Episode 107: Pepe the Frog feat Arthur Jones & Giorgio Angelini
How a stoner frog in an indie comic was engineered by 4chan to become the face of alt right trolling. We speak to the filmmakers behind 'Feels Good Man', a new documentary on Pepe the frog, the creation of artist Matt Furie. Find out about the wholesome man behind the original Pepe. Then hear an ex-Trump campaign guy talk about the "meme war".
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 107 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Pepe the Frog episode.
As always, we're your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week we're covering Pepe the Frog, a character created by indie cartoonist Matt Fury.
Now, perhaps you haven't yet heard of Matt, but one thing's for sure, you've definitely heard of Pepe.
What started as an innocent character in a 2005 Stoner webcomic was later reappropriated by users of the 4chan image board and became the centerpiece of a massive culture war, one that arguably helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016.
A fantastic new documentary called Feels Good Men has just been released on the topic, and it was made in close collaboration with Pepe's original creator.
They even animated Fury's characters.
So this week we invited the people behind the movie onto the podcast, Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini.
First, we'll explore Pepe and his cultural ascendance on the alt-right, and then we'll jump into a deeper dive with the filmmakers.
But before all that... First up, I have massive anti-lockdown demonstrations in Berlin and London attract QAnon followers.
So worrying.
These are photos from Germany.
The effort behind those signs outdo anything I've seen at any QAnon rallies here.
I mean, they went to a print shop.
It was pro-looking, yeah.
In Berlin on Saturday, thousands of people took to the streets to protest social restrictions that are in place due to the pandemic.
One estimate from the BBC said that there were 38,000 protesters in attendance.
That's like a small town.
Some carried signs reading, stop the corona lies, end the plandemic immediately, and please, Mr. President, make Germany great again.
In English, by the way.
Yeah.
And there is also a very strong QAnon presence.
Please, Mr. Trump, take us by land.
Unbelievable.
So our worms have sprouted out of people's ears.
They've slithered across the beaches.
They've dived into the ocean.
There was a brain worm D-Day where they all had to kind of like, they were in the shuttle and they were moving through the choppy sea.
And they've wriggled their way on shore.
shore overseas and burrowed themselves.
Yeah, the Travis views and the turrets that were just kind of like trying to...
And the cold temperatures and the sausage diets, it makes it easier to assimilate into
the brain and take over function.
I think that's why we're seeing bigger numbers over there.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, Germans are half sausage basically, and that half is incredibly vulnerable to
brain worms.
One sign at the Berlin protest, which read, WWG1WGA, also said, Mr. Trump, please don't
forget the German patriots.
Like don't forget us when you awaken the world, when you cleanse it with your radiant light.
Please, Mr. Trump.
As long as I live, I'll never figure out why this dipshit inspires such odulation.
On their knees, unzipping his horrifying weird pants.
If you had to draw like an area, like an aging Aryan, kind of like Nazi general, it would probably be, you know, whatever Trump is going for.
The blonde hair and all the, you know, I mean, yeah, you have to, in your imagination, draw angel wings behind him to, like, sort of accept everything else.
Like, it's perfect.
It's perfect for, you know, capturing that, you know, uber religious crowd.
But you're right.
He's a particularly grotesque image for the entire world to rally behind.
Meanwhile, also on Saturday, a large crowd of protesters gathered in London's Trafalgar Square to demonstrate against the UK's government coronavirus measures.
Photos circulating on social media showed protesters holding up banners with slogans including COVID hoax, no mandatory vaccines, and no lockdowns.
There was, of course, a strong QAnon presence there as well.
The so-called Unite for Freedom protests, which they labeled it, called for an end to mandatory measures such as lockdown,
social distancing, mask wearing, and the track and trace systems described by the organizers
as a violation of people's rights and freedoms.
One man was photographed unfurling the flag of the British Union of Fascists, which was
a group that was formed in the early 1930s.
Very worrying development.
Their organization is called BUFF?
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, it's QAnon is like, I feel like it's sort of becoming like the conspiratorial glue where it's like, it's like, it's like just, just fascists and like, you know, moral panic, save the children people and COVID denialists, whatever you're into.
It just sort of binds them all together.
For my next story, a children's nonprofit issued a statement denouncing QAnon.
The Florida-based nonprofit KidSafe Foundation, which works to fight child sexual abuse and exploitation through preventative education, issued a statement denouncing QAnon, and it was very, very forceful.
I'm gonna have Jake read it, because I think it's fire.
The conspiracy theory and cult movement known as QAnon is attempting to hijack the good names of organizations leading the fight against child sexual abuse and sex trafficking.
We cannot let this happen.
QAnon followers preach that a cabal of powerful people within government, business, academia, and media are seeking world domination while engaging in child sex trafficking, pedophilia, cannibalism, and satanic sacrifice.
To advance their agenda, QAnon followers have adopted a propaganda tactic that demands an immediate response from all of us in the field.
QAnon promoters are parasites.
To grow their footprint, gain credibility, and spread misinformation, they associate their message of hate and bigotry with well-known, well-regarded organizations, specifically those working to end child sexual abuse and sex trafficking.
That strategy threatens to diminish our identities, tarnish our reputations, and harm our good works.
QAnon promoters are parasites.
Does not mince words.
The problem is deepening.
Many of our supporters are unknowingly redistributing QAnon messages embedded within posts that appear to be
straightforward statements against pedophilia and trafficking.
We must speak out strongly against this.
Just as education is the most powerful means we have to prevent child sex abuse and trafficking, education will be
our most powerful weapon against the threat QAnon presents.
All of us working in the field must join together and speak out loudly.
Very, very forceful.
And by my count, this is actually the third charity that has had to distance itself from QAnon or QAnon conspiracy theories.
And so KidSafe, they make, like, what?
Child-sized safes?
Yeah, they make child-sized safes to guard against the pedophiles who put the child in the safe and where they cannot be reached.
They provide educational programs on how to identify abuse for educators and other people who work with children in order to help protect them.
Right, but I'm a QAnon follower, so I stopped at Child Safe.
You stopped at Kid Safe.
