How Actual Nazis Are Influencing Trump (More Than He Knows)

Imagine if the president of the U.S. took advice directly from you and your friends. And I mean all of them ... even the ones whose local claim to fame is "guy who buttered his dick in my dad's trailer." Normally, that's the kind of sweet-ass situation only kids in Disney Channel original movies and billionaires get to experience. But in the bum-fuck craziness of the 2016 election, a few thousand loud, angry, and mostly very young people have found themselves acting, collectively, as some of Donald Trump's most valued advisers.

See, Donald Trump isn't a tech-savvy guy. He doesn't use email, barely uses computers, and generally has articles he wants to read printed out for him. Check out this picture of him at his desk:

Donald Trump's been tweeting for a while, but before he started running for president he mostly tweeted harmless nonsense. Even his Twitter-fights with people were fairly tame and perfectly captured their demographic of 12-year-olds.

As soon as he started running, the darkest and angriest corners of the internet realized that a man who publicly said all the terrible shit they could only type might actually become the president. They set out to help him win the domain they knew best: the internet. And Trump noticed their support.

Now, Donald Trump doesn't know what Pepe is. But when he retweeted this bizarre channer meme, you can bet he understood the message of whoever made it:

We, trolls of the internet, are adopting you, Donald Trump.

And he welcomed their support, because Donald Trump believes in hiring the very best, most knowledgeable people to help him accomplish his goals. No one knows more about fighting on the internet than the dregs of 4chan and Reddit, and the "everyone" of 8chan. So Trump turned to them for meme advice:

Remember this tweet that got Donald attacked for being anti-Semitic? Well, it originated from the /pol/ board of a site called 8chan, one of the chief online bastions of the so-called "alt-right" that Hillary Clinton just attacked in a big speech. A lot of 8channers reject being lumped in with the rest of the alt-right: They're literal Nazis, and that's what they'd like to be called.

The media is right but they've cried wolf so many times that no one believes them anymore. People are seeing the situation on a microscopic scale and are only seeing things like the double standard of Hillary having meetings with BLM while they're out killing cops. For the normie it's absurd that Trump must disavow some nebulous movement that he has no official ties to.

The nazis are on the march and the media is trying to warn everybody but nobody is listening.

No, that's not paraphrased:

Note that he's not saying "the Nazis are on the march" is a bad thing. He's one of the Nazis. A running theme in 8chan commentary on the alt-right is, "The media is right for once, but no one listens anymore when someone says 'these people are Nazis!' Isn't that sweet?" To wit:

Trump is right the average Americans don't know wtf an 'alt-right' even is, so lumping Trump in with it means utterly nothing to them. They'd have been better to going back to calling him Hitler, at least then the population understood what they meant. ... Trump's response is perfect, this way he doesn't need to disavow jack shit and makes the media look retarded even though they're actually telling the truth for once.

It may just be that hours of reading 8chan's Nazi conspiracy theories has me in a conspiratorial mindset myself, in the same way that if you hang out with plague victims long enough you're more likely to catch the plague. But the more I crawled down that rabbit hole of ultra-modern memes and ol'-fashioned racism, the more intentional their courting of Donald Trump started to look. Here's one of them talking about memes -- like the Pepe meme that marked Donald's introduction to the internet's fetid under-crotch -- as Sirens of Nazism.

People come here for the dank memes and then, after a time that is determined by open-mindedness of the person, stay because they want to gas the kikes. If we remove the dank memes, we will be effectively eliminating the reason why people are becoming politically incorrect in the first place.

And while the media tends to refer to them as Trump's followers, the hardcore of them -- represented by 8chan -- see things the other way around. When Trump announced a revision of his plan for illegal immigration that was notably softer than "fuck the Mexicans," the Nazis were not happy:

That "one debate" happened in early March. Trump told Megyn Kelly that he was "changing" on his attitudes towards the H1B Visa. His flip-flop resulted in a torrent of angry tweets, and the Trump campaign reversed his reversal literally an hour later. Trump has a record of letting angry Internet people guide his policy, and they know it.

No compromise whatsoever. If he tries to push touchback amnesty, we start shooting. There's nothing to fucking discuss here.

