-haver or a woman,

neurotypical, socially

well-adjusted person.

Once you get that seed

planted in the head of, like,

the popular kids and

look how they're living

and look at you--

you're this slug.

All you normies have been

bullying us our whole lives.

I'll never be one of

you disgusting normies.

Fuck normies.

[SCREAMING]

These were a group

of disempowered men

who had retreated

into fantasy worlds.

[GROWLING]

That was their last place

of retreat, in a sense.

And so having women

there was what

they didn't want,

because that was a symbol

of their defeat in real life.

Ursula.

Hey.

Is that Twilight Sparkle?

Mm-hmm.

Is that her name?

Yeah.

She's like, Ursula,

I'm going to help you.

Aww.

That's so cute.

That one says, a pocket mouse

sleeps safely in its nest.

That's so cute.

It's a little mouse.

People would just email me

fucked up pictures of Pepe.

And it didn't really shock me.

I would be more shocked by

people actually expressing

some form of cuteness or love.

This other stuff

is just garbage.

I think a weird thing about

American culture in general

is we do kind of

celebrate garbage,

and we also produce a hell

of a lot of physical garbage.

So it's just like

fucking garbage world.

I was definitely

conscious of not wanting

to be remembered as the

artist that did Boy's Club,

so I just wanted to

keep doing other stuff.

There's no connection

between this frog and Pepe

other than they kind of

look like one another.

But this is just another

frog in a different place.

I decided to do a whole kids

book that was totally wordless.

It follows the life of

this frog and his pet rat.

Live in their little

mushroom house.

Their travels on

the back of a bike.

They wake up at nighttime and

go exploring through the forest

and end up surfing

on some dolphins

and swimming and

going underground.

I just really went for that

childlike wonder with this one.

The Night Riders, it's a work

of highly skilled craftsmanship.

Took him almost a

year to make it.

1 told him I saw that

he had that in him,

he had a Where the

Wild Things Are in him.

I just knew it.

We were working on

The Night Riders

before all this insane Pepe

stuff started to happen.

Pepe is really just the tip of

the iceberg for the kind of art

that Matt's capable of making.

How come the dragon

doesn't have wings?

It's more of a land dragon

than a dragon of the air

or a dragon of the sea.

So he's a land dragon.

The characters are

of different species,

but they seem like friends

from a neighborhood.

We can tell they

love each other,

and the book is build toward

a bunch of nocturnal animals

experiencing a sunrise.

The end.

Pepe had escaped, and

he was roaming around.

And it was fun for a while,

until it wasn't any more.

On 4chan, whenever they

thought, quote-unquote,

"normies"” or

outsiders, other sites,

were stealing their memes,

they would try and make them

as offensive as possible.

It's like a classic

punk response.

You're literally

armored, like a punk.

And you're like,

it's so offensive,

it can't be co-opted.

So they put him next to the

trade towers disintegrating.

They put swastikas all

over him and Nazify Pepe.

And it snowballs.

Back then, it was just the most

offensive thing you could do.

But it now reads

as a weird prologue

to when the irony

kind of melted away.

There are people on

these platforms who

believe that because

you've couched

your intention in a joke

that you can disavow it--

That's right.

--When people come asking.

That's exactly right.

So you create this

ambiguity so there's

no way for you to mean

what you really mean ever.

Yeah.

1 think what's

appealing about Pepe

is that he combines this

impossible mixture of innocence

and evil.

He has this kind

of knowing smile

while he's performing acts

that are really atrocious.

It sort of fulfills

the idea that we

can say these terrible

things and just mean them

as jokes all the time.

They're always just

jokes all the time,

and you can't prove otherwise.

We're just a bunch of

kids in our underwear.

It's harmless.

No one really means it.

The problem, I

think, is that it's

really demonstrable in the worst

cases that this isn't funny.

It's not funny when people die.

[INAUDIBLE] in progress.

We got another gun shot victim

at [INAUDIBLE] shots fired.

Shots fired.

A black car pulls up and stops,

and he rolls down the window.

I just saw four gunshots.

A Friday night rampage in

this bustling college town.

After two gun battles

with police and a chase,

seven people were dead.

22-year-old Elliot Rodger

believed to be the gunman.

Tonight, investigators are

poring over videos Rodger

posted online.

There was this

intense pain that you

could see where he was

really divorced from reality.

He did the shooting spree

in a car, a fancy car

that his parents had bought for

him to boost his confidence.

Didn't even make an

effort to talk to anybody.

He was so closed off.

And it was like, when

he's sitting there,

you can just tell he's just

thinking these thoughts

in his head the entire time.

He's just talking to himself.

I came onto 4chan that day.

People in this environment

were starting get whipped up.

And they were like,

yeah, that's right.

You showed them who's boss.

He went out there, he stood up

for being the virgin with rage.

The very first picture of

Elliot Rodger that I saved

was a picture of this sort

of semi transparent sobbing

woman, and then three

or four Pepes with guns.

It was one of the

very first ones

that took Elliot and put it

into sort of like a context.

People started drawing Pepes

riding around in a BMWs

with Elliot Rodger.