Another charity that had to distance itself from QAnon was the Polaris Project, which had to issue a statement after its national trafficking hotline was jammed with bogus tips from the Wayfair conspiracy theory.
The UK-based charity Save the Children, which is 100 years old, Also had to issue a statement distancing itself from hashtag save the children campaigns because that was basically a QAnon campaign that they didn't want to associate their organization with an obvious QAnon campaign.
Can you imagine you listen to like pretty horrifying tips and have to kind of follow up on this stuff and then for like two weeks you just have to hear about fucking barcodes and furniture and you're like what the fuck?
And e-commerce stores.
What the hell is going on?
This is a night table.
It's called the Joey.
They're selling it for $11,000.
Can you believe?
It's amazing that we're still dealing with the fallout of the Wayfair conspiracies.
Things live so much longer now.
Maybe it's because of the memes because it's preserved in a picture and so that lives forever and so people are still continuing.
Maybe somebody's going to get pilled on Wayfair in two months.
Of course, of course.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that they don't die.
It's like they just sort of compound.
In Europe, Pizzagate seems to be making strides.
In France, there's a Parisian pizza place called Pizza Girl that has been getting harassed by people who believe the conspiracy.
Mostly because their logo is dough.
It's a pizza dough.
And then you have a spiral of red tomato sauce.
Unfortunately.
Why?
Because they of course think that this is a child trafficking symbol or whatever.
This is stupid for multiple reasons.
Number one, if the pedophile code was actually cracked, they would change the code.
Would you like to hear about how funny and French this story is, though?
Sure.
So the pizza place was opened 30 years ago, and the name was Pizza Girl from the beginning, and the idea was, like, our pizzas will be delivered only by women.
Which, hmm, seems a bit weird, but then he said, hey, listen, it's like Hooters, right?
No, no, no, but he said that there's no, like, it's not sexualized, like, there's nothing sexualized about the women.
So he made sure to know this was not a pervert thing.
As a French guy, right?
All right.
I swear I'll be dressed very appropriately.
This is where things get real bad.
They have a naming scheme on their pizzas that is country and then girl.
So, you know, you could have like the Italy girl or the Martinique girl.
So, you know, of course, people have decided this is a menu of children.
And I guess he's been operating for 30 years out of like a small, like, you know, very, very, very public French, uh, Parisian street.
For our last story, QAnon Promoting Congressional Candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene invited to final night of the Republican National Convention.
Now, remember, I suppose there was some kind of question before whether or not Marjorie Taylor Greene would be kind of isolated within the Republican Party because, you know, Republican Party leaders denounced her for bigoted statements she made before and she's a deranged QAnon follower.
You'd think they'd want to, you know, keep that shit quarantined.
But no, she was straight up invited to the last night of the Republican National Convention to watch Trump accept the nomination.
So it seems like she has been brought right to the fold before she even walks into Congress.
Yeah, I mean, Trump is a bit like Joe Ray Perkins, like his staff can do whatever the fuck they want.
He's always going to go rogue afterwards and be like, actually, I like her.
Yeah, right.
They don't give a fuck.
So that's just just a hint of where what's good with the Republican Party is going to look like starting in 2021, regardless of how this election comes out.
In his 20s, a man called Matt Fury moved to San Francisco from Ohio and started working at a store called Community Thrift, which sold secondhand clothes, books, records, and toys.
During downtime, Matt would sit and draw the piles of different toys the store would regularly receive.
Of all the monsters and animals and robots Matt drew, the frog was the most recurring figure.
But it was only in 2005, when Fury created a cartoon called Playtime on MS Paint and posted it to MySpace, that the frog would get a name.
Pepe.
Pepe and his friend Brett, another anthropomorphic chiller, mostly did stuff like eat pizza, paint, go to raves, get drunk, the stuff Matt was doing with his friends at the time.
By 2006, Fury was ready to publish The Evolution of Playtime, which he dubbed Boys Club.
Suddenly, Pepe and Brett were joined by two new characters, all of them navigating the post-college haze.
But we're not here to talk about Boys Club.
We're here to figure out how a frog from an indie comic book became the face of the army of pro-Trump trolls in 2016.
And for that, we must look to a particular strip, one where Pepe reveals to his friends that he likes to pull his underwear all the way down to his ankles when he pees.
Asked why, he responds to his friend, A couple of years after the release of Boys Club, a user uploaded a scan of the drawing to the image board 4chan.
For those who don't know, 4chan is basically just an anonymous message board where you can only post images or text.
It has roots in the nihilism and slacktivism of the 90s and early aughts and basically serves as a communal id for its members, who often self-identify as societal outcasts.
So an anonymous user posts Pepe taking a piss with his underwear around his ankles, saying, Members of the B-Board, where the image is posted, soon enshrine Pepe as a recurring presence in their memes, taking him on as a sort of avatar for their own emotional states.
At first mostly sad, Pepe came to represent a whole range of emotions for 4chan users.
He took on a variety of shapes and colors, becoming a true cultural feature of the image board.
Then, almost 10 years after he was created, Pepe went mainstream.
By 2014, an entire underground culture had formed around Fury's Frog.
For some, it had even become currency.
Rare Pepe's were traded for real money online.
These were unique and hard-to-find versions of the meme, like Homer Simpson Pepe, or Pepe sinking into the pasta bolognese, or Incredibly Sad Pepe with a Giant Bloated Face.
But it was also in 2014 that things tilted into a new phase.
When stars like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj posted Pepe's that year, It led to 4chan resenting the normies for stealing one of their favorite memes, the very things they had created to shield them with irony from the grey, drab world of normal people.
And so they went into overdrive to make Pepe horrifying and unacceptable to normies.
Soon Pepe was racist, violent, misogynistic, a Nazi.
4chan experimented until they found exactly the traits they needed to trigger those who weren't as irony poisoned as them.
Many of the users took pride in being alienated and in alienating others, referring to themselves as NEETs.
That's N-E-E-T, or Not in Education, Employment, or Training.
So why were these users so alienated?
To understand this, we must look at both their material condition and the state of media.
According to a 2017 study, later printed in Forbes, 78% of workers in America are living paycheck to paycheck.
Precarity is now the norm.
