Groypers

an analysis

I’ve been thinking about Groypers lately, which is never a great mental space to be in. If you don’t know what Groypers are, I am sorry that I am about to tell you.

”Groyper” is a version of Pepe the Frog, a meme beloved by the alt-right but also widely spread in other contexts. Pepe famously became an icon of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, at the same time as he became a meme people who liked Trump posted online — memes are always multifaceted. Because of his proximity to major political discourses, Pepe is probably the most-studied internet meme.

Groyper is a fat Jabba the Hut-like Pepe variation. The information graphic below, which I found on a subreddit devoted to the Botez sisters, a pair of Canadian Chess live streamers (you discover a new highly specific internet niche everyday!) which explains the major Pepe variations well.

A crucial thing to understand about all the Pepe variations is that in the beginning, he was just a meme. But then the worst people in the world adopted him as a mass self-portrait (I’ve discussed a little bit how Wojak works this same way). Part of what called for mass self-portraits on 4chan was the platform’s anonymity and facelessness.

The Groyper variation originated at some point in the mid-2010s, and in 2019 he was adopted by a group of white supremacist neo-Nazis, led by repugnant streamer Nick Fuentes (here is Fuentes’ Southern Poverty Law Center page).

What interests me is the look of Groyper. The chin rested in the hands gives an impression of plotting something — and is an acceleration of normal Pepe’s chin-touching gesture. As a toad, Groyper is plumper and uglier than Pepe — and the name itself sounds gross, something a toad would croak. In full-body depictions, Groyper is often pictured as naked (while Pepe is almost always clothed). On top of the core Groyper body, different garments (such as Confederate uniforms) and attributes (such as far-right symbols) are sometimes placed, the way you would put different outfits and markers on a Barbie doll.

Another frequently-used Groyper image shows him walking in a group. This meme originates after the 2019 appropriation of Groyper by literal Nazis, and the posting context (to me) is menacing: a column of Groypers advancing on the viewer, each identical, each vaguely smiling.

Intertextually, this Groyper meme relates to the Alex Jones fandom — it is adapted from a mid-2010s meme showing clones of the rightwing conspiracist influencer walking out of a tunnel. (My archival source on this 4chan meme history is the record at Know Your Meme).

The use of Groyper as a mass self-portrait by this movement of internet users is telling for a few reasons. First, Groyper is inhuman: unlike Pepe, he is not entirely anthropomorphized with pants, shirt, and other attributes. Second, Groyper is bulbous and unattractive, with an eerily flat affect. Third, Groyper is laughable (he shares this with Pepe): to a normie audience, he is just a funny picture of a cartoon frog. Add to this the uncanny babytalk slang of the alt-right (“fren” for “friend,” “lulz,” etc.) and he seems darkly, ironically innocent.

Usually, we think of fascists as trying to look tough. They wear military uniforms, they shout, they think they’re better than everyone. But the Groypers choose a goofy fat toad as their profile pictures and identify themselves with him. The Jock-Creep Theory of fascism, as expounded by John Ganz, applies here. Ganz argues that 1930s German and Italian fascism were made up of two constituencies: jocks and creeps. Mussolini was a jock, with all his chest-thumping and bullying. Most of the Nazis were creeps: the weird neo-pagan stuff, the frustrated and marginal lives many of them led before joining the party, the oddness around sex, etc. In cultural memory, we recall mostly the jock side of fascism, but the creep side is arguably the more potent part of the mix.

The Groypers are creeps, and proudly so. They take pride in being ugly, opaque and unpalatable. Functionally, the Groyper label also serves to render them illegible: CNN can’t show a Groyper meme on national television, people just would not get it. It’s too disconnected from other discourses. The entire movement has a self-deprecating tongue-in-cheekness that just isn’t in the script for how anyone on the conventional left, center, or right understand politics. Like Trump, Groypers are always trolling. The online right radicalizes people by making them laugh and then appealing to their grievances and prejudices. The Groyper movement tells society’s most noxious and justifiably-spurned young people that it is okay to say and do hateful, disgusting stuff because they are among friends who make them laugh. But it is not okay.

In America today, the Groypers have many frens. Last month, Elon Musk announced he would undo Nick Fuentes’ ban on Twitter / X after an account called Goya Bean Groyper accused him of “working for the Jews” and called Elon a hypocrite for saying he was a “free speech absolutist” yet not allowing Fuentes to post. Under this kind of pressure from an anonymous account with a cartoon toad profile picture, Musk handed a megaphone to America’s most prominent Nazi and then went on proclaiming that student protestors on college campuses are anti-Semitic.

Fuentes was then on a Twitter Space (which is like a big audio-only chatroom, a live podcast thing — DeSantis famously announced his presidential campaign through one) on May 5th. The Space was a summit of the online right: Fuentes was joined by Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Sneako, and, bizarrely, a guy named Adrian Dittmann who sounds exactly like Elon Musk and has been gaining followers among people on the right thinking he is Elon incognito.¹ But anyways — 2.2 million people tuned into this Twitter Space, according to the platform’s own (sometimes sketchy) metrics. So it was a big deal online.

The Groypers are not the bugs beneath the stone you lift up and expose to daylight. They are the bears in the woods. The normie media is a guy who thinks he’s walking a dog but really he’s just dragging a collar and leash down the trail. The dog (the public) has run off to chase some squirrel (a meme, likely) and the bear of radical right misinformation is prowling.

More people are engaged in the discursive world of memes, conspiracy theory, and post-truth than are engaged in the discursive world of the New York Times. This is the way the world works now. CNN enjoyers believe they are eating at the adult table, but in reality they have simply wandered into the wrong restaurant. Everybody else is sitting down at the table where our public discourse is actually going on and feels horrified to see that the Groypers definitely have a seat, because Elon and the online right have given them one.

1. Dittmann maintains a position of strategic ambiguity on whether he actually is Elon Musk or just a guy using AI to sound like Musk, which seems key to his success. I honestly would believe anything at this point and don’t know what to think. If you are an editor someplace, I would love to do an investigative story on who Adrian Dittmann actually is. I hope someone is already doing one.