Part 4 - The End of the Culture War Era
The Institutionalization of the Meme War
The Institutionalization of the Meme War
The 2024 election demonstrated just how controlled social media had become. I already covered the New Right’s extensive ties to organizations such as Peter Thiel, National Conservativism, and the Claremont Institute. But the really significant demonstration of this was the controversy surrounding “Tenet Media.”
Tenet Media was a conservative media company founded on January 19, 2022 by Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. Chen was a right wing influencer, with about 500,000 followers on YouTube and 580,788 on Twitter. She had been among those on the Right who had been critical of America’s support of Ukraine in its war against Russia. The Department of Justice indicted two Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, for funneling nearly $10 million to this media company.
The indictment unsealed in New York’s Southern District accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to an unidentified company, described only as “Company 1” in court documents.
CNN has independently confirmed that “Company 1” is Tenet Media, which is a platform for independent content creators. It is self-described as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues,” according to its website, which matches language contained in the newly unsealed indictment.
The alleged Russian operation tapped two people to set up the company in their names to add to its legitimacy and the two founders were aware Russian money backed the operation, according to the indictment.
— CNN, Sep 5 2024, “DOJ alleges Russia funded US media company linked to right-wing social media stars” (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics/doj-alleges-russia-funded-company-linked-social-media-stars/index.html)
Tenet Media’s commentators included influencers such as Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and David Rubin. According to the indictment, one of Tenet Media’s influencers was paid a “$400,000 monthly fee to create ‘four weekly videos,’ along with a $100,000 signing bonus.” Lauren Chen and her husband seemed to have been perfectly aware of this money’s origins.
A private message between the two in May 2021 read, “So we’re billing the Russians from the corporation, right?” Two weeks later, another message said, “Also, the Russians paid. So we’re good to bill them for the next month I guess,” the legal filing details.
— CNN, Sep 5 2024, “DOJ alleges Russia funded US media company linked to right-wing social media stars” (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics/doj-alleges-russia-funded-company-linked-social-media-stars/index.html)
The DOJ indicted two Russian nationals, who were employees of RT (Russia's state-controlled media). They were accused of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Of course others, such as Tucker Carlson, had voiced similar skepticism towards the war in Ukraine or US hostility towards Russia in general, and there is no evidence that they were influenced by Russia to do so. So this is not to say that there was no organic criticism of the war. Additionally, many of the personalities receiving this money—such as Dave Rubin and Tim Pool—claimed to be “victims” of the Russians, unaware that they were being financed by a foreign information operation. If true, this would indicate that their views may have been genuine and simply happened to be convenient for the Russian operatives to promote.
The point here is not about the war in Ukraine in particular, nor do I mean to imply that all those who oppose it are Putin’s puppets. The larger issue of interest is how pervasive Internet influence operations have become. 500,000 is a decent amount of followers, but compared to Ben Shapiro’s 7.2 million subscribers, Steven Crowder’s 5.7 million subscribers, or Matt Walsh’s 3.13 million subscribers, Lauren Chen is a mid-sized influencer at best. She was hardly a household name, and probably unknown outside of conservative political circles. Yet, she was considered to have a far enough reach for foreign actors like Russia to take an interest in her. This poses the obvious question: “what other influencers are being paid?”
Apparently, influencers can even be paid shills without knowing that they are paid shills, if Rubin and Pool are to be believed. While this may not change the message of their programming directly, it indirectly promotes these views by providing them more resources and thus potentially a greater reach.
The Democrat party had their own set of paid influencers. During the 2024 election, Democracy Defense Action, a Democrat political action committee, paid influencers on TikTok—presumably in order to amplify or influence their opinions. Among them was Gen Z influencer Harris Sisson, who was paid $13,000 over the course of the 2024 election cycle (https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/detail/2024?cmte=c00746073&tab=expenditures). Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting President Biden's reelection, invested $1 million in a "creator" program, recruiting 150 influencers to create content during the campaign (https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/23/biden-campaign-social-media-influencers-00136389).