Compounding their material conditions, generations began growing up in a world increasingly manufactured by megacorporations who became better and better at co-opting and commodifying authentic counterculture, politics, music, and art.
With no sense of opportunity in their future, and a profound sense that all the normies were faking it, online users banded together to create impenetrable cultural fortresses where only they would know the rules, and anybody who wasn't a proud outcast would be relentlessly bullied.
It's often difficult for the average person to understand the insider language on 4chan, laced as it is with nihilism and slurs, calls for other users to commit suicide, and even illegal content like child pornography.
In 2015, as the United States hurtled along its late capitalist trajectory, many of these alienated chan users took a liking to Donald Trump, who had announced his candidacy for president.
He perfectly exemplified their nihilism, and more than anything, he seemed rude and unacceptable compared to all other politicians.
Everything the Chan users prided themselves on being.
So they started creating memes for Trump.
And the newly radicalized Pepe was soon dragged into the mix.
By October 2015, Trump retweeted a meme of himself as Pepe standing at a podium labeled with the presidential seal.
4chan rejoiced.
Later, Donald Trump Jr.
and right-wing political operative Roger Stone posted a meme called The Deplorables, which featured Trump alongside Pepe-fied Trump and a cast of other characters that included Alex Jones.
The host of InfoWars would later become deeply entangled in a lawsuit with Matt Fury after he sold an InfoWars poster featuring Pepe through his online shop.
In 2016, as the new alt-right movement grew, along with ethno-nationalist sentiment in America, Pepe became a symbol for white nationalism, xenophobia, and misogyny due to a vicious cycle between the media, the Clinton campaign, and the 4chan trolls who leaned into the bit.
After Trump won, white nationalist Richard Spencer famously wore a Pepe pin to the inauguration, a pin he attempted to explain to a journalist as he was punched in the face by a member of the anarchist, anti-fascist group Black Bloc.
In January of 2017, the Twitter account for the Russian embassy in the UK tweeted an image of Pepe in response to pundits calling for Theresa May to break off her government's relationship with Russia.
Matt Fury, who was really just interested in making indie comics and art, finally reacted to the horrifying debacle in May of 2017 by killing off Pepe in a comic strip.
He would later be revived in what Fury called a puff of marijuana smoke.
But it was difficult to halt the growing association of Pepe with the rise of fascist sentiment in America.
Aside from the lawsuit against Alex Jones, Matt Fury soon found himself suing the author of a book titled The Adventures of Pepe and Pete by Eric Hauser.
The story of a cartoon frog and his friend, the millipede.
Pepe and Pede was a vehicle for anti-Muslim sentiment.
A slave-owning crocodile called Alca was the villain, and he forced his small pink minions to wear hijabs in the story.
So I put a little picture in here for you boys.
Give a little zoom on the little minions.
Alca has a beard.
He's one letter off from Allah.
And I think you can clearly see what he's trying to represent in the minions here.
Eric Hauser lost his job as assistant principal at Rodriguez Middle School in Denton, Texas after parents and members of the school staff found out about his creative endeavors.
He later announced that, Due to the controversy surrounding the book I have published, I think it's best that I not serve as assistant principal at Rodriguez.
The students, the community, and the teachers are too important to me to subject them to all the negativity and disapproval resulting from this book.
To my colleagues, I offer my deepest apologies if this has affected them or their families in any negative way.
Yeah, there was an investigative piece about this where they uncovered the emails between him and the person doing the drawings, where he literally just sent her an anti-Muslim, like a crop of an anti-Muslim comic to base the minions on.
And he also, he like was like, yeah, you need to put the alligator in like a white robe and like he needs to have a beard.
And there was like clear stuff in the emails, even though he denied all of this, of course.
But yeah, it was obvious.
And members of the now-defunct subreddit The Donald disagreed with this negative assessment as well.
By the accounts of an editor at Post Hill Press, which published the adventures of Pepe and Peed, the book saw, quote, a flurry of activity on the message board.
Pepe memes had flourished there since its founding in June of 2015.
Eventually, the popular alt-right Twitter clone Gab used a frog as their logo.
They stopped doing so in September of 2018.
And in June of 2019, Matt Fury received $15,000 from Alex Jones after basically, uh, you know, InfoWars just decided to settle the case and then go on a big spree of like, oh, we've only paid him like 15k and he lost basically, which is false.
Along the way, Fury also managed to get neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer to take down images of Pepe.
Matt has stated that he would continue to, quote, enforce my copyrights aggressively to make sure nobody else is profiting off associating Pepe the Frog with hateful imagery.
And one thing I don't go into here is that the ADL ended up, uh, you know, declaring Pepe, uh, an anti-Semitic, like, symbol or whatever.
They'd be in a kind of battle that's explored in the movie where Matt Fury's trying to kind of argue that it, you know, that it's not fair.
Um, and there's, you know, there's interesting arguments, I think, on both sides.
It remains one, although there's the kind of caveat written into it where they say the majority of Pepe memes, like, this is not true about them.
But they also can't deny how often it's used and the ways in which it's used.
This is like the whole problem with sort of the, I guess, the semantics of the internet, which I think is kind of well explored in the movie.
It's like a symbol can transform into whatever people want it to mean if they're forceful enough about it and they create enough culture and art around it.
I mean, this is something that 4chan is good at, honestly.
Meme magic.
I mean, we're seeing it with QAnon right now.
It's being transferred into a culture and into a, I mean, we're seeing it with the, yeah.
But something they did with, for example, like the OK sign, where they said, it's like, oh, what we're going to do is that we're going to trick people into believing that the OK sign is a white power symbol.
And they promote that.
But then actual white nationalists started using it.
And then whenever people pointed it out, it's like, oh, this person is flashing this white, this OK sign.
And then they would jump on that person's like, oh, this person just made an OK sign, and you are freaking out about it.
The problem is that by the nature of meaning, if you trick people into believing something means something else, then that's what it means.
Meaning is sort of a culturally, mutually agreed upon sort of phenomenon.
I mean, that's the problem is that so much of the internet has become a battle for meaning.
Is QAnon a dangerous domestic extremist movement?
Or is it a group of patriots working to expose the deep state, you know?
What does it really, really mean?
