4chan Brain Is Real, and Donald Trump Showed How Damaging It Is
The notorious website that helped meme him to victory in 2016 is responsible for the utterly unhinged man we all watched in the presidential debate.
I’ve been on 4chan. It’s one of those places that, much like Twitter before Elon Musk, started as a place that was generally entertaining and sometimes absurdly funny, and then under new ownership morphed into a hellhole of racial slurs, Nazi organizing, and general awful behavior. One thing it’s always been known for, though, is making things up. They have a rule on one of the most popular boards [pages], /b/ or “Random,” that reads, “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” All of the QAnon stuff started there as a joke, but it leaked out into the rest of the world, and this is how Donald Trump has spent his last eight years: marinating inside of invented bullshit designed by teenage boys and misanthropic single men.
I used that preface to best explain what 67 million of us watched on Tuesday night. Kamala Harris, the vice-president, got on stage and immediately struck the power move of crossing to his side and making him shake her hand. For about ten minutes, at best, he kept himself at calm on the Trump scale. That did not last, though. His answers started wandering off in six different directions and never addressed the actual question. Harris started needling him with her responses, and this is a sampling of the insanity that he firehosed at everyone: [all use of boldface is for word emphasis]
Repeating one of those fake 4chan stories— “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of people who live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.” He then pivoted to talking about how great his rallies are while she openly laughed at him.
"You’ve got illegals rampaging through towns and buildings in Springfield [Ohio] and Aurora [Colorado]." The Aurora was reference to a video shared by a bunch of right-wing Twitter accounts tagged as Aurora, Colorado when it was, in actuality, from South America, because the signs were in Portuguese.
"She supports giving transgender operations to illegal aliens in prison."
"I have the concept of a plan" to repeal the Affordable Care Act but couldn't give a single detail of his concept, despite spending the past decade promising to get rid of it. He notably failed at doing this the first time he was President.
He was asked about how he would handle Israel’s ongoing onslaught against Palestinians, and he responded by talking about Russia and Ukraine, and pivoted to claiming that President Joe Biden (who was not on stage) got $3.5 million in bribes from the wife of Moscow's mayor.
When he finally got to answering the actual question, “But when she mentions about Israel, all of a sudden, she hates Israel…If she’s president, I predict that Israel will not exist within two years from now. At the same time, in her own way, she hates the Arab population because the whole place is gonna get blown up, Arabs, Jewish people, Israel, Israel will be gone.”
When Harris brought up how badly he handled COVID (in response to if things were better than they were four years ago), he replied by claiming Democrats support executing babies after they are born.
This is a lie he’s told since 2017 or 2018, one that the Republicans have echoed repeatedly based upon a deliberate twisting of former Virginia governor Ralph Northam describing how, as a pediatric neurosurgeon, he and his colleagues did their best to comfort parents whose children were born unable to survive because of birth defects.
The debate was so one-sided in Harris’s favor that it led to this post.
Since Tuesday night, there has been a deluge of social media posts, interviews on right-wing media, and more from Trump supporters about how the debate was rigged or the moderators were unfair, which is what they always say when he gets his clock cleaned. It’s always unfair. It’s always rigged. Donald Trump got to speak for sixteen minutes more than Kamala Harris and got the last word in on every single subject during the 94 minutes of the debate—he would get additional time to talk and she would be cut off. If he thinks something is unfair, it’s that he had all of these advantages and only succeeded in burying himself by constantly spewing 4chan lunacy and word salad.
These people cannot stand to lose and never accept losing gracefully. They’re out here playing Calvinball, except instead of it being fun, it just turns into rage and violence. As Harris so eloquently put it on Tuesday night, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let’s be clear about that, and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.” In November, we need to stick that message with him again, and maybe he’ll get the therapy he desperately needs.