I’ve been saying for years, at least a decade at this point, that the internet was a mistake for the Right.
Way back during the beginning of the first Trump administration, the hot take of the moment was that Trump won because liberals lived in a “bubble” and didn’t realize how many truly despicable people they shared a country with. This is, in part, true. For the most part, people tend to assume that other people operate the same way they do, so it’s hard to imagine that millions of people would be won over by someone who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy.
But what’s more true, I have been arguing forever, is that Trump happened because conservatives had a bubble … and social media burst it. It’s not that they didn’t know the rest of us existed, but they didn’t see us, they didn’t have to interact with us or know what we were talking about at social gatherings.
On April Fool’s Day, 4Chan — a website for the most repulsive people on earth — did a “prank” meant to teach the lesson that immigration is bad because it’s horrible to be around people who are different from you. They shut down one image board at a time, which apparently forced people from the boards that were shut down to go post on other boards, and no one liked it!
Whoever came up with that wrote:
This Year’s April Fools event was centered around Mass Immigration. Notice how the most degenerate board /cm/ (Cute Males) was the first to be deleted; this entire event was an alegory (sic) for what happens when mass immigration, open border policies, are allowed to continue unhindered. The /cm/ users migrated to the other porn boards and started spreading their degeneracy and mixing it with other degeneracy such as with the pony posters, this continued for hours across the boards until they settled on /pol/ which at that point had become nothing but sheer chaos. Shortly after /pol/ was deleted /v/ and /a/ were next and this left only /b/ as the most viable migration board. The /b/ board is the “random” board, where very few rules exist and are even less likely to be enforced, /b/ is chaos incarnate especially when you force the entire userbase of the site to raid the board simultaneously.
This years April Fools Event was a perfect allegory for how destroying borders, allowing unfettered mass immigration, and refusing to enforce immigration laws to those who invade your lands leads to; chaos, confusion, and the loss of individual cultures, identities, and even civilizations.
Either that or that these people are all so terrible they even repulse each other.
One user really got the message, writing:
What this r*t*rded “April Fool’s prank” has taught me:
The right is correct. There needs to be borders. There needs to be containment zones.
People from different countries (boards) are being flooded and forced into a singular one (America) that creates nothing but chaos and division. Nobody has any similar interest or cultures. You have anime posters and music posters fighting each other to dominate the discussion. You have porn posters, gay posters, pro wrestling, biz, tv, and every other type of poster (immigrant) funneled into one place, that benefits absolutely no one at all. There is no mixing. There is no common group. There is simply chaos and fighting.
Trump is right about immigration.
If you’re wondering where I came across this, it was on the Great Awakening QAnon message board, where they all shared similar sentiments like “The melting pot should have been thrown into the dumpster long ago.” I’d love to say that this nonsense is just in these fringe places where people feel free to say the quiet part out loud, but I’ve seen it on Reddit, I’ve seen it on what used to be Twitter, and it’s becoming utterly pervasive on the Right. People are just openly admitting that they do not want to be around people who are different from them — even people who just occupy different horrible parts of the same horrible website.
It’s not just them. A very large portion of the Right has become absolutely obsessed by the idea that the only functional society is a homogenous society and that diversity is somehow responsible for all of their unhappiness.
It’s not hard to imagine that if the same “trick” were to be played on the Left, we’d probably just have had some silly fun with it if we wanted to engage or just ignored it until things went back to normal. It would hardly be the end of the world or proof that people can only get along with other people who are exactly like them.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The rise in white nationalism. The rise in Christian nationalism. The obsession with immigrants, particularly those who don’t “assimilate.” The seething anger over the idea of said immigrants “disrespecting them” by holding onto and celebrating their own cultures, speaking their own language. Their rage over diversity and their love of hierarchy. Their anger at colleges and academia, their hysteria over every new idea. The whole pronatalism thing they’re going bananas with, obsessing over how young women need to get knocked up instead of going to college and establishing a career or waiting until they feel financially stable enough to raise children. Their demands that transgender people and often all LGBTQ+ people disappear from public life, their anger over said people supposedly “rubbing it in their faces” by merely existing. They’re angry at creative people, they’re angry at nerds, they’re angry at people with different colored hair.
What does that sound like to you? Well, to me it sounds a whole lot like the small town I lived in until I was 15. I’ll tell you, one of the biggest lessons I learned from living there is that whereas you or I would feel “disrespected” by people being unkind to us, people like that feel “disrespected” when people don’t try to fit in with them or win their approval — and that’s the same pattern I see on a macro scale with the Left and Right today. I truly believe that a lot of the Right’s hysteria over trans people is that trans people don’t “respect” them and their (Cartman voice) authoritah enough to pretend not to be trans. They don’t like that people won’t pretend to be Christians or drop their own cultural customs to adopt theirs. That people won’t suppress who they are or do any of this for them is, to them, proof that they do not have the social power to which they feel entitled.
They used to live in these areas where almost everyone was white, almost everyone was Christian, people dressed the same, had kids at a young age, got married at a young age, where everyone who was different or creative or LGBTQ+ was systematically bullied until they either “changed” or got the hell out of town, either to college or a big city. Now, they still live in those areas, but it’s different. It’s different because they know what the rest of us are doing and talking about, and it’s different because the kids who are different feel more empowered to be themselves because they have online support from kids in other areas going through the same thing.
Is it possible that being deprived of their precious homogeneity has actually driven them mad?
To be clear, this is not me making excuses for these people, because “Oh, they’re just wired differently, they can’t handle being around anyone but straight white cis Christian people, the poor dears! They’re very delicate, you know.” I’m just saying that they had the thing they wanted, to some degree, and now that they can’t have that anymore in their small towns, they are trying to force it on the rest of us and turn the whole damn country into a small town. I’m also saying that, if I’m reading this correctly, I have no fucking idea what to do about it.
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