He points to Otpor, the Serbian pro-democracy protest movement that supported efforts to overthrow Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 through pranks and street comedy. For years, critics of Chinese President Xi Jinping have shared images of Winnie the Pooh to signal their opposition online, where more bold-faced criticism could face censorship.<\/p>\n
Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have also embraced Pepe, unaware of his political affiliations in the US.<\/p>\n
“Of course, authoritarians don’t like to be laughed at,” he says. This kind of symbolism works because “without even giving a speech, you are undermining the authoritarian script”.<\/p>\n
At home in Oregon, a group of Portlanders doubled down on the viral fame and banded together to form “Operation Inflation”, which collects and distributes inflatable costumes to protesters.<\/p>\n
They started a website where supporters can donate $35 to buy suits “for community members to wear at ICE protest sites to help deflate (pun intended) the tensions surrounding protests”.<\/p>\n
Brooks Brown, a co-founder of Operation Inflation, says the point is to “shift the story that’s being told”, by the Trump administration, that all protesters are part of a violent mob.<\/p>\n
“Our job is to build a different stage, and to force them onto ours,” he says.<\/p>\n
Brown says the inflatables bear similarities with the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, when protesters would often dress in their Sunday finest and sit motionless as they were harassed by counter-protesters and arrested by aggressive police.<\/p>\n
Pepe, Mr Brown says, “was a fascist symbol for 4chan. And now we’re being reclaimed. Feels good man.”<\/p>\n
By late October, his group had bought more than 350 outfits, and is planning a “pipeline” to send supplies to other cities where inflatables have been used at protests.<\/p>\n
Once synonymous with the right, the Portland frog has now been sometimes dubbed the “Antifa Frog” online – referencing the decentralised, leftist movement that opposes far-right causes and has been designated a domestic terrorist group by Trump.<\/p>\n
Memes depict him fighting Pepe, two frogs battling for national attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He points to Otpor, the Serbian pro-democracy protest movement that supported efforts to overthrow Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-659255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115795801268734912","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}