James Taranto of the WSJ writes:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has published a parody of Vox, the liberal news site for young adults. Headline: “Donald Trump, Pepe the Frog, and White Supremacists: An Explainer.” Subheadline: “That cartoon frog is more sinister than you might realize.”
It seems that both Trump adviser Roger Stone and scion Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a “meme” (a picture with a slogan) the other day. It depicts a row of gun-toting, black-clad male bodies with faces superimposed over them. They are labeled THE DEPLORABLES. Front and center is Donald Trump père; to his immediate right is the face of Pepe, drawn with a Trumplike mop of yellow hair.
“Please explain,” writes Elizabeth Chan of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, in the voice of an imaginary questioner. And does she ever:
Here’s the short version: Pepe is a cartoon frog who began his internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike.
But in recent months, Pepe’s been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the “alt-right.” They’ve decided to take back Pepe by adding swastikas and other symbols of anti-semitism and white supremacy.
“We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association,” one prominent white supremacist told the Daily Beast.
That Beast story, which ran in May, turns out to be “more or less a complete troll job,” according to an extensive investigation by Jonah Bennett of the Daily Caller. Its main victim was author Olivia Nuzzi—but even she didn’t get trolled as ridiculously as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign did.
The “prominent white supremacist” Chan describes is one “Jared Taylor Swift,” whom even Nuzzi knew better than to describe as prominent. She called him “an anonymous white nationalist who claims to be 19 years old and in school someplace on the West Coast.” (He told Bennett those were lies; he is neither 19 nor on the West Coast.) There is a white-nationalist author named Jared Taylor. We wouldn’t describe him as “prominent,” but we suppose one could argue that in the small pond of white nationalism, he is a big frog. Taylor Swift, a 26-year-old pop star, definitely is prominent.
“Jared Taylor Swift” not only is obscure; he tells Bennett he is no white nationalist:
“I think the most ridiculous thing is that a random guy on the internet who trolled a journalist once is now a ‘prominent white supremacist.’ I mean, the only accurate part of that is the ‘white’ part,” Swift told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “And my Italian ancestry means that even that is disputed!” . . .
“Basically, I interspersed various nuggets of truth and exaggerated a lot of things, and sometimes outright lied—in the interest of making a journalist believe that online Trump supporters are largely a group of meme-jihadis who use a cartoon frog to push Nazi propaganda. Because this was funny to me,” Swift told TheDCNF.
Nuzzi based her stories on interviews with “Jared Taylor Swift” and “another anonymous white nationalist, @PaulTown_,” who “estimated the broad #FrogTwitter movement to consist of about 30 people but said 10 core members helped plot it out over drinks in late 2015.”
Apparently that was a hoax too. Bennett: “ ‘There was no “plot” to take a cartoon frog and make it a symbol of white supremacy,’ Paul Town told TheDCNF. ‘That’s absurd on the face of it.’ ”
The trolls also boasted to Nuzzi that they had turned Taylor Swift into an “Aryan goddess”:
When several publications (Broadly, Slate, and The Washington Post) this week reported on the alt-right’s fixation on the pop star, #FrogTwitter was somewhat triumphant. “I never thought that would work,” @JaredTSwift said, “but they finally noticed.”
Bennett concludes on a cautious note: “The stewards of this Twitter world are notoriously capricious and trolltastic. They could even retract this mea culpa of sorts.” That is, maybe the revelation that Frog Twitter was a prank is itself a prank. It also could be that some Trump supporters who actually do hold invidious views were among those fooled by the prank, so that some of the ugly Pepe memes were created unironically.
“Either way,” Bennett writes, “this is almost certainly the case: A journalist with a clear lack of healthy skepticism and an added dose of internet dopiness got duped.”
Put that down to confirmation bias. As “Swift” tells Bennett: “The idea that every major Trump supporter online is secretly a neo-Nazi, for one. I mean, it’s just not true. But it’s the kind of thing that a journalist will readily believe.” So too, it appears, will the most qualified man, woman or child ever to seek public office anywhere.
Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog back in 2005, has a healthy perspective on the matter. “I don’t take it too seriously—I just try to take it in stride,” he tells London’s Guardian:
I didn’t know what white nationalists were until, like, yesterday. And the alt-right or whatever? It’s all very new and very strange and definitely not something that I support.
