Episode Transcript
17: Understanding the Boys and Men of 4chan/Dale Beran
[00:00:08] Matthew Remski: Hello, everyone. My name is Matthew Remski. This is the Anti-Fascist Dad podcast. It’s Episode 17: Understanding the Boys and Men of 4chan, with Dale Beran.
[00:00:19] Dale Beran: All of the other politics that I wrote about that were in the book—I kind of thought they would fade into irrelevance—but a lot of it is still bouncing around. So, yeah: politicians using that QAnon-style rhetoric, or spreading misinformation like far-right trolls were doing in 2017, where they’re just divorced from the truth and they’re spreading ideas that are politically expedient but just wrong—that’s become part of politics. In the same way, all the alt-right influences, all these strange, quirky, dysfunctional personalities that I thought would fade away because they were so ridiculous or so clearly wore their problems on their sleeves—well, they’ve had second and third and fourth acts. Elon Musk let them all back on Twitter. Then he monetized Twitter. So they were making money again, and a lot of money.
[00:01:17] Matthew Remski: That’s writer and artist Dale Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office.
The book came out in 2019, and it told me more about young men and the online drivers of the fascist MAGA movement than anything else has since.
And that came from Dale’s deep immersion within those communities from years before.
So that interview is coming up.
For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and on YouTube and TikTok as AntiFascistDad. The Patreon for this show is AntiFascistDadPodcast, where subscribers get early access to every Part Two of these main-feed episodes. Eventually, the Part Twos are all unlocked to the wild, because this is an open education project. There’ll also be a link in the notes for my book coming out, called Antifascist Dad. The publication date is April 26, so that’s soon, and the preorder link will be in the notes.
Over on Conspirituality, a few weeks back I interviewed Norelle Cook, the journalist and documentarian who just published a fantastic book called Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging. It’s really the first ethnography of conspirituality, and it’s a valuable text.
She was able to do this work because she embedded herself in a volatile culture and found its emotional logic. She was able to do that because, like her subjects Tammy and Yvonne—who she met through the aftermath of their participation in January 6—Norelle was also a white, middle-aged divorced woman. And so they found points of connection and solidarity.
With Dale’s book we have an even longer-term enmeshment that dates back to the year 2000. He grew up on the message boards that he later returned to to research. And that’s what makes his analysis of Chan culture—its humor, bitterness, paranoia, despair, and aggression—so rich and nuanced.
Now, when I spoke to Norelle, she had a lot to say about how difficult it was to cleanly and ethically navigate this genre at the threshold between memoir and journalism.
The way Beran controls for this problem is through the constant contextualization of 4chan drama within a larger sociological and geopolitical history.
So the title It Came from Something Awful is a double entendre, because it both names one of the earliest mostly young-male internet forums that took their lead from anon boards in Japan—Something Awful—but it also pegs the origins of the MAGA movement’s deep web infrastructure in a tangle of aggrieved, inflammatory, ironic, self-isolating users who yearned to tear everything about their hypocritical and imprisoning world down, even as they knew they were somehow keeping it on life support with their demoralized consumerism.
Dale leads readers through these rhizomes—the message-board infrastructure—until we have a history of the underbelly of the internet, and we’re able to connect the dots in a parade of online ecosystems that are all attempting to out-disrupt each other: Something Awful to 4chan, to subreddits, to 8chan, to Wizardchan, and then finally incel groups.
All of these groups share social rules. The users—who are mostly young men—both hide themselves through anonymity, but also overshare their most intimate anxieties. They create a kind of new form of cathartic agitprop: the meme, which disrupts every rule of cultural exchange and political discourse with a kind of reductive cruelty that can always be disclaimed as ironic.
So this is a world in which there is no good faith. And Dale tracks how it leads to the support of a presidency which is half serious and half a joke, devoid of meaning, and now hurtling toward disaster.
Now, as colorful as Dale is at describing the personalities and antics in these spaces, he’s also really lucid about the material conditions. And I think that’s crucial, because it draws attention away from the preponderance of psychological discussion—you know, like “why are these boys so dysfunctional?”—and it pushes things more into the realm of: what kind of society produces an internet underbelly that looks like this, and why do people get stuck in it?
Because I do find that a lot of discourse focuses on boys and men in basements through this framework of almost personal disgust. And that really doesn’t get us anywhere. In fact, the red-pilled, black-pilled, and incel users that Dale writes about turned that framework into a morbid source of what we can only call a kind of negative dignity.
They affected a kind of pride in their degraded social status. It was like they took that Beck song seriously: “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?”