Yeah, I did get a little

bit energized by it.

It was just like,

maybe society does need

to get flipped on its head.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hi.

Elliot Rodger here.

I don't condone violence.

I'm not a violence condoner.

But he set me off in the path

that made me who I am today,

and I have to acknowledge that.

On 4chan, you see

something totally new

called the beta male

uprising, the beta uprising.

The idea would be

that all of them

would run out of

their mom's basements

and start shooting people.

And of course, it's a way

of making fun of themselves.

It's always coded

in guarded irony.

But of course, behind the

irony is the seriousness.

Why are you talking about that?

It's because that's an issue

that resonates with you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Uprise.

Welcome to your demise.

Pepe then becomes the symbol.

You see him holding the gun.

It's the classic

response from 4chan,

which is the most nihilistic

and despairing and cynical,

where anyone wants to kill

themselves or do something

awful or do something

anti-social,

making that screen

illusion real in some way,

they're like, yeah, go for it.

Philadelphia area colleges

have all warned students

to be extra cautious tomorrow.

This is the thread

that was posted

on 4chan, a message board

where everyone is anonymous.

It was posted last

Friday, the day

after the shooting in Oregon.

It phrases the gunman

as a fellow member

of the beta rebellion.

The post on 4chan

uses a profile picture

of what appears to be the

Grinch in a mask holding a gun.

That same picture was

used in a post the day

before the Oregon massacre.

We see it's not just the

memes generate the violence.

It's that the violence

becomes a meme.

But it's just a joke, right?

It's just a stupid frog.

If you had had a victory

over the normies,

striking back at

the oppressors, it

was seen as too enthusiastic to

post a big grinning, laughing,

ha-ha-ha.

So when the smug

Pepe came out, it

was groundbreaking in a way

that is maybe hard to explain.

It was the most

succinct, perfect face.

Then the hand up.

It had the perfect

silly look to it, crude,

like holding back

laughter but enjoying

the suffering of others.

It was the perfect

trolling accessory.

The way he's redrawn

with his thumb

up like this like really smug--

Yeah.

That tone is so ugly.

It's used to imply being

above a conversation

that people are trying

to have about kindness.

Trump was seen as

the personification

of the smug Pepe meme.

When he was announcing

that he was going to run,

every news story is

they don't like him.

People in his own party,

they don't like him.

And people in the other party,

they really don't like him.

It was like, oh,

this is perfect.

He's making everybody upset.

A really interesting

time in 4chan

is Trump's initial

announcement that he

is running for president.

If you look at the 4chan

threads, before Trump's speech,

it was fairly skeptical.

But then they saw a lot of

these things in his rhetoric

that they liked.

They saw nationalism.

They saw white nationalism.

And almost immediately,

you'll see people being like,

can we get a Pepe with

Donald Trump hair?

I want to start

circulating this.

And that happened--

that's within hours.

I think that President Trump

is a real-life version of Pepe

in the ability to

elicit a reaction

and to get attention, to express

and to capture people's hopes

and fears.

I was formerly the director

of strategy and data

for the Trump campaign, so

I know as much if not more

about how to use voter data than

anybody else in the country.

During the campaign, there

was an effort by 4chan

to get other people to support

the president by creating

memes, and then

sharing them to, say,

normies to try to motivate them

to support President Trump.

The inside terminology for

this was the great meme war.

It gave people who

had never really been

involved in politics

before a way in.

The best memes that you see,

the most effective ones,

are just some person

who has no power at all.

They have no influence.

They have no money.

They have no connections.

But if they can

make one good meme,

they can take off and go viral.

And then when you

hyper charge it

by having the

President retweet it,

you felt like you were

part of this rebel group,

this insurgency

that was completely

unpredictable and from--

where no one would

have ever expected it.

How does an image like this end

up on Donald Trump's Twitter

account?

4chan supported Trump

for a mix of reasons.

Some of it I think was

this nihilistic idea

that Trump was a wrecking

ball and that they

wanted to embarrass

people by electing him.

And so when Trump retweeted

himself depicted as Pepe,

it was like this

watershed moment.

This is Donald Trump a

co-opting the idea of himself

substituted as Pepe.

It was so transgressive,

so anti-PC.

To most of the voters out

there, it just seem kind of odd.

But if you were part

of the community that

has been spending years and

years and years using Pepe,

suddenly a little antenna goes

up and you pick up a signal

and say, wow, maybe

this guy's right for us.

There was always magic going

on in any political campaign.

And so what happened when

Pepe the Frog suddenly

became, in effect, Donald

Trump's invisible running mate

was that a magical force

had entered the picture.

And it was a wild card.

A meme can become the anchor,

the seed, if you will,

around which a group of

like-minded people can gather

and toward which they

can focus their energy.

That's a basic

tool of meme magic.

And that's one of the things we

saw during the 2016 election.

The way that magic

was used on the chans

was they focused on building

up a series of hyper-sigils

of images like Pepe

the Frog, and piled

into those images all of their

hopes and all of their energy,

their emotional focus of seeing

Donald Trump in the White

House.