I have absolutely no commitment to Trump or his family's continued existence on this planet, and neither should anyone else while on this site. If he doesn't do precisely what we want him to do, he doesn't need to exist. Deporting beaners is pretty much one of a very small handful of issues we're even vaguely in the ballpark with him on. If he isn't going to do it there's no reason for him to be around.

And yes, if enough of them send emails and rage against Trump online, they've got a good chance of influencing the man's mind ... which at this point sounds about as easy as appeasing a screaming baby by shaking your car keys in its face. Donald Trump has proved deeply wary of alienating his "base." When the religious right freaked out at him saying a non-terrible thing about transgender folks using bathrooms, he immediately reversed his stance. He may very well do the same thing on immigration if he sees enough backlash.

Even when they aren't trying, Donald Trump's fringe internet followers have a significant impact on his campaign. Reddit's r/The_Donald may be the origin of the most recent rumors that Hillary Clinton is dangerously unhealthy. Snopes credits an American Mirror article posted on Aug. 7 as being the first outlet to question Hillary's health based on a picture of her stumbling on some stairs:

But that article was just reporting on the speculation of a number of Twitter users. Both of whom tweeted:

Note how neither tweet speculated about her health. But a thread on Reddit's r/The_Donald, started hours before either tweet, includes both the image and rampant allegations about Hillary's health.

It's extremely likely that the writer of the American Mirror article came across the Reddit thread and thought, "Sweet, I can pound this fucker out and be playing Overwatch by noon." We're in an election where some nerds gossiping anonymously on the internet can spark a story that dominates whole news cycles. And they know it. Make no mistake: This is the world.

Another thing that makes these people influential is their sand-people-like ability to hide their numbers. Think back to Gamergate, where a relatively small group of very angry gamers harassed several (female) game developers with an army of sock-puppet accounts on Twitter. Gamergate was a kind of coming-out party for many in the alt-right. It comes up regularly in discussions on 8chan:

Look at Gamergate, it became a massive movement because it was amorphous enough that a wide variety of people thought it represented their interests. Yet when someone targetted GG's enemies they could plausibly claim whoever did it had nothing to do with GG. It was plausible since GG was a leaderless, poorly defined, hard to pin down movement that anyone could claim to be a part of.

People with more mainstream beliefs who sympathize with one or two points can join ... making the movement bigger while more extreme ideas are free to percolate within. Meanwhile if people like Hillary attack it, it just looks absurd (looking at funny frog pictures online makes me a nazi, really?)

Donald Trump's probably never heard of 8chan or Gamergate. But he knows that a ton of his most motivated followers love that Milo Yiannopoulos guy, the tech editor of the right-wing "news" site Breitbart. Yiannopoulos first became a figure on the alt-right when his sympathetic coverage of Gamergate gained him a following and his job at Breitbart. Donald Trump loves Breitbart so much that he hired their chairman to be his campaign's new CEO.

That's sure as hell not going to decrease the influence of 8chan's literal Nazis on the mind and campaign of Donald Trump. And, again, they know it. Here's an anonymous 8channer who decided to attach a picture of Hitler to his post.

We put the finger on the correct issues, to the point that we're so scary to (((the right people))) that our enemies dare not even name us properly, nor our actual goals/desires for fear of empowering us.

And all we do is show up, anonymously call people faggots, kick them in the proverbial dick with smug anime girls, then scamper off to memeworship a frog.

And here's the most frightening part of all of this: We see idiocy like this and instantly write them off as harmless internet trolls. We laugh at their dipshit ideologies with a dismissive, "Of course people say stuff like this. Welcome to the internet, buddy!" Meanwhile, they tunnel into a legitimate presidential candidate's brain like mind parasites from a bad sci-fi. Then, a month later, we see their toxic goals pouring out of the mouth of someone who could potentially become the most powerful person on the planet.

Enjoy those nightmares tonight. We've earned them.

For more of our coverage on all things Trump, check out how Donald Trump panders from book to book in 6 Ugly Things You Learn About Donald Trump Reading His Books, and learn how Donald Trump can actually build his wall without congressional approval in 5 Very Possible Nightmare Scenarios From A Trump Presidency.

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