Tana Mongeau, an internet personality with six million followers on Instagram, claimed she was offered "millions" to endorse a political party, and alleged that hundreds of other influencers had accepted similar offers from both political parties (https://www.fastcompany.com/91218544/like-seriously-go-vote-influencers-are-getting-paid-to-court-your-vote).
Unlike traditional ads, influencers could take money to endorse a particular candidate without disclosing this fact.
Unlike political ads that run on TV or the nonpolitical #sponcon that makes up much of influencers’ feeds, content creators are not legally required to disclose if they’ve been paid to endorse a candidate on their page, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) determined earlier this year. While exact numbers vary based on size of following and engagement, People First, a firm hired by the Harris campaign, has paid influencers anywhere from $200 to $100,000 for political posts this year, according to the Washington Post.
— Fast Company, Oct 29 2024, “‘Like, seriously, go vote’: Influencers are getting paid to court your vote” (https://www.fastcompany.com/91218544/like-seriously-go-vote-influencers-are-getting-paid-to-court-your-vote)
If smartphones and social media were a new technology that disrupted and changed American politics in 2016, by 2024 it was clear that enough time had passed that the system had fully adapted. At the same time, it appeared that social media was still enough of a new frontier that regulations had not yet caught up with these political influence operations.
Other liberal PACs, including NextGen America and American Bridge, deployed paid influencer campaigns in the 2022 midterms. But Priorities USA’s creator campaign amounts to a stamp of approval from one of the most influential partisan political action committees — with a new approach using both local and national influencers — and part of a sharp shift in how campaigns are pivoting online to reach voters.
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Priorities plans to transition all its spending to digital communications in 2024, and sees the influencer campaign as key to reaching people who don’t see typical campaign ads on TV. As it does, however, it is running into platforms’ at-times confusing guidelines on political ads — and appears to have violated some policies banning paid political content on TikTok.
With few federal regulations over campaign advertising on social media, each platform sets its own rules. TikTok has the strictest policy — banning political advertising entirely, including branded political content from creators. Instagram and Facebook, owned by Meta, allow for paid political ads and sponsored political content from creators as long as the group is registered in its ad library. (Priorities is listed.) And X, formerly Twitter, lifted its political ads ban last year.
The policies appear to be poorly enforced. After POLITICO shared five TikTok videos from August and October from national creators paid by Priorities, TikTok removed four of them for violating their branded content policies on political issues.
Similarly, Storr said one of her TikTok videos she posted on Oct. 27 encouraging people to vote in last November’s Pennsylvania election was removed by TikTok for violating its branded content policy.
However, the same video she posted on Instagram remains — showing how far platforms’ rules can diverge around paid political content.
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Polling shows a third of people under age 30 get their news on TikTok. In the coming year, Priorities says it plans to pay for creators to make videos on TikTok and Instagram — and eventually YouTube — to discuss topics like the economy, abortion access and democracy.
“As we looked to 2024, we felt like it was important to reach voters where they were spending their time,” Butterfield said, and that was increasingly on TikTok.
— Politico, Jan 23 2024, “Seeing a viral pro-Biden TikTok? A PAC might have paid for it.” (https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/23/biden-campaign-social-media-influencers-00136389)
Kamala Harris’s campaign was notable for its effective use of TikTok. Even conservative influencers noticed that her meme game was stronger than that of most Democrat campaigns. The Biden administration, like Hillary Clinton, seemed out of touch in the digital world. They had tried to shill the “Dark Brandon” meme—a copy of an earlier pro-Trump meme “Dark MAGA”—that portrayed Biden as a strongman type of leader with lazer eyes and a mischievous, “Gigachad”-esque smirk. However, this came off as derivative and inorganic. Meanwhile, Kamala’s campaign included tech entrepreneur Mike Nellis as her senior advisor, as well as a young team of digital strategists, some as young as 19 years old (https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/08/politics/harris-social-media-tiktok-dg/).
Last year at a White House event in May, the vice president jokingly said, quoting her mother, “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
This now-viral quote has resurfaced and spawned endless online content. Many online users (and particularly young people) are referencing the quote in their posts, describing themselves as “coconut pilled” and lining their social media bios with coconut emojis.
