17. Understanding the Boys and Men of 4Chan w/ Dale Beran

17. Understanding the Boys and Men of 4Chan w/ Dale Beran

Writer Dale Beran visits to discuss the far-right online subcultures he documented in his excellent 2019 book, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office.

I ask whether the cohort of alienated, terminally online young men still exists and whether it lost power after gaining it. TLDR? The specific 4chan generation has aged or splintered, but the type endures, and its ideas have been mainstreamed—especially through Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into a platform that rewards provocation and misinformation.

Did these young men ever face a real ideological fork? Do they regret that meme-friendly scapegoating traveled faster than deeper structural explanations? We also whether the left should start meming harder.

DALE BERAN is a writer and artist whose work has been published in McSweeney’s, Quartz, The Huffington Post, The Daily Dot, The Nib, and The Baltimore City Paper. He has a BA in classics from Bard and a JD from Fordham. He lives in Baltimore.

All theme music by the amazing www.kalliemarie.com.

Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times (North Atlantic Books, April 2026).
Preorder: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/

Instagram: @matthew_remski

TikTok: @antifascistdad

Bluesky: @matthewremski.bsky.social (Bluesky Social)

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AntifascistDad

Chapters
  • (00:02:34) - From Something Awful
  • (00:11:19) - Anti-Fascists Dad on The Alt-Right
  • (00:19:19) - The Left and the Far Right
  • (00:24:45) - The Memes on the Shooting
  • (00:28:19) - On Mediums and the Left
  • (00:38:06) - 4chan: Anonymity and the Alt-Right

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(82)

UNLOCK 42.1 Friendship (is not easy)

UNLOCK 42.1 Friendship (is not easy)

An excerpt from the audiobook of Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times — Chapter Eight, Friendship Is Not Easy. I'm putting this out as a companion to my interview w...

9 Aug 43min

UNLOCK: 41.1 The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word Pt 2 w/ Nathan Evans Fox

UNLOCK: 41.1 The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word Pt 2 w/ Nathan Evans Fox

Part 2 of my convo with Nathan Evans Fox, going deeper into the psychological and theological architecture of what JD Vance is actually doing in his new memoir, and what it costs him and everyone else...

2 Aug 45min

42. Keep the Little Flame Alive w/  Carsie Blanton

42. Keep the Little Flame Alive w/ Carsie Blanton

I sit down with socialist singer-songwriter Carsie Blanton to explore how unstructured freedom — from schooling, the music industry, and institutional religion — became the soil for her political and ...

29 Jul 1h 1min

UNLOCK 40.1 Episodic and Thematic Thinking and Feeling

UNLOCK 40.1 Episodic and Thematic Thinking and Feeling

Picking up a on thread from my interview with Nora Loreto interview: a coda on the tension between zooming in on the daily news cycle and zooming out to a coherent analytical framework. I draw on Shan...

26 Jul 19min

41. The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word w/ Nathan Evans Fox

41. The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word w/ Nathan Evans Fox

JD Vance's Communion presents itself as a spiritual memoir but functions as a rebranding operation: It's the same narcissistic trick he played with Hillbilly Elegy. Who better to sit down with to sort...

22 Jul 52min

UNLOCK 39.1 Epistemic Injustice

UNLOCK 39.1 Epistemic Injustice

Years ago, I failed to understand my autistic son's needs. Instead of fully taking in his distress at school, I projected my own story, values, and experience on him. He'll manage. He'll get used to i...

19 Jul 21min

40: We Live on This Planet to Do Good Work w/ Nora Loreto

40: We Live on This Planet to Do Good Work w/ Nora Loreto

Today I sit down with Nora Loreto, a Quebec City-based journalist and labour organizer, to discuss her five-volume Canada in Decline series — a forensic history of the dismantling of Canada's social d...

15 Jul 1h 8min

UNLOCK 38.1 Gramsci’s Wars of Position, Wars of Maneuver

UNLOCK 38.1 Gramsci’s Wars of Position, Wars of Maneuver

Antonio Gramsci, writing in a fascist prison in the early 1930s, distinguished between wars of position—the slow struggle over culture, values, and consent—and wars of maneuver, or direct confrontatio...

12 Jul 33min

Populært innen Politikk og nyheter

giver-og-gjengen-vg
aftenpodden
forklart
aftenpodden-usa
popradet
stopp-verden
nokon-ma-ga
rss-gukild-johaug
det-store-bildet
hanna-de-heldige
lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
dine-penger-pengeradet
rss-ness
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk
e24-podden
aftenbla-bla
frokostshowet-pa-p5
rss-borsmorgen-okonominyhetene
unitedno
grasoner-den-nye-kalde-krigen