Pepe the Frog was just a meme like many other. In the beginning, it was a character of a comic series called Boy’s Club, created by Matt Furie in 2005. It’s an humanoid frod that mostly smile and say “Feels good man”, except in its variation, such as Sad Frog, Smug Frog or Angry Pepe.

He started appearing on 4chan in 2010 and soon become the unofficial mascot of the Politically Incorrect channel on 4chan.

When Trump appeared, the guys back at /Pol/ just mixed all their icons together, in a typical mash-up fashion, and here was the result :

And then weird stuff started to happen. Internet magic.

To understand them fully, they are two other things that you need to know.

Dubs

I didn’t knew about Dubs before that guy explained it to me : “Every post on 4chan and similar venues comes with an 8-digit numerical stamp. This number represents that post’s entry position in the entire posting lineage of the imageboard”.

With the amazing amount of messages 4chan gets, the last numbers are, for the most part, totally random. So for 4channers, it’s basically like rolling a dice, and it soon became a game : “When a poster gets repeated digits, its called “dubs”, “trips”, “quads”, and so on”.

Therefore, users started placing bet as to what number they were going to get :

When you win, it’s called a “GET”.

Kek

At the same time, in another corner of the web called World of Warcraft, the term “KEK” was born. The online meme dictionary, Know Your Meme, explains it better than me :

In the online multiplayer role-playing game WoW, released on November 23rd, 2004, players can choose to play on either the Alliance or Horde factions, which are considered enemies within the game’s universe. Players of separate factions are unable to communicate with one-another, as their typed text is run through an in-game translator. For players of the Horde faction, typing the letters “LOL” results in members of the Alliance faction reading “KEK”.

Internet magic

All those elements came together and things happened :

Pepe the Frog was mixed with Donald Trump as mascots of 4chan.

4chan users started noticing that discussion associated with Trump contained more “GETS” than others.

“KEK” kept appearing in the messages, notably because of the amounts of “GETS” but also to celebrate the a new trolling by Donald Trump.

…and then 4chan started believing : something was really happening. Something was telling them one thing : TRUMP WILL WIN. Below, you can see how a user managed, on June 19th 2016, to obtain the ultimate GET with the most sacred of number : the 77777777.

But that’s just the beginning. It gets weirder and weirder.

On November 27th, 2015, a 4chan user submitted a post about the Egyptian deity to the /his/ (History) board on 4chan, featuring a depiction of the god as a frog-headed man.

It was a real Egyptian deity.

It had the head of a frog.

And — OH MY GOD — HIS NAME REALLY HIS “KEK”.

I’m sorry I freaked out but you have to admit that’s a pretty big coincidence. Then we head right into synchromysticism, an internet practices that consist in “drawing connections in modern culture and finding connections that could be coming from the “collective unconscious mind”; and finding connections between occult knowledge (i.e. esoteric fraternities, cults and secret rituals), politics and mass media.”

But that’s not it yet.

The /Pol/ channel greeted the news with praise and a bit of awe : how could this be real, and what did it meant ? What was even more fascinating was the description of that Egyptian God :

Kek (Kuk, Keku) means darkness. He was the god of the darkness of chaos, the darkness before time began. He was the god of obscurity, hidden in the darkness. The Egyptians saw the night time, the time without the light of the sun, as a reflection of this chaotic darkness. As a god of the night, Kek was also related to the day — he was called the “bringer-in of the light”. This seems to mean that he was responsible for the time of night that came just before sunrise. The god of the hours before day dawned over the land of Egypt. This was the twilight which gave birth to the sun.

The “bringer of the light” sounded awfully like the Donald to them.

The proof kept piling up : this statue of Kek appeared on the message board. However fake it may be, the hieroglyphic name of Kek literally blew 4chan’s mind:

You can now even buy it online on Amazon.

At that point, a “Kek worship general” thread was created on the /trash/ (off-topic) board on 4chan. On June 25th, an anonymous 4chan user submitted a post to the /r9k/ (Robot 9000) board asking if viewers had “accepted lord Kek, ancient Egyptian god of darkness, into their lives?”.

At that point, the Cult of KEK was born — and Meme magic seemed more real than ever. As far as 4chan is concerned, it was as official as it could be, and it had a precise theology, centered around “Memetic Magic, the manipulation of the Root, social matrix and the fabric of reality” :

Of course, by that time, Trump had started using those unexpected allies, and winking at them on social medias.

Can you imagine that ? Underdog troll of society getting the attention of the (future) President of the United States ?

It happened… and more than once :

And along the long campaign they led on social media, they started to notice how they managed to succeed in destabilizing their opponents. They started to feel their power of disturbance, and the power of “Kekism” and “Memetic warfare”.

It became so strong… it got to Clinton.

September 11th : Pepe the Frog rises

On the 10th, Donald Trump JR posted this on his Facebook page :

The day after was a historic date in Kekism.

First, Clinton famously fainted. For all of 4chan, it was a sign that the forces they had conjured were answering the call.

Second, Hillary Clinton campaign team posted an article against… Pepe the Frog, making him more real and more powerful than ever, describing him as a “cartoon frog who began his internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike” :

But in recent months, Pepe’s been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the “alt-right.” They’ve decided to take back Pepe by adding swastikas and other symbols of anti-semitism and white supremacy.

Then all forces of memetic magic were unleashed.

Strongly ingrained in conspiracy theories, and with Alex Jones on their side, the Trump Army viewed the struggle as a real fight against Satan. The number of the Beast was considered a bad signs on message board as Hillary Clinton became an embodiment of the evil God Moloch himself, as part of a Luciferian globalist conspiracy and all New World Order Illuminati theories: