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ISTANBUL Handcuffed and naked, Melek Ipek endured a night of beatings, sexual assault and death threats from her husband that left her and their two daughters battered and traumatized. By morning, after he went out and came back to the house, she had picked up a gun and killed him in a struggle.

Ms. Ipek, 31, was detained after calling the police to the scene in the southern Turkish city of Antalya in January. On Monday, she went on trial, charged with murder and facing a life sentence in what is shaping up to be a politically contentious case for womens rights in the country.

Womens rights organizations have leapt to support her, saying that she acted in self-defense and had suffered years of abuse by her husband before a long night of torture. If she had been given health care and a psychiatric evaluation after the assault, she would not even be on trial, the Antalya Feminist Collective said in a statement.

For President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of a conservative Islamist movement who has championed the traditional family as the Turkish ideal, episodes like Ms. Ipeks case have become an increasingly explosive issue. His opponents accuse him of allowing violence against women to soar during his tenure, and women in his own party, if more cautiously, are supporting better protection for women.

Womens right groups have pointed to a sharp rise in deaths of women over the last two decades almost three a day occur somewhere in Turkey and the impunity of men charged with domestic abuse.

According to Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, 266 women were killed in episodes of domestic violence last year. Womens rights groups say the real toll is much higher, citing their own figures of 370 recorded femicides last year that is, women murdered by men because they are female and 171 cases of women who lost their lives in suspicious circumstances. On top of that are womens suicides that are barely investigated, they say.

They point to a steep rise in murders of women from 2002, when Mr. Erdogans Justice and Development Party was elected into office. Murders of women rose from 66 in 2002 to 953 in the first seven months of 2009, according to Sadullah Ergin, Mr. Erdogans justice minister at the time. The government stopped releasing data on murders according to gender after 2009.

In Turkey at least three women are being killed every day, said Berrin Sonmez, an activist and commentator on womens issues. More important, we observe that murders of women have become more violent.

Some of the brutality of recent cases amounts to systematic torture, she said.

Ms. Ipek appeared in court on Monday by video link from jail. She said she was sad about what had happened and offered condolences to her husbands family. Weeping, she added, But I want to tell everything that I have been through without being ashamed and scared anymore.

She said that she had been a successful student and had dreamed of becoming a math teacher, but that her husband, Ramazan Ipek, had sexually assaulted her while she was still in high school to force her to marry him.

On the night of Jan. 6, Mr. Ipek, 36, who worked as a driver, hit her with a rifle butt and threatened to kill her and their daughters, ages 9 and 7, firing the gun and shattering the window beside them, according to her account in the indictment.

He left the house in the morning and said he would return to kill the two children and then her. When he came back shouting an hour later, a still-handcuffed Ms. Ipek picked up his rifle and the gun went off in a struggle, she said in her account. He was killed by a single round at close range.

Lawyers and activists in Antalya have been dismayed that Ms. Ipek was detained. They are also concerned that the indictment described Mr. Ipek as a family man and charged that Ms. Ipek had chosen to shoot her husband rather than seek help from the police or neighbors.

Everyone is judging Melek right now: Why did she not call the police? Why didnt she accuse him before? Why didnt she get divorced before? said Gurbet Kabadayi, a teacher and activist at the Antalya Womens Counseling Center and Solidarity Association, which has offered support to Ms. Ipek and her family.

The indictment cites the fact that Ms. Ipek did not apply to the state for help or protection, or seek it from her neighbors, before or during the attack as evidence of her intention to kill him. She was ordered to remain in jail until the next hearing, on April 2.

But activists and lawyers say that the police and the judiciary in Turkey frequently fail women in need. Police officers often persuade battered women to return to their husbands, restraining orders are rarely enforced, and the courts often give reduced sentences for good behavior, which encourages a sense of impunity among perpetrators of violence, Ms. Kabadayi said. In one case, a Turkish court in 2017 acquitted two men accused of helping to kill their sister because of her Western lifestyle.

Political opponents and womens rights campaigners have accused Mr. Erdogan of encouraging the sense of impunity and the subsequent rise in violence by expressing conservative views on womens role in society and his increasingly authoritarian grip on the judiciary and law enforcement.

In principle, Turkey recognizes womens rights in legislation and in the Constitution, largely because female activists took part in crafting them, said Hulya Gulbahar, a lawyer who is a member of the Equality Monitoring Platform.