Dale’s dialectically inspired historical throughline really goes beyond and behind all of these crusty details. So here’s a summary of his big picture.
Dale argues that once wealthy industrial global North societies met the basic needs of their postwar citizens, capitalism pivoted to manufacturing need as a product—selling dissatisfaction, and turning even anti-authoritarian pleasure into a marketable promise.
So Dale says that the original hippie—and then later grunge—critique of commodification was rapidly absorbed. Their aesthetics, their music, the transcendence of these became lifestyle products, while structural demands for new power relations were sidelined in favor of consumer freedoms and niche hobbies.
As the cooptation of counterculture deepened, its thinkers developed irony as a protective shell. Coolness became a form of indifference, a kind of ambivalence that was protective. And this helped set the tone of 90s ennui and a screen-soaked adolescence where reality felt thin and illegitimate and insubstantial.
So Dale draws on Mark Fisher—the writer of Capitalist Realism—and Jean Baudrillard to describe the feeling of the cancellation of the future, as progress collapses into endless circulation and virtual reflection. And this goes so far that even The Matrix, like Star Wars before it, becomes an example of rebellion repackaged as escapist screen illusion.
When it comes to anonymous online spaces, the escapism is accelerated. In Dale’s telling, identity dematerializes into desire catalogs, discussion becomes performative derailment, and memes function like a gag reflex that regurgitates meaninglessness.
In this psychic landfill, atomized masses seek safety through hierarchical thinking, conspiracies, and race, and they wind up thinking that their declassed resentment aligns with elite power somehow.
So the Chans give rise to a kind of gamification in politics, with irony curdling into belief, where online fantasies attempt to materialize in real-world spectacle—and even violence.
Yet Dale insists that toxicity isn’t really about human nature. It’s context. It’s entertainment culture. It’s materialism. It’s self-gratification.
Naming despair, Dale argues, is the first step—or would be the first step—toward refusing a world that demands we pretend we’re fine.
I think what’s most moving about this book and Dale’s work is that he really shows these young men shared a central despair.
They had been betrayed by every promise offered by a counterculture that never followed through. They all watched punk, grunge, gaming, and the internet itself get coopted into the great corporate machine.
And that machine collapsed history into a never-ending sales pitch. It offered everything from everywhere all at once on flat screens without depth, so that no one could know where they are from, or where they are going, or where they even came from—because the Chan boards actually delete themselves.
So when I say I found hope in this book, that might sound a little remote at this point, given this introduction. But there was a certain amount of eavesdropping on the honesty of the people who inhabited this world that I found almost inspiring. Like, these are people who are in touch with their despair. And I see this in small parts, little corners of the internet quite regularly, where people are willing to be absolutely transparent and confessional—unfortunately, usually with anonymous people that they’ll never meet and won’t be able to continue a connection with.
[00:10:55] Matthew Remski: But there’s something the internet can draw out of people. And in this case, with this demographic, there were many people who seem to have been in touch with their despair, which can be the first step on that long journey: recognizing one’s misery when the world insists that you ought to be content.
Dale Beran is a writer and artist whose work has been published in McSweeney’s, Quartz, Huffington Post, Daily Dot, The Nib, and the Baltimore City Paper.
He has a BA in Classics, and he’s got a JD from Fordham, and he lives in Baltimore.
Here’s our conversation.
Hello, Dale. Welcome to Anti-Fascist Dad.
[00:11:44] Dale Beran: Hi, thanks for having me.
[00:11:46] Matthew Remski: So the story you tell about the troll army on 4chan that helped meme a fascist into the White House—it’s super weird, it’s super compelling. And even these years later, it kind of haunts me.
And at the center of it is this demographic of young men who feel catastrophically alienated from mainstream culture. And ultimately that alienation is turned against scapegoats—first as a joke, and then it’s a provocation, and then it gets real.
And so I guess my first question is: does this demographic still exist in the same way? Has it grown or changed?
Did they lose power, paradoxically, when they gained power?
[00:12:34] Dale Beran: I would say it still exists, but not in the same way. I do think the group I was writing about was alienated young men who were mostly on a website called 4chan, but also a variety of websites, and had formed part of the proto–alt-right and became part of the alt-right. They were defined by not having a lot of prospects outside of internet life, and spending a lot of time online.
And that, for a variety of reasons, made them drift to the right or the far right, and made them pretty radical. And for a while, they supported Trump.
