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[1] https://lafontainesafety.ytmnd.com/

I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.

As for the origin of the movement I remember saying exactly this way back in 2008 after the bank bailouts:

(Paraphrasing a bit)

“People don’t realize how much trust has been lost. People want pitchforks. I don’t think they care whether the far left or the far right is handing them out.”

The far left did hand out a few, but they tended to sublimate all their anger into race and minority grievances. Their pitchforks didn’t have enough mass appeal, especially to the white working class killing themselves with opiates.

The right handed out more classical pitchforks with more mass appeal. They went for the old timey scapegoats of immigrant and minority hate and good old fashioned antisemitism (thinly veiled).

They were also the only ones who started talking about “elites.” I remember reading an actual quote on Reddit back then that stuck with me: “if we can’t destroy the financial industry from the left we’ll do it from the right.”

Americans have a short memory. We’ve already forgotten the Bush administration and how it burned a century of goodwill toward our country and a trillion dollars or two in Iraq. We’ve already forgotten how banks that imploded were rescued in such a way as to give the executives leading them a bonus and a promotion for imploding them. (The blame for that goes to both Bush and Obama for doing nothing to intervene.)

So now people are like “where did all this populist rage come from?” They blame crap like gamergate and 4chan when those were just small lightning rods for niche communities. The USA around the turn of that decade was a pile of oily rags waiting for a source of ignition.

The alt right and Trump just saw an opportunity. They didn’t create it, nor did 4chan.

I disagree. Anonymous was an substantial movement.

4chan has long existed before the concept of facebook and to compare 4chan to the new trends of the likes such as facebook or reddit when 4chan is it's own, you can't.

Reddit and Facebook have all been designed to cater to the masses; 4chan not so.

To rule out that 4chan has never been influential is incorrect.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...

My serious but unsubstantiated suspicion is that this was part of a neoconservative campaign, which included the likes of GamerGate, all in the interests of defanging and commodifying observant, critically-minded, tech-savvy young people (mostly men, mostly white) who otherwise would have found themselves on the progressive end of the political spectrum (as per their class affinity).

If you ask many of them, they will tell you that they were "red-pilled" after Occupy Wall Street so spooked the establishment that "wokism" was deployed to split the bottom 3 wealth quintiles and pit them against each other. My take is that the premise is correct (OWS did indeed push the elite to take class solidarity as a serious threat in a way that they hadn't previously), but that the conclusion is wrong. Rather, "red-pilling" was the intended remedy, and "meme magic" was the vector.

Case-in-point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 and parent.

All you had to do was say "this will offend people" and 4chan rushed off to do exactly that, over and over.

4chan was originally just a contest to show how much something doesn't bother them, because they were still competing with each other like a clique of schoolkids, and any feelings were viewed as weakness.

Also, 4chan spawned QAnon. That was absolutely "starting a movement".

As far as the alt-right goes, this is true, but they're definitely responsible for Pizzagate and QAnon. One might consider those the genesis of a "post alt-right" movement but it might also be too soon to tell.