![]() But around 2008 I decided to do a story on them. I knew they were a group of teen anime fans who met to party awkwardly like so many other teens at nerd-themed conventions. In the beginning I didn’t pay all that much attention to 4chan. This essay is an attempt to untangle the threads of 4chan and the far right. How did we get here? As someone who has witnessed 4chan grow from a group of adolescent boys who could fit into a single room at my local anime convention to a worldwide coalition of right wing extremists (which is still somehow also a message board about anime), I feel I have some obligation to explain. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) that it had fabricated the so-called Trump “Kompromat”. The week before that, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer was about to explain the significance of his 4chan-inspired Pepe the Frog pin when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly.
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