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Comment by _etyf | Hacker News Reader

QAnon isn't even really a 4chan meme, at least not for a while and not at the Jan. 6 peak of its fervor. The "official home" of QAnon has been 8chan/8kun for years, since shortly after the meme's first appearance [0]. Several jouranlists believe the 8chan owner and his son to be the main users of the QAnon account [1][2][3]. There's a contingent of regular QAnon posters on /pol/, but they're regularly mocked as mentally-ill "boomers" who need to "take their meds."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.nl/ron-watkins-the-man-widely-ru...

[3] https://mashable.com/article/q-identity-revealed-hbo-documen...

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True, but would there be an 8chan if there wasn't a /pol/?

I forgot to mention that on the other end of the spectrum, a good amount of (extremely online) American leftist culture ("the Dirtbag Left") is also linked to Something Awful, the Chapo Trap House three were either from SA or from the Weird Twitter subculture descended from SA's FYAD subforum.

Certainly there wouldn't be an 8chan/8kun without 4chan /pol/. Simlpy pointing out that it's another newer branch on the SA family tree, one with its own distinct culture and character. As an object of study, I find it interesting as the embodiment of "stuff that's too much for /pol/" in the same way that /pol/ was "stuff that's too much for the rest of 4chan," and 4chan was "stuff that's too much for SA."

The influence of CTH on contemporary American politics is similar in scope to that of a fly farting into a hurricane. A few people around the fringe breathe it, a portion of the left is sympathetic to it, but it has not managed to perform an insane coup on one of the two mainstream political parties, or have its ideas overtake an entire category of mass media (AM radio).

The democratic machine is proving rather resistant to those forms of attacks.

I wonder how much of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon was bolstered by Chapo and extremely online figures inspired by Chapo. Obviously, that's not to say that the Squad nor the post-2016 DSA surge owe anything to them, but they likely contributed towards the popularizing of the left to a certain younger extremely online audience.

> but it has not managed to perform an insane coup on one of the two mainstream political parties

That's also overstating 4chan's influence in the 2016 election.

> overtake an entire category of mass media

Well, podcasts are pretty big now.

I'm not talking about 2016, I'm talking about the crazy shit that has happened since then - most specifically in the tail end of 2020, where instead of dropping Trump like the bad acid trip that he was, much of the Republican party doubled down on qanonsense.

As for Sanders, he didn't win, he hasn't taken over half the Democratic party, and the people in charge aren't even paying lip service to his platform.

Without getting too off-topic, I’d argue that the GOP has always been more flexible towards embracing ideological extremism than the Democratic Party has, and this trend has existed since Barry Goldwater at least.

But back to SA culture and its innumerable offshoots and bastards: even if Chapo has comparatively less actual political influence than say Q did (someone posting on a 4chan offshoot), the dirtbag left subculture the podcast spawned is still of internet historical value, in the same way Anonynous (a 4chan hacker collective) is historically significant despite Anon having been dismantled by the security state since the mid-2010s.

Oh, and on that note- perhaps that means 4chan had some influence on the Occupy movement, not as a prime mover but certainly one of the groups participating in it. And while Occupy is long gone, it had its important moment, once.

On the flipside, later on 4chan was one of the major staging grounds for Gamergate.

At some point 4chan’s actions are its members’ own with no connection to SA, but without SA, there would be no 4chan, and the people who acted within it would’ve been redistributed elsewhere.

The hand of Lowtax moves through history like a dumb idiot god, but it does move.

> Anon having been dismantled by the security state since the mid-2010s.

I thought they just grew up. Any records they were really dismantled?

Seems like it

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anonymous-arrests-fbi_n_37809...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/07/members_of_an...

Not just left and right, but establishment, too. Eliot Higgins was an SA mod, who got into analysing images out of the Arab spring uprisings after learning that some of his fellow goons had gone there to volunteer for one side or another. He got picked up by the US/UK FP/MIL/INT establishment after his excellent documentation of modified volcano rockets in the Syrian civil war.

I think that wasn't just for his journalism though, but from worry that he might become another headache like Wikileaks, should be start focusing on other conflicts. They groomed him to be a bulwark against less friendly OSINT journalism.

Also a moderator was Vilerat who died in the Benghazi attacks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_(diplomat)

He was mostly in D&D IIRC

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