“Are you like the hipster version of the neo-Nazi movement?” “What?” “What is your little frog?” “It’s Pepe. He’s become kind of a symbol —” “Internetting with Amanda Hess.” Have you ever wondered what Richard Spencer was about to say right before he got punched in the face? Like, “Oh, Pepe the Frog, he’s become kind of a symbol of … being a Nazi.” But let’s back up. Pepe was a stoner cartoon frog. Then he became an internet legend. Then he became an ironic Nazi. And then actual neo-Nazis realized that they could promote their sincere white supremacist beliefs by remixing them with ironic Nazi memes and spread them further than they’ve ever spread before. Matt Furie created Pepe in 2006. There’s this one comic that sums up Pepe’s vibe. He pulls his pants to his ankles to pee. And when his roommates wonder what Pepe’s doing, he’s just like, “Feels good, man,” which is charming, right? Because he’s supposed to be embarrassed, but actually he embraces it. Like, “Of course, I pull my pants all the way down to pee, and I like it.” Stuff like that turned Pepe into this symbol of Zen acceptance of being socially awkward. By 2015, along with Kermit and Dat Boi, Pepe helped establish frogs as the internet’s favorite everyman symbol. Announcer: “Watch him go.” Manipulating Pepe’s image became kind of an internet-wide game. On Tumblr, he became an icon of sensitive teenage outcasts. But on hyper-masculine, geek culture message boards, he went to dark emotional places. He was sad, angry, disconnected, suicidal, homicidal and really racist. In those corners of the internet, Pepe memes were edited to be as offensive as possible. It was a kind of gate-keeping tactic to try to keep outsiders, like, uh, me, off the boards. They call us “normies.” “Pepe!” At some point, a subreddit called Meme Economy, where meme enthusiasts speculate about memes like they’re futures in a financial market, warned that normie sharing was making Pepe dangerously overexposed. “Normies out!” “Normies out!” The more normie fans Pepe got, the more the boards churned out offensive Pepes to try to make him untouchable to the mainstream. Pepe became this symbol of ambiguous provocation. Maybe he just represented outsider status or free speech or whatever. Whatever he meant to you, he provided plausible deniability. “I thought it was a frog in a wig.” “I thought it was funny.” “I had no idea that there’s any connotation there.” Meanwhile, another group was making use of all those racist Pepes: racists. When the A.D.L. listed Pepe as a hate symbol in 2016, internet Nazis celebrated it. They owned him now. At that point, all the normies who used to love Pepe suddenly had no incentive to keep sharing him. It just wasn’t worth it to be confused with a racist. If white supremacists used to hide their faces under hoods or their swastika tattoos under their hairlines, today’s internet-savvy racists cloak their ideology in irony, provocation and trolling. The publisher of the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer, said that his site uses non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism to help spread its ideas. Matt Furie, the artist who created Pepe, tried to stop all this. They killed Pepe in their comic strip and sued white nationalists. They started campaigns with the A.D.L. and Kickstarter to try to rehab Pepe’s image. “And together, we can save Pepe.” But trying to shut down a meme only feeds it. That’s the Streisand effect. When Barbra Streisand tried to get an aerial picture of her house taken off the internet, it only made people want to share it more. Whenever Furie speaks out against Pepe’s downfall, a meme army assembles in private channels like Discord and starts pumping out even more offensive Pepes, feeding off the mainstream attention paid to the controversy. “And fire.” [gunfire] Nobody can actually kill a meme, even the person who created it. “Next time on Internetting: You get a reaction GIF, and you’ll get a reaction GIF and you’re a racist!”