Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!

I'm reading Gary Lachman's 2018 book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. Having read Bruce Charlton's negative review, I was prepared for it to be politically biased and to have a lopsided and distorted view of Trump's base. So far, it's living up (or rather down) to those expectations. Trump is constantly lumped together with Hitler and Mussolini, and Lachman's view of the "alt-right" is a funhouse-mirror version apparently derived from the legacy media, one in which the central figure is -- care to guess? -- Richard Spencer. Astonishingly, for a book which has as a central theme the use of meme-magic "sigils" to bring Trump to power, there is not a single mention anywhere in the book of MAGA -- neither the hats nor the acronym nor the slogan for which it stands.

I was expecting all that sort of thing. What I was not expecting was that Lachman would get basic facts -- facts which it is trivially easy for anyone with an Internet connection to verify -- completely wrong. For example, here is his account of the origin of Pepe the Frog:

Pepe came into the world through the work of the artist Matt Furie, who put him in his 2005 comic strip Boys' Club. Furie pictured Pepe as a kind of millennial slacker, and in his first appearance he is urinating in public. When asked why he was acting so deplorably, Pepe answered, "Feels good man."

Here is the comic strip in question, which Lachman had obviously never bothered to look up:

Pepe is very clearly urinating in a toilet, with the door closed, and nowhere is it implied that he has been behaving "deplorably." It appears that Lachman's research on this point consisted of reading the Wikipedia article on Pepe the Frog, which in 2018 described the the above comic strip thus:

In the comic, Pepe is seen urinating with his pants pulled down to his ankles and the catchphrase "feels good man" was his rationale.

Based on that description alone, one might naturally conclude that Pepe was urinating in public (since he was "seen") and that he had to defend this behavior with a "rationale." But what was Lachman's rationale for not just looking up the strip? I mean, even way back in 2018 they had Google Image Search, didn't they?

Wait, they did, didn't they? Just to be sure, I checked, and got yet another reminder of why you should never trust Wikipedia:

That's right, according to Wikipedia -- and they have three footnotes to back it up! -- Google Images was introduced because everyone was looking for pictures of the dress Jennifer Lopez was going to wear almost 17 years in the future! And then in 2018, when JLo finally got around to wearing the much-anticipated dress, "image search functionality was added" to what had previously been "Google Image Search." (In fact, the dress was worn in 2000, and they meant reverse image search functionality.)

The present version of the Pepe the Frog page also contains misinformation (added on March 28, 2025, before which the description was the same as in 2018) about his debut comic:

In the comic, Pepe is seen urinating in a toilet, having left the door open; when one of his friends asks him why he lowered his pants to urinate, Pepe simply answers: "feels good man" as his rationale.

Pepe didn't leave the door open. Two whole panels of this six-panel strip are used to show someone else opening the door on him. And no one asked him why he lowered his pants; they just commented that they'd heard he did.