[api]

It’s more likely that it was just one of the places that movement coalesced. Others include Reddit before they ban hammered a lot of that stuff, Twitter, and Telegram.

As for the origin of the movement I remember saying exactly this way back in 2008 after the bank bailouts:

(Paraphrasing a bit)

“People don’t realize how much trust has been lost. People want pitchforks. I don’t think they care whether the far left or the far right is handing them out.”

The far left did hand out a few, but they tended to sublimate all their anger into race and minority grievances. Their pitchforks didn’t have enough mass appeal, especially to the white working class killing themselves with opiates.

The right handed out more classical pitchforks with more mass appeal. They went for the old timey scapegoats of immigrant and minority hate and good old fashioned antisemitism (thinly veiled).

They were also the only ones who started talking about “elites.” I remember reading an actual quote on Reddit back then that stuck with me: “if we can’t destroy the financial industry from the left we’ll do it from the right.”

Americans have a short memory. We’ve already forgotten the Bush administration and how it burned a century of goodwill toward our country and a trillion dollars or two in Iraq. We’ve already forgotten how banks that imploded were rescued in such a way as to give the executives leading them a bonus and a promotion for imploding them. (The blame for that goes to both Bush and Obama for doing nothing to intervene.)

So now people are like “where did all this populist rage come from?” They blame crap like gamergate and 4chan when those were just small lightning rods for niche communities. The USA around the turn of that decade was a pile of oily rags waiting for a source of ignition.

The alt right and Trump just saw an opportunity. They didn’t create it, nor did 4chan.

[underlipton]

I've tried to square the racial-justice-amorality of the "someone fck sht up, I don't care who" crowd with the racist sources of many of their grievances (as someone who can't afford such extravagant feelings). The roots of so many of our issues with abuse of the downtrodden, the impunity of the elite, the distrust of populist-minded institutions, the misplaced trust in monsters who whisper sweet words, etc., come from our history of racialized classism.

I don't know how you convey to such people how these problems don't get solved without rectifying the racist underpinnings - that "that's not okay" only gets teeth when "that's okay because it only happens to 'those' people" is no longer accepted. Only then do you see a substantial decrease in face-eating leopards.

[api]

A huge problem is that a lot of poor white folks see attempts to rectify racial or other injustices as a slap in the face, because they see themselves (perhaps correctly) as among the downtrodden. It turns into a battle of comparing wounds. Is a poor white person with no health care and no job prospects living in a dying town better or worse off than an urban black kid who grew up with a broken family in a bad neighborhood surrounded by crime? Are either of these better or worse off than a gay or trans person who's been bullied and ostracized by their community, or a battered wife whose community sides with her abuser, or a woman who was raped and forced to bear the child?

It's very easy for populist demagogue con artists to pit these groups against each other or focus all these groups' anger at one third party scapegoat ("the Jews," "the rich," or some foreign enemy are popular choices) in order to gain power.

A big problem is that real solutions to these problems don't fit nicely into 140 characters. They require that people stop and take the time to understand one another and the historical forces that created their situations, empathize with one another, and find win/win solutions. Populist demagoguery, scapegoating, and totalitarian schemes do fit neatly into sound bites, so they're easier to spread especially in an era of collapsing attention spans.

[KittenInABox]

Another issue is that class-based inter-racial cooperation was actively persecuted and propgagandized against by the government. Fred Hampton was an American activist who was building a coalition across racial divides. The FBI launched an entire political campaign to sow dissent against him specifically and, when that wasn't working, the police shot him in his bed.

[whaleofatw2022]

Yep, and I think that's why so many folks jumped from Bernie to Trump during/after the primaries. They couldn't be given a fair chance for peaceful change so they went for the other change option.

[api]

I wish I’d gone around the Internet screen shotting comments from Reddit and Twitter from 2008 until 2016 so future historians could understand. A lot of this stuff got purged.

Some others I remember (paraphrasing):

“I can’t throw a Molotov cocktail into the White House but I can throw a Trump.”

“I hope Trump does as much damage as possible.”

“When Trump said he’d do something about outsourcing I decided I’d die for this man. I don’t care what else he does. He can eat a baby on live TV.” (This was a self described former union Democrat from Michigan.)

