In Hong Kong, Pepe The Frog is a symbol for freedom and anti-authoritarianism.

It’s interesting. Pepe has never actually really been a hate symbol. He’s an Everyman symbol, in the tradition of Pierrot, the sad clown, the trusting fool, who just happens to be used by a casual online video game culture (which is definitely a superset of various hate groups, but also contains many who are simply there to Minecraft and shoot aliens.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot

I would be very sad if Pepe writ large were banned, he's always been much larger than the racist aspects of how people tried to abuse him.

He's a victim in all of this too, IMO...

After seeing the documentary "feels good man" about pepe, I felt sorry for his creator.

Pepe emotes on Twitch are omnipresent, and have no political connotation.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-mea...

edit: Downvotes, really? I'm not wrong. Read the link, or use Twitch chat for yourself, as I do on a semi-daily basis.

This Pepe shit is crazy to me. Pepe was and still is used as a generic meme in so many contexts it just makes no sense that people declare it a hate symbol. I was watching a keyboard review by a Korean guy the other day and it had pepe meme in the video. He has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. English isn't his first language. You really think he's dog whistling to thousands of racists, or people just like stupid memes? Do you think whoever made this (extremely popular) short is a racist? https://youtube.com/watch?v=gAbi2_n8_Mw

It really feels like some CNN broadcaster said something like "Trump bad, and Trump Pepe!" And suddenly there's this small subset of the population who dropped everything they were doing, faces flushed, veins popping, and started vehemently writing about why this crude depiction of a frog used by teenagers for laughs should be #cancelled. It's absurd. It's like progressives are parodying themselves.