4 Chan and the Alt-Right
I will be flabbergasted if this post doesn’t rub some people the wrong way. The truth about the the Alt-Right is that they’ve kinda always been here. By here I mean the internet. As soon as they raised their privileged ugly heads I instantly recognized these loser robot for what they are.
Back about 2005(ish) the rise of internet message boards became a common hangout for the average American teenage male. Popular in Japan anonymous boards seemed like an breath of fresh air as more and more of the web became moderated. Sites like MySpace and Facebook required users to login with email addresses or other tractable factors. These image boards in a way were in the same family as BBS forums or IRC.
4 Chan became one of the largest English message boards. Some amazing things came out of that. We got some fantastic memes that have really become part of our culture. For every positive thing there was an equal negative. People are more themselves when they’re not filtered. Some threads were not just gross but strait up racist. I’m my ignorance I simple thought it was dumb privileged white boys trying to shock the world and eventually they’d grow out of it. I was wrong.
When anonymous, people are less filtered
We flash forward to today. These dumb white kids are now 25 to 30 years old. They have not grown up. They are still monstrously racist. Worst of all, they are voting and making real decisions. I don’t know why I didn’t see this till after Trump won the election but now it’s clear as day. They even talk in memes; calling any man that disagrees with them a Cuck.
I think back in the days when 4 Chan was a cultural phenomenon and feel helpless knowing that even if I knew that the Alt-Right movement was growing in those message boards, there is nothing I could have done about it. Now we have a resurgence of White Supremacist building America to match their ideology.