The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have surprisingly been defined more by the daily stunts & shenanigans of unelected government official Elon Musk than they have been by the actions of the president himself. Sure, Trump is signing a relentless barrage of hateful, unconstitutional Executive Orders that are threatening to crumble decades of social & economic progress in a matter of days. That was fully expected, though, especially if you paid any attention to the “Project 2025” agenda advertised during his election campaign. Musk’s overt, oligarchic influence on these Executive Branch actions have been just as nefarious but much more bizarre, especially as an extension of the failed meme humor of his current reign as the Villain King of Twitter. It’s not enough that Trump & Musk are wielding institutional power to reshape America with a straight-up Nazi agenda; they’re also irony-washing that Nazi ideology through several layers of internet meme humor, so that their above-board, bought-and-paid-for coup is read as a humorous prank meant to “trigger the libs,” not to welcome in a new, shameless era of American fascism. Between Musk’s “DOGE” branding, his juvenile obsession with the numbers 69 & 420, and the bar now being so low that his executing a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration now qualifies as a “dog whistle,” it’s clear that we’re living through America’s first 4chan presidency. Evil has never been so inane.

If you catch yourself wondering how, exactly, we got here over the last few years, I’ve seen no better explainer than the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man. A 90-minute history lesson on the memeification of a cartoon stoner frog may sound trivial in the context of America’s Nazi takeover, but Feels Good Man somehow does a better job explaining & contextualizing that far-right political shift than any other film I’ve seen – predating and overriding all of those QAnon docs that auto-populated on every streaming service in the years following the January 6 coup attempt of 2021. The stoner frog in question is, of course, Pepe the Frog, the breakout character from alt-comics artist Matt Furie’s cult series Boys Club. A soft-spoken San Francisco stoner who’s been drawing goofy frog doodles his entire life, Furie confides that Pepe is the Boys Club character he most personally identifies with . . . which is a brave thing to admit given the character’s eventual perversion and radicalization in the Hell pits of 4chan once it escaped the pages of his comic book. A single frame of Boys Club in which Pepe explains to his burnout roommates that he urinates with his pants completely lowered to his ankles because it “feels good man” was a funny enough image that it started getting shared on the internet outside the context of its source material and, as the movie argues, somehow snowballed into Donald Trump becoming the 45th President of the United States.

I have a general affection for Anthropology of the Internet documentaries that immortalize disposable online ephemera for cinematic prosperity, especially when they capture the sinister atmosphere of the Internet’s dankest dungeons (see also: the Russian dashcam compilation The Road Movie, the evil-clown sightings doc Wrinkles the Clown, and Jane Schoenbrun’s Slenderman doc A Self-Induced Hallucination). Even so, Feels Good Man does a better job than most at explaining how its own subject’s online virality led to real-world consequences outside niche meme forums. It chronicles Pepe the Frog’s transformation in the hellfires of 4chan from loveable frog to “the new swastika”, explaining how users who identified with Pepe as much as its creator had to force the frog to “go dark” to protect him from “normies” (i.e., women) who might identify with him as well. Because 4chan is an attention-economy culture that mostly traffics in “ironic” racism, this effort manifested as Pepe becoming a mouthpiece for Nazi rhetoric and an online dog whistle for alt-right C.H.U.D.s. Making Pepe as bigoted as possible became a kind of online game, and it gave real-world Right Wing ghouls a way to signal to the keyboard Nazis at home that the Trump-led establishment shared their values without abandoning their more buttoned-up, traditional voter base. That co-opting seems a little quaint now that Elon Musk is Sieg Heiling on an official government stage, but it was a major stepping stone that led us here.

The half of Feels Good Man that explains how 4chan memes created a new Nazi America is populated with all the expected demons of 2010s alt-right ascension. Pepe’s Nazi radicalization was directly inspired by Steve Bannon’s political strategy to “flood the zone with shit,” which has become the go-to playbook for the Trump-led Republican Party. During the infamous street interview when Richard Spencer is punched in the face by a protester, he’s explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin to a reporter at the moment the fist connects with his jaw (which the movie graciously repeats in several loops for our viewing pleasure). Pepe is even transformed into a direct stand-in for Trump himself, outfitted with a new smug facial expression and a Trumpian wig. Most critically, former Infowars blowhard Alex Jones is sued for copyright infringement by Matt Furie after using Pepe’s image on a fundraising campaign poster, marking Furie’s too-little-too-late attempt to reclaim his intellectual property from the worst people alive. The half of the film that’s about Furie’s astonishment & unpreparedness for the Internet’s hateful perversion of Pepe is adorably naive and populated with fellow alt-comics artists who are sad to see their friend suffer in this exponentially shitty shithole of a world: Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, Aiyana Udesen, etc. Their attempt to reclaim Pepe and save his reputation was heavily outgunned, though, since the opposition included literal White House occupants.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the twee preciousness of Furie’s pleas for good vibes and kindness as opposition against the hateful scum who’ve stolen & desecrated his art, but I appreciate the sentiment. I could not have sat through an exhaustive recounting of how 4chan “elected a meme as a president” and ushered in a Fourth Reich for the LOLs without a little kindness & levity. Being reminded that there are still sweet, reasonable people in the world who are oblivious to the deep well of evil on the other side of their computer screens was a calming counterbalance to the infuriating co-opting of meme culture to enact real-world fascism detailed elsewhere in the film. Five years later, it’s clear which side of that divide is winning the Culture War, but it’s also clear that they cannot create anything substantial themselves worthy of sharing & celebrating; they can only pervert, corrupt, and drain the humor & life out of previously existing art & language (which explains their more recent fondness for generative A.I.). As evidenced by the interstitial animations that imagine what it might be like if Boys Club had been adapted into a psychedelic Adult Swim sitcom instead of a Nazi dog whistle, Pepe deserved so much better than the hell-world we live in. He’s a cool frog.

-Brandon Ledet