A college in California recently got the hard arm of Johnny Law involved in an incident involving a cartoon frog named Pepe.
Like a lot of institutions of higher education, Folsom Lake College, a two-year school in central California, is a hot bed for young political activists.
Recently when a poster depicting Pepe the Frog, a cartoon meme made popular by users of the website 4Chan, was spotted on campus, an FLC faculty member decided to call the police because "hate has no home on our campus," according to Campus Reform.
An campus faculty member discovered the image of Pepe the frog on a sheet of paper taped to their office door earlier in February.
TRIGGERED! The school called the Los Rios, California Police Department so the local law enforcement community could “be on heightened alert for any signs that this may be part of a larger trend or pattern,” according to Campus Reform.
As if that wasn't pointless enough, FLC President's Whitney Yamamura, along with different student leadership from around the campus penned an email to the campus community that raid, "[Pepe] has been commonly co-opted by white supremacists and others as a symbol of bigotry. While we do not immediately know the intentions of the person(s) who posted the picture, we are treating this incident with the highest level of seriousness and have already conducted a sweep of all Folsom Lake College campuses to look for other instances of these materials."
Pepe the Frog was deemed a symbol of hate by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016, which means almost nothing because he's a cartoon frog, not a swastika.
Wow! And this is a publicly funded college? I feel safer already - great job FLC staff! I'm sure the local police who investigated this incident didn't have anything better to do with their time.
Photo of hateful cartoon frog provided by Getty Images