You ended up with a lot

of people on the chans

just going, wow,

1 could do this.

This is not Republicanism

as we have known it.

These are racist ideas,

race-baiting ideas,

anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant,

anti-women, all key tenets

making up an emerging

racist ideology

known as the alt-right.

Pepe!

Now, alt-right is short

for alternative right.

The Wall Street

Journal describes it

as a loose racist ideology

known as the alt-right.

Pepe!

And to most people, that was

a totally inexplicable thing

at the moment.

Must be totally random.

To the white supremacist,

anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi right

in this country, that

was a moment of triumph.

Suddenly, Pepe the meme,

the most silliest piece

of meaningless culture, was sort

of passing through the screen.

It was like the

dream of the troll,

making the internet real.

It was becoming weird

to have this tattoo.

Here to get me involved

in your nightmare world?

Mm-hmm.

That's good.

We're here to exploit you.

Is this-- this better

be about Landwolf.

Watch your head.

Please don't kick my

cat, if you can help it.

I think it's funny

that Chris got the Pepe

tattooed on his arm, and he's

like, I have to hide it now.

Somebody at Subway thought

I was a white power dude.

[LAUGHTER]

Everybody's actually

very-- everybody

was very excited about Pepe.

They were like, oh, wow,

Pepe's this awesome meme, dude.

Pepe rules.

Wow, you made Pepe?

I was all proud of myself,

strutting down the street.

Now people just

throw rocks at you.

That's the guy who created Pepe.

You're not strutting

anymore, are you, sicko?

Now I'm like just

slithering down

the street in a pool of

my own waste or something.

Whoa.

Like a slug lord.

Like just a slurping slimeball.

But I really do feel like

this would only happen to you.

I interviewed Matt

Furie in September 2016

for the Atlantic.

My impression of Furie was that

he was very well-intentioned

but somewhat naive about the

extent to which this symbol had

been appropriated

by the far right.

Pepe is a white

nationalist symbol.

Increasingly being used

by white supremacists.

Something of a mascot

of the alt-right.

Defining the alt-right is

somewhat easier these days.

But in around 2016,

it encompassed a lot

of people who were ideologically

opposed to the left,

but not necessarily

united on every issue.

And then you had people

like Richard Spencer, who

were overt white nationalists.

It's going to involve Pepe.

It's going to involve

unleashing a little chaos.

For the alt-right, Pepe

allows them to pretend

that they're kidding.

They're not kidding.

What they want is for you to

be both scared by the threat

and be mocked for being

scared in the first place.

The point is to cause that

kind of psychic anguish,

and they draw a great deal

of pleasure from that.

Basically, alt-right

is a big tent,

or rather a big rock under which

creeps a diverse assortment

of paleoconservatives,

men's rights misogynists--

I remember I went to

a taping of Sam Bee,

and she had a segment

about Pepe the Frog.

And I got to meet

her after the taping.

--Cyber-bullies, and good

old-fashion neo-Nazis.

And I was like, you

know, Pepe was actually

created by a friend of mine,

and he's a really sweet artist.

And it doesn't mean this thing

that it transformed into.

And she was just like, OK.

The alt-right's use of

Pepe just drowned out

any other visual interpretation.

Trump's former campaign

chair, Steve Bannon,

said the Democrats are

not the opposition party,

the media is the

opposition party.

And how do you beat the media?

You flood the zone with shit.

Well, these people are

flooding the zone with shit

so that you don't know

what's real or what's not.

Quite frankly, I've

been to these events.

Wasn't even real.

Oh, no.

They're just Jewish actors,

a lot of the KKK guys

with their hats off.

Literally looks like

the cast of Seinfeld.

A conspiracy theorists

like Alex Jones

appeals to Trump because one of

Trump's major political tools

is forcing people to reject

objective reality in favor

of his version of reality.

Well, Donald Trump,

let me say this,

you are the leading

presidential front

runner with the Republicans,

gaining a huge lead

as you don't back down.

But I've got to just--

And the point of it is to

obliterate objective truth.

Fake news!

Fuck CNN!

Trump frames his language in

terms of winners and losers.

Are you sick of fucking winning?

No!

What happens when that

mindset is adopted

by people on the bottom?

Instead of thinking of society

as where everyone's equal

and we're all lifting

ourselves up together,

you think the world

is a hierarchy.

And the only way you're

going to get to the top

is by displacing someone else.

Then you start getting

these ideas like,

well, maybe I'm at the bottom

because this group of people

has snuck their way to the top.

They probably cheated

their way up there.

And so then you get these

elaborate conspiracies about,

like, oh, well, the

Jews run the media.

Immigrants, they're the problem.

Build the wall!

Fuck those dirty beaners.

Build the wall.

We're not giving in.

We're not going away.

And we're giving them a big,

giant, red, white, and blue

middle finger!

[CHEERING]

So then it started

to get strange.

Somebody on the chans,

nobody knows who,

found an ancient Egyptian

frog god whose name was Kek.

He looked like an

anthropomorphic figure

with a frog's head,

rather like Pepe.

Obviously, that

had to be shared.

And the chans went ape.