Now, does that exact demographic exist? Well, it’s probably different people. It’s different young people. There are certainly alienated young people with not a lot of prospects in life who are spending a lot of time online—who are terminally online. In fact, that’s become a type. We see it depicted in media. And terms for them—like “incel”—get thrown around as jokes. People are more aware of it as a sociological problem.
But all of the other politics I wrote about in the book—I kind of thought they would fade into irrelevance—but a lot of it is still bouncing around. So, yeah: politicians using that QAnon-style rhetoric or spreading misinformation like far-right trolls were doing in 2017, where they’re just divorced from the truth and they’re spreading ideas that are politically expedient but just wrong—that’s become part of politics.
In the same way, all the alt-right influences, all these strange, quirky, dysfunctional personalities that I thought would fade away because they were so ridiculous or so clearly wore their problems on their sleeves—well, they’ve had second and third and fourth acts. Elon Musk let them all back on Twitter, then he monetized Twitter, so they were making money again, and a lot of money.
So a lot of those people are doing extremely well in the new Trump era.
And then, yeah, there are things like Silicon Valley’s lurch to the right, which was somewhat related—similar politics. And what Elon Musk turned Twitter into is very similar to the Twitter website that I wrote about. It looks a lot like 4chan. And Elon Musk was using the same tactics, where he was spreading misinformation, retweeting the people I wrote about in my book in 2019.
This was just what he was doing a few months ago when he was empowering government.
It all still feels like it’s there, though. Of course it shifted.
[00:15:32] Matthew Remski: It must be such a wild ride for you to watch Musk retweet the subjects from your book in 2019. I don’t even know how you look at that and say, “Is this the real world?”
[00:15:47] Dale Beran: Yeah. I kind of assumed that things would be bad, but in a different way that I didn’t understand—and that all of this would be really, really outdated.
But no, he was retweeting the old memes. I remember there was a New York Times article when he was doing this about how he seemed a little outdated. It seemed like 10 years old, where he was retweeting Keximus Maximus memes of Pepe the Frog as a God Emperor, which were old 4chan memes from 2017, 2018. So he was living in an old internet as he was tweeting all this stuff on Twitter while he was running DOGE.
But yeah, it felt very strange. I’m always surprised that it’s effective.
When he would do something politically and then retweet a bunch of people whose job is to spread misinformation online because that makes them a little bit of money—or a great deal of money—and then he would say, “Okay, this person found evidence of corruption in exactly this agency that I’m dismantling,” even though last week they were saying something totally different, or whatever was popular that week. That’s the thing they’re tweeting about and spreading nonsense about.
The fact that that’s a useful or workable strategy—and that it’s not just a strategy but something powerful people are doing—that’s surprising.
[00:17:28] Matthew Remski: I didn’t actually put these two obvious things together until I heard your answer, which is that many of the subjects you covered fell out of favor or got demonetized, QAnon implodes after Biden’s inauguration—but when Musk buys Twitter and monetizes it, he’s not only inviting them back. He’s giving them jobs.
[00:18:05] Dale Beran: Yeah. Of course you can make money just by being popular online anywhere, but they were deplatformed for a while and had a harder time making money on obscure third-party copies of the first-tier platforms.
But yes: the idea that he’s just sending everyone a check who has a lot of followers and gets a lot of retweets—that strategy incentivizes people to spread things that make people angry, spread misinformation, spread things that really push people’s buttons.
Does it incentivize funny memes? Sure. But it really incentivizes the worst behavior, which far-right trolls and alt-right personalities were very good at.
And yeah, when he unbans them, he’s just sending them checks now—paying them to do it.
In particular, they realized they’d get retweeted by Musk if they spread information that was pro–Elon Musk. So that was more money. It’s a clear indirect payment—almost a direct payment—if you do that.
[00:19:19] Matthew Remski: Rolling back to this original demographic: one question that has lingered in my mind since reading your book is whether there was ever a fork in the road for some of those guys, where different information might have pushed them into a more leftist provocation—realizing their problems were more likely related to capitalism than feminism or immigrants, for example.
Was there a fork in the road there? Was there a path not taken?
[00:20:00] Dale Beran: Yeah. If you’re talking about ordinary users online who didn’t have a lot of prospects and spent a lot of time online playing video games or on 4chan, there was a lot of oscillation, a lot of flipping back and forth.
Even on the sites themselves there was this quote-unquote horseshoe theory, where the two extreme sides of politics would meet on the horseshoe.
So yeah, I think certainly a lot of people were searching for an answer: “Why am I here? Why am I stuck? What’s wrong with society, or what’s wrong with me?”
