The New York Times attempts to explain the NPC meme to NPCs:
It’s a long story, but the short version is that a group of young, extremely pro-Trump internet trolls have spent the past several years mocking anti-Trump people as whiny, easily triggered snowflakes who are primarily motivated by social acceptance rather than by logic and critical thinking.
Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters — including, as of last week, Kanye West — put their support for him in the language of freethinking rationality and paint the other side as being motivated by blind loyalty and identity politics. (Mr. West said of his pre-Trump-supporting days, “I was programmed to think from a victimized mentality.”)
The NPC meme fits neatly into this narrative and offers Mr. Trump’s online supporters an easy shorthand way to paint liberals as humorless prudes who say “Drumpf” because the HBO host John Oliver told them to, who march in protests and put on pink “pussyhats” because they’re the popular things to do, and whose views can’t withstand scrutiny.
(And then, when progressives object to a meme that portrays them as unthinking automatons, it becomes another piece of evidence: See? The left can’t take a joke.)
It wouldn’t sting if it wasn’t true. And the Left observably can’t take a joke. That’s why it attempts to deplatform and silence everyone who cracks wise at their expense.
It’s all a bit meta at this point, as what the NYT is really doing here is programming the NPCs to point-and-shriek: “NPC meme racist!”