There's this sort of like meme war sort of fomenting and sort of to try and you know
force that kind of meaning into the wider normie public.
One popular alternative to Pepe is what's known as a groiper which just looks like a fatter
smirking Pepe stroking his chin knowingly.
The word groiper also refers to the white nationalist activists who have gathered around Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi twerp.
Pepe also grew to be associated with kek, which originated in World of Warcraft as a variant of lel or lol.
Soon 4chan expanded its meaning, creating a fictional country named Kekistan and a religion named the Cult of Kek, which worshipped Kek, a dark and ancient Egyptian frog god.
Although it's difficult to say if Pepe can be reclaimed from the cultural abyss, a pang of hope came in August of 2019, when Hong Kong protesters used images of Pepe as symbols of resistance, without any of the far-right connotations that were happening in the United States.
Fury told a protester by email, When a female protester lost an eye to a police projectile, images of Pepe with one eye covered made their way through the furious crowds.
There's an excellent new movie about Matt Fury and his creation entitled Feels Good Man and we've got the filmmakers with us today.
Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini, how are you doing?
Great.
I'm a little hungover.
We did a Q&A last night.
We did a virtual screening with Fantagraphic Books and FilmBot, and then we did a Q&A afterwards with Duncan Trussell, and I got drunk on the Q&A, so I'm feeling hungover.
Beautiful.
Appreciate the honesty.
Yeah, you come on with a hangover or you don't come on at all is my policy.
Because, you know, if your brain is completely well, that's obviously not going to be good podcasting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So if it's swollen a little bit, you match ours a little bit more evenly.
So it feels less like, you know.
As long as, like, yeah, your skull feels the strain of your brain as it kind of pulsates against it, damaging itself potentially.
Who knows?
Yeah.
Well, I drank three liters of water, so the sponge is hydrated, but... There we go.
We'll see.
Yeah, I don't know if it all went straight to my brain or not.
So you boys spent a lot of time with Matt Fury and a lot of time studying Pepe to make this movie.
Before all the shenanigans, do you think Pepe was kind of a form of Matt in a way?
Like, it comes through in the movie.
Do you think that that's a one-for-one or there's some subtlety there?
Well, you know, Pepe comes from this comic book boys club that Matt drew kind of just for fun to entertain his friends in his mid-twenties.
And all the characters in Boys Club are actually like very similar from each other.
The comic doesn't have like a lot of like storyline.
It's kind of just like gag jokes for the most part.
I do think there is something innately Matt though about Pepe.
He almost can't help himself from drawing frogs.
It's something that feels like it's almost compulsive.
And he also described Pepe as the kind of little brother figure in like the House of the Stoners, that post-college kind of haze.
So do you think that, you know, Matt once played that role in his group of friends?
Well, I mean, Matt's an older brother, not a younger brother, but he did have a crew of guys in San Francisco that were all Midwesterners.
They moved out from Ohio together.
And they had this very jokey dance squad that they had together.
And they would show up at art events and do Backstreet Boys style choreographed dance events.
Kind of just as like party stunts.
You see the pictures of them dancing.
They look exactly like Boys Club characters.
They're wearing tight short shorts and basically kind of like Jane Fonda workout gear or something kind of.
And so, um, and each one of those guys had their own nicknames.
Um, there was like Dazzle and Moody Bitch.
And it was a little like funny crew of guys.
One of those guys actually came to Sundance, um, and hung out with us, uh, when we were there.
And, um, so Boys Club was kind of based on this very funny dance crew.
And actually one of the guys in that crew also was the manager at Community Thrift.
And Community Thrift was where Matt, uh, you know, started making Boys Club.
He had a job sorting toys in Community Thrift.
And everyone at Community Thrift is an artist.
It's in the San Francisco Mission.
Some people have like worked there for 20 years.
And so Matt would draw these comics kind of based on like Muppets and stuffed animals and stuff that he was sorting through working at the thrift store.
And so, you know, Matt seems like someone who has a kind of easygoing mood.
But in the movie, there's moments where you can really see kind of clouds troubling him.
And I mean, did his move change?
First of all, how long was the shoot?
And did you see a kind of arc in terms of your relationship to the project?
Or did Matt change along the way as well?
Oh yeah, we started in like November of 2017.
Arthur did his first kind of foundational interviews with Matt and Ayana.
So in terms of like a documentary shoot, it actually was a pretty quick turnaround in a sense.
It was about two and a half years.
Part of that was because We just knew the film had to come out before this election and part of it also was just that like the the sorcery of like storytelling itself just allowed us to make it in that amount of time uh with a with a good ending because you know that's often the difficult part of documentaries figuring out when when to end the thing
But like, yeah, for Matt's sake, for sure.
He had a pretty transformative experience.
Like all of us do in the middle of making a film.
Like you of course learn a lot along the way about yourself and about the subject matter.
But Matt, I think like what you're seeing starting midway through the film
is Matt kind of getting up off the proverbial couch and like taking some action and getting involved
and realizing that like, there's a difference between peacefulness and passiveness.
Right.
Whenever I would see Pepe on the internet, and I had known Pepe from Boys Club.
I always had this feeling of like, oh, shit, Pepe's lost.
Like, why is this comic done by my friend appearing on the Internet?
That never really made sense to me.
And so I had this sense of like, like I wanted to take care of Pepe or something in a weird way.
When we started making the film, it was really kind of born out of Observing Matt and seeing just how interesting this story was, and a story that I think a lot of people know the Pepe the Frog story, but I feel like even if you think you know the story, this film is going to break some new ground for you.
And then, you know, there is a part of me also that, you know, I think both Giorgio and I were obviously really affected by Charlottesville, and we wanted to make some sort of piece of artwork that would kind of cut through all the cultural noise in that time period.
And there were all these docs, like these kind of journalistic docs, made about that
moment.
And they just kind of, you know, made about the alt-right.
We felt like because this movie had Matt as a central figure, and he's such like a likable
person, such a relatable protagonist, and it's about this stone cartoon frog where you
can talk about these very serious things with this very absurd character.
And so I think we both just really got excited by the challenge of that.