The left almost gets it. “A riot is the voice of the disenfranchised.” They just need to understand that for many, especially in 2016, Trump was a riot. They were electing him to do harm, explicitly.

In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening.

If you don’t know US history from 2001 until 2008 you can’t understand what’s happened since.

[couchand]

The MLK quote is "a riot is the language of the unheard", and the full context is rich:

> And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

The last point in particular has proven quite prescient to our current moment.

[silverquiet]

> In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening.

I recently heard that depressed people are unable to habituate to things. I think I might be very depressed because I was never able to accept the increasing inequality, pointless wars against "terror" (how do you ever win a war against an emotion/concept?), surveillance/ad-driven capitalism, and environmental degradation. I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills.

[unclebucknasty]

>I was never able to accept the increasing inequality, pointless wars...

>I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills.

Years ago, someone on HN made a comment to the effect of, "I feel less and less a part of this world. Like the world is just moving away from me."

I understood the sentiment perfectly. And, this was before the madness of the last 9 years or so.

Funny thing is it seems that a large number (perhaps the majority) of people feel this way, yet powerless to do anything about it. I think the things you mentioned represent a very short list of the total dysfunction to which people of conscience cannot (and probably should not) habituate. And, I wonder if it's really the sense of powerlessness in the face of these things that is actually the depressing bit.

Of course it seems that the sentiment has been weaponized, with a third to half of the U.S. (and some significant portion of other countries), now incited to destroy it all, including their fellow citizens whom they have been convinced are part of the problem.

While this superficially sates their disaffectedness by channeling it into a kind of frenzied bloodlust, their behavior further demoralizes those who consequently feel more powerless in a world that is now more hostile and even less sensible.

[_heimdall]

Defining crazy is a weird thing. Most people don't hear voices in their head (unless its chalked up to a religious experience), so hearing voices is on the list of things that make one "crazy."

If its all about what is normal, actually caring about the things you mentioned are indeed crazy. Growing your own food, or even knowing where your food comes from, is then also crazy. Ironically, not taking any prescription pills is also on the list of taking crazy pills, as I think the last stat I saw was that something like 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug and a little over 50% are on two or more.

Normal today is a very strange thing, in my opinion.

[kevinventullo]

Ironically, not taking any prescription pills is also on the list of taking crazy pills, as I think the last stat I saw was that something like 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug

Psychological drugs specifically? I imagine the bulk of these are people managing their cholesterol or something.

[_heimdall]

Oh no I may have phrased that poorly. I used "crazy pills" there in reference to the GP comment, definitely not as a reference to psych medications.

I don't have the stats handy though I do remember psych meds being a high proportion of those on prescription drugs.

The even more interesting/concerning (IMO) related stat is that the US military recently released a report that 77% (going off memory here, if that's not exact it was very close) of 18-24 year olds wouldn't be deemed fit for service and a majority of that was related to psych med prescriptions. Nothing wrong at all with taking those meds when they are needed, just an insight into how many younger people couldn't enlist due only to that rule.

[throw4847285]

Yeah. The real reason America doesn't get caught up in stupid ancient conflicts is two fold:

1. The conflicts in the Middle East aren't ancient. They originate in the 19th Century at the earliest. 2. When you're the world's current most powerful global empire, you have the privilege of forgetting. Chile can't forget. Cambodia can't forget. Nicaragua can't forget. Etc.

[Avicebron]

I mean from looking back as a non participant in either (way too young to even care), it seems like occupy Wallstreet and the alt right pretty much pretty much had a similar message, some people have used money and power to make the US far more unbalanced and it's grinding people down. So 2008 seems a good benchmark

[_3u10]

The anger was palpable back then. The MSM swept it under the rug and replaced it with BLM.

Being anti globalism was THE left wing thing back then. Trump sounds more like Michael Moore / Noam Chomsky than anything approaching right wing. He’s classic 90s left wing, especially the taking the jobs thing, that’s Michael Moore to a T.

[Perceval]

Before BLM, OWS was hamstrung by the introduction of the Progressive Stack, ensuring that they could not effectively organize or even remain coherent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack