Creator Gets Pepe The Frog Removed From Neo-Nazi Website Daily Stormer

The story of Pepe the Frog is a unique one with many twists. One such twist occurred Tuesday, when his creator Matt Furie succeeded in getting his creation removed from more than 40 articles featured on neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.

About a year ago, Furie had promised he would take back his creation Pepe the Frog, a green anthropomorphic frog with a human-like body that was often depicted sad or melancholic in far right and alt-right internet memes.

At that point in time, Pepe the Frog had become one of the biggest symbols of the far right. Ironically, White Supremacist Richard Spencer was explaining his Pepe the Frog pin in an interview on Donald Trump’s inauguration day Jan. 20, 2017, when he was punched in the face on camera.

Last year, a former Texas assistant vice principal published “The Adventures of Pepe and Pede” — an alt-right children’s book featuring the hang-easy amphibian and Pede the centipede. Friends in a farm, the book depicted the two enjoying good times at the ranch as a change of farmer had brought an end to eight years of bad leadership at the venture, Motherboard reported. However, they face challenges in the form of an alligator Alkah with their favorite pond now turned into a swamp, ruled by the reptile.

Since then, Furie has committed himself to pry his creation away from the far right. Motherboard reported that the character was originally conceived as a laid back, marijuana smoking frog. Furie was represented by the Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, the report said.

The law firm served Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices to the company it said was hosting The Daily Stormer as the character was featured in over 40 articles on the website.

Louis Tompros, one of the intellectual property lawyers working for the firm, told Motherboard it took this long due to the fact that the neo-Nazi website is sometimes down owing to it being plagued by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks since moving to the dark web.

“The Daily Stormer has been a bit of an annoyance, frankly,” Tompros said. “For reasons separate and apart from copyright infringement, [The Daily Stormer has] been rejected and shut down by a variety of different ISPs over time.”

“We had seen for a while that they had been using Pepe images in a few places,” the intellectual property lawyer added. “The problem was that they would be up and then their entire site will be down and move somewhere else and reorganize. The reason it takes us longer on this and some of the others is the way their website moves around a bunch.”

The frog, who Furie described as a “peaceful frog-dude,” was listed as a hate symbol by the American Anti-Defamation League in 2016.

“It’s completely insane that Pepe has been labeled a symbol of hate, and that racists and anti-Semites are using a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book as an icon of hate,” Furie wrote at the time for TIME Magazine. “It’s a nightmare, and the only thing I can do is see this as an opportunity to speak out against hate.”