Last weekend, the Hillary Clinton campaign did something extremely controversial: It published an explainer devoted entirely to Pepe the frog. Pepe, a popular cartoon frog who first showed up in a web comic by Matt Furie back in 2005, has been embraced en masse by the wider internet, mutating over the last ten years into a zillion different forms that have invaded 4chan, Tumblr, Twitter, and dozens of other online venues.

The Clinton campaign’s explainer was about Pepe’s darkest, most recent iteration: Far-Right Pepe. For months, now, Pepe has been showing up online as a Trump supporter, a Nazi, a white nationalist, or sometimes Trump himself — in one popular version of the image, he’s even got Trump’s hair. This, the Clinton campaign explained, is a “horrifying” turn of events, a clear sign of Trump’s depravity, of the extent to which we have slid into alt-right, racist, anti-Semitic madness. “Pepe’s been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the ‘alt-right,’” the explainer explained. “They’ve decided to take back Pepe by adding swastikas and other symbols of anti-semitism and white supremacy.”

For those of us who spend too much time on the internet and write about or otherwise engage with the alt-right, it may feel like this iteration of Pepe and his adherents are everywhere. (In particular because his visage is frequently used as a Twitter avatar by Trump’s most vocal and extreme supporters.) In reality, they constitute a fairly small slice over the overall population, their apparent numbers inflated by how active they are online. And there’s effectively no sign, with the sporadic exception here and there, they engage in any actual political activism that doesn’t involve slinging dank memes. For all anyone knows, many of them aren’t old enough to vote or don’t have any desire to; they certainly don’t act like people who plan on participating in the democratic process.

So how the hell did they gain so much notoriety the Hillary Clinton campaign felt a need to respond to their memes? What happened?

It all stems from an interesting collision between those trolls and another group of people — political journalists and operatives — who have very different incentive systems. Journalists and political operatives have coherent beliefs and politics and goals, and spend a lot of time thinking and writing about other people’s coherent beliefs and politics and goals, and the strategies those people will use to achieve those goals. Internet trolls, on the other hand, either don’t have beliefs or goals in the traditional sense, or aren’t constrained by any of the incentives that guide most of the rest of humanity’s behavior. Their main goal is just to elicit as much outrage and draw as much attention as possible. And that’s exactly what they’ve been able to do, to great effect.

For a good example of how they do this, take a Daily Caller piece by Jonah Bennett published Wednesday entitled “Here’s How Two Twitter Prank

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