The issue is, she said, as we have seen in the Melek Ipek case, none of the clauses in those laws and the Constitution that are in favor of women are applied.

In his first decade in power, Mr. Erdogan was applauded for instituting democratic reforms as part of Turkeys bid to gain membership of the European Union. He also hosted and became the first signatory of the Istanbul Convention, the first international agreement to take on domestic violence, in 2011.

Yet a decade later, womens rights campaigners say they are fighting attempts from Islamists to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, roll back legislation like articles covering alimony and inheritance rights, and lower the age of consent from 18 to 12.

Unfortunately we are in a state of trying to protect what we already gained, Ms. Sonmez said.

As the issue of withdrawing from the Istanbul Convention came to a head last year, Mr. Erdogan encountered resistance from women in his own camp, including in his family.

The Women and Democracy Association, a nonprofit womens rights organization founded in 2013, of which Mr. Erdogans daughter, Sumeyye Bayraktar, is vice president, came out in favor of the Istanbul Convention. Mr. Erdogan appears to have shelved the idea of withdrawing.

The womans association is closely aligned with Mr. Erdogans Justice and Development Party and supports its Islamist ideals, emphasizing the importance for women of family and raising children. But its female members have also been supportive of justice for women in marriage and in the work force.

Nurten Ertugrul, a former party member who resigned after being passed over for a position as deputy mayor in favor of a man, said it was the groundswell of support for womens rights with the Islamist movement that had prevented the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. Conservative women cannot always speak out, but they encourage others to do so, she said.

If the Justice and Development Party had not been afraid of their own womens rage, and of the women who voted for them, she said, they would easily have withdrawn from the Istanbul Convention.

See the rest here:
Trial of Woman Who Killed Her Husband Highlights Domestic Abuse in Turkey - The New York Times

Gianluca Stringhini practically saw this coming. His lab had been studying hate speech and other malicious activity on social media platforms for several years, when they detected a spike last March in the use of words like Chinese and virus.

Stringhini, a BU College of Engineering assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Chen Ling (ENG24), a PhD candidate in his lab who came to BU from her native Shanghai in 2019, and an international team of researchers from the United States, China, Italy, Germany, Cyprus, and Iran, sifted large-scale data sets from Twitter and the alt-right fringe network 4chans Politically Incorrect board, called /pol/, from November 1, 2019, through March 22, 2020. They reported an explosion of Sinophobiaanti-Chinese slurs, threats, and conspiracy theoriesas the pandemic spread from China to other countries.

Researchers tracked a shift on Twitter to posts blaming China for the pandemic, while on /pol/, known for polarizing hate speech and where people can post anonymously, the shift was toward the use of more and new Sinophobic slurs.

In April 2020, Stringhini and the other researchers issued their findings in a preliminary e-preprint as a call to action, warning that the online anti-Asian rhetoric evolving around the pandemic could possibly lead to hate attacks in the real world and most certainly harm international relations.

Its now a year later, and with the Asian community grieving and fearful over the March 16 shooting deaths of six Asian women in Atlanta, Stringhinis and Lings study appears prescient. They are preparing to present their teams findings at Aprils annual Web Conference, the top academic conference for web-related research.

Hate crimes increased 149 percent for people in the US Asian community from 2019 to 2020, according to preliminary data gathered from 16 major cities by the California State University Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, in a study released this month. The first spike occurred in March and April 2020 amid a rise in COVID cases and negative stereotyping of Asians. The number of Anti-Asian hate crimes reported in Boston went from 6 in 2019 to 14 last year. Hate crimes in the United States decreased 7 percent overall, a decline that could likely be attributed to the pandemic-imposed drop in social interaction in public spaces, according to the study.

BU Today talked in separate conversations with Stringhini and Ling, who brings a background in psychology to her research, about the rise of Sinophobia online.

Q&AWith Gianluca Stringhini and Chen Ling

Gianluca Stringhini: Our results indicate that the explosion of the pandemic corresponded to a rise in Sinophobia on social media. We not only observe an increase in the use of anti-Asian slurs on Twitter and /pol/, but we also see the emergence of new, COVID-inspired slurs. We also find that the word Chinese started being used in similar contexts to the word virus as lockdowns started.