The reason why this

caught on is that Kek

is a bit of gamer slang.

For complicated reasons,

where we say, ha-ha-ha,

in certain gaming circles,

you say, kek-kek-kek.

Trumpeter is taking the Hill.

The nation of Kek,

Kekistan taking the Hill.

They come up with

this idea of Kekistan,

of a kind of promised

land for Pepes.

And any time you

have these ideas

of ethnic homelands and

tribalist blood and soil,

it automatically

seems to cluster

in with the worst exercises

in human depravity.

So all I need to do is

just put on the mask.

Put on the mask.

There had been rumors

flying on the chans

that Hillary Clinton was

actually seriously ill.

And a great many chaos

magicians magicians

were focusing their magical

work on one goal, which was

making her collapse in public.

There's a thing that people talk

about in occult circles called

the TSW moment.

TSW-- the polite version

is This Stuff Works.

The chans went through

their TSW moment.

Hillary Clinton collapsed and

had to be hauled into the SUV

by other people.

1 honestly think, at that

point, if Donald Trump had

asked the habitues of the

chans to walk into the ocean,

they would have done it.

To just be grossly

generalistic, you

could put half of

Trump supporters

into what I call the

basket of deplorables.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

They're racist, sexist,

homophobic, xenophobic,

Islamophobic.

Hillary Clinton then

released an explainer

explaining that Pepe

was a hate symbol

and that he symbolized

the alt-right.

And through these

associations, it really

made Trump look like a neo-Nazi.

But it made her also

look a little clueless.

The idea that she was

denouncing a cartoon frog

was delightful to 4chan,

delightful to the alt-right.

It was the best thing that

could have happened for them.

It certainly galvanized people

who thought, hey, I really

dig Pepe, and she just

launched an attack on me

and called me a Nazi.

Ladies and gentlemen, the

battle has just begun,

and we are ready.

I think that that

just solidified it.

Once you start deeming

something as a hate symbol,

it does kind of become that.

A popular cartoon

character turned

internet meme,

Pepe the Frog, has

been added to the

Anti-Defamation League's

database of hate symbols.

In a press release,

the organization

wrote the character

had been, quote,

"used by haters on

social media to suggest

racist, anti-Semitic,

or other bigoted

notions as a hate symbol."

Matt's name was in the

description about it

on the website.

It's like a nightmare.

He's thinking, I've worked

my whole life as an artist,

and now I'm going

to be lumped in

with this weird new swastika?

Matt Furie put out a statement

to the Associated Press.

He said he was horrified

to see his creation become

a mascot for the

alt-right fringe movement.

I don't want to be

associated with this.

I'm trying to write

children's books.

The nature of media

and politics is stuff

that I've been trying to

escape from my entire life

as an artist.

I don't give a shit

about any of that stuff.

And then I got pulled

into it just because I'm

on a hate symbol database list

now, and it pissed me off.

As the news was going on

that this internet frog has

been marked as a

hate symbol, that's

when I got the phone

call from our buyer.

They pulled it right away.

So we have about

3,000 items that

were going to go into

580 stores across the US,

and now it's in my garage.

These were probably

like $15 each to make.

If you think of $15 times

3,000, it's pretty crazy.

Yeah.

It's $45,000.

We didn't want to

give it to Goodwill.

We didn't want to

sell it ourselves

because we were afraid white

supremacists would wear it.

And then what is that

worth versus putting out

a hate symbol?

And I'm sure you

feel the same way.

A lot of the merchandise ended

up having to be destroyed.

Yeah.

Now that's kind of the

least of my worries.

I know.

He was a dummy.

He just let his character

get away from him,

and now this shit happen.

Matt's just like most of

us, a poor cartooning loser.

I was suggesting that he

sue the Anti-Defamation

League for defamation.

I'm just trying to be positive.

Not everybody has a platform to

talk about this kind of stuff.

I teamed up with the ADL

to just try to offer people

some creative solutions.

[APPLAUSE]

Hi, everybody.

So what we're

trying to do now is

to start a save Pepe campaign.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

I invite everybody to draw their

own peaceful version of Pepe

and share it on social

media with #SavePepe.

Can we turn something that's

become a recognized hate symbol

into a recognized love symbol?

It was really funny, but

it was also really lovely.

1 tweeted about it.

I tried to help.

Yeah, I drew a Pepe.

Part of the Save Pepe campaign.

I'm like, damn, he's going

through a situation that

isn't right, and I

want to help him out.

Does that look like Pepe?

[LAUGHTER]

I've never drawn

Pepe before, but I

figured I'm going to do

whatever ll can to help

because I'm such a big fan.

So I'm butchering Pepe here,

but something like that.

In Matt's work, I

can feel his love

for nature and the universe.

I was like, oh, yeah, Matt's

my buddy, and I like Pepe,

so I just--

I made a peace frog Pepe.

Does that look like Pepe?

[LAUGHTER]

It's getting less

and less like Pepe.

I've been working on it

for about a month now.

I've gotten about 500 and

counting brand-new peace Pepes.

My goal with this is to

eventually start something

that I'd like to call the

Peace Pepe Database of Love.