And if you didn’t spend a lot of time educating yourself, or didn’t have an opportunity for education, and you just spent a lot of time online reading message boards or Reddit or Wikipedia, it’s hard to settle on the right answers.
So a lot of people would find answers that seemed right at first but were not particularly correct. And you could see that in the shape of the politics, where far-right sites were providing answers like, “Oh, in the past you wouldn’t have been this alienated,” or “This is how you would have perceived yourself as a man,” or “You would have had self-esteem,” or “You would have been more successful.”
So you could see the politics trying to provide answers for those things. And a lot of the time they were shallow answers.
It certainly happened that if people were smart or had the wherewithal to educate themselves, they would reach answers that were more nuanced and complex and say, “Actually, maybe this is why I’m in this position.”
The shallow answers were very cruel-minded. And if you think more deeply, you get more sympathetic and thoughtful: maybe it’s not just about me. Maybe if you have compassion for other people and think about what forces in society have brought all of us to this position, you get a better answer.
[00:22:24] Matthew Remski: Yeah. A better answer that’s harder to meme about, right?
[00:22:27] Dale Beran: Yeah, certainly. The medium itself flattens things and simplifies things. So you get simplified answers spreading quickly, and long complicated answers not going very far at all.
But yeah, I do know a few people who started out in the far right and then read more and moved to a more thoughtful position.
The one that comes to mind is Frederick Brennan, founder of 8chan. That’s where Gamergate started and where a lot of far-right mass shootings later came from. Frederick started out pretty far right, or at least adjacent. He had an extremely difficult life, but he’s extremely smart and eventually moved to a very different position as he learned more. That happens all the time.
[00:23:37] Matthew Remski: There’s one aspect of horseshoe theory that I find tolerable, and it’s in affect and aesthetics. Usually the theory gets used by centrists or liberals to say the aims of the left and right are the same, and it depoliticizes action.
But when we get to internet communications and memeing, I can see some usefulness.
The example I think of is that when Luigi Mangione murdered Brian Thompson, it unleashed a flood of memes and jokes—relief, schadenfreude, and nihilism.
I wanted to ask about the question of “Can the left meme?” And if they can’t, why not? Or was that an example where they could?
Is there a qualitative difference between the emotions packed into a Luigi meme and the bearded-man memes that drive in the opposite political direction, or the Wojak memes?
[00:25:15] Dale Beran: You’re right to point out the similarities between the Luigi Mangione memes and the 4chan memes—when they were memeing mass shooters, and memeing far-right politics and mass shooters together, celebrating the mass shooter.
It’s hard to neatly divide those and say, “One is right and one is wrong,” because they look extremely similar. So it is peculiar to think about: here are two sides of the spectrum doing almost the exact same thing.
I do think “the medium is the message” applies here.
There was a moment—I remember when we learned Luigi Mangione’s name was Luigi. I think I was scrolling Twitter, which I rarely do these days, and I was like, “Oh no, I know exactly what’s going to happen next.” And I could join the race.
If I was fast enough, I could look up a picture of Luigi from Super Mario Brothers and put a gun in his hand. And maybe if I’m really fast I’d get 100 retweets, get that big dopamine hit—1,000 retweets—and my tweet would go viral.
Now, it used to just be dopamine. You used to have no money. If you did that in 2019 or 2020—unless you got really large—you wouldn’t get paid. But now you’d get a check for $50, $100 or something from Elon Musk for that work.
So yes, you can see how the medium incentivizes it.
Are people doing it out of a sense of therapy? Yes. They’re frustrated about society, CEOs, medical insurance—yes. Is that why the memes are popular? For sure.
But another reason is simply how the system works. There’s that moment where you’re like, “Okay, I could put together the meme and I’ll get all the retweets.” The platform rewards attention. That shapes the product.
[00:28:19] Matthew Remski: I’ve seen mainly liberal commentators respond with a kind of centrist attitude: “We don’t want to stoop so low. That’s tasteless.”
You called it “peculiar” to note the similarity between Luigi-as-Mario or Luigi-as-saint memes and what happened on 4chan.
I’m wondering how you hear that “don’t stoop so low” argument, because it suggests that if you’re progressive or leftist, you should do it in a tasteful way.
[00:29:43] Dale Beran: I certainly didn’t create any Luigi memes. Did I chortle at a few? Yeah. But ultimately it felt like it wasn’t a good idea.
It felt too similar to what was happening on 4chan in 2019. It felt a little stale too. I was like, “Oh wow, I’ve seen this for so long.”