We focused on Twitter and /pol/ to be able to draw comparisons between a general purpose social network and a more polarized and hateful one. We find a clear increase in the occurrence of Sinophobic slurs on /pol/ after the beginning of the pandemic, when the lockdown was announced in Wuhan on January 23, 2020, and it kept increasing as the pandemic started hitting homefor example, when Lombardy started their lockdown in March. We also observe spikes in the use of certain Sinophobic slurs both on /pol/ and Twitter right after notable events, like President Trump referring to COVID-19 as the China virus. Although we didnt measure this, I expect similar trends to hold for other social media services.

Trumps actions definitely had an impact on anti-Asian rhetoric online. Anecdotally, we saw something similar after the Muslim ban. The issue with Trumps account was kind of unique, because Twitter hesitated to enforce its code of conduct on that account until after the Capitol insurrection, and this allowed some of Trumps behaviors that would have not been tolerated in the accounts of other Twitter users to go uncensored.

Generally speaking, the trends on the two platforms show similarities: at first they were considering COVID as a Chinese problem that did not affect the Western world and later shifted to blaming China for the pandemic. However, /pol/ is quite a different community than Twitter, and it is not surprising that they started creating new slurs as time went by.

Stringhini: Online hate emerges in various contexts. One project we are working on is related to COVID misinformation, and as part of that project we are observing several misinformation narratives that we may consider racist, blaming Chinese people for the pandemic and speculating that the virus is an actual bioweapon designed to attack the Western world.I think the online racism that we observe is a symptom of broader problems in our society which manifest with physical violence. The online and offline world are linked. Although it might look like online racism is more widespread because we are more likely to stumble upon it when reading the comment section of news articles, for example, it is actually a problem affecting people in their in-person interactions.

Stringhini: My biggest concern is the rise in physical violence against Asian people. It is unclear how much online hate results in physical violence, but racist rhetoric online for sure helps set the climate for escalations. The killings in Atlanta are a sad example of this escalation.

Stringhini: The two kinds of hate go together: while our study focused on measuring Sinophobic rhetoric in general, it is reasonable to expect that many individuals have been targeted by anti-Asian racism as well. The racist activity that we observed is filled with stereotypes, and while focused on China, it ended up affecting Asian people in general.

Stringhini: I think its a mixture; /pol/ is generally a racist place and casual slurs are commonplace. At the same time, this emergence of Sinophobic rhetoric can be explained by the theory of defensive denial, in which the virus was seen as a problem of China at first, and did not affect the United States. Later, the emerging pandemic was blamed on China, which fueled more racist rhetoric.

I think that conspiracy theories on the fact that the virus was engineered in China go hand in hand with blaming Chinese people for the pandemic.

Chen Ling: When people are anonymous online, theyll say things more emotionally. They use it to express their anger, the fear of the pandemic. In psychology, its called scapegoating. People need to find a scapegoat. They did this to the Chinese even before the pandemic. But COVID-19 was like a trigger. It allows people to express their fear and anger in wordslike a swordand put them online. I think deep down they feel quite vulnerable.

We want to know why people are doing thistheir motivations. People have different coping methods when they are under pressure. There is content moderation on some mainstream platforms, like Twitter, to lead people to a healthier coping method. But on the fringe communities, especially 4chan, people say whatever they want. I believe there are a lot of people who are having a hard time in their lives because of the pandemic, and they transfer it into hate speech, to scapegoating Asians for losing their jobs, maybe, or for not being able to see their families because of social distancing. They find people online to share their fears and anger with.

Stringhini: I think that the administration having a clear anti-racist stance is good, but I doubt that this will have a positive effect on communities that are already hateful and polarized. Online moderation could help.

Stringhini: I think it is important for institutions to take a clear stance against Sinophobia and show support to their members of Asian descent. The goal of our work is mainly to raise awareness about the problem, but more effective online moderation could help curb the problem.I think that each and every one of us must work towards making every member of the BU community welcome. Local support by peers can help in putting casual hate received online into context, and help people deal with it. We also must denounce any sign of racism that we may spot in our community.

Stringhini: My research has always been focused on protecting people online. After witnessing a rise of hate speech in the past years, I decided to focus on ways we can make the Web a safer place for everyone.