My whole thing is just

to focus on positive

and just keep being creative.

The attempt by Matt Furie

to wrest control over Pepe--

it seems like he understands

the internet about as well

as Hillary Clinton does.

Maybe if the original

artwork wasn't

so pedestrian and basic that an

eight-year-old can draw Pepe,

a scribbling that was improved

upon by others, that was given

meaning that it

never had before,

I would just

encourage Matt to just

be glad to have been a small

part of a very big thing.

Art is supposed

to be therapeutic.

So before Trump

got elected, I just

did this kind of

nightmare scenario of Pepe

slowly morphing into Donald

Trump and then into a monster,

and then being trapped

inside the monster's mouth,

as you can see.

And then the threat

of nuclear war.

This is the new American moment.

This is like Martin Luther

King, "I Have a Dream" speech.

It's like Washington

crossing the Delaware.

(SINGING) "We are the

champions, my friend"

We were all ecstatic.

Donald Trump, he wasn't

supposed to be there.

We all felt like the memeing had

played a part in the election.

The internet's joke kind

of came to fruition.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The chaotic scene just blocks

outside the secure area

of the inauguration

and parade route.

Are you the hipster

version of the neo-Nazi--

What?

--Movement?

What is your little frog?

It's-- Pepe has become

kind of a symbol--

After the election,

Matt just came to me

and he said, hey,

I'm going to draw

a comic strip with Pepe in

it, and I'm going to kill him.

The Pepe thing was so out

of control at that point,

and whatever Pepe meant

to all these other people

didn't mean the

same thing to me.

So ll just killed him.

I just thought it'd be funny

to do a comic strip where all

the boys are at his funeral.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) Your picture

is still on my wall.

On my wall.

The colors are bright,

bright as ever.

The red is strong.

The blue is pure.

Some things last a long time.

I didn't think it would

get noticed or anything.

I'm sure you recognize

the cartoon character Pepe

the Frog.

Well, he won't be

around for much longer

because his creator has

decided to kill him off.

A cartoon frog died

on the internet.

His name was Pepe.

It seemed like every

time he drew Pepe,

he would get hounded

by reporters.

He just hated it.

When I had first seen Matt's

death of Pepe a comic,

I was honestly a bit sad.

But the Pepe we see on

4chan now has been so far

removed from the

original that the Pepe

Matt was killing was his own.

The burden of this

weird Pepe shit

was starting to make me

feel anxious and weird.

Maybe it is whatever

people say it is.

I can't control it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) "... harnessing

the power that's inside.

RARE PEPE!"

Owning a rare Pepe

is about being alpha.

It's about having dank,

rare Pepes nobody else has.

And it's about, how do we

get to the moon in a Lambo?

OK, let's pull it up.

I'm in these crypto forums,

and for the longest time,

these guys would

talk about Pepe cash.

Some huge guys, like seven-,

eight-figure portfolio crypto

guys.

And I look at the

website, and I'm

like, what the fuck

are they talking about?

What is it?

Sol actually am a

Pepe cash millionaire.

How many million is that?

Is that $363 million?

$363 million internet

Pepe, and ll like that.

This has been

rechristened the SS Rare

Pepe, which I bought with Pepe

cash, and now I live on it.

If you want to explain

the rare Pepe economy,

imagine a few dozen geeks on

the internet came up with a way

to trade memes off 4chan and

lock them into ownership.

There's some Pepes that

are in superhero knockoffs,

so Iron Man Pepes,

Spiderman Pepes.

Some people's heroes are

more political in nature.

Trump Pepe, which is awesome

because he's make crypto great

again, whether you

like it or not.

It's much different than comic

books or even collectible

baseball cards because it exists

as math on the internet first,

and then later you can

print a physical copy of it.

This is a physical card.

This is worthless.

This is the thing that's

worth hundreds of thousands

of dollars.

So I was going to this

digital arts conference

called Rare AF, Rare As Fuck.

Luckily for me, they're

having the world's

first rare Pepe auction.

Rare Pepe after rare Pepe after

beautiful rare Pepe passing by,

and then finally

gets to the end.

It's the ultimate rare

Pepe, the Homer Pepe.

And I'm like, I'm

getting this thing.

Selling for 200.

Homer.

200.

People start placing bids--

20,000, 30,000, 40,000

100,000 Pepe cash.

200,000 Pepe cash.

75.

270.

It starts getting

so crazy, and it

gets to 350,000 Pepe cash,

which is about $39,000 US.

350 going once, going twice.

Sold.

[CHEERING]

What inspired you to pay

$39,000 US for a rare Pepe?

I was really excited about Pepe.

OK.

So this is Homer Pepe, currently

the world's most valuable

rare Pepe.

Now, what makes this

Pepe worth so much,

it's the only one

with a misprint.

Wait a minute.

Wait a mint.

That's value.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) I will

Lambo across the land,

searching far and wide.

Each rare Pepe to understand

the power that's inside.

Rare Pepe!

You're Matt, right?

Thank you for creating

our whole line of work.

You have gainfully

employed all of us.