And, you know, speaking of the challenge, I think you guys also rose to the challenge of attempting to show what it's like for a meme to exist and evolve online, but also what it's like for a person sifting through all this information and watching this culture and interacting with it online on the chans.
So I wanted to ask you, you use kind of animation to do that.
And, you know, we look at the kind of way we consume memes, I guess, through the animation.
Can you tell us a bit more about that?
My experience in film, you know, I didn't go to film school.
I never shot anything before.
Feels Good Man was kind of my film school.
But the thing I had done was I'd done motion graphics on some friends' films.
And they were always kind of like low budget movies for us, basically like just helping out someone, you know, and that's
how I met Giorgio.
I worked on his film, Owned, A Tale of Two Americas, which is a documentary about post-war housing policy in America.
And I was doing some animations for him and then we became pals.
And, and, um, I was also working on, um, this movie that my friend, Amy Scott made about Hal Ashby.
It's a Hal Ashby biofilm and bio documentary.
And so from working on the Hal movie, you know, I was in the timeline of the locked edit.
We were going to Sundance with it.
And I was like kind of like the last person putting it together and I just kind of had this like it made me understand movies in like a really like hands-on way.
It was like oh okay here's how you set up the building blocks and I felt like oh I could do this.
This is something I could maybe do.
So, but, you know, we also wanted the internet to feel really alive and emotional, and we knew that 4chan is, like, not very aesthetically pleasing.
It's a tan message board with tan blocks on it, or blue, depending on.
But, you know, we wanted the internet to feel alive, and we wanted the emotions that people were communicating on the internet to have, like, a real impact, so that the documentary felt like a movie.
And so all the motion graphics in the film were done by myself.
And then the animations in the film of Boys Club, the cartoons, I did with the staff of three other animators, Jenna Caravello, Nicole Stafford, and Kylan Woodrow.
And they really took on the project as like an art project for themselves.
Like they really absorbed Matt's comics, and it really just became like a collaborative effort to basically canonize those comics.
Right.
Yeah, no, I really appreciated just how much collaboration you seem to have with Matt as you were exploring both, I guess, him in this portrait and his family, but also his creation.
From the beginning, the idea behind the animations was, like Arthur said, was to canonize Pepe because our theory, and I think it's Probably, Drew, is that, you know, there's so many other famous comics that have been Nazified or turned into, you know, internet sludge like Bungebob or whatever.
But like everyone always understands that those are derivations of the original.
The issue with Pepe was that it was just this tiny indie comic.
And rather than having like a multi-billion dollar conglomerate court behind it, like pumping money into its brand, it was just math.
And so in that vacuum, the internet sort of filled the narrative of Pepe up as they saw fit. And so with our
animations in the film, what our hope is that maybe we kind of create this origin story so that now
people can see the memes for what they are, which in many cases are really fucking funny to be
honest, but like in others, they're not.
But like, at least, you know, the fuller story. In terms of like the animation process, though,
I would talk to Matt about movies a lot before we started making Feels Good Man.
And we would talk about like Werner Herzog and David Lynch and we have kind of the same taste.
And we realized that like for Feels Good Man to be a good film, Matt couldn't really have any editorial control over it.
And he was very gracious just to be like, all right, I'm going to trust you.
You make this.
But the one thing he did say about the filmmaking was like, make sure the animations don't suck because most animations and documentaries suck.
So I was like, OK, we can do that.
And so he did in various places like Pepe's head is a little too big in that animation or something like that.
Right.
And then towards the end of the process, like after we had basically locked edit, we did kind of go back and have him draw a couple sections.
Like there's this section that we really love that Kylan Woodrow, one of our animators, was working on that kind of shows Pepe evolving as a meme.
And so Pepe's like swimming through like a kind of swamp of ideas and then he kind of explains memetic evolution in this very funny flipbook animation.
So Matt did all of those drawings and then I did the animation of like Pepe sort of swimming through the computer windows.
And that was like just the way the three of us kind of vibed and collaborated on that section after we got the edit together.
I want to talk about something else that was pretty funny in the movie.
You had an archdruid come in to explain meme magic.
So tell us, how does one even find an archdruid these days who has like, by the way, is sitting in the movie like in a library with a long beard.
Like it's everything you hope.
A giant gorgeous library.
I was on a podcast talking about my last film that Arthur mentioned owned, A Tale of Two Americas.
And one of the last kind of questions at the end of that interview was, what are you working on next?
And we were trying to keep the project pretty under wraps.
So I was trying to be kind of vague about this thing about memes and Pepe the Frog.
And this fan of the podcast just emailed me and was like, Hey, you should check out this guy, John Michael Greer.
He's written a lot about memes and meme magic.
And so like I forwarded it to Arthur and we started reading his stuff and we're like, This seems kind of interesting.
And like, we honestly, like, the more time we spent talking to him on the phone and setting it up, he's like a very peculiar, eccentric man, as you might imagine.
But he lived in Providence, which is where Arthur went to school at RISD.
And so we were going to go there to film with him, but he didn't want us to film at his home,
which is the case for a lot of people.
You know, of course it's very invasive.
So we were trying to figure out where we could shoot it.
And Arthur quite brilliantly came up with, I'm going to butcher how to say the word,
but it's, can you try to say it?
It's the Providence Anthenaeum.
It's an old-ass library that's basically one big room, and it's supposedly where Edgar Allan Poe wrote his final works.
John wrote, he has a blog called EcoSophia, and he wrote a four-part article on Keck.
I was shocked by the amount of engagement that article had.
There were like 400 comments after that article.
And there had always been like kind of a card on our bulletin board where we were breaking the story about me
magic, because it's obviously something people talk about on 4chan all the time.
And we were like, how are we going to tackle this without talking to an alt-right ghoul?
You know, like, how do we sort of get into this in a way that feels unique and also doesn't
just kind of like focus on the trolling of mead magic, but really is able to talk about
Pepe as an archetypal character.
And so you, uh, you, you couldn't get Shingy.
Yeah, no, we, we, we found our own.
I mean, I think people should check out John's work because he is a unique guy, completely.
And we'd initially booked the conversation before the library opened at 10am.
So I was like calling John, which was always a little bit of a process.
I told him, like, all right, here's the call time, all this stuff.