So if you have a set of ideas and politics and you want to get them across—what do you do?
I guess there’s a question of cruel-mindedness and what you’re expressing. That’s an active debate on the left: how far do you want your rhetoric to go, what kind of radical politics you’re into.
But in terms of whether it’s helpful to spread ideas this way: my feeling—maybe optimistically—is probably not.
This form of social media and the idea of spreading viral memes has been around for a while. We might be at the tail end of it.
Are there better ways? If you buy “the medium is the message,” then podcasting, for example, is a different medium, and it creates a different form of expression and art. It’s long-form, more free-ranging, and you can bounce ideas around. People love podcasts the way they love social media.
So there are probably other outlets to get your message across that, because they’re different forms, create better, more nuanced expression.
If I were someone thinking, “I want to get my message out,” would I go to Twitter? No. Would I go to TikTok? No.
It’s good to sell products, but is it good to change minds? Probably not. At this point it mostly benefits the platforms because it’s addictive.
[00:32:27] Matthew Remski: My own dinosaur status on Twitter became obvious when I realized what I really loved was creating a thread—point by point—a fairly complex argument about conspiracy theories or cult journalism.
I’d do the 10-tweet thread. Not the Seth Abramson “BREAKING” thing, but more like: if I wanted to turn this into a thousand-word op-ed later, how could I confine myself to point-by-point writing?
I realized that while I enjoyed it, it didn’t go anywhere, because it was counter to what the medium was actually offering.
And I realized I was maybe a bit selfish in my participation. It was just for me.
Thank you, Elon, for the opportunity to hone my craft—but I’m not surprised it went nowhere.
[00:34:05] Dale Beran: I think you’re also describing the frustration of writing and the creative act. You change your own mind first. You’re like, “Okay, I’ve learned a lot writing this down. Hopefully other people will read it.”
And then, whatever medium you’re in—if you’re writing a book, you think, “Well, I might change minds of people who read long-form.”
If you’re writing a tweet, okay—you changed your mind, maybe educated yourself, maybe other people read it, but it can just fly by in the constant stream. It’s like dropping something in a river and watching it rush off. That’s what it feels like putting anything on Twitter. You’re never sure what it’s doing in this strange landscape where everything gets swept away immediately.
[00:34:57] Matthew Remski: The fantasy depended on the idea that readers would see I was doing something unique in this format. Everybody else is tossing things away, but this guy is taking up proper space. It was so delusional.
[00:35:26] Dale Beran: Yeah. You can change it. You can change the whole system, right?
No, but I do think everyone felt that way at the beginning. There was optimism at first. So you were fine to try it before we realized what it was.
[00:35:48] Matthew Remski: One of the most interesting professors I had at the University of Wisconsin assigned a 25-word synopsis of every reading. If you could do that, he felt confident you caught the idea.
That exercise in concision was super helpful. I think I write too much generally. And that mindset is what I was in when I thought Twitter could become a genre for disciplined argument.
[00:36:44] Dale Beran: That’s true. I felt the same way early on. Like, if I can’t compress it into a single tweet, that’s just a writing challenge. Plenty of people are successful in this medium.
But in the rearview mirror, I think of social media as a place where people go to tickle themselves—entertain themselves, feel good hearing their politics in an echo chamber. It’s entertainment, not messaging.
That’s not true of other media. Podcasting feels like people are listening for company because they’re lonely, but also because they’re interested in being informed.
I’m not sure that happens on social media as posting gets faster and more addictive.
[00:38:06] Matthew Remski: In Part Two, now up on Patreon, Dale and I pick up the thread with the people he followed while reporting on early 4chan, and we talk about how many of them eventually grew out of that phase. Some moved on once their offline lives improved, while others remained tied to screens—showing how internet use can resemble gambling or addiction. When the real-world supports aren’t there, they don’t materialize.
We talk about online spaces as fantasy worlds—like ideological Minecraft servers—where belief systems can crystallize and then vanish once people log off. Constant immersion often leads to isolation and misery rather than freedom.
We also talk about accountability, especially for those whose early trolling techniques later fed into QAnon and the alt-right. Anonymity encouraged antisocial behavior without consequences, and many former participants now wrestle with guilt and confusion about what they’re responsible for, and what they were up to.
A lot of kids were thrown into this environment without a hand to hold, and it took too long for us to recognize the harms created by toxic platforms and corporate incentives.
I was also able to tell Dale how his work has helped me explain these dynamics to my own kids, as a form of inoculation.
That’s the show, folks. Take care of each other.
Sam.
