He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.
- moot was fundraising for his VC backed startup during the years the emails are in, and he was likely connected via mutuals in USV or other firms. These meetings were clearly around him trying to solicit investment in his canv.as project.
- /pol/ was /new/ being returned; the ethos of the board had already existed for a long time and the decision to undo the deletion of /new/ was entirely unsurprising for denizens at the time, and was consistent with a concerted push moot was making for more transparency in the enforcement of rules on the site and fairness towards users who followed the rules. /pol/ didn't start a culture war at this time any more than /new/ had previously - it just existed as a relatively content-unmoderated platform for people to discuss earnestly what would get them banned elsewhere.
If you radicalise the 0.01% of people who are prolific meme creators, you radicalise the masses.
* I did say old...
Who can say what effect it had on the world, but a presidential candidate reposting himself personified as Pepe the frog was still weird back then, and at least a nod to the trolls doing so much work on his behalf
https://medium.com/tryangle-magazine/meme-magic-is-real-you-... (dismissable login wall)
Summary: Trump used memes not in the sense of pepes but in the original (Dawkins') sense of "earworm" soundbites, along with a torrent of scandals, each making the previous seem like old news, to exploit a public tired of the "status quo" into voting for a zany wildcard pushing for reactionary policy
Looking back on it, I wonder if this was priming.
I didn't fall for it. They are still losers, but the encyclopedia dramatica with swastikas looks way way way less funny in 2026 than it did in 2008.
That many serious commentators didn't see this was itself very funny as anything with lots of attention on the internet does become influential! It is funny to a troll to see people pay serious attention to them "I am just a clown and they think I'm serious!". But don't think that they were actual comedians, lol, they are as serious as HN users.
In the dawkins sense of the word: the "meme" wants to spread and grow and the mechanism for it's virality was the immune response to it.
On another angle, the responses also gave the target an identity. Groups get defined as groups from outside more than from within. And it's always a wrong characterisation which also helps define the in group in relation. "You guys are all toxic Linux dude bros" inside: "but some of us love macs and windows, and some of us are girls, they sure dont understand our ways"
I'm just saying, it's a symptom. The crazy found critical mass, broke containment. From there it was laundered in millions of Facebook groups and here we are.
Of course in 2026 it is apparently fine to break into homes without a warrant and execute protesters. The same people are able to "believe" two literally opposite concepts.
There would be times when you would go to the r/all and half the page would be posts from them.
Not to mention a lot of the organized harassment a lot of the mods/power users of that sub caused in the years after. It was a mess.
Hey quick question, around January 2021, what would happened that caused Trump to be deplatformed? Anything stick out in your mind?
This is a good book about it.
We're just not going to talk about that one I suppose?
The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.
And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01992...