When he first appeared the Philadelphia Flyers mascot was merely an oddity. But he quickly became a part of the internet’s culture wars

Last week, a headline on neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer read like something from an alternate universe: “Alt-Right Icon Gritty Seeks to Follow Adolf Hitler’s Footsteps and Become Time’s 2018 Man Of The Year”. It was at least the third piece the site has posted in the last month proclaiming Gritty – the googly-eyed, giant, orange, hockey-playing monster mascot for the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers – as a symbol of the far right.

As it happens, the Daily Stormer is playing catch-up, in reality trying to re-appropriate Gritty as a symbol – to take him away from their ideological opponents on the left. Because, you see, Gritty was already a partisan. Gritty, this smiling muppety nightmare on skates, is antifa.

To learn of how innocently Gritty’s story began is to experience mental whiplash. As the son of the Flyers chief operating officer, Shawn Tilger, watched the on-ice antics of other NHL mascots at last year’s All Star game, he asked his dad why Philadelphia didn’t have a participant. The Flyers hadn’t had a mascot since 1976. His name had been Slapshot, and he was a one-season wonder. Forty years later Tilger wondered if it wasn’t perhaps time for another try.

Gritty (@GrittyNHL) Sleep with one eye open tonight, bird. pic.twitter.com/wLmGBa0Oyh

When Gritty was unveiled in September, the immediate reaction was horror and revulsion (including from this very publication). But within hours, the tide began to turn, thanks largely to Gritty’s early Twitter activity – particularly when he told cross-state rivals the Pittsburgh Penguins to “Sleep with one eye open tonight, bird” – as well as his instant visual meme-ability. The gigantic face, the wide mouth set in a permanently crazed smile, and the massive swirling eyeballs made Gritty a grotesque underdog in a social media world of aesthetic perfection. He is hideous, yes, but one cannot help love him for it – recalling for many hockey fans the historically rough-and-tumble Flyers, or, for others, the city of Philadelphia itself and its famously aggressive sports fans. His entrance to the Flyers’ first home game of the season further solidified his status as a sympathetic destructive force: he came in on a wrecking ball.



Then, very quickly, Gritty’s relationship to hockey, or sports, fell by the wayside. Into the mix, another underdog cause attached itself to Gritty: the political left.

A few days after Gritty first appeared, Jacobin magazine, a socialist publication, tweeted simply: “Gritty is a worker.” Whether it was this tweet which sparked what has come since, or whether Jacobin caught on very early to Gritty’s leftist memeification is difficult to ascertain, but in the weeks since, Gritty’s image has been used by anti-fascist protesters, anti-Trump protesters, and in countless left-wing memes.

Fellow Worker Gritty (@FellowGritty) But, whatever the reason, Grit's heart or Grit's wigs,

Gritty stood there on Christmas Eve hating the pigs.



Then he growled, with his Gritty fingers nervously drumming,

"I must find some way to keep capitalism from continuing!"#1u #Gritty pic.twitter.com/oIjASjfxUK

Among other things, Gritty has been seen anticipating the collapse of the state, stealing Christmas from “capitalist pigs” and threatening to nationalize manufacturing. Gritty has also been recognized by the city of Philadelphia as an anti-fascist, and, indeed, advocating for his place as Time magazine’s person of the year.

But of all the memes, two images in particular are perhaps the source of the Daily Stormer’s efforts to claim Gritty as their own. Both depict Gritty triumphantly conquering Pepe the Frog, the alt-right symbol that proliferated online in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. In one, Gritty beats Pepe with the caption “Good night, alt-right.”





In the other, Pepe’s fate is even less ambiguous: Gritty decapitates Pepe with a guillotine – an image clearly echoing the original Jacobins. “Any last words?” Gritty asks Pepe in the first frame of the four-part comic. “So much for the tolerant left,” Pepe replies, his head below the blade. Gritty says nothing, and, after a pause, chops Pepe’s head off.

It’s nice to see Gritty – and the left – win one back over the vile Pepe and his bigoted fans. And this last image is genuinely funny. But reinserting into the collective imagination the idea that a guillotine is an appropriate form of justice might surprise even sympathetic leftists, if for no other reason than the impact simplistic memes can have. Pepe is the most prominent example of how memes play a role in shaping modern political discourse, but it’s not the only one, and it’s not the only one that’s worked. It’s why so many groups, including political parties, on both the left and right spend so much time creating them and trying to make them viral. But that virality means memes can get quickly out of control. Guillotines are funny – until they’re not.

As the Thanksgiving weekend approached, the New York Times unveiled a tool it called the Angry Uncle Bot, a chatbot that allowed people to practice having a political conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table. The bot encouraged users to ask questions of their familial political challengers, rather than engage immediately in a battle of talking points. In short, it suggested people try empathy.

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There’s fat chance much of that will carry over into the Gritty meme war. Those on the left would, probably with justification, argue that Gritty’s decapitation of Pepe is only a kind of online justice, rather than a suggestion of offline action; simply the murdering of a meme that was so toxic it deserved to die. And maybe fair enough. Besides, whoever doesn’t want Gritty to win that fight isn’t likely someone capable of reasonable political conversation, not to mention empathy, no matter how much practice you’ve had with a chatbot.

But examining either the Gritty v Pepe meme, or the Times’ chatbot conversation guide, as pure jokes, or even as more profound symptoms of a deeply divided political sphere might only get us so far in understanding what they really mean – now, and for the future. More interesting is to wonder whether they are also, in part, the cause of the division.

We are tending more and more to default to technology as a mediating force, as a way to put ourselves at arm’s length from reality – and one which allows us to create another, more comfortably simplistic one. In this case it’s become a middle ground in which to wage ideological wars that otherwise might not exist, simply because they would be impossible to conduct face-to-face.



Gritty v Pepe is, for those engaged, a romp. Hell, I’ve joined in. Gritty is a lot of fun, as far as it goes – a kind of political sideshow lark. But, in time, we risk these meme wars becoming the main event. That, one day, democracy is purely about who has the funniest cartoon mascots. No conversations at all, even with bots. Just memes.