Eris/Pepe mash-up ripped from the pages of The Pepe Report.
One of the crazier rabbit holes to emerge from the 2016 Presidential campaign was the viral meme of a frowning frog named Pepe, who in the election’s aftermath all of the sudden got this shit eating grin on his face (his frown turned upside down) and MAGA cap planted on his head.
For those unfamiliar with Pepe the Frog (aka Kek), there’s a whole mythology around this meme that’s indeed quite mind warping. Long story short, Pepe became a sigil for 4chan trolls to focus on; a sort of mental image for a magickal working. It’s a story filled with more sordid synchronicities than you can shake a magick stick at, all of which ostensibly got Trump elected.
A good overview of the Pepe mythos can be found here.
Pepe also had a hand (“some people are saying”) in creating—or giving some oomph to—the movement now identified as the Alt-right, which pretty much appeared out of nowhere not so long ago. And a faction of the Alt-right are those who frequent Reddit, 4chan and the deeper regions of the dark web doing whatever it is they do in dim-lit basements, their 400 pound fat guy faces illuminated by the eerie glow of computer screens. This, theoretically, included birthing Pepe into pop culture like some kind of right wing Rosemary’s Baby.
Some of the first articles on Pepe and the Cult of Kek linked the meme to Discordianism.
Many Cult of Kek enthusiasts were quick to make this Pepe/Discordian association, which is way off base IMHO, at least in terms of how I view the Early Discordian practice of Operation Mindfuck (OM).
Just the same, these Pepe/Discordian comparisons could be considered valid in a limited sense, or as its writ in Principia Discordia:
“All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”
Discordianism (such as it is) has greatly morphed over the years. Some who nowadays identify themselves as Discordians bring all sorts of divergent political baggage to the party—left, right, or off the map—hence the old adage: “We Discordians must stick apart!” In other words, there’s no formal agreement as to what a Discordian is—let alone what the meaning of “is” is— other than Discordians often agree to disagree—or agree on some things, but not so much on others. Hence what might be true for one is false for another. Much of what presents itself these days as Discordianism (ala social media) comes in the form of the sort of shitposting that Discordian founder Greg Hill would have no doubt recoiled from in horror.
Some have also compared Pepe-ism to Chaos Magick, which itself is tangentially linked to Discordianism. The Early Discordians, for the most part, were never all that much involved in ritual magick—chaotic or otherwise—except of course for Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), easily the most famous Discordian of all who dabbled in various forms of ritual magick.
There was a network of chaos magicians that emerged in the 1970s (many of them influenced in part by RAW) who were likewise into Quantum Physics theories in terms of influencing physical reality and consciousness using memes akin to sigils; for instance, the Discordian practice of focusing on the number 23, and the more you concentrated on it, the more it would manifest, the same sort of mindfuck more recently observed with the whole 11:11 phenomenon. Seek and ye shall find…
These earlier Discordian practices
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page. (ala the 23 Enigma) were conducted on an informal and often individual basis or through small group experiments—or simply by those who stumbled upon RAW’s Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1—all of this occurring long before the Internet was but a glint in Al Gore’s eye.
Back in the day, it was word-of-mouth-high-weirdness; the memes spread gradually over time in contrast to the Internet age information overload where a simple meme (posted to social media) can spread like wildfire over the course of a few hours.
To this end, the Cult of Pepe is, in essence, a sort of chaos magick working that took some elements from all of the above and projected them across a cyber landscape gone wild, making The Illuminatus! Trilogy look comparatively like a Sunday stroll through the park.
Another Pepe/Discordian connecting point concerns elements of the hacker community (aligned with Pepe) pushing Operation Mindfuck “fake news” memes as a magickal working ostensibly designed to alter physical reality or create a new paradigm; in essence planting a weird seed to see how it will sprout throughout culture and grow tentacles.
With the early Discordians such OM endeavors took the form of injecting into pop culture a fake or alternative Illuminati mythos that was partly true and partly false, fact mixed with fiction which—in turn—created a viral mutation of how we now, as a culture, collectively view the Illuminati.
When Hill, Kerry Thornley, Wilson et al. first launched their OM Illuminati conspiracy, it was uncertain (at least to those of us now on the outside looking back) whether they had any sort of end game in mind—or if OM was all just good fun.