And he was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
I mean, I won't be out of bed until at least 6 p.m.
or 7 p.m.
I was like, oh, OK.
And so it's like, oh, he's he's nocturnal.
Interesting.
And so then we had to, like, rebook the library for the night.
But it was perfect.
We wanted to take him at his word that he obviously spends a lot of time thinking about this stuff.
And we were really fascinated with his take, but like very Very early on in the interview like I started to get goosebumps because I knew that how special this interview was because of the absurdity of the story we're trying to tell like of course it takes an archdruid to explain it in like an actually cogent and intelligent way that suddenly like everything started clicking for me in my head about like how all this shit came to be and there's just something that you can't get from like a 4chan person or a journalist and I don't know I really thank him
Quite a bit.
Another fascinating interview in the movie was with the former data chief and strategist for the Trump campaign, a guy called Matt Brainerd, who was also, I noticed upon rewatching, he has an OAN badge.
So he has a One American News badge there.
I guess he was at the time you filmed him was working there in some capacity.
And so you get him to kind of, oh, by the way, this is the same guy who recently tweeted, quote, Kyle Rittenhouse is a patriot of the first order.
That's the man who murdered several people recently.
So great guy, this Brainerd.
But here's a clip out from FeelsGoodMan where I think basically he kind of describes how the Trump campaign used 4chan in a way as a kind of R&D department.
I think that President Trump is a real-life version of Pepe in the ability to elicit a reaction and to get attention and to express and to capture people's hopes and fears.
I was formerly the director of strategy and data for the Trump campaign, so I know as much, if not more, about how to use voter data than anybody else in the country.
During the campaign, there was an effort by 4chan to get other people to support the president by creating memes.
And then sharing them to, say, normies, to try to motivate them to support President Trump.
The inside terminology for this was sort of the Great Meme War.
It gave people who had never really been involved in politics before a way in.
The best memes that you see, the most effective ones, are just some person who has no power at all.
They have no influence, they have no money, they have no connections, but if they can make one good meme, then it can take off and go viral.
Then when you hypercharge it by having the president retweet it, you felt like you were part of this rebel group, this insurgency that was completely unpredictable and from where no one would have ever expected it.
How does an image like this end up on Donald Trump's Twitter account?
So the final image where they ask that question is a kind of anti-Semitic, like, Hillary meme.
And I'm just wondering, like, how was it kind of speaking to Matt?
This feels kind of unprecedented for me, kind of a breaking story within the documentary almost.
So yeah, do you have any deeper insight?
Did he say any stuff that you couldn't put into the movie?
The situation was obviously like in a lot of these situations where there's just an assumption of bad faith on all sides.
And like we came into it trying to be as honest as possible.
And luckily, you know, he trusted us enough to allow us to interview him.
But still, you know, he had his own recording set up to ensure that like we didn't take him out of context or, you know, I don't know, do a Vic burger on him or something.
Yeah, I mean, I shared with him, he's the only person that we talked to where I shared our questions with him.
And so I shared questions with him early.
And then when we actually did the interview, we just went off script, like he just wanted to talk.
And so it was a really interesting discussion that, you know, we'd always felt like for the film to be credible, we really needed to make the film feel like it was from like a real like primary journalistic perspective.
So So having like a Trump surrogate in the film was like important, you know, and he worked, you know, basically Matt story is, you know, he was, he was getting his MFA at Columbia, and he.
It was one of these, like, campus war moments.
He tried to bring Ann Coulter to Columbia University, and then there was this, like, dustup between, you know, the Young Republican Club or whatever, and then the rest of the student body.
And that was, I think, kind of the moment where he kind of became really invested in politics.
And so he then, I guess, just went down to Trump Tower and volunteered almost.
I don't know exactly how he got hired, but he was part of the Corey Lewandowski staff.
The description of him getting involved in the Trump campaign is also just very illuminating in terms of like how little organization it seemed the campaign had in those early days and he managed to, I guess, get pretty high up pretty fast over there.
And so he seemed, if not knowledgeable, incredibly prepared around Chan culture.
Do you get a sense this guy was into the Chans before he joined the Trump campaign?
I got the feeling that he was trying to seem more base than he actually was.
I think he probably would have gotten things from like R. The Donald and stuff like that.
I don't think he was like sitting on poll and shitposting himself on poll.
Though it is funny, we did get into like little kind of back and forths about like he objected to the way I referred to shitposting as maybe being inaccurate.
You know, obviously, there's a moment where he's kind of critical of Matt and Matt's ability as an artist.
And he was teeing teeing up for that, you know, like he was being a troll in that moment.
There was when he said that there was a part of me that that I was mad at him.
I was mad at him.
And then, you know, kind of after the interview, there was a little bit of like energy in the air between him and us.
You know, I mean, he has the recordings himself.
But what I was struck with was He would give you a reason, like he would give you a set of agreements that like, you know, the working class, like these kind of almost leftist critiques of government and society.
But then the solution for that was somehow Trump.
And it was always this really weird disconnect that seems to be so pervasive within this generation of Trump supporters.
I would love to continue to have a one-on-one conversation with him outside of Pepe about how he intellectually circles that square because so much of it is underpinned by really bad faith kind of logic.
You know, I do think, though, the point that he ultimately makes that is important for the film, and I think he's correct, is that memes have really democratized the way that people are able to participate in elections.
So you, as someone who is making memes that are pro-Trump, you are now suddenly part of the Trump campaign.
You are someone who is now an active participant, and that's very different than just sort of being like a passive supporter.
And so that was something that they were really able to do both through the rallies and then through online meme making.
So, you know, he is right that pretty much any campaign moving forward in order for them to be successful is they're going to have to have to hope that they can really get their user base to participate in the campaign by making things for the campaign.
And, you know, we've you see that play out all over, you know, certainly now with candidates like Andrew Yang or even, you know, Bernie Sanders, memes are a huge part of their supporters feeling as though they're like part of this groundswell movement behind the candidate.
But on the right, they have terms like the meme war, digital soldiers, and QAnon has now kind of, you know, is spreading and is encouraging people to do the same, to go out, to post.
And Arthur, you mentioned having an evangelical background and that maybe that gives you some insight on this.
