How the Far Right Took Over 4chan

What is 4chan?

4chan is an imageboard (image board) on the internet, a type of forum where users can post a photo with a comment and thus create a thread. Posts are organized by channels and by timeline. The most successful ones (those that generate the most comments and interactions) stay longer on the frontpage, and the ones that don't generate interactions are deleted. After some time, the most commented ones are archived. 4chan is divided into channels, and there are all kinds: /b/ is dedicated to random (a mix of random and bizarre things), although nowadays it's been co-opted by pornography. There are also other quieter channels like /tv/, dedicated to TV shows and movies, or /vg/, dedicated to video games. But the most recognized and infamous is /pol/, the channel dedicated to "political incorrectness."

For some time, /pol/ was the home of anonymous, from where DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service) and massive trolling campaigns were coordinated against countless sites, such as when they turned Microsoft's Twitter bot into a Nazi¹ or when they got Adolf Hitler elected as the smartest person in history².

The site had its moment of glory in 2016, during the presidential campaign in the United States. In that election, almost by chance, the site chose to support Donald Trump simply for the sake of trolling. The incident that marked the beginning of the forum's support for the then-candidate's presidential campaign relates to the site's logic. Each post has an identification number, and round numbers or those with repeating digits hold special value. Right on post number 77777777, extremely special because of its association with good luck, someone wrote "Trump will win."

The anonymous video "The Year Where 4chan Won" shows many of the coordinated actions during the campaign from the board to heavily troll the media with a specific goal: to reclaim a meme. For years, Pepe the sad frog, created by Matt Furie, was the symbol and pride of 4chan. But over time it had gone mainstream and had fallen into the hands of the normies, that is, ordinary people, outsiders to the forum and its antisocial practices. The forum then decided to reclaim it and placed Pepe in the most extreme and "politically incorrect" situations possible, such as raping women, burning Black people while wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood, and so on. If they managed to scare off the normies, Pepe would once again be exclusive to 4chan.

Trump himself used it in his campaign, which fed back into 4chan's fanbase and set off alarm bells in the more progressive press. The New York Times dedicated a special two-page spread warning about how dangerous the forum was and how it had become a symbol of racism and white supremacists³. I came across this publication at my in-laws' house, thanks to the Argentine newspaper Clarin, which at the time published a selection of the "best" articles from the New York newspaper. I remember that moment and my sense of disbelief thinking: "How did Pepe end up in a newspaper in Buenos Aires?"

Hatred and frustration

Using 4chan is quite confusing at first because the interface is unfriendly. But there's a simple trick to make it easier to read: first go to the site, then choose the channel and select the "catalog" button. (You can also type directly in the browser 4chan.org/pol/catalog). This way, all comments are organized by thread and it's much simpler to read them. Also, the site is fairly lightweight and doesn't require too many resources, so any internet connection is enough to browse it.

The first thing you find when entering 4chan's /pol/ channel is angry people. At first, it's reminiscent of the old internet forums, where everything was trolling, scandal, and noise. But after spending some time there, you realize it's something else entirely. There's a kind of hatred or frustration with the world that manifests in various ways. This seems to be related to the forum's user base. While the matter would deserve a sociological study, the vast majority of the site's users identify as NEET (not in education, employment or training). They are unemployed men or men with poor-quality jobs, living at their parents' house, with little education and almost no contact with women. It's quite unlikely that all forum users are actually NEETs, but the label serves a function: to make all users assume they are "losers," marginalized, cast aside by society. This translates into a common feeling: frustration, which then turns into anger, hatred, and resentment. Frustration with the "Western" way of life. In line with the 4channer way of thinking, most users would be "betas," that is, failures (the opposite of "alphas").

