What the uncanceling of Pepe the Frog - just for HK protests, though - tells us about US media https://www.rt.com/op-ed/469318-pepe-frog-hong-king-media/ Published time: 21 Sep, 2019 12:58  Having written hundreds of articles demonizing the amphibian meme as inherently sinister, news outlets have had to perform a quick 180 now that he has been adopted as the mascot of the Hong Kong protest movement. Pepe the Frog has been everywhere during the past six months of anti-government demonstrations in the Chinese city – as a flash graffiti drawn on and washed off walls, a doll holding placards with political slogans and calling for political changes from custom-made t-shirts, in user-made pictures and cartoons circulated on social media and in organizers’ WhatsApp and Telegram groups. For the Western media slavishly dedicated to covering the demonstrations from the protesters’ perspective, this has been awkward, yet impossible to ignore. Is this not the same Pepe whose alternately self-satisfied and downbeat visage was used as a vehicle for alt-right talking points prior to the 2016 election? The one that candidate Hillary Clinton dedicated a special warning to on her website, saying he had been “almost entirely co-opted by white supremacists”? The one that the Anti-Defamation League still considers a hate symbol even in its unaltered form? The simplest route has been to wave this away as a coincidence, with almost every mainstream media article at pains to emphasize that the Hong Kong protesters are not alt-right, and were entirely unaware of the connotations of the cartoon frog, which do not apply outside the US. More sophisticated explanations have celebrated “reclaiming” Pepe, recalling that he had begun his life as a stoner joke for a minutiae-obsessed apolitical web cartoon by artist Matt Furie back in 2005, three years before “alt-right” was even a word. All that might be correct if not for the glaring similarities between how Pepe was used three years ago and now that make it hard to believe that the current green frog had no lineage. In both cases the cartoon gave a chance for protest movements to challenge the establishment through his sly subversion. Is Pepe trolling you or is he being serious? When he cries is that just a cheap joke, or a comment about grave imbalances of power? Using him as a truth-sayer figure couched in levels of irony, disarms, gives plausible deniability, and most of all, reflects the young, media-savvy culture that permeates both the Hong Kong movement squaring up to the might of Beijing, and the 4Chan provocateurs who helped Donald Trump get elected against the prevailing cultural winds. [more]