The clip of Harris speaking has been stitched and reposted thousands of times by TikTok users, remixed to the music of iconic Gen Z artists such as Chappell Roan and even used as a soundtrack to a viral dance associated with Charli XCX’s song, Apple.
Harris’ campaign appears to be leaning into the joke, with the bio of the official Kamala HQ TikTok and X accounts now being just two words: “Providing context.”
Even the header image of Kamala’s X account (pictured at the top of this article) is a reference to British pop singer Charli XCX’s recently released album Brat. According to the singer – who sent the internet into a frenzy when she tweeted “kamala IS brat” last week — the archetypal brat is,
"just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile."
You’d be forgiven for thinking these might be undesirable traits for a presidential candidate. But by leaning into the “brat summer” brand and tapping into trending audios, Harris’s campaign is leveraging youth culture to position herself as a relevant and contemporary candidate for Gen Z.
Young social media users have largely embraced Harris’s chaotic and excitable energy. In a way, the very personality quirks that Republicans have tried to construe as baggage to take Harris down have emerged as one her greatest assets in connecting with younger voters.
— United States Studies Center, Aug 2 2024, “How Kamala Harris’ meme-fied campaign is leveraging social media and Gen Z culture” (https://www.ussc.edu.au/how-kamala-harris-meme-fied-campaign-is-leveraging-social-media-and-gen-z-culture)
“Kamala is brat” was derived from pop artist Charlie XCX. Popular with Gen Z but lesser known to an older audience, she was the perfect artist for Harris to associate herself with. The Kamala Harris campaign appropriated the “Kamala is brat” branding—complete with the iconic chartreuse color scheme of Charlie XCX’s album—as their own. “Kamala is brat” remixes dominated TikTok in much the same way as “Can’t Stump the Trump,” Pepe the Frog, and other 4chan-inspired memes dominated Twitter during the Great Meme War. The remixes interspersed CharliXCX’s song “Apple” with Kamala’s characteristic nervous laughter and strange turns of phrase, such as “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” This attempted to transform Kamala from a notoriously poor speaker who had never performed well on the debate stage at any Democrat primary into a relatable politician with a personality somewhat akin to someone’s quirky aunt.
Of course, much of the Internet Right Wing—an older demographic of Millennials and Gen Xers primarily on Twitter as opposed to TikTok—handwaved these memes away as “astroturfed” and said that the enthusiasm for Harris was overhyped. Perhaps they were right—after all, Trump did ultimately win. But, as we have seen, basically all influencers have been astroturfed by this point. The question is more about an effective aesthetic quality. Did the “Kamala is brat” memes pass the smell test? Did they appear organic? In my opinion, they did.
The Tenet Media scandal, combined with the obvious paid shilling operations of the 2024 election raise another interesting question: when did political Internet content go from being grassroots to astroturfed? Surely back in 2016, the memes were organic, right? Truly the Great Meme War wasn’t an influence campaign—that had to be real, right?
Some have cast aspersions on this popular narrative. Consider the case of Ricky Vaughn—perhaps the most well known “anon” account of the Great Meme War (covered in “A Normies Guide to the Dissident Right Part 3”). Some have suggested that he, and other supposedly “anon” accounts, may have actually been part of a deliberate influence operation. This is based on the facts surrounding Ricky Vaughn’s doxxing in 2018.
Ricky Vaughn’s true identity was reveled to be Douglass Mackey, a 28 year old economist for consulting firm John Dunham & Associates. During the Great Meme War, Mackey organized meme campaigns with a number of different collaborators, including right wing influencer Baked Alaska. According to Huffington Post, who broke the story, Mackey was also a member of a “political saboteur” and “get out the vote campaign” group “MAGA3X,” which also included Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and Jeff Giesea. Jeff Giesea was a disciple of none other than Peter Thiel—a name that has rapidly become synonymous with online and offline influence operations to both promote Donald Trump and exert control from within his administration. In fact, Douglass Mackey had briefly worked as a contractor for one of Peter Thiel’s companies, Smartcheckr, “the precursor name for what would become Clearview AI, a shadowy Thiel-backed facial recognition company” according to Huffington Post (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fbi-ricky-vaughn-election-interference_n_60120aeac5b6b8719d89a072).