The average /pol/ user believes that the West is in a state of near-total ruin, the product of losing "classic Western values," a concept that is quite difficult to define in itself. The clearest manifestations of hatred are racism, white supremacism, and homophobia. Many of the memes circulating on the channel reference the racial "inferiority" of Black people, Latinos, and Arabs, which supposedly manifests in "low IQ levels," to cite one example. All users defend some form of ethnocentrism, and a large part of the forum's discussion is about defining who is "white" and who isn't, who is "the West" and who are its racial, cultural, and political enemies.

Another common denominator is the belief, on one hand, that Europe is being invaded by Arab immigration and, on the other, that the US is in a process of decline because of interethnic couples, same-sex marriage, and comprehensive sex education. The idea of the "Great Replacement"⁴ is that the population of all of Europe, the US, and the Commonwealth (what is usually called "the West") is being replaced by immigrants of Arab origin, as part of a conspiracy led by international organizations or institutions (the United Nations [UN], the International Monetary Fund [IMF], or the European Union), and some add Zionism, to weaken the ethno-cultural heritage of those countries and thus make them pliable enough to submit to a "new world order."

Another important element for understanding the language of 4chan is the slurs used, which allow us to see what kind of things users consider derogatory and show us how certain mechanisms of the forum work. "Nigger" is an obvious slur. Although this word's derogatory connotation for the African American community is so strong that its use is banned in public in that country, on 4chan it's used every other line. They also use "cucks," which refers to "cuckold," a type of paraphilia in which a man enjoys watching his wife have sex with another man, and it's used as a synonym for being unmanly or having no decision-making power. They also use "fag," which is short for "faggot" and is the equivalent of "nigger" but applied to gay men. "Kike" is used to accuse someone of being Jewish and obviously has a derogatory connotation.

The problem of irony

In an earlier version of this article⁵, I received some criticism from forum users who argued that I had not understood the "ironic" tone of the site's posts because I was a "newfag" (a newcomer who doesn't understand the codes). While I can't say much about the latter, there's something important to mention about the former. In this sense, the problem when analyzing the 4chan phenomenon is that if the forum indeed promoted Trump's candidacy as part of an ironic gesture, any attribution of logic and rationality becomes meaningless. And it may well be that this gesture was pure irony, as summed up by the motto "For the lulz" (for the laughs) adopted by the site's users during the 2016 presidential election.

But after Trump came to power, the "ironic narrative" mutated into something else. This can be seen in the Charlottesville march of August 11, 2017, when hundreds of young people marched at night with lit torches chanting "You will not replace us." Or in the case of Brenton Tarrant, who killed 50 people in the attack on two mosques in New Zealand and left a manifesto on 8chan (a site similar to 4chan but slightly more marginal and violent), livestreamed the massacre on Facebook, and stated that "memes have done more for the ethnonationalist movement than all the manifestos."

These cases of terrorist violence, along with the emergence of extreme right-wing political parties like Vox in Spain or Alternative for Germany (AfD), which hold exactly the same "replacement" discourse, demolish the idea that all the content circulating on /pol/ is merely ironic. In fact, these formations not only bought into the 4channer narrative of the "Great Replacement" but also that of the war against the "cultural left."

Added to this is the narrative of hatred. It's a reactionary worldview in which the right sees itself at a disadvantage against the "leftification of the elites," which, combined with the conspiracy theory of the "Great Replacement," produces the ideological combo of today's far right: anti-communism, anti-establishment, and racism. For this worldview, the IMF is socialist, the EU is socialist, the UN is a communist stronghold, and Washington, being infiltrated by Israel, is also under the orbit of international Zionism which, in this case, is indistinguishable from communism/socialism.

It's a narrative that serves a simple function: to organize world events in such a way that they are consistent with one another and "tell a story." The story told by the narrative of hatred is precisely that of international elites conspiring against "the West" to introduce foreign populations, make them more "domesticable," and change the form of government. The only way to confront this scheme of things is to maintain a policy totally opposed to those values: nationalism, unified ethnic identity, expulsion of immigrants, annihilation of the left. Ultimately, it's a vision that polarizes against globalization, its ideology, and the shape it gave to the world. For believers in the narrative of hatred, it's necessary to react forcefully against the current state of affairs. While on /pol/ there's only a minority of users who choose to take action, when they do, the entire forum celebrates.

