Pepe the Frog, Trump, Corriere della Sera ENGLISH

This is the translation of an article appeared on a national-wide italian newspaper, "Corriere della Sera" on the 30th of September 2016.

[Author] Serena Danna

[Section] Foreign news

[Section subtitle] United States - Dangerous Relationships

[Main body] In the year the dark side of the internet - from Wikileaks to corrupt hackers - became a political actor, a funny frog with big eyes is banned for racism. Pepe the Frog, the character of the comic "Boy's Club," born on MySpace in 2005 and one of the most popular memes of Internet, was inserted by the Anti-Defamation League in the database of hate symbols, along with the svastika and the Ku Klux Klan's burned cross. The organization's, founded in 1913 to fight antisemitism, decision has got to do with the controversial evolution of the frog, that - from ironical figure shared on socials even by pop stars such as Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj [translator's note: originally written as Nichi] - became the mascotte of the Alt-Right movement: a variegated coalition of white supremacists, sworn enemies of the politically correct and femminism, that found on the internet a huge sounding board. It was them who transformed an easygoing frog into a political propaanda instrument with Donald Trump's blessing, who, more or less knowingly, allowed his name and face to be associated with Pepe. An ingenuity? Not really. The mechanism chosen by the trolls is that of the "dog whistle:" that consists in associating with an innocuous looking image a reprehensible concept - in this case racism, mysoginy, anti-islamism - to help its diffusion. The republican candidate, who in October 2015 shared a tweet containing a Trump version of Pepe, swore multiple times to be unaware of its connection with the Alt-Right. It's the same justification used by his son, Donald Trump Jr, who - disputing with Hillary Clinton who criticized Trump's voters - shared online a photomontage with the subtext "The Deplorables", white right wing men (Some very evil) and, naturally, the frog.

Trump though made his - in a lighter version - some of the themes close to the movement's heart, such as protectionism, nostalgia for the past, male chauvinism. Without forgetting that Stephen Bannon, his new campaign manager, is the former boss of the Breitbart website, defined by Bannon himself "a platform for the Alt-Right." The website - as Gabriel Sherman, author of the popular biography on the former boss of Fox News Roger Ailes, confirms to the Corriere della Sera - has conveyed together the "Trump's voters that see Fox News as the establishment of the Republican Party."

It's the idea of betrayal of ideals that is able to rally the exponents of "GamerGate" - the online molesty campaign at the expense of the women in the gaming industry - with islamophobes and frustrated white nerds. If places like 4Chan - the forum where Anonymous was born, responsible for the "radicalization" of Pepe the Frog - remainthe natural habitats of the Alt-Right, Breitbart has become its "institutional" voice. It's not a coincidence that in the span of nine years the website has made a fortune with conspirationism, defining arab and mexican migrants as "rapist gangs," has tripled its number of visitors since the beginning of the campaign, reaching the numbers (18 million monthly viewers) of Politico and Tory pillars like The Daily Caller. "More than a journalist company - Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at the City University, told the Corriere - is a political organization masked as news company." Whose boss, despite Pepe's face, is Donald Trump.


[Sidenote tidbits - (short phrases inserted amongst the lines of the article's body) ]
Topics
The republican candidate made his some of the right wing themes

18 million
The monthly viewership of Breitbart, the extreme right website close to the radical "Alt-Right" group.

600
the percentage of increase on twitter of the US nationalist movement in the last year


[Pictures description]
The pictures represent Pepe in a few different contests, as a jew onlooking the 9-11 plane crash, with a 3rd Reich t-shirt giving a middle finger, as the columbine killers with guns in the school, as Donald Trump and as white supremacist with an ak-47, white power t-shirt, nazi armband, ski mask and 3 nooses in the background.

[Pictures caption translation]
Pepe's evolution
The Pepe the Frog cartoons, the character transformed by the extreme right groups into a strument of propaganda. Before "radicalizing," Pepe the Frog was a comic bool created by Matt Furie. The frog became popular on 4Chan's forum in 2008, then begun being used as protagonist of smash photomontages on Tumblr, the microblog platform.