Yeah, I mean, my take on it is...
Yeah, I was raised Evangelical Christian in Missouri, and it's kind of weird because the politics of Missouri in the 80s became the national politics in the 90s, like, you know, Ashcroft and Roy Blunt and all these people.
And so, I don't know, my take on QAnon and Evangelical Christianity is one that does kind of start actually in the early 90s.
There was this I'm curious to see if you guys have any thoughts about it too, but there was this kind of like fad as the Soviet Union was falling apart where all of these evangelical Christians, without the Cold War to fixate on, they really looked to the Book of Revelation to kind of tell them what was going on because the Book of Revelation has all these sort of like notions of like different wars happening in different places and
Who is, you know, what means what?
Who's the Antichrist?
All this sort of stuff.
While people were just, like, getting obsessed with Revelation again in the evangelical community, there was also this secondary obsession people were having with this notion of, like, spiritual warfare.
And there was this book that came out called This Present Darkness that was, like, exceptionally popular among evangelical Christians.
It's kind of like a Stephen King book where Christians are existing in this town and right sort of past the veil of of reality, there are demons and angels fighting for their souls in a very active way.
And Christians can then communicate to these angels and demons through their prayers.
And so it's really this kind of fantasy where Christians are actually fighting demons through their prayers.
And then there's passages in the Bible about the You know, spiritual warfare and wearing the armor of Christ in a variety of ways.
But this notion of angels and devils being very, very real really took off in the Pentecostal community.
And I feel like so much of the QAnon stuff Really kind of extends from this moment where the satanic pedophiles are something that I think people can actually really think about in their imagination because they've been imagining that Satan has been controlling people's like actions for all of these years and so now all of a sudden
You know it seems that like the Book of Revelation in some way is playing a part in the politics and normally like a cult would not normally the reality testing if you were inside a cult would um maybe make you question things but this is like a cult where the reality testing is off because ultimately like the President of the United States Who is the most powerful person on the planet is there kind of as your figurehead.
So your imagination is directly connected to the most powerful person on Earth.
I don't know.
That was a little freewheeling.
No, no, no.
It's not at all.
There's definitely a direct line, you know, and we see, you know, I think Praying Medic is one of the big figures inside the QAnon community, and he perfectly embodies that intersection that you were describing.
And so it is interesting.
It's this idea that In like this hyper militarized kind of America after the Cold War made everyone pay attention to nukes and how many weapons we have.
And are we, you know, competing with others?
And is our stockpile big enough?
You know, if you believe that like Satan's at work, it's just like the question is through who?
And I have to unravel the riddle the same way you got to unravel the scriptures.
This is also coinciding with a general trend, a low point in evangelicalism, right?
And I think before Trump, there was a real concern within the Republican party about what the marriage
between evangelicalism and its relevancy within American culture would be
with politics moving forward.
And I think Trump, as we see now with what's happened with Mr. Falwell at Liberty University,
like they had to make odd bedfellows, right?
And again, it's about circling the square.
It's about like, how can I be both a devout Christian and also support this guy who's so clearly un-Christian
in every single aspect of his life.
But I still wanna feel like I'm part of this savior culture, that I'm saving people, that I'm a warrior for good.
And like Q offers a really profoundly useful circling of that square, right?
It's like, oh, well then, yeah, maybe he's like married three times, has cheated on all his wives,
and is like a horrible person and probably a rapist, but he's saving the children, right?
He's actually, like, beyond... He's, like, a demigod.
We can't really judge him.
He's, like, holding a flaming sword with, like, wings sprouting out of the back.
I mean, it's exactly what Arthur was saying earlier, that just outside the realm of reality, there's a very real battle going on between, like, angels and demons.
But not just that, but the redemption story is absolutely fundamental to Pentecostal Christianity.
The MyPillow guy used to be a crackhead, and he talks about it constantly.
So, it's like, yeah, he did all this bad shit, but then, like, he totally found Christ, and now he's leading the digital soldiers in this new war that's both, like, a meme war, but also a hidden spiritual war involving demons, and it's all coalescing.
And also, like, kind of a real war being started.
Unfortunate.
Horrifying stuff.
As like a born-again teenager, the thing that would drive me the most crazy was there's this sort of notion that God is always in your head, that you were supposed to be having this dialogue with Jesus constantly throughout the day.
And I was, as a teenager, I would like, I would drive myself fucking crazy.
I would be like, I'd be like at a vending machine trying to figure out which soda to buy, and I'd be like, does Jesus want me to buy a Yoohoo or a Coke?
Like, what do I do, Jesus?
And there was a moment where I was like, I feel schizophrenic.
I have to turn this off because in order for me to find my authentic self, then this is not a communication that's helpful.
And I think there are people who are kind of self-torturing with this way of thought.
That's so crazy.
You just unlocked another memory.
Last night, Arthur unlocked a deep memory.
Now he's done it again.
When I was like 10 years old, I had this guitar.
That sounds like different.
Yeah, this is not a Q&A.
It was in a Q&A, not in a boudoir.
Not a hypnotherapy thing where he also has to kind of put hands on kind of thing.
That's the way I, that's, hey, that's how I direct my crew.
I get them all on the sofa.
I hypnotize them.
I turn them into automatons for my will.
No, but I was 10 years old and getting guitar lessons actually from a former crack addict turned born again.
And he would like try to kind of prophetize to me during our guitar lessons.
And both my parents are atheists and I'm not sure that they even knew he was doing that.
But I remember at 10, Not having grown up with religion.
He was like, yeah, you got to find Jesus.
Jesus is away.
I was like, well, how do you do that?
He's like, oh, well, you just got to let him into your heart.
And I was like, what?
Let him in your heart.
And I remember like being in the shower that night.
It sounds like a ghost.
Yeah.
I was like, come into my heart, Jesus.
Come in.
Like, is he there?
I don't know if he's there or not.
Is he there yet?
Fucking incredible.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's true.
I think we do swim in a kind of soup of religious extremism here in the United States, and 4chan is kind of acting as this weird id that takes extremist religious ideas and then kind of repurposes them into memes, which kind of cleans them and adds a bit of humor to the mix, even though what you're looking at is people who think the world is ending and we're going to have to fight to the death.