Red pills

The idea that neoliberalism has a strong component of cultural leftism is indebted to the neo-reactionary philosopher Mencius Moldbug (his real name is Curtis Yarvin), who developed his "The Cathedral" hypothesis. With this name he refers to the American intellectual complex, whose fundamental figure would be Noam Chomsky, made up of academia, journalism, and Hollywood. According to Moldbug, left-liberal ideology took over these spheres, consolidated its hegemony, and replicates itself as a secular creed, through strong control over what can be said, read, and done. The main space it co-opted was universities, which are the source of knowledge that feeds public opinion. This ensures that the media subscribe to the same creed, since universities enjoy an incredible level of authority within secular societies, and then the star system subscribes to this ideology so as not to appear coarse or uneducated. According to Moldbug's view, "The Cathedral" defines the current global paradigm of thought even though it systematically denies it, since it cannot acknowledge itself as part of the core of power, but always positions itself against it because of its "leftist" roots. Moldbug presents this idea in the first chapter of his book A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations⁶ and does so with a name that would also resonate deeply in 4chan forum culture: red pills. Red pills are an ideological device whose origin we can trace back to the film The Matrix (1999): there Morpheus offers Neo, the protagonist, a pill that "would show him reality." The red pill is hard to swallow, but once we take it, it shows us reality as it truly is.

4chan, and by contagion the internet, became fertile ground for Moldbug's explanations. The advantage of 4chan and similar forums is that the spread of any content is unregulated and moderators are almost absent, so anything can be discussed without expecting a negative reaction from other users or even from the company itself. That's why these discussions can't happen on platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Both companies operate, in Moldbug's terms, with the logic of "The Cathedral," something evident in the updates to their terms and conditions, which tend to censor content that incites hate crimes and similar actions.

Red pills are key to understanding 4chan and the idea that communism/Zionism -- yes, communism -- is running the world. In the 4chan context, red pills are arguments to reveal a truth that was hidden. Something like the exit from Plato's cave. It's very common to find tons of posts saying: "Hey guys, red pill me on x."

Most replies to these topics are a way of introducing extreme arguments about some subject, such as Holocaust denial. Red pills are fundamental to the channel because they generally serve to break some taboo of "political correctness." In general, all red pills are xenophobic or antisemitic arguments that attempt to justify themselves with "scientific" data: the cognitive inferiority of Black people; or how Jews control the media and the economy; or how gender ideology is destroying "Western values."

These topics are by no means minor and form part of the fundamental beliefs of /pol/ users. For example, there's a documentary that gets posted from time to time that explains the supposed connection of the Rothschild family with the Russian Revolution and how communism has been, from its origin, an ideology to control citizens, steal their money and freedom. Red pills are a fundamental part of the narrative of hatred because they are key to explaining how the world came to have its current shape, and this in turn validates the conspiracy theories that sustain it. Thus, a solid narrative is created whose primary function is to make sense of the world and show a way out. The way out, clearly, is to the right.

With these concepts, 4chan builds a common sense, which spreads across the internet, according to which being a communist is synonymous with being a feminist, being in favor of abortion, or supporting gender equality. Ultimately, it's a conservative reaction to a complex and changing world. The funny thing is that it's a conservative reaction led by young people. Of course, it's a way for users to deal with a world undergoing a transition to postmodernity, driven by a turbo-capitalism that distresses citizens as a mechanism of control. But this didn't stay within the forum -- it mutated into a narrative with a high power of contagion thanks to 4chan's lethal weapon: memes.