These connections are somewhat tenuous, but it is very coincidental that an anonymous Trump supporter supposedly taken at random just so happened to be involved with a Thiel-connected organization.
After Douglass Mackey was prosecuted for “voter suppression” under the Biden administration, many establishment figures on the Right came out to his defense, including Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Dinesh D'Souza, and accused the Biden administration of selectively targeting right wing Twitter accounts for political reasons. This demonstrates some level of acceptance of Mackey by the conservative establishment. In 2024, Mackey was broadly aligned with the “New Right,” adopting a “lazer eyes” profile pic, promoting New Right content, and voicing support for Trump 2024.
According to the implications of these skeptics, “the Great Meme War” was far from an organic uprising by anonymous 4channers. Instead, it was a precursor to the types of influence operations such as Tenet Media, the Thiel network, and Priorities USA that are commonplace today. And Douglass Mackey—far from simply being an organic, anonymous troll—was most likely an early Thiel-aligned operative.
One could take this theory a step further, and conclude that Trump was never an anti-establishment populist even in 2016, but instead was always meant to redirect this populist sentiment towards the ends of a small handful of behind-the-scenes actors. After all, many of Trump’s ties to Zionists such as Sheldon Adelson and Chabad Lubavitch (covered here) go back well beyond the 2024 or even 2016 campaigns. Peter Thiel himself was an early backer of Trump back in 2016. Trump’s chief campaign advisor in 2016 was Steve Bannon, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart, a publication with extensive ties to Israel and the Israeli Right. How events that seem to have been organic displays of populist fervor—such as the J6 Capitol riot—fit into this theory is not particularly obvious. But, it is worth taking into consideration in light of what we now know about online political influence operations.
Whatever the case may be, many of the accounts during the Great Meme War were simply anonymous 4channers who wanted Trump to win for the lulz. It is possible that they were unknowingly being influenced and directed in some way, which would put a dent in the popular “Great Meme War” narrative. Nevertheless, for many anons, it was real.
Real or not, the Great Meme War seems to have marked a turning point in the way American campaigns operate. By 2024, campaigns on both the Right and Left have wised up to the fact that in order to win control of the government, they must have an army of paid online shills, and a sophisticated meme arsenal at their disposal.
Still No Brakes on the Trump Train
With another four years of Trump on the horizon, his legacy is still being written. Without a doubt, he will go down as one of the most significant figures in the post-war era, surpassing presidents like JFK and Ronald Reagan in the scope of his impact. His influence has been so enduring that it has spanned over a decade, outlasting the Culture War Era itself. Originally it was the intention of A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right to explain Trump as existing from within the context of the broader Culture War Era, but it now seems that Trump has eclipsed it, and the Culture War Era is but a mere chapter in his political saga.
In the context of the Culture War Era, and the influence that Trump had on it, as well as whether or not he played a part in ushering in a new political thesis (as posited by the introduction to A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right) there are three main perspectives one might take:
1. Trump Maximalist - Trump was the first one to stand up against “wokeism” and since then a cultural shift occurred, with more and more people “waking up.” Trump 2024 is his crowning achievement, marking a new post-woke era, complete with elite support from figures such as Elon Musk.
2. Trump Skeptic - Trump was anti-establishment in 2016, and has caused the culture to shift to the right since then, but at some point the political revolution was captured and Trump has been subverted by a new generation of establishment elites that favor an interventionist foreign policy (especially in the Middle East), and Big Business—just like the neocons that came before them.
3. Trump Minimalist - Trump was always fake. Even during the “meme war” of 2016, large accounts like Ricky Vaughn turned out to be astroturfed by those aligned with forces within the elite.
The next decade, which will include Trump’s last four years, followed by whoever his successor will be on the Right, will determine which of these three perspectives is correct.
For over two decades, American politics will have fallen under the shadow of one man. It is hard to not feel a sense of pride for having been a small part of that, to the insignificant extent that I was.
