8 The New York Review
r/The_Donald, 8chan and /pol/ became
major drivers of far-right content into
the mainstream media. After Trayvon
Martin was murdered in 2012, a user
called Klanklannon hacked the dead
teenager’s e-mail and social media
accounts, changed the passwords to
racial slurs, and posted a set of slides
to /pol/. These slides showed proof of
the hack and doctored screenshots of
Martin’s messages, under titles like
“Trayvon Martin Was a Drug Dealer”
and “Trayvon Martin Used Marijuana
Habitually,” fueling a narrative that
percolated up through the right-wing
media ecosystem. During the Black
Lives Matter protests, /pol/ produced a
constant stream of memes framing the
protests as if they were a race war. Like
a bolus of food passing through some
awful human centipede, the notion of
a “great replacement”—the conspiracy
theory that white Europeans are being
deliberately replaced with a nonwhite
population through mass migration
and a declining white birth rate—has
made its way from the salons of the
French far right into the chans, and
out again to Fox News, informing the
Trump administration’s staging of the
so-called border crisis (a term that is
often enough repeated uncritically even
by members of the so-called fake news
media). Fox host Tucker Carlson was,
according to a study by the monitoring
group Media Matters, mentioned over
19,000 times on the chans in the first
seven months of 2019, with many pro-
posing him as a presidential candidate.Of course, fascist radicalization on the
chans is not just a question of a “battle
of ideas.” The manifesto of the Christ-
church mosque attacker, who mur-
dered fifty-one people and wounded
forty-nine in March 2019, blends 8chan
in-jokes with material that reflects ex-
posure to European far-right thinking.
In his last message posted to 8chan, he
wrote, “Time to stop shitposting and
make a real life effort post.” Then he
began to livestream his attack, wear-
ing a tactical vest bearing a patch of the
Sonnenrad, or black sun, an occult Nazi
symbol. His weapons were painted with
a palimpsest of names and references,
many of them to historical figures as-
sociated with the Crusades and other
Christian wars against Muslims.
The descent down the golden escala-
tor of the orange-hued candidate whom
/pol/ dubbed “God Emperor” was the
catalyst for the underemployed proto-
fascist Gamergate army to form itself
into an effective political force. As
Beran writes, to the cynics and self-
identified losers of 4chan, Trump “em-
bodied their beliefs in how the world
worked—as a series of flickering, pro-
motional lies.” He was a loser’s bitter
caricature of a winner, a boorish, brash
serial liar, a holder of grudges, proof
that you could run for the most pow-
erful political office in the world and
still be a small man. He was, in effect,
a human shitpost, calculated to stir up
trouble among the normies. His oppo-
nent was symbolically (and literally)
a mom. Electing Trump would annoyMom and bring on race war. So Trump
became the candidate of the chans.
The story of 4chan is often treated
as a sort of grotesque sideshow to the
growing populism of recent politics, but
Beran’s book shows how central it was
to the changes that have taken place
as Internet natives reshape political
discourse. Stephen Miller, the thirty-
four-year-old white nationalist who
runs US immigration policy, is clearly
a product of the chan culture. The re-
cent chaos at the Iowa Democratic cau-
cus was exacerbated by eager Anons
responding to a 4chan call to “clog the
phone lines,” making it difficult for
precincts to report results. The origin
of Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory
that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta
were running a child sex ring out of the
basement of a pizzeria in Washington,
D. C., betrays 4chan’s longstanding
compulsion to make jokes out of child
pornography (or “cp”). “Denizens of
/ pol/,” Beran writes, “saw references to
cheese pizza in Podesta’s email... and
noted the initials of Comet Ping Pong,
the rest of the tale wrote itself.”
During the 2016 election campaign,
the raiding party of hyperactive anons
found it all too easy to sow panic
among a demographic new to the Inter-
net, older people who lacked the skills
or discernment to assess the sources of
the “news” they were consuming. Re-
search has suggested that older Inter-
net users are more likely to get trapped
in “filter bubbles”—chains of websites
that prevent them from seeing opposing
views—and this tendency made them
perfect targets for disinformation.
The question of causality preoccu-
pies anons, many of whom believe they
were instrumental to Trump’s victory.
/pol/ promoted Trump relentlessly,
never missing an opportunity to go
on the offensive against his enemies.
On October 13, 2015, Trump acknowl-
edged his far-right fans by tweeting a
picture of himself as their cartoon al-
ter-ego Pepe the Frog, a louche figure
who’d been appropriated from a comic
by Matt Furie, and had been through a
complicated life as a meme, ending up
as a vehicle for jokes about gas ovens
and SJWs being thrown out of helicop-
ters. Now Pepe was going to be presi-
dent, and the scent of lulz was in the air.
On election night in 2016, I had /pol/
open on my phone. I found the anons
professing to believe (ironically, of
course) that through “meme magic”—
an occult system elaborated with a
theology incorporating an ancient
Egyptian frog god and a 1980s Italian
synth-pop record—they were actually
willing into being a Trump victory.
Many posts were variants of “God
Emperor take my power!,” as if we
were in the final scene of an anime
whose heroes channel energy into
some cosmic weapon or vessel. When
Trump did in fact win, there was a mo-
ment of stunned incomprehension at
this unprecedented intrusion of the
real into the world on the other side
of the screen. Or was it vice versa?
Then the board set about celebrating
by memeing pictures of crying Clinton
supporters. QNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
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Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
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The exhibition is made possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
Corporate sponsorship is provided byMajor support is provided by David S. Winter and the Modern and Contemporary
Art Visiting Committee.
Additional funding is provided by Angela A. Chao and Jim Breyer, Jane C. Carroll,
the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Kenneth and Rosalind Landis, and
the Peterson Family Foundation.
The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts
and the Humanities.
The catalogue is made possible by the Mary C. and James W. Fosburgh Publications Fund.
Additional support is provided by Christie’s, and by Sharon Wee and Tracy Fu.
Gerhard Richter, Ice (detail), 1981. Collection of Ruth McLoughlin, Monaco. © Gerhard Richter 2019.Through July 5 metmuseum.org Catalogue available
Gerhard Richter
PAINTING AFTER ALL