(Photo: Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla)

Cartoonist Matt Furie—who is unfortunately best known for creating a friendly stoner frog named Pepe that somehow became a mascot for neo-Nazis calling themselves the “alt-right”—has recently begun taking steps to either regain control of his Pepe character or burn it to the ground and prevent anyone else from using his work to promote a racist agenda again. Back in May, he formally killed off Pepe The Frog in one of his own comics, and in August he shut down an attempt to release a blatantly racist and copyright-infringing children’s book that featured direct ripoffs of his own Pepe art. That was just the beginning of Furie’s new mission to protect his creation, though, with Vice now reporting that his lawyers are basically going to war with the “alt-right.”


Apparently, Furie’s legal team has sent cease and desist orders to several prominent members of the “alt-right”/neo-Nazi community, including Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and the people who run the infamous r/The_Donald subreddit. They have also filed Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests with Reddit itself, Amazon, YouTube, and Twitter, indicating that the use of Pepe The Frog as an “alt-right” meme is copyright infringement. The Vice story notes that uses of Pepe on unofficial t-shirts sold through Amazon seems to be down, but Spencer, Cernovich, and r/The_Donald are still using the stupid frog to try and mask how disgusting their thoughts and opinions actually are.

Creators using DMCA takedowns against online racists seems to be becoming a thing now, with Furie’s legal moves coming just over a week after indie video game developer Campo Santo decided to do the same thing to PewDiePie after he used the n-word in a video game stream. He was forced to pull all existing videos of Campo Santo games—specifically Firewatch—and will most likely be blocked from posting any others in the future. It remains to be seen if Furie will be similarly successful.