It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

From the festering online ids of nerds comes America’s vitriolic right-wing politics, according to this scintillating study of the ideology of 4chan. Expanding a widely shared article published on Medium.com, Beran recounts 4chan.net’s history as a social media platform for disaffected, socially awkward, deliberately offensive white man-boys steeped in nihilistic trolling and jokey memes like the now-infamous Pepe the Frog. 4chan’s mutating ethos, he contends, married the victim culture of its self-labeled low-status “beta males” to the alt-right’s prescription of white nationalism, patriarchy, and fascist power politics as a salve for the grievances of dispossessed men, culminating in a half-sincere, half-cynical embrace of Donald Trump. (He also explores the opposing movement of intersectional-justice–focused identity politics spreading from Tumblr to left-wing campuses.) Writing in funny, caustic prose—right-wing provocateur Gavin McInnes is “a punk [rocker] venerating the square suburban values of the 1950s”—Beran dissects the noxious political runoff of 4chan’s “depravity and weirdness.” Equally stimulating is his argument, invoking cultural theorists from Hannah Arendt to Herbert Marcuse, that capitalism’s blend of Darwinian competition and consumerist fantasia makes everyone feel like powerless losers. Beran’s focus is narrow and doesn’t encompass the full roots of Trumpian politics, but he offers smarts insights into its most lurid constituency. Photos. (July)