Yeah, it's the apocalyptic thinking in America, which I guess comes from our Puritan past.
But yeah, this notion that so much of conservatism just assumes we're in the end times anyway, that basically America is Sodom and Gomorrah, and therefore there is no reason to believe in colonialism.
Climate change because we're not going to be around for that if the world's the world's burning anyway in their
minds Like why deal with this stuff right now?
Because you need to have your you know, you need to be thinking about the afterlife
So we got a lot of the angel with the most wings and a biggest
Thanks for polishing the joke That's really terrifying.
Is it like, you know, there's a group of people who are cynically using this, obviously as a political tool to try to build coalitions who don't actually believe in it, but also in that deep cynicism, they're playing with fucking fire.
Right.
And like, I just have just to back up earlier about the tweet that you talked about that Matt Brainerd said, I'm not aware of that.
And I just want to be like unequivocal about the fact that even though he's in our film, Fuck that shit.
Like, 100%.
Yeah.
And it's for the most petty, stupid reasons.
It's just to, like, get likes.
You know?
It's like, what are we actually doing here, man?
Is it worth getting likes by supporting a double murderer before you really understand what the fuck happened?
On the right in America, there's this palpable thirst for authoritarianism.
It's out there right now.
And this is just an example of it.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I don't know where this pushes the Overton window, but it's not good.
And so fellas, I want to ask a question before we let you go.
You injected this story with a lot of hope about Pepe and the potential rehabilitation.
There's that beautiful Hong Kong moment where Pepe is stripped of all of his alt-right context completely organically and used as a kind of figure of the resistance for the young people or people of all ages that were in the street protesting.
And so do you still feel that optimism?
How does it, I guess, how does it feel now watching this movie right as it's coming out and I guess seeing what happened since?
Yeah, I mean it's a really difficult time to be putting a film like this out into the world but it's precisely why we wanted to make the film, right?
And it kind of dovetails into what we were just talking about.
Like at the end of the day the film We made the film as a kind of righteous rejection of this internet culture that has been seeping into our collective lived realities, right?
This idea that trolling has become mainstream and that our politics are built around, you know, like the RNC literally did not have a party platform, like no platform whatsoever.
It is purely aggrievement and anger.
And like you cannot build a society on that.
You cannot build a society on cynicism and I think like the fact that 180,000 people are dead of COVID is a perfect example of how you cannot build a fucking...
Organized society on cynicism and so this film in a way is a kind of reminder to people that you shouldn't feel beholden to the way that the internet like forces you into these kinds of conflicts.
You shouldn't feel like you're shamed out of your capacity for compassion and for acceptance and for empathy because at the end of the day like we're only on this earth for a brief moment of time and the people who are around you will continue to be around you and like this fucking fantasy of A racially pure world is a fucking fantasy the film essentially is then it's a reminder of love basically like that as cheesy as that sounds you shouldn't feel like it is cheesy right it is it is the only way forward I think there's an artistic heart to the movie a kind of collaboration between a bunch of artists who wanted to make art.
Beyond it being a good documentary and so I think that like the joy comes out in just this celebration of Boys Club and so much color and attempting to tell a story that is tragic but but with humor and with everybody on board and and and I guess feeling creatively satisfied with their contributions to it so I definitely felt that but Arthur you wanted to say something as well?
Well, you know, at the end of the movie, Matt says this thing where he's basically like, he has this phrase that he uses a lot.
And the only thing that seems true to me is that everything's going to change.
Like, Trump's not going to always be the president.
You know, planet Earth isn't always going to have people on it.
You know, who knows?
The positive notion of Pepe is the possibility that he can change again.
Hardcore happy place.
You gotta go hardcore happy.
You gotta go hardcore happy.
It's something that if you just kind of take it without the context of the previous hour and a half film, it maybe would sound like a little reductive or a little hippy dippy or whatever.
But when he says it, he says it with kind of this like very like straight face.
And you know, Matt struggles with being optimistic all the time.
Like, I'm someone that very easily seeks into pessimism, but I think my hope is that underneath that, that I do believe, obviously, that life is worth living and we have to do it.
People should go watch Feels Good Man, obviously.
Where can they find it?
Well, it's coming out September 4th digitally on Apple TV, Amazon, Alamo On Demand, and a bunch of other things you can find on our website, feelsgoodmanfilm.com.
We're also going to be, I can't believe I'm saying this, but we are going to be in movie theaters too at Alamo Drafthouse Theaters, wherever they are able to be open.
But you know, if you don't feel comfortable going, don't feel like you have to.
It is available for home viewing as well.
We're showing an edited version of the film as part of Independent Lens' season premiere on PBS as well.
So that's maybe a chance I would say like you watch the movie and you like it and want to like yeah that's October 19th and maybe you want to like recommend it to a parent or someone like that or you want to watch it with your family.
That's a kind of interesting time to do it and we've had to Edit it slightly, so you miss some of the fun stuff, but it's a good edit and we can't have any frog butt crack or Pepe peeing in that section, so that's all redacted.
You're going to be looking at a lot of 4chan posts redacted.
Just FeelsBadMan is this movie where he doesn't get to pee with his pants around his ankles.
We are now experts on how to censor cartoon urine, but apparently Drips of urine on the edge of a toilet are totally okay.
It's the stream that is the problem.
Of course, it's the sound.
In a way, the stream is part of the penis, if you think about it.
So, where can people follow you two online?
I am at Georgie Angelini.
On Twitter and Instagram.
And you can't follow me online.
That's right.
That's the real generation.
Please keep making stuff because our ability to pay attention to anything for sustained time is ruined.
So stay pure, Arthur.
Keep making good things.
Stay pure, Arthur.
Georgie's fucked.
But I have to say thank you for having us on.
We love this podcast.
It's a real pleasure to have you on and the movie is really good.
Support these these guys and and obviously go check out this this labor of love that a lot of people worked on in a really really cool and artistic way.
Thanks again.
You'll never look at a Pepe the same way ever again.
Definitely.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
A fully loaded deep dish pizza.
I'm alright.
I love all kinds of pizza.
Yeah, well that's good because that's what you have access to on the road.