I think there is a serious risk for researchers in this space to feel overwhelmed and fall into rabbit holes, and this can have serious effects on their mental health. I think that people working on these kinds of projects should constantly check on each other and talk about particularly disturbing content that they might encounter. Taking breaks is also very important. With my collaborators, we joke that we should take a break every couple of hours to go watch videos of kittens on YouTube, but thats actually very good advice.

I am always concerned about the mental well-being of students working on these topics. We are trying to develop best practices about thisbeing open about problems and talking about it and taking breaks.

Ling: Professor Stringhini makes sure we feel comfortable. I am prepared for this because this is the research I do. I want to know how people think this way instead of that way and what makes them think this way or that way.

There is a social psychology book, The Nature of Prejudice [published in 1954 by Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, translated by Ling into Mandarin], which was developed from the fact of the victimization of Jews during World War II. It emphasizes the importance of such hate speech research. If we pay no attention to such behavior online, the situation will get worse quickly. And there will be physical attacks in real life.

If we do not prevent this kind of hate speech, things will escalate.

When I was reading those posts on 4chan and Twitter, it was like PTSD. I was in Manhattan in December, 2019, before the pandemic and I was walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was cold and windy. There were not many people on the street. This young boy shouted something at me. I dont remember what he said, it was something about I should go back to my country. I was so afraid. I kept walking to the museum.

I still remember that feeling. I never think I will be unwelcome by any people. In Shanghai, I can go anywhere I want. In America, people are always so nice to me. I heard about racism in America, but this was the first time I was confronted by this thing.

Nothing like that has happened to me since then, or in Boston. I dont go out much because of the pandemic. Im afraid of the cold. My parents tell me not to go outside around the time of the presidential election. It was chaotic. And I know these days there are attacks against Asian people. I see it on the news. I know that other minorities in the U.S. have more or less experienced this feeling that I do.

I feel sad about the attacks in Atlanta. I read President Browns letter about it. It is inspiring. Things will get better if we keep working to make our world a better place.

The rest is here:
BU Researchers Warned of Online Surge of Anti-Asian Attacks a Year Ago - BU Today

From 2019 to 2020, the Anti-Defamation League tracked 193 incidents of hate, extremism and anti-Semitism in Connecticut, ranging from a July 2020 murder in Hartford in which the accused, Jerry David Thompson, claimed to belong toan extremist movement thatbelieves the government has no authority, to putting up fliers and disseminating propaganda.

Last year, ADL reported the highest level of white supremacist propagandacirculated in the U.S. in at least a decade, and reader Gary Trahan asked ifthere are active white supremacist or domestic extremist groups in the region and Connecticut. That question received the most votes in the latest round ofThe Day's CuriousCT feature.

The "biggest perpetrator" of propaganda distribution in Connecticut is the alt-right group Patriot Front,said Steve Ginsburg, director of the ADL's Connecticut office. In one incident reported by ADL on Dec. 31, 2020, Patriot Front distributed propaganda in Jewett City that read: "One nation against invasion," "America is not for sale," "Not stolen conquered" and "Life of our nation. Liberty of our people. Victory of the American spirit."

Ginsburg said the ADL also has reported activities by Connecticut members of the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, both anti-government extremist groups thatare part of the militia movement.

Earlier this year, a group that identified itself as the far-right, male-only extremist group the Proud Boys attempted to donate more than 500 pounds of food to the nonprofit Hands On Hartford.

Related story: Sub base hits pause to talk about extremism in the ranks

ADL determines someone as "actively" involved in a hate group if they spread the group's ideology or help recruit new members, among other actions. While historically these groups convened in person, "now we are at a point where they can be sitting in basements and identifying themselves as part of these groups," Ginsburg said.

That makes it difficult"to know real total numbers," he said.

The actions taken by these groups and their members are not always violent, Ginsburg said, though those are the incidents ADL is most concerned about. Being active could mean planning a "banner drop" over a highway or a peaceful protest, he said.

"Our main point of concern is violence across the spectrum," Ginsburg said. "Most of the violence comes from white supremacist and what is called right-wing ideology."

Hate crimes in the U.S. rose to the highest level in more than a decade, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported last year.

The FBI also has seen a rise in domestic extremism nationwide in recent years, said Supervisory Special Agent Marcus Clark with the agency's New Haven division.

