The 4chan-Tumblr War never ended - instead it ate the world.
How conflict between two online communities set the stage for the culture war; and remade American politics in the process.
In 2014, two online communities went to war. The belligerents were fairly niche social media boards: 4chan and Tumblr. While their short-lived conflict amounted to little more than a curious moment in Internet history, I have become convinced that it actually set the stage for everything that has come to pass since: the devolution of American political life into a relentless, grinding, culture war, climaxing with the near-total victory of the right following the reelection of Donald Trump. At the time, neither online community was particularly influential or relevant outside of very-online internet circles, but in the intervening decade, their echos have spread throughout our culture, ultimately subsuming the American left and right and remaking them in their respective images. The American right in the year 2025 essentially has become an extension of 4chan, and it’s politically incorrect subforums /pol and /b. Similarly, the American left has become completely fixated on the brand of quasi-academic intersectional social theory (now called “wokeness”) that first exploded on Tumblr in the early 2010s.
The 2014 conflict was not the first skirmish between the two sites. As early as 2010, 4chan trolls had raided Tumblr, posting pornographic images and running a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), for no real reason other than the lulz. Remarkably, Tumblr users were able to band together and execute their own short-lived DDoS attack on 4chan briefly bringing the site down as well. The whole affair barely made any ripples outside of a bemused article in NPR and some academic discussion about how the then-nascent world of social media was changing how young people formed communities.
It wasn’t until 2014 that things really popped off. In a move of breathtaking naivete, it was Tumblr that fired the first shot. This flier began circulating in Spring of 2014:
Despite being from over a decade ago, it shows all of the hallmarks of what might now be called “wokeness” – warnings about all of the typical -phobias and -isms, the sincere conviction that they speak for the whole world, and a completely implausible confidence that they could make a real difference by posting “corrections” to the terrible beliefs of the average 4chan user. Independence Day arrived and dutiful Tumblr activists swarmed 4chan, flooding the board with posts of kittens, flowers, and whatever they thought might “detoxify” the board. Long, quasi-academic essays about the reality of rape culture and feminist analyses were posted, presumably in the hope of convincing users through the power of reasoned argument.
4chan responded with overwhelming fury and launched a counter-raid, although where the Tumblr users had posted wholesome cuteness and essays on feminist sociopolotical analysis, the 4chan users flooded Tumblr with misogynistic pornography, violent gore, and anything else they thought might shock and traumatize naive and overly-earnest feminists. According to a short video by a self-described Internet Historian, 4chan users photoshoped selfies posted by Tumblr users into pornographic images (preceding the phenomenon of “deepfakes” by a decade) and shared malicious code designed to brick Windows computers when run (apparently a few dozen Tumblr users were dumb enough to run it, destroying their own computers in the process). After two days of abuse, 4chan got bored, and Tumblr basically folded. The conflict petered out and the Internet’s famously short attention span moved on to other things.
The whole affair was overshadowed by Gamergate just a few months later, and at the time (as I remember it), neither side was particularly popular with the “normies”. 4chan was always been considered to be the absolute dregs of the Internet: a kind of diseased fever dream that was rife with all of the worst content online (when Tumblr users called it filled with bigotry, they weren’t wrong). Tumblr was seen as, perhaps less overtly toxic, but certainly more annoying and without any of the edgy fuck-you “coolness” that made 4chan darkly appealing. The social justice warriors (“SJWs”) were treated with almost universal disdain, with reactions ranging from embarrassed eye-rolling and cringe to furious criticism. For the most part, people who were even aware of the drama mostly treated it as a kind of fireworks show put on by two deeply dysfunctional online subcultures of no real consequence.
