How 4Chan Changed American Culture Forever

Artists are in constant dialogue with the mind of God, translating the unknown into the partially known and beautiful.

The originators of culture are much like artists. They attempt to accurately translate unknown truths into works of art, whether that be movies, YouTube videos, slang terms, metaphors, or philosophy.

Anonymous posters on 4chan have undeniably dominated the cultural production of our time. So, does that mean they briefly brushed against the mind of God?

You might be skeptical about how much of our culture 4chan really originated, but we can fix that easily. Ask yourself, have you ever heard these words?

Based, cringe, poaster, shitpoasting, cuck (in a general insult way), cuckservative, rizz, rizzler, looksmaxx, doomer, wagecuck, NPC, or brainrot? More importantly, have you ever seen Pepe the Frog?

Yeah, I know you have.

During his heyday, Jordan Peterson noted that anonymous right-wingers and 4chan trolls embraced Pepe the Frog, which to him was a deeper mythological commentary on the nature of these anonymous posters.¹ In the symbolic and mythological world, frogs are creatures that can bounce between the known world and the unknown world and create great transformations of reality.²

That’s what mystics do. It’s what artists do. It what 4chan did, and it’s what anonymous Twitter right-wingers are doing now. Ultimately, it’s what the originators of culture do.

Yeah, it’s that deep.

The descendants of 4chan on Twitter are known as the frogs, and that part of Twitter is called “frog Twitter.” It’s where most of the interesting cultural and political commentary of our times now originates from. You can even argue that 4chan and frog Twitter are responsible for the rise of Donald Trump.

This is how the anonymous 4chan trolls changed the English language and briefly brushed against the mind of God. It’s how that process helped Trump become president, and how the left lost its cultural production mechanism. Oh, and we’ll talk about all the hilarious words that 4chan created.

How The Left Lost The Culture

Culture has two aspects, just like religion. The dogmatic and the mystical. Dogma provides rules, structure, and stability. Mysticism provides new insights, revelations, and creative breakthroughs. For most of modern history, the left played the mystic role and originated culture, but sometime in the 1990s and 2000s, that changed. The left hardened into dogma.

The left dominates the cultural institutions today, including the universities, Hollywood, the mainstream media, social media, music, and academic philosophy. The only problem is that they’re completely stagnant. Part of this stagnancy originated at the top levels of universities in the 80s and 90s in what is known by 4chan as “gay race communism.” This phrase so accurately describes the left that it’s still used today,, constantly on other social media platforms.

There are three key philosophies that inform “gay race communism,” critical race theory, feminism, and gender theory. These philosophies all function through a Marxist lens, meaning that they frame the world through the opposing forces of the oppressed and the oppressor. There’s always a group of poor downtrodden people being oppressed by the big mean capitalist for the Marxist. For the others, it’s the white man, the man, and the heterosexual man, respectively.

These left-wing philosophies are rigidly dogmatic, and any denial of the underlying faith claims is treason in their eyes. It’s grounds to be excommunicated from the group. Among their faith claims are things like “all men are patriarchal tyrants,” “white people are inherently and irredeemably racist,” and “biological sex is a social construct.”

The dogmatization of left-leaning institutions came as a result of many of these faith claims. This laid the groundwork for edgy teenagers to poke chinks in the armor of the mainstream institutions proclaiming these dogmas. Terms like based and cringe or red-pilled and blue-pilled, which were heavily popularized on 4chan, arose from this tension.³ Based and red-pilled both mean that you reject the cultural narrative on a particular topic and have “seen the light” that something being said by the mainstream is stupid. Cringe and blue-pilled are the opposite.

The term based is generally considered a positive thing, and it is heavily associated with both 4chan and the right wing now. This is deeply interesting because it implies that the right wing is now contrarian, at least at the moment.

Psychologically, someone who is contrarian is likely to be low in personality trait agreeableness, meaning they’re perfectly willing to go against the mainstream culture, unlike the normies, or normal people in the language of 4chan.

They’re perfectly willing to create culture, unlike the current institutions of the left.

How 4Chan Took Became The Cultural Innovator

The left’s hardened dogmatic assumptions about reality laid the groundwork for bored teenagers to annihilate them on 4chan in their free time. A massive portion of the left and our cultural institutions have the implicit assumption that “all people are created equal” and that “men and women are basically the same” baked into their thought. To 4chan, these ridiculous lies weren’t sacred truths. That cringe nonsense was the perfect target for mockery, memes, and cultural sabotage.

