Charlie Warzel

Fuentes, who is influential enough that he's trying to force the MAGA coalition further towards white nationalism, that he's able to go into a club with these guys and get them to play the Ye song, Heil Hitler.

and turn that into this viral moment that then gets the mayor of Miami to have to react to it, to condemn it, to basically apologize on behalf of the city for letting this happen.

These guys are extremely effective attention hijackers, and that is important.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that we are in the middle of a crisis of nihilism.

And it's a very online phenomenon to some degree.

But some of the original message board spaces, 4chan is probably the most popular one, which came out of this other forum, Something Awful.

It was populated by a lot of kids and young men who felt really disaffected.

who were bored, who felt like they weren't living up to their potential.

They gathered, they found community here, and one thing that they developed was this incredibly robust, ironic culture, right?

It was this idea that given their own insecurities, if they could believe in nothing, if they could hold nothing in their hearts,

Then they were invincible.

Right.

You couldn't hurt them.

You couldn't insult them.

You couldn't make fun of them for living in their parents basement.

Right.

And so there became this way of, you know, trolling people of really having no ideology other than.

chaos that really has bled into all kinds of culture over the last two decades.

And the Trump movement in 2016 was a huge leap forward for these people feeling like they had representation, but also that their culture was fusing with a type of politics.