Conversely, the Cult of Kek’s modern and—some might say—twisted form of OM took stories that were partly true—like John Podesta’s real emails—and OM’d them into such beasties as Pizzagate, which is—in essence—a mash up of several pre-Internet conspiratorial yarns, including the Hillary-satanic-lesbian story that was first rolled out in one of the weirder mind control/conspiracy books of the early 1990’s, Cathy O’ Brian’s Trance: Formation of America (archive.org TXT file / Amazon).
Add to that secret tunnels below Comet Pizza—a throwback to the alleged McMartin Pre-School tunnels where children were purportedly transported and used as sex slaves during the height of the Satanic Panic craze—all of which has been recycled into this lurid story of a modern day pizza parlor gone bad!
So the modus operandi was similar (re: Cult of Kek vs. the Discordian Society’s OM) where you take factual elements and conflate them with misinformation/disinformation thus turning these stories into viral Molotov cocktail’s launched into the body politic, the end design to burn it all to the ground—or at least deliver a fully loaded monkey wrench into the works and gum the fuck out of The System.
Perhaps the foremost Pepe chronicler these days is a fellow named A.T.L. Carter who maintains a twitter page called—appropriately enough—“The Pepe Report” where I recently posited that perhaps this whole Pepe craze was on its last (frog) legs. In response, one agitated pro-Pepe commenter suggested I was nothing more than a worthless sack of you know what (ouch, that hurt!) and that if we sorry lot of Discordian losers were as adept as the Cult of Kek in the art of doxing, trolling, and shit posting, we would have elected our very own Discordian President by now instead of talking smack about poor little Pepe.
The agitated tweeter in question also posted a mash-up of Eris meets Pepe—green skin and all—which I must admit is pretty cool and sort of reminded me of an Orion slave girl, and for these reasons we have selected her our Eris of the Month!
In any case, I immediately screen-capped this Eris/Pepe mash-up because you know how these things have a tendency to disappear. This turned out to be a wise move because shortly afterwards our Green Skinned Lady of the Golden Apple was deleted for some reason—by the agitated tweeter in question, I presume—or maybe A.T.L. 86’d it because he didn’t want his Pepe Report devolving into a flame war about who is the superior agent of chaos: Pepe or Eris?
Just the same, A.T.L. referred to me as a “cuck” for my crack about Pepe’s possible demise, which I guess suggests that being called a cuck isn’t quite as bad as being called a worthless sack of stuff.
Whatever the case, A.T.L. seems like an alright (A.L.T. right?) guy, the cuck comment notwithstanding. Of course, I wasn’t entirely clear what “cuck” meant at the time, aside from being a popular Pepe enthusiast putdown.
‘Cuck’, it turns out—after some master class googling—has multiple meanings related to ‘cuckold.’ However, the more recent Breitbartian application (often employed by that creepy Milo guy) seems to describe your average limp-wristed liberal types who get their jollies letting black men do it to their wives while voyeuristically watching from the sidelines. (For further information on the meaning of “cuck” consult your pineal gland and/or Roger Stone.)
Discordian social media forums have been infiltrated—to a certain extent—by this Cult of Pepe crew with the sort of shitposting that some consider hip cutting edge political incorrectness. This type of political incorrectness—it could be argued—eventually led to Milo’s (whatever his last name is) fall from grace due to remarks made on the Joe Rogan Show implying he was cool with underage gay sex—comments that turned out to be a bit much for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) organizers who had scheduled our favorite Alt-right rock star for a speaking gig at their shindig, but thought better of it once his creepy comments made the rounds of social media. Soon after, CPAC withdrew their invite to Milo, who in short order got the boot from Breitbart, as well, probably because it’s kind of hard to promote cheesy Pizzagate stories when your fair-haired Aryan boy is endorsing the very same illicit activities that John Podesta was supposedly party to at Comet Pizza!
Speaking of CPAC, one of the more Discordian acts I’ve seen of late was perpetrated by a couple young pranksters who had a bunch of Russian flags made up with “Trump” printed on them, and then passed them out to clueless CPAC participants entering the event who either weren’t smart enough to know better—or just plain didn’t care that they were waving around Trump/Russia flags. When CPAC organizers caught wind of this gag, they sent their goons into the crowd to retrieve them, but even then some of the recipients refused to hand-over their prized blue, white, and (commie) red banners, the treasonous bastards.
Afterwards, the two pranksters who pulled off this jake were interviewed outside the event, employing mock Russian accents.
Приветствие Эрис!
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.