[LAUGHTER]

So what are you

guys talking about?

We're all working the general

realm of weird online behavior

from a scientific perspective.

We have security

people from the US.

We have cryptographers

from the UK.

We have systems people

from mainland Europe.

And we take a large

scale analysis of data,

getting a quantitative

understanding of hate speech

throughout the web.

This is [INAUDIBLE]

We had to figure out a

way to be able to measure

this stuff at large

scale, and we ended up

building a system

to measure memes.

Just to give you an

idea of the scale, Matt,

so we had over a billion

posts from Twitter, Reddit,

Ipol/ and Gab.

And we examined 160

million some odd images.

So obviously, these

weren't all Pepes,

but the scale of

this data is huge.

This was only for a year.

Interesting.

There's a variety

of different memes,

but there tends to be a Pepe

variant in every single one

of these clusters.

So you pick a random meme, and

Pepe has been inserted into it

in some way, shape, or form.

In a lot of ways, Pepe

becomes an entry point

to radicalization.

That's a very scary

thing to think about.

Do you feel any

personal responsibility

for the bad stuff that

has come out of this?

You shouldn't, but we're humans.

We feel guilt for things that

we shouldn't feel guilt for.

Maybe I could have been

more proactive earlier

on to try to control it.

To the question of,

can you get Pepe back,

the reality is that there's

160 million memes, essentially,

in a year that we collected.

Not all Pepes, again, but

a good chunk of them are.

That's tough genie to

put back in the bottle.

1 wish you luck.

I do, sincerely.

Sol try to stay positive.

But to be honest,

I've gotten trolled.

Somebody sent me this.

I don't take it

personally, even though I'm

having my head decapitated.

It is what it is.

It's not only

wearing on my spirit,

but it's wearing on my

drive to be creative.

It did manifest anxieties

that I have yet to unravel.

He just slept a lot

and, honestly, it

was hard to talk to him.

I let them know I was

there for him and all that,

but there wasn't anything

anyone could really do.

Tonight, a Denton ISD

assistant principal

is coming under fire for

writing a new children's book,

a book some say is

politically motivated.

I'm using Pepe just as a

lighthearted way of expressing

maybe some conservative values.

If you love America,

you're going

to love this book for sure.

When Matt found out that

there was a Islamophobic

racist children's book starring

Pepe coming out on Amazon,

he was so upset.

And that's when he kind

of freaked out about it.

It was like the last straw.

It's like hell, man.

If you want to escape

hell, you can't ignore it.

You almost have to go

to the center of it.

It is not very often that nerdy

intellectual property lawyers

get asked to fight

the alt-right.

But when we do, we're ready.

I have a whole team of lawyers

that are working with me pro

bono and have

really empowered me

to feel like I do have

some say in all this.

He really wanted to prevent the

digital release of the book.

He saw it was in fact a

not so veiled reference

to a lot of alt-right themes.

We found out who

was publishing it

and explained that Matt Furie

own the copyright to Pepe

and that we were prepared to

enforce his rights in court.

The Adventures of Pepe and

Pete, the electronic version

was never published.

But the issue here is, when

you shut down one person,

others pop up.

I'm a compassionate guy,

and I'm a sensitive guy.

But being able to work

with a team of lawyers

has given me strength to

shut these assholes up.

You've been sued by frog, bro.

Do you even know this yet?

No.

It's all over--

Surprise.

--The internet.

Surprise, motherfucker.

You got sued by a frog.

You've been sued by

a fucking frog, dude,

a conspiracy frog named Pepe.

We did sell a poster

that a listener made

titled Make America

Great Again that

had a bunch of images

of symbols that were

popular during the campaign.

We talked to our trademark

lawyers, and they said,

Mr. Jones, this is so outrageous

against the First Amendment.

It is insane.

This is cockamamie balderdash.

He was selling a

poster with Pepe on it

with a bunch of douche

bags, and I just

didn't want him to

sell the poster.

The problem isn't the

drawing or making of the art.

You can do that.

It's just when you mass

produce it and sell it.

That's when it gets

into a stickier area.

He's like, yeah, the

man's going to stop us.

He just jacked up the

price of the poster

and then offered to sign them.

I'm trying to free

Pepe the Frog.

And I'm either going

to succeed, or I'll

be destroyed in the process.

But that's OK.

I actually don't know

many people on here.

Is that Trump too?

Yeah.

There's two Trumps.

So it's like having two

Trumps in the same poster?

Is that legal?

Well, there's going to be

Joe Armstrong from Green Day.

And there's Marsha

from The Brady Bunch.

There's Billy Idol.

Billy Idol.

And there is Courtney Love.

[LAUGHTER]

A lot of times, I'm cutting

people's hair for court

where they're in trouble.

Yeah, I'm not in too--

I'm not in any trouble.

It's all just weird situations.

Yeah, about this notorious

character named Pepe the Frog.

Have you ever heard of it?

Yeah, I actually have.

My kids have too.

Oh, Yeah?

This the guy, Pepe?

Yeah, that guy right there.

So the guy Matt,

do you know him?

That's me.

