This is how a hate symbol rises in 2016: A podcast sound effect becomes a Twitter meme and a browser extension before it finally slithers into the physical world.

The “echo” is the first officially recognized symbol to emerge from the “alt-right,” a movement of white-and-proud extremists who are as obsessed with cultural memes as they are with white nationalism. They play fast and loose with white supremacist iconography, remixing it with pop culture and the sardonic tone of internet subculture. Their regressive message, cloaked in an ultramodern skin, is being spread online to a new generation of race warriors.

“There’s now an unlimited number of white supremacist memes, just like there’s an unlimited number of cat memes,” said Mark Pitcavage, an expert on right-wing extremism who also maintains the Anti-Defamation League’s hate-symbol database. “They’ll take all sorts of pop culture memes and white-supremacize them.”…

The echo symbol is emblematic of a new class of bigotry born and bred online. “Anti-Racist Is Code for Anti-White,” a slogan that was lifted from an early-2000s pro-segregationist tract called “The Mantra,” has proliferated online as a piece of white supremacist copypasta — text that’s obsessively copied and pasted across internet forums. The mathematical sign for “not equal” has been repurposed as a statement against racial equality. Like the echo, it leverages the computer keyboard to create the new supremacist symbolism for the modern era.