What nobody realized at the time was that we had just gotten a glimpse of the future. Thinking back over the last eight years of America’s endless, grinding culture war, it’s clear that the 4Chan-Tumblr War never actually ended. Instead, it ate the world, and we are all now trapped inside of it, our brains slowly being digested by the endless onslaught of outrage, grievance, and cruelty that is our online milieu. The ideas, conspiracies, and rhetoric of the modern American right has become indistinguishable from what was bubbling around the Chan boards in the early 2010s: the white identity politics, anti-feminism, conspiracy theories, and nihilism that dominated the right today are all downstream of what was happening on 4chan in the early 2010s. Similarly, the American left has been almost completely taken over by the ideas, social norms, and intellectual frameworks that dominated Tumblr in the same time: any time someone lectures you about “checking your privilege”, accuses you of perpetuating systemic oppression, or tries to cancel something “problematic”, you’re seeing the echos of what was happening on Tumblr back in the day. These two niche communities, that no one with any power in 2014 cared about, have punched so far above their weight that they collectively remade our culture.
Writing this in the wreckage of the 2024 election, having watched the left repeatedly fail to block the far fright from gaining power, it’s hard not to see parallels to what was happening online back in 2014. Earnest, progressive Tumblr, which took itself extremely seriously (despite being completely naive), utterly failed to understand the nature their enemy and ran headlong into the reactionary nihilism of 4chan, which took nothing seriously beyond the atavistic desire to visit cruelty and trauma on anyone it disliked.
And now the story plays out again.
How 4chan ate the right.
The grim reality that the modern Republican party has become completely cordycepted by reactionary online communities is well-documented. Internet commentators and journalists like Robert Evans (who wrote an excellent history of the American fascist right called The War on Everyone, which is available to listen to for free) have been beating this drum for years.
The moment that the online right really broke containment was Gamergate, which exploded just a few months after the Tumblr-4chan war – in fact, I think Gamergate, with it’s continued fixaction with “SJWs” is probably best understood as merely opening another front in the pre-existing conflict. A lot of ink has been spilled on Gamergate, and if you’re not familiar about it, it was basically right-wing Cancel Culture: a lot of very-online young men who had a lot of pent-up anger about the growing feminist movement self-organized into a vicious online harassment campaign against progressive women in the gaming industry. While not overtly political in the sense of Republicans-versus-Democrats party politics, Gamergate became the blueprint of right-wing organizing just a few years later. Many of the strategies and animating grievances first used by Gamergate supporters resurfaced two years later as part of the insurgent Trump campaign. Steve Bannon even said as much, commenting that the angry young men who formed the core of Gamergate represented an “army” that could be “activated” by the right message. Many of these young men were in the emerging tech industry, where tech-adjacent thinkers like Mencius Moldbug (real name: Curtis Yarvin, which is somehow even worse) were busy laying the intellectual groundwork for a new political reality they called “The Dark Enlightenment”; the sweeping away of democracy in favor of a kind of techno-feudalism, with Silicon Valley billionaires as the rightful lords of the new order. Moldbug himself would go on to become something of a court philosopher to right-wing billionaires, including Peter Thiel, who would go on to launch the career of one JD Vance.
JD Vance is clearly the first Executive to be “Very Online.” A quick look at who Vance follows on Twitter (a forum where he is very active) shows a lot more than just politicians, celebrities, and government officials: he’s plugged into an ecosystem of often anonymous, right-wing accounts which collectively organize around ideas that grew out of the Chans in the early 2010s. Preoccupations with IQ as a measure of human worth, shifting demographics and decreases in (white) birthrates, evolutionary psychology, antifeminism, and the naturalness of social hierarchies are all there. There’s also just an undeniable “vibe” that the man has that screams: “I spent too much time in my youth arguing online.” As someone else who as also wasted a huge amount of their life in various online communities, it’s something that you recognize. Take this Tweet:
If your soul is unsullied by too much time online and not yet so blistered and melted that you can parse it, this post might just look “weird” – why is the VPOTUS talking about IQ? What is “elite failure”? However, if you have spent the last decade pickling in The DiscourseTM it is immediately obvious that this is a Tweet from a man who has spent a lot of time in online, very reactionary political circles. This is a man who is who he is because of 4chan. Perhaps not in the literal sense (although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Vance was active as a young man), but in a kind of spiritual sense: all of this stuff began on forms like /pol and after Gamergate, eventually washed over the American Right, infecting it like some kind of memetic plague until it completely replaced every last fragment of the 2000s-era neoconservative consensus that dominated the Republican Party when I was young. For God’s sake, event George W. Bush, a president who most people thought had utterly destroyed the Republican Party, is starting to look good by comparison. He may have tanked the economy, killed millions of innocent people in Iraq, and laid the groundwork for the modern surveillance state, but at least he didn’t Tweet Reddit-tier reactionary gibberish about IQ.