That who you got to

go to court with?

Oh, no, no, no.

That's me.

1 am Matt.

Oh, you're Matt.

Yeah.

Oh.

I don't know what this guy's

doing, this Furie fellow.

But I've agreed to be deposed

for the Pepe the Frog deal.

Sir, would you raise your

right hand to be sworn?

Do you solemnly

state the testimony

you're about to give will be

the truth, the whole truth,

and nothing but the truth?

1 do.

I don't like the frog.

I don't like this whole thing.

But I've got to stand up

for the First Amendment.

Let's say this frog is

triggering for me now.

1 hate Pepe.

Videotaped deposition of

Matt Furie in the matter

of Matt Furie versus

Infowars and Free Speech LLC.

So from 2001 to 2007, you

had this carefree, part-time,

knucklehead life.

1 still have that.

Excellent.

What did you do to prepare

for today's deposition?

Really nothing.

So how did you pick

the name Pepe the Frog?

It sounded like pee-pee.

To go pee-pee.

So it is a cartoon frog, right?

Yes, it's a cartoon frog.

It has round lips, right?

1 wouldn't call it round lips.

More tubular.

Tubular lips.

1 thought ll had some

Kind of zen-like grip.

He kind of did a good

cop, bad cop thing on me.

He was like, so you like

Beavis and Butthead?

Do you watch Ren and Stimpy?

Yes.

But then he was

like, let's get him.

49,

This is a fun one.

Hold that up.

Tell us what's 49.

It's an allegory on

the direction nature's

going from my perspective.

Excuse me, the second

to last page, page 20.

Sorry.

I worked out this morning.

It's just coincidental

that they look alike?

Absolutely.

An original character that's

based on a hot dog man.

Part man, part hot dog.

It's clear what all

this is, so people

can say Jones is using a

white supremacist symbol,

when it's not.

And it's a way of saying

I'm a white supremacist.

So it's a way of defaming me and

acting like I stole something

all at the same time.

It's just-- God-- evil.

That is just evil.

Is that Big Bird?

Yes.

31 is not Grimace?

No.

So those aren't derivations

of the Hamburgler?

Oh, these guys?

Yes.

Do you mean Mayor McCheese?

And you got no license

to put that up?

When I was in sixth grade,

1 did not obtain a license

to draw this, no.

1 went to the

bathroom at one point,

and he's taking a piss too.

And he's like, so

I guess this is

where all the dicks hang out.

And I was like,

ha-ha, that's funny.

So awkward that I got

my dick in my hand

and we're talking right now.

And then, shortly

after that, he's

just fucking screaming at me.

We're suing Alex

Jones because he--

That's not the question I asked.

Answer the question I asked you.

It twisted my

noodles for a while.

And I-- you know when

you say something

in passing to somebody

else, and it's

like you wish you would've

said something else.

This was like four hours of

concentrated me wishing I

would have said something else.

It's not a comfortable

situation, dude.

It sucked.

It was hard.

From my point of view,

this is a direct copy.

So all of your references

before are just references,

but this one is, what,

traced, you mean?

Yeah.

Why do you suppose Pepe

looks happy in that picture?

Pepe's like a mirror.

So the way that users

online would use Pepe

is a reflection of

themselves, to an extent.

That's my interpretation of it.

No further questions.

And nothing else here either.

Thank you for your time.

This marks the end of

the videotaped deposition

of Alex Jones.

Good luck.

We're going off the record,

and the time is 13 even.

Let's try to find

a little round--

Oh.

Oh, there it is.

There.

So we need two dark green ones.

OK.

It took me weeks to

de-tangle my mind

after all this legal stuff.

And put that in the [INAUDIBLE]

But that's why I signed up for.

It's not going to

be easy, but I'm

willing to go the

distance with this shit.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) Pepe, Pepe come here.

And he hops and hops.

Pepe watch out and

he hops and hops.

Pepe, please stop.

And he hops and hops.

You make me dizzy.

I say, Pepe come here.

Yeah.

(SINGING) And he hops and hops.

Pepe [INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHTER]

Everybody's saying

congratulations.

A sparkle of good news

in these troubling times.

This was actually

going to trial,

and then Louis was just

like, oh, surprisingly,

they want to settle.

We were confident we were

going to prevail at trial,

and Infowars gave up.

Infowars settles Pepe

the Frog lawsuit.

Pays tiny settlement

to creator Matt Furie.

This amount, that's a bar

tab at a topless club for one

good night.

So what the heck.

This is more than I've ever made

on the Boy's Club comic book.

So it just-- to put

it into context,

Alex Jones is like, we got away

with barely paying anything,

but it's all relative.

This is a big deal to show

what these bullies are up to

and what happens when

you stand up to them.

You are the resistance.

At the end of the

day, he's just selling

a bunch of bad ideas,

bad supplements,

and a bad attitude.

It's just a business.

Without you buying the

videos and the books

and the supplements,

we couldn't put

on one hell of a junkyard dog

fight against these bastards.

This case against

Infowars was the latest

in a string of successes.

We went after Richard Spencer.

We went after Baked Alaska.