You may have heard of the movie “The Matrix” (if you haven’t, you’re cooked) and be familiar with a scene where Morpheus hands Neo a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill reveals the world as it is, and the blue pill sends him back into the matrix. This iconic scene spawned more cultural production than any movie scene ever. The pills immediately became metaphors for reality itself and were smuggled into political language by anonymous right-wingers online. One of the first to use it in the philosophical sense was Curtis Yarvin, one of the most famous right-wing philosophers of our time, in his essays “The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pills.”⁴

The term became popularized on the 4chan board /pol/ where edgy teenagers used it as shorthand for rejecting mainstream narratives, particularly mainstream media, politics, race, and sex. This eventually led to the emergence of red pill ideology, which is an ideology based on rejecting mainstream feminist ideas, embracing evolutionary psychology, and “accepting reality as it is.” Content that is “red-pilled” or about “red-pill ideology” now completely dominates social media. Think Andrew Tate, the Whatever podcast, Fresh and Fit, Myron Gaines, etc.

One of the funnier things I found in the research for this article is the blue-pilled nature of the Wikipedia article about the red pill. It says, “It concerns awakening men to the supposed reality that men are the oppressed gender in a society dominated by feminism.”⁵ Now I’m not here to cry about being oppressed, but to argue that society isn’t dominated by feminism is so completely ignorant that it is actually amazing to read. The person who wrote this is definitely on a steady diet of SSRIS and mainstream media. Ask yourself, if you said at your work that you hate feminism or you hate the red pill, which one would you get attacked for? Yeah. You know which one.

Speaking of pills, have you noticed that everyone seems to be saying “pilled” as an addition to whatever they’re saying these days? You’re height-pilled, red-pilled, Vance-pilled, etc, etc, etc.

Yup. That all came from 4chan.

Red pill ideology wasn’t the only philosophy that emerged from 4chan. It also came with several other terms and cultural artifacts that are used by nearly everyone to understand our world.

Since the mainstream worships at the feet of equality and the idea that men and women are the same, they have become unable to accurately describe man-to-woman interactions. This laid the groundwork for 4chan to produce all of our modern dating terms and thus dominate cultural production in that arena as well. Red pill ideology has an entire set of terms used to describe these things, and you’ve probably used every single one.

The red pill idea created more than just the blue pill and the red pill. Pills started popping up everywhere. On 4chan boards /r9k/ and /pol/ terms like blackpill and white pill began their journeys into our lexicon.

The black pill is expansive, and can mean the same thing as doomer, another 4chan word. That just means you’re nihilistic and accept that the world is eternally damned and you’ll never succeed. It can also be used in the dating sense, as in you accept that Chad, another 4chan incubated word that means attractive male, will always beat you in the dating market. The white pill is the opposite of all that.

The idea of Chad spawned the Chad v. Virgin meme, which you’ve probably seen used to describe many different modes of being.

Other dating terms like looksmaxxing, which just means trying to look as good as possible, originated on 4chan. Hypergamy means that women prefer men who are above them in sexual market value, or above or up the social status ladder from them. SMV or sexual market value also originated on 4chan. What these terms share in common is an origin in the ideas of Evolutionary Psychology. Much of what is being described by these terms is confirmed and can be found in Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss’s landmark book, The Evolution of Desire.

Remember, at the base of the philosophies of left-wing institutions is a strange belief that men and women can be the same. This tenet of faith is what leads to the idea that a man can become a woman, IE, transgenderism. You cannot deny these faith claims in these institutions, and thus, you cannot use words to describe male-female sexual dynamics accurately. You will get attacked by your fellow academics if you say these things in public, like Jordan Peterson did.

From 2010 to 2020, these 4chan terms started to dominate our cultural discourse, till they got to the point we’re at now. You can go on Instagram and type in any of these terms, and you’ll see hundreds of thousands of posts.

These terms and memes now dominate politics, dating, and cultural discourse as a whole, but one meme rules them all. That meme got Donald Trump elected. That meme influenced an entire generation of anonymous political commentators that changed the course of history. That meme is Pepe the Frog.

Many of the creators of these terms and some of the descendants of 4chan trolls now dominate the cultural discourse of places like Twitter. To understand how that came to be, we need to understand Pepe the Frog. Let’s go through a brief history of the frogs.