Elon Musk, our acting POTUS, is even more obviously a creature of the Chans. His beliefs, posting style (or should I say “poasting style”), and obsession with memes are even more obviously reflective of Chan-culture than Vance’s. He even approvingly re-Tweets screenshots various deranged 4chan posts, suggesting it was an “interesting observation” that only men with high testosterone levels and people with autism are capable of critical thinking.
Musk’s 20-year old shock troops at the Department of Government Efficiency are probably too young to have participated in the glorious revolution of Gamergate, but they are clearly it’s rightful heirs. The Tweets by DOGE staffer Marko Elez in favor of repealing the Civil Rights act, normalizing “Indian hate”, and supporting eugenics would have fit right in on 4chan, and apparently are not disqualifying to work for Musk, as Elez is going to be re-hired anyway after being defended by Vance (whose wife is Indian-American).
4chan is now made it to the central halls of American power. They also have your social security number.
How Tumblr ate the left.
If the modern right is the spiritual successor to the online, reactionary fever swamps of the Chans, then the modern left is absolutely the spiritual successor to the online, progressive fever swamps of Tumblr. For those who are too young, or too old, to have been part of Tumblr’s brief Golden Era, it was a micro-blogging site largely in the same vein as early Twitter. In many respects, it had similarities to 4chan structurally: mostly anonymous, short-form content, although in terms of politics and culture, it could not have been more different. Tumblr was ground-zero for the emergence of activism centered on the framework of intersectional feminism. Once a theory from the academic world of legal studies to explain the discrepancy between how black women and men were treated in the court room, on Tumblr, intersectional feminism flowered into a grand, unifying Theory of Everything. Mixing with older traditions of anti-capitalist and left-wing activism and the emerging dynamics on online fandom culture, “intersectional feminism” became a social movement of almost religious significance to its adherents. Many of the idioms that would go on to become culture war flashpoints, including “trigger warnings”, “checking your privilege” and the urge to label things as “problematic” were already the air that Tumblr users breathed by 2014.
I titled this section “how Tumblr ate the left” for purposes of conceptual symmetry, but to be honest, it’s not as clear how this happened. There wasn’t a “Gamergate” moment – a singular event where ideas previously relegated on online fringes broke containment and started doing influencing the real world. No progressive equivalent to Steve Bannon saying “I did this” as an insurgent left shocked the world by disrupting the status quo. Instead, I think there was a more “long march through the institutions” effect. My hypothesis is that Tumblr’s mostly young, very politically-minded users were generally highly educated and ambitious. Despite all of the radical chic, almost everyone I knew who was a die-hard Tumblr-user either had, or was in the process of getting, undergraduate or graduate degrees. Almost all of them had ambitions of improving the world via work in the professional-managerial class: non-profit work, professional activism, higher education, and political organizing were all natural directions for young people who spent their free time calling each-other out online over systemic racism and the evils of cis-heteropatriachy.
