Like, seeing it in original context, it neither screams "Nazi" nor "having enough aesthetic value for Nazis to bother appropriating"
Like, seeing it in original context, it neither screams "Nazi" nor "having enough aesthetic value for Nazis to bother appropriating"
Pepe was a 4chan meme for a long time before it went mainstream in 2014-2015. Like another user said, a big part of it was that these people who had been using the meme for years turned into nazis and took Pepe with them. But, another part of it is that some 4chan types got really angry that "normies" co-opted their beloved Pepe. So they started cranking out the most vile bigoted Pepe memes they could, some ironic and some unironic, to scare away the normies. The /pol/ types liked these and started using them unironically, spreading them beyond 4chan.
They did the same thing when Hot Topic started selling the rage guy. They said he was actually the "race guy" and started posting racist stuff and then publicly demanded to know why Hot Topic would dare to sell racist paraphernalia.
Hot Topic was basically like "okay, whatever, we know this is a prank, but we're just gonna pull it because it's not worth it"
That probably served as the template for nazi pepe memes.