Pepe, Twitter Frogs, And 4Chan’s Legacy

Pepe the Frog is the most influential meme on the political New Right today and it was memefied in 2008 on the /b/ board and popularized on the /r9k/ board.⁶ If you spend any time at all on political Twitter today, you will see this meme everywhere. Even Trump and Elon have posted it.

New Right Twitter celebrities such as Aristophanes and MedGold use this meme constantly. In Aristophanes’ bio, it reads “Man I Love Frogs” and a quick scroll of his replies shows retweets with Pepe. MedGold’s replies are similarly filled with images of Pepe.

But where did this all begin? How did this frog get so popular?

It came from a very imaginary place called Kekistan, which resulted in a very real reaction from the mainstream media. Buckle up.

Pepe the Frog’s memefication began on 4chan, but it didn’t stop there. The meme quickly went mainstream from 4chan to people like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj posting it. Then the ADL declared it a hate symbol, and the Hillary Clinton campaign called it a symbol of white nationalism, but how did that happen?

The trolls of 4chan started realizing some very interesting coincidences with Pepe the Frog. You can find a full explanation here. I’ll stick to the most important aspects. Pepe came to represent 4chan; he was rebellious and representative of a kind of divine troll. In the video game world, Kek became synonymous with LOL for complex reasons. They used kek constantly on 4chan boards where these Pepe memes were popular.

This is what really got 4chan users going, because they realized that Kek was also the name of an ancient Egyptian frog-headed god of chaos. There is also a goddess of birth with a frog-head in ancient Egypt, but that’s unrelated. Anyways, the overlap was too perfect for 4chan trolls. Pepe the Frog became the symbol of their now fictional world, which they named Kekistan.⁷ A kind of decentralized parody country of Pepe memes. Then came the Cult of Kek. They formed a kind of parody religion. That leads us to this amazing picture.

This is an actual picture from the Cult of Kek’s website.

You’ve heard the saying that life imitates art, but how about life imitates the internet? This picture represents the moment that cultural production truly shifted completely to 4chan, and I’ll explain why.

Then candidate Donald J. Trump very quickly became the fan favorite to win the presidency in 2016 on 4chan, because 4chan trolls saw themselves in Donald Trump. He was a troll at the highest level. He gave the middle finger to the establishment that stood for everything 4chan trolls despised. Dogmatism. Gay race communism. Wokeness. DEI. All of it. To them, Donald Trump was the Troll-In-Chief. This led to the Meme Wars of 2016⁸ which, in some ways, was the opening battle of the Culture Wars.

The trolls of 4chan invoked magic during the 2016 presidential race, saying things like “meme magic is real.” On other social media platforms, Pepe became a symbol of political rebellion. He became synonymous with even Trump himself. Then Hillary gave Trump the biggest slam dunk of all, calling all of his supporters “deplorables,” which led to this picture posted by Trump.

This eventually led to Hillary Clinton declaring Pepe a symbol of white nationalism, as did the ADL. This opened the floodgates for the mainstream media to declare the same. As you might expect, this only emboldened the 4chan trolls.

Then something insane happened: Donald J. Trump won the presidency. The 4chan trolls were vindicated. The memes WERE magic. They memed Donald J. Trump into the White House.

Let’s go back to the original picture. If you can understand this picture, you can understand how the left lost the culture, how 4chan came to be the originator of our culture, and how Trump became president. To understand it, we need to know a little something about mythology.

As we’ve said repeatedly throughout this article, the frog is the god of chaos. It is the character that can go between known and unknown. That’s the Egyptian god Kek. So why the Statue of Liberty and Donald Trump? This picture illustrates two key mythological aspects of reality: the eternal feminine and the prodigal son.

The Statue of Liberty represents America in the symbolic sense, and also the eternal feminine. She is the chaos from which every man is born. She is Manifest Destiny. She births all possibilities. Donald Trump is the prodigal son. He is the man who manifests that destiny. He comes from America and brings peace back to it. As mythology and religion expert Joseph Campbell would put it, he’s the transformational hero, or as Jordan Peterson would say, he is the man who dances on the edge of chaos and order, a true king of the frogs.

The 4chan trolls helped deliver Trump his presidency. This image is the unconscious representation of that.

The fact of the matter is that 4chan is just a part of history now, and it probably got Trump elected. Deal with it.