All power to the memes

A meme is not just a funny internet image made in Paint. The first time I came across the definition of "meme" was in a text by analytical philosopher Daniel Dennett who, in turn, cites biologist Richard Dawkins⁷. According to Dennett's interpretation, memes can be ideas, objects, or events with a high capacity to self-replicate and withstand the selective pressure of the cultural environment. This means that each meme "fights" against other memes to capture agents' attention and then replicate. The wheel, for example, is an invention and at the same time its own transmitter of the idea of a wheel. Each wheel is an object with certain utility and at the same time a vector of its own meme. And memes compete with each other, in culture, to replicate and ensure their existence over time. They can be a video, a phrase, a photo. This idea of meme, while quite criticized as an explanation for all cultural phenomena for discarding the idea of agency, works very well to explain how digital culture functions. Internet memes and digital narratives can be analyzed from this perspective, and it's possible to obtain some criteria for evaluating them.

The advantage that 4chan users or someone who is sexist, xenophobic, and antisemitic have is that they have no taboo or moral consideration when it comes to "making a joke." For example, the internet video that uses "I Need a Hero," the Bonnie Tyler song, and changes the lyrics to "I Need a Pinochet"⁸. This is horrible, but sometimes it can be very, very, very funny. And that's nothing -- then there are super cruel jokes about Black people, Jews, and others. All with enormous contagion power, because they work on what "cannot be said" or what would be censored on other platforms or in mainstream media.

4chan is like an internet meme factory, from classics like Pedobear (a bear that preyed on minors) to newer ones like "the chad vs the virgin" (a series comparing how "alphas" and "betas" behave)⁹ or "ok boomer" (to point out the generational gap between millennials and boomers and their use of internet language). The replicating power that memes have to spread an idea is incalculable, and that's why they are the vectors of the new right-wing narrative, because they manage to condense a lot of information into very little space. This way, whoever was interested in the meme can later reconstruct the path toward it and thus come to know the entire doctrine. The meme functions as an index.

The success of the narrative of hatred is partly a product of this capacity for propagation, since it provides an easy explanation of the world that doesn't question the foundations of injustice but rather works on common sense. Even the attacks by white terrorists who subscribe to this ideology function as a meme, hence the fact that the attacks keep happening.

"Alt-right" is said in many ways

4chan does not have a monolithic or unified way of thinking, much less a systematic program. There are socialists, liberals, Zionists, Nazis, neo-pagans, eco-fascists, and accelerationists, as well as Luddites and others. But the unifying factor, at least among the right-wingers, is a common narrative about the world: current society is in decline, the product of cultural Marxism that promotes the "mixing" of ethnicities, which produces a "white genocide." Almost any redpilled /pol/ user believes in the narrative of hatred or some variant of it. But, and this is a personal hypothesis, 4chan functions as a catalyst or a place where angry people converge who are furious with the world order but found a way out to the right. The current world is a very frustrating place: everything seems to be slowly heading toward collapse, labor conditions are the worst in decades, political parties seem increasingly disconnected from their voters, democracy fails to solve nearly chronic problems, etc. The narrative of hatred provides a simple answer, easy to understand and replicate, that explains the world.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the American media repeatedly used the expression "Alt-Right," an abbreviation of "Alternative Right," to talk about extreme right-wing groups, when not outright Nazis. They presented them as a movement of racists, white supremacists, pro-Trump, congregated on Reddit, 4chan, and similar sites.

The Alt-Right doesn't exist as a homogeneous bloc. The figure of Trump is even a focus of discussion and division within the forum. Many believed he would be the anti-establishment president who would reverse the state of affairs and stop the "white genocide." All of that went down the drain when Trump proved to be one of the most pro-Israel presidents in US history. Many were disappointed. Others believe that the blame for the current state of affairs lies not with leaders but with capitalism, and therefore it needs to be destroyed. Others are anti-civilization and believe we must return to a tribal society model. Others believe the problem is democracy, and so there are some variants that combine their opposition to progressive neoliberalism. Others consider that an Israel governed by the far right is an ally against Islam and in the defense of the West.