"On the domestic terrorism side, there's been anevolution away from the large group conspiracies that people often think of toward more of a lone offender attack without any clear affiliation to a group," Clark said."That makes it more difficult for us toidentifyand disrupt."

The agency relies on its partners, including state and local law enforcement agencies, and even nongovernment organizations and community groups, to help share information about suspected domestic extremists.

The internet and social media have helped to radicalize domestic terrorists, Clark said, given the speed and reach with which their messages and ideology can be disseminated online.

In Connecticut, Senate Democrats are seeking to create a new department within the state police focused on combating hate crimes and violent right-wing extremism.

Some of the perpetrators, but not all,involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol are accused of having ties to or expressing support for hate groups and antigovernment militias.

Ginsburg contrasted those involved in the Jan. 6 attack with participants in the "Unite the Right" rally that occurred in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Va., which was "almost purely a convening of extremists."

"That's what it was marketed as. That's who it appealed to," he said. "Even before they started marching, ADL shared with law enforcement half the people who were coming because we knew them because we follow these extremist groups."

ADL's investigators knew only a "small portion" of those involved in the Capitol attack, he said.

"A lot of them are not extremists. The question is: Did January 6 start a new type of extremist ideology called 'I'm just going to believe in Donald Trump'?" Ginsburg said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

j.bergman@theday.com

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Are there active hate groups in Connecticut? - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com