We went after The Daily

Stormer, the neo-Nazi website.

We have successfully enforced

Matt's copyrights in Pepe

against somewhere between 75

and 100 different entities

in connection with images

or language of hate.

And this is beginning to

turn the narrative of Pepe

back around.

These guys are kind of

messing with reality,

amplifying negativity or

normalizing negativity.

I'm doing everything

I can in my power

to change the course

of this thing.

And I think removing Pepe

from the hate symbol list,

it would be a win for peace.

With all these legal

steps that I'm taking,

everything that I've

been doing up until now,

my goal was to get it off

the hate symbol database.

To me, it's not a symbol.

It's a character.

It's the character, but he's

adorned with different symbols.

And they're pretty

extreme stuff.

Yeah, it's tough.

Having it on the

hate symbols database

we have found to be

really useful for those

who are trying to understand

this barrage of symbols that

is being thrown at them, whether

it's a frog, a meme, or a hand

gesture.

It's complicated.

Well yeah, it is complicated,

because I think with Pepe

on the list, it's

seen more as a win

for the so-called

alt-right or these others

because now they

have that symbol.

And this is going to be a

lifelong journey for me,

because I'm going to be

entangled with this character

forever.

But what would be the

impact of removing it?

Most of these people are

creating these images,

and they're going to keep

churning these things out.

Your bottom line

request, it's really not

going to solve the issue.

It's not about this cartoon

being on the hate symbols.

And it sucks.

All right, man.

Thanks a lot.

Yeah, thank you.

Good luck.

I don't want the narrative to

be that I'm victimized here.

People have to deal with

horror on a daily level.

Let's work together.

Let's figure this shit

out, because it's not

getting any better.

All of the accounts of what

happened to me and my family

over the years are

enormous in scale

and historically rooted in

the legacy of white supremacy.

(SINGING) This little light of

mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

Why are you being provocative?

I like trolling people.

It's fun.

You do it for fun?

Yeah.

It's fun.

The aesthetics and

ideals that extremists

are promoting online with

their use of Pepe the Frog

are now bleeding completely

into what you would otherwise

describe as regular people.

Yeah, go ahead and video me.

I'll be doing it

too, motherfucker.

You know what's coming

to you people, right?

You know Trump is

just the beginning.

You bearded monkeys have

no place in America.

The ideology is premised

on justifying violence

towards vulnerable people.

USA!

When that seeps into the

beliefs of regular Americans,

you're heading for

some place very bad.

You can't put the genie

back in the bottle,

but you can send

it somewhere else.

To actually change

the narrative,

it would be necessary

to take the frog,

to take Pepe, and

do something very

different with him,

something that could

develop a meme of its own.

[NON-ENGLISH CHANTING]

Suddenly, out of

nowhere, Pepe is

being used in Hong Kong as a

symbol of freedom, democracy,

and youth protest.

I was surprised

as much as anyone.

This is the newer

version of him.

He's wearing a hard

hat, and he's wearing

the outfit of the protesters.

This is a way to resist

authoritarianism.

Oh, he crying from the tear gas.

Pepe is now been spray painted

on walls as a symbol of hope.

When has that actually

happened in history?

You see it in

movies all the time.

They're like, this is

the symbol we're all

going to rally behind.

It just never

happens in reality,

except now it happened to Pepe.

Pepe beams into everyone's

brain this idea of the everyman.

As you grow up, you

realize that, in fact, you

can affect the world, and

you can use a small lever

to actually move a

great amount of weight.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

That's the power that Pepe has.

Like, oh, what's more

worthless than cartoons?

But what's more powerful

than Mickey Mouse?

It's one of the most

powerful things you can do

is create an iconic cartoon.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

In a lot of

traditional societies,

it was very standard to look for

omens, signs, strange portents,

things that were not expected,

that came out of the blue.

Because that was a warning

that something was shifting

in society, something

had gone wrong,

or there was something building

that you needed to know about

before it arrived.

Pepe the Frog is an omen.

We need to listen,

because it's not

going to go away until we hear

the message that it has to say.

Nowadays, I've

just been thinking

about this concept of a spiral,

life unfolding in this kind

of spirally nature.

So I have been drawing

in more circular ways.

1 think that there is a

collective consciousness

of darkness and light.

And the only thing

that seems true to me

is that everything's

going to change.

Trump's not going to

always be the president.

Planet Earth isn't always

going to have people on it.

Who knows?

The positive notion of

Pepe is the possibility

that we can change again.

Hardcore happy place.

You've got to go hardcore happy.

I still like drawing him.

1 go through waves.

1 think the last

time I talked to you,

Arthur, I was sick of him, but

now ll like trying him again.

[MUSIC - "LET GO"]

(SINGING) Brother's

smile taking on its own.

Identity only to

then leave it behind.

Foreign light in the afternoon.

Held by what-be-nots.

Stay until remembered.

Here Pm standing, ripped

apart by albatross.

Hanging by a thread.

What's in a name.

Down on the other side.

I'm almost out of sight.

Looking up to let go.

Now I'm letting go.

Feels Good Man (2020) - full transcript