I have no data to back this up, but my guess is that, between 2010 and 2020, an improbably large number of young people (especially young women and gays/lesbians) who started jobs in the PMC or the Democratic Party political machine had their political consciousness at least partially formed by time spent on Tumblr. This also probably applies to therapists and teachers. In part, I think we can see evidence for this in how the earliest fault lines of the 2010s culture war appeared on college campuses in largely bottom-up fashion. Remember all the conflict around “trigger warnings”? Those were warnings generally demanded by students, not put in place by administrators, and were already de rigueur in progressive online spaces well before it was ever an issue on campus. Similarly, campus blow-ups over “cultural appropriation” and offensive Halloween costumes were almost entirely driven by students, not administrators. Contrary to what conspiracy theorists on the right like to claim, the explosion of identity-focused progressivism on campuses wasn’t the result of top-down brainwashing by manipulative professors or “woke” administration: it was almost entirely grassroots, driven by 18-22 year olds who wanted to remake the culture; first of Higher Ed, then the world at large.
Students, especially those at elite schools, were participating in online subcultures that 95% of adults had never heard of, and eventually, just like with Gamergate, those subcultures spilled out from cyberspace into the real world. Rather than taking the form of an outsider, anti-establishment candidat like Trump, however, it happened on college campuses that were raising up the next generation of “elites” and so the ideas of intersectional identity politics had a direct intravenous line into the core institutions of liberal and left-wing power.
Where will things go from here?
Writing in the aftermath of Trump’s dizzying first two weeks back in power, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the world-historic failure of the left to provide any effective resistance to the rising right, and the way that 4chan essentially steamrollered Tumblr back in 2014. To be fair, I don’t think it’s fair to blame Harris’ loss to Trump on “wokeness”; far from running a left-wing, identity-focused campaign, Harris tacked hard to the center, running a campaign designed to appeal to the 5 brain-damaged beltway consultants who thought that “Liz Cheney is brat” would be a winning message to an electorate staggering through the wreckage of a global pandemic.
However, I think it is fair to say that the left, both center and radical, has utterly failed to provide any kind of resistance to the consolidation of right-wing power. In 2017 liberal feminists marched against Trump in pink pussy hats, while radical antifas punched Nazis in the streets. In 2020 there were mass movements for Black Lives Matter and the cause of racial justice, and throughout it, liberals exhorted everyone to Vote Blue No Matter Who. As far as I can tell, none of it, radical or centrist, made a lick of difference. My adult life began with the election of Barrack Obama and the promise of an unassailable, rainbow coalition of young people, progressives, and minorities. Now, as I start my 30s, Trump is back in power, Elon Musk is dismantling the American government, and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is already rolling back everything from abortion protection to the Chevron doctrine. The 4chan right controls every branch of American government and the architects of Project 2025 are clearly striking while the iron is hot. The Democrats in Congress appear to have completely given up, barely presenting any kind of opposition, while institutions from Harvard University to Amazon are falling over themselves to “comply in advance.” Whatever counterbalance or bulwark the left was supposed to provide has been about as effective as a wet tissue in front of a blowtorch: just like the fantasy that Tumblr could “detoxify” 4chan with feminist essays and cute cat photos.
I don’t know what the next generation of left-wing or progressive activism and ideology will look like. Depending on how far the ascendant right goes in consolidating power, and how willing they are to follow the Dark Enlightenment thinkers into a truly post-democracy world, we could be looking at a multi-decade power shift in favor of the far right. On the other hand, I suspect that Trump and Elon’s slash-and-burn approach to the Federal government and international relations won’t be without significant economic consequences, in which case, we might already be at the high-water mark of MAGA’s influence, as the pain of an economic downturn turns supporters against them. In either case, it is finally undeniable that the liberal order that has dominated global politics for the last 75 years is well and truly its deathbed (if not already dead). The question of what will replace it remains to be seen, and if the “left” (or what remains of it) wants to be a have a seat at the table, it will have to shed its current form and be reborn as something completely different. The Tumblr-era of American leftism is over (whether it knows it or not), while the rise of the 4chan era of the American right may have only just begun.