A Latin American leg: Argentina

It's common to see Argentines participating in /pol/, as their flag and the topics they discuss give them away. For example, it's quite funny to see how in fascist threads, foreigners include Juan D. Peron as an important symbol of that movement and Argentine users instantly try to explain that no, Peron, "although he was indeed a fascist," "destroyed Argentina" (all in English, since no other language is allowed on 4chan). Amusing examples of ideological contortionism. But beyond that, in Argentina there are some forums similar to 4chan, especially Voxed.net, which is organized similarly, although the interface is different. On Voxed it's common to see posts about politics and discussions about Kirchnerism and local right-wing figures in their various versions (more liberal or more Nazi-like), such as Juan Jose Gomez Centurion, Jose Luis Espert, Alejandro Biondini, and others. Although politics doesn't seem to be intrinsic to the forum, the entire language of the internet certainly is, and 4channer memes are obviously replicated as if it were a local branch.

However, it's unlikely that this alone would be enough to install the narrative of hatred in a country like Argentina. The cultural differences are significant: in Argentina, "The Cathedral" is not hegemonic, and policies that have been common in Europe for several years (abortion, gender, etc.) are only beginning to appear on the public agenda at a national level. But perhaps precisely because of this, abortion, feminism, and gender identity are the topics that most dominate the conversation on Voxed, generally in completely derogatory and sexist ways. And while Muslim immigration barely exists in Argentina, the replacement theory can be adapted to the local structure if "Arab" is substituted with "poor." Believing that poverty is promoted by politicians to keep the population sedated in exchange for votes is an idea that has circulated in Argentine common sense for years and can be adapted to fit that narrative. In any case, today the topics that polarize the forum are feminism, the legalization of abortion, and all the ramifications of that debate.

Conclusions

4chan managed to spread a narrative about how the world works and why it's heading toward disaster, and this narrative allows people to make sense of that world, the facts, the things. Without it, it's much harder to navigate the turbulent waters of reality, hence its importance and relevance. /pol/ is a manual of simple explanations about the current state of the world, which often generates a deep sense of anguish, lack, or despair.

4chan found an answer to that feeling and channels it through graphic pieces and arguments with a high power of replication. Moreover, by maintaining that the left won the culture war, the right has an extra appeal: now it's anti-establishment -- something that, broadly speaking, was classically a role of the left. Through this device, 4chan created a conceptual framework in which the right functions as an alternative to the world order. In the same vein, the existence of a candidate like Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary for the US presidency is very relevant, as he polarizes almost as a mirror image of the narrative of hatred. Sanders and his followers also maintain that the establishment led the world to decline and that's why things need to be changed completely, regardless of whether that can actually be done or not. This marks a substantial difference from candidates like Hillary Clinton, who maintained that everything was fine and no major changes were needed. Sanders is a response to post-Trump polarization.

It seems that the future of politics lies in questioning the status quo.

• 1. See the Wikipedia entry on the topic at <https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)>.
• 2. "4chan Votes for Hitler as the Smartest Person in History" in The Daily Dot, 2/25/2013.
• 3. Christopher Mele: "Pepe the Frog Meme Listed as a Hate Symbol" in The New York Times, 9/27/2016, available at <www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/us/pepe-the-frog-is-listed-as-a-hate-symbol-by-the-anti-defamation-league.html>.
• 4. Pablo Stefanoni: "The Future as 'Great Replacement.' Far-Right Movements, Homosexuality and Xenophobia" in Nueva Sociedad No. 283, 9-10/2019, available at <www.nuso.org>.
• 5. J. Ruocco: "What I Learned Reading 4chan/pol for a Year" in Medium, 2/1/2019.
• 6. The book is available on Moldbug's blog, Unqualified Reservations, <www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/>.
• 7. D. Dennett: Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1991.
• 8. Available at <www.youtube.com/watch?v=io_1fr3tzqc>.
• 9. "Chad" is a kind of winner or alpha male; the virgins are, obviously, the losers. Some images can be seen at <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/virgin-vs-chad>.

This article was originally published in Nueva Sociedad No. 286 (March-April 2020). It is reproduced here with the author's permission.