(2017-02-14) 4chan The Skeleton Key To The Rise Of Trump

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

Donald Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him.

1. Born from Something Awful

4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole

4chan met once a year in only one place in the world: Baltimore, Maryland at the anime convention, Otakon.

2. Anon Steps Out to Fight Lord Xenu

The key to 4chan’s popularity (and what distinguished it from its progenitor Something Awful) was the Japanese bulletin board Poole had adapted for English use

you didn’t have to make an account

On all those millions upon millions of posts the author’s name was simply, “Anonymous”.

4chan invented the meme as we use it today.

In 2008

They had planned to protest the church of Scientology.

it codified its value system in a series of “rules”

4chan users were deeply sensitive and guarded. They disguised their own sensitivity (namely, their fear that they would be, “forever alone”) by extreme insensitivity. The rules, like everything else, were always half in jest.

Before 4chan’s dispute with Scientology it had banded together for practical jokes they had called “raids”.

Durings the raids, they would enforce “Rule 1”, and conceal the very fact of 4chan

The Scientology “protest” was also in large part a “raid”. Videos were made directed at Scientology pretending “Anonymous” was a shadowy and powerful cabal

They all wore masks, mostly Guy Fawkes masks, inspired by the Wachowski brothers adaptation of a comic book. This was, in comic book parlance, the mask’s “first appearance” (IRL).

*“It was organized on a site called newgrounds.com” he answered.

“Is the protest a joke or serious?”

“It’s serious business.” he replied. Serious business was a meme, a joke on 4chan*

When the protest broke up (it was scheduled to end at noon), a nerd dressed like Neo from The Matrix in a long black duster shouted, “Now back to our parents’ basements!” and the whole crowd laughed.

3. New Horizons

The peculiar thing about the Scientology protest was how little 4chan cared about Scientology

By the end of 2011, 4chan had finally been outed. Subsequently, the group splintered in a sense; anyone could and did pick up the banner of Anonymous.

It was a culture that celebrated failure — that from the very beginning encouraged anyone who posted to “become an hero” (their term for killing themselves, and sometimes others in the bargain).

4. GamerGate: Anon Defends his Safe Spaces

It’s difficult to recall what started Gamergate because, like much of 4chan-style content, it never made sense on the surface

Again, here we can understand this group as people who have failed at the real world and have checked out of it and into the fantasy worlds of internet forums and videos games

Yet, in the one space they feel they can escape the realities of this, the world of the video game, here (to them, it seems) women want to assert their presence and power.

take for example Milo Yiannopoulos

He is 4chan at its most earnest, after all these men have finally discovered their issue — the thing that unites them — their failure and powerlessness literally embodied (to them) by women.

Gamergate at last (unlike Habbo Hotel, Scientology, Paypal, or Occupy Wall Street) was a “raid” that mattered, that wasn’t just a fun lark to pass the time or a winking joke. Here was another issue (besides “let me do what I want on the internet all the time”) that spoke to the bulk of 4chan users.

It was almost as if all these disaffected young men were waiting for a figure to come along who, having achieved nothing in his life, pretended as though he had achieved everything, who by using the tools of fantasy, could transmute their loserdom (in 4chan parlance, their “fail”), into “win”.

5. Trump: the Loser who Won

Trump, of course, has made his fortune in a similar manner, with casinos, correspondence courses, and pageants, swindling money out of aspiring-millionaire blue collar workers, selling them not a bill of goods, but the hope of a bill of goods, the glitz and glamor of success, to people who don’t win

The older generation of Trump supporters the press often focuses on, the so called “forgotten white working class”, are in this sense easier to explain since they fit into the schema of the 1950s electorate

To younger generations who never had such jobs, who had only the mythology of such jobs

America, and perhaps existence itself is a cascade of empty promises and advertisements — that is to say, fantasy worlds, expectations that will never be realized “IRL”

*Such an idea — one of utter contemptuous despair — is embodied in one image more than any other, one storied personage who has become a(n) hero to millions, the voice of a generation.

I am speaking, of course, of Pepe the Frog.*

6. Trump the Frog

Pepe, like so many memes, was born on the “random” boards of 4chan’s /b/ (“b” for random) circa 2007

Pepe symbolizes embracing your loserdom, owning it.

It is a culture of hopelessness, of knowing “the system is rigged”. But instead of fight the response is flight, knowing you’re trapped in your circumstances is cause to celebrate. For these young men, voting Trump is not a solution, but a new spiteful prank.

Trump’s farcical nature, didn’t seem to be a liability, rather, to his supporters, it was an asset.

Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel, how they feel the world works around them

Trump, in other words, is a way of owning and celebrating being taken advantage of.

*For this reason, the left should stop expecting Trump’s supporters to be upset when he doesn’t fulfill his promises.

Support for Trump is an acknowledgement that the promise is empty.*

7. The Un-rarest Pepes of Them All

8. 4chan vs. Gender

We can see now why several weeks ago 4chan went to “war” with artists and their “safe spaces”, trying to shut down music and arts venues across the country. What’s striking is how close the populations of 4chan and those who wanted to shut down the “safe spaces” are. The artists themselves are young people on the fringes of the economy who are also immersed in romantic fantasy. The main difference is that the artists have learned different ways to cope with the same problem. Instead of residing in their mother’s basements, they created ways to live together cheaply in warehouse spaces.

if they are to accept the left’s viewpoint, they must accept that the problem at core of their being is all in their heads. That is to say, the left’s viewpoint of sexual-difference-as-illusion is exactly what they don’t want to hear — that they have cornered themselves into their mother’s basements.

9. Can Pepe be un Nazi-fied?

left and right are in some sense outdated ideas. The new division in politics is those who favor the current global hegemony and those who are against it

Trump and the mocking cruel anguish he represents is not a genuine solution to the electorate’s powerlessness, but rather, simply the one closest at hand.

the left should not be paralyzed with horror by the Deplorables, but rather view them of as a symptom of a larger problem, one which only the left can truly solve.