As the U.S. grapples with domestic extremism in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, warnings about more violence are coming from the FBI Director Chris Wray and others. The Conversation asked Matthew Valasik, a sociologist at Louisiana State University, and Shannon E. Reid, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, to explain what right-wing extremist groups in the U.S. are doing. The scholars are co-authors of Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White, published in September 2020; they track the activities of far-right groups like the Proud Boys.What are U.S. extremist groups doing since the Jan. 6 riot?Local chapters of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Groypers and others are breaking away from their groups national figureheads. For instance, some local Proud Boys chapters have been explicitly cutting ties with national leader Enrique Tarrio, the groups chairman.Tarrio was arrested on federal weapons charges in the days before the insurrection, but he has also been revealed as a longtime FBI informant. He reportedly aided authorities in a variety of criminal cases, including those involving drug sales, gambling and human smuggling though he has not yet been connected with cases against Proud Boys members.When a leader of a far-right group or street gang leaves, regardless of the reason, it is common for a struggle to emerge among remaining members who seek to consolidate power. That can result in violence spilling over into the community as groups attempt to reshape themselves.While some of the splinter Proud Boys chapters will likely maintain the Proud Boys brand, at least for the time being, others may evolve and become more radicalized. The Base, a neo-Nazi terror group, has recruited from among the ranks of Proud Boys. As the Proud Boys sheds affiliates, it would not be surprising for those with more enthusiasm about hateful activism to seek out more extreme groups. Less committed groups will wither away.How does that response compare with what happened after 2017s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville?Neither the Capitol insurrection nor the Charlottesville rally produced the response from mainstream America that far-right groups had hoped for. Rather than rising up in a groundswell of support, most Americans were appalled some so much that they have abandoned the Republican Party.Additionally, right-wingers have been hit hard by the post-insurrection actions by large technology companies like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google and Amazon. They took down far-right group members accounts and removed right-wing social media platforms, including permanently blacklisting Donald Trumps Twitter account and temporarily blocking all traffic to Parler, a conservative social media platform. Those steps are more significant than earlier moderation and algorithm changes those companies had undertaken in previous efforts to curb online extremism.Another major difference is the lack of regret. Nobody on the right wanted to be associated with Charlottesville after it happened. Figureheads of the far right who had initially promoted that rally saw the negative public reaction and distanced themselves, even condemning the Unite the Right rally.After the insurrection at the Capitol, their response was different. They did not split and blame other right-wing groups. Instead, conservative and extreme-right circles have united behind a false claim that they did nothing wrong, and alleged, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that left-wing activists assaulted the Capitol while disguised as right-wingers.Are extremist groups attracting new members?Some members have left extremist groups in the wake of the Jan. 6 violence. The members who remain, and the new members they are attracting, are increasing the radicalization of far-right groups. As the less committed members abandon these far-right groups, only the more devout remain. Such a shift is going to alter the subculture of these groups, driving them farther to the right. We expect this polarization will only accelerate the reactionary behaviors and extremist tendencies of these far-right groups.Right-wing pundits and conservative media are continuing to stoke fears about the Biden administration. We and other observers of right-wing groups expect that extremists will come to see the events of Jan. 6 as just the opening skirmish in a modern civil war. We anticipate they will continue to seek an end to American democracy and the beginning of a new society free or even purged of groups the right wing fears, including immigrants, Jewish people, nonwhites, LGBTQ people and those who value multiculturalism.We expect that these groups will continue to shift more and more to the extreme right, posing risks for acts of violence both large and small.Have far-right extremists views toward the police changed?With a Democratic administration and attorney general, the far right will no longer view federal law enforcement agencies as friendly, the way they did under the Trump administration. Rather, they view the police as the enemy.Even before Joe Biden took office and the Republicans officially lost control of the U.S. Senate, the Capitol riot showed this divide between right-wing extremists and police. A Capitol Police officer was assaulted with a flagpole bearing an American flag, and some members of the mob were police officers and military personnel. Many more were military veterans.Its not clear what this different view of law enforcement means for police officers, active-duty military and veterans who are members of right-wing groups. But we anticipate that only those who are most zealously committed to far-right causes will remain active. That, in turn, will push those groups even farther to the extreme right.Has anything changed for militias since Biden has become president?In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning about the growing membership in far-right groups, including their active recruitment of military veterans. Shortly after the report was released, Republicans in Congress pushed for the report to be retracted and for dramatically reducing the federal effort to monitor far-right groups in the U.S. This permissive atmosphere allowed far-right groups to grow and spread nationwide.The Trump administration further served far-right groups by failing to pay out federal grants for grassroots counterviolence programs, by refusing to help local law enforcement agencies with equipment or training to deal with these groups, and by routinely downplaying the violence perpetrated by these white power groups. Essentially, far-right groups were unpoliced for the past decade or more.But that approach has ended. Merrick Garlands appointment as Bidens attorney general is a big signal: In his career at the Department of Justice before becoming a federal judge, Garland supervised the investigations of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing.These were two of the most noteworthy acts of far-right domestic terrorism in the nations history. Garland has said that he will make fighting right-wing violence and attacks on democracy major priorities of his tenure at the head of the Justice Department.In January, Canada designated the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups as terrorist organizations, which puts pressure on U.S. law enforcement to reconsider how they evaluate, investigate and prosecute these extremist groups. Beyond law enforcements treating these far-right groups like street gangs, there are also laws in place to combat violence associated with domestic terrorism.It appears that U.S. prosecutors may finally begin to take seriously the violent actions of Proud Boys, especially as more and more members are being charged with coordinating the breach of the U.S. Capitol Building.But as police power comes to bear on these violent right-wing groups, many of their members remain at least as radicalized as they were on Jan. 6 if not more so. Some may feel that more extreme measures are needed to resist the Biden administration.The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

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Commentary: After the insurrection, America's far-right groups get more extreme - pressherald.com

*Pepe The Frog is a meme frog. He is the mortal form of Lord Kek and the leader of Kekistan. PepeAllies

The Kekistanti people

Enemies of Kekistan

Upon the rise of his followers to form a nation, Lord Kek decided he should directly influence his followers, help them grow and flourish. As such, he took on a mortal form. A frog known as Pepe, the undying King of Kekistan. He led his people through numerous battles and wars, helping them through hardship with his divine powers. However, Pepe was an unstable entity. Like the Kekistani bordered the line of dank and cringe, Pepe bordered Meme God and Devil Entity. Pepe/Kek remains sane for the moment, though those who know his secret are wary he could snap. Regardless, Pepe is an influential meme leader and not to be underestimated. He is Kekistan's representative at the United Memes, and seems to truly care for his people. Crazed God or not, there is some aspect of Pepe that can be....respected.

During the Great Mongo-Kekistan War, Pepe led a massive force to attempt to retake parts of the Mongoose Empire, but was beaten back by the combined forces of Megarton and High God King Overlord Sashank. Since then, he has not ventured out of his lair, except to attend meetings of the United Memes or meet with his generals.

Since you found this

Link:
Pepe The Frog | Derp Cat Wiki | Fandom