The End of the Internet
The days of the Internet as a disruptive force in society defined the Culture War Era. However, it seems that those days are now firmly in the rear view mirror. More savvy elites (such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel), or those in their orbit (such as Bronze Age Pervert and Jonathan Keeperman) have mastered the art of using social media to manipulate the masses in exactly the same way as the legacy media was once used. Just as legacy media had become centralized, allowing a few individuals to control a few “transmitters” and thus the flow of information, so too have a few individuals started to control the choke points of discourse online, such as large social media platforms.
That being said, the medium of the Internet still presents a number of unique problems.
First of all, the content is still user-generated. While the platform can control “freedom of reach” and resign heterodox ideas to a ghetto as they did in the era of traditional media, it is still inherently easier for these ideas to spread due to the incredible efficiency that the Internet has by nature as a free, instantaneous transmission medium.
Secondly, the censorship is blatant and transparent. When an account is banned or a message censored, this is itself sending a message about what ideas are being banned. This also sends a general message that the platform is censorious and not a place for free speech. The more people who are banned, the more the platform is seen as a censorious platform.
True manipulation of mass opinion must be opaque. It must seem that people’s opinions are organic and a result of free discussion. As soon as people realize they are being manipulated, they become much harder to manipulate. This is why the Censorship Era was never a perfect solution to the threat posed by the Internet. However, due to the changing nature of technology, these problems are slowly becoming solved.
New methods of censorship for a new medium are being developed—a Censorship 2.0. As trite as it is to say, if these Censorship 2.0 methods become adopted it is hard to not compare the future of the Internet to the world of 1984. There will be no history, just an infinite now. The past will be memory-holed. The algorithms will control the information that the masses see with unprecedented efficiency.
Unlike traditional censorship, there will be no censors. Before, one could at least rest assured that some human was making a conscious decision to redact information with a black felt marker or some other crude implement. Now the censorship will be instantaneous, automatic, silent, and performed by a machine that is not only totally unaccountable, but operating unconsciously. The world after 1991 was a time of unbridled information freedom, created by the advent of the Internet. But the coming years could potentially usher in a reversal of this trend. An era of information control.
One aspect of Censorship 2.0 is botting. By creating an army of online bots, you can amplify a certain message, or even control both sides of the issue by amplifying two messages, one of which is controlled opposition. On Twitter, for instance, you can spread hashtags, like and repost tweets, or leave comments that oppose a tweet. With the increasing sophistication of AI, it will become increasingly difficult to tell if a user is real or a bot.
Or, you can simply create an army of shills. Human “bots” hidden behind an anonymous identity that operate in a similar fashion. They can even create their own content such as YouTube videos, TikToks, podcasts, publications, and even live events. They can create their own networks of fans. Tenet Media demonstrated what this may look like. This method was already possible with traditional media, but is now exponentially more efficient. Due to the more decentralized and segmented nature of the Internet, a smaller influencer can still have a noticeable impact and spread their message more easily for far cheaper.
These methods solve some of the threat that the transmitter→transmitter structure of the Internet poses (covered in “A Normie’s Guide to The Dissident Right: Introduction”). By owning large networks of these transmitters, you can now drown out the voice of smaller networks of transmitters.
The problem of making censorship more opaque is also largely being solved by AI. Beginning in the Censorship Era, algorithms were able to automatically perform moderation processes such as flagging content or users. As AI becomes more sophisticated, these algorithms have grown more and more efficient, with less and less supervision needed from a human.
Additionally, platforms are moving to a more “curated” mechanism of content distribution, such as TikTok. Using this mechanism, content is still user-generated, but it is the algorithm that determines what content is shown to other users in an “endless scroll” of content that the algorithm has determined the user will be interested in (covered in “A Normie’s Guide to The Dissident Right Part 7”). This replaces how content was presented to the user in earlier platforms such as 4chan, reddit, and Twitter, which was more or less chronological. This curation means that the end user is completely oblivious to the fact that certain content is not being presented to them, and even the creator cannot know for sure if their content has been “shadowbanned” or is simply unpopular. This means that neither is aware that censorship has occurred.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
— Brownstone Institute, Oct 30 2024 “They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now” (https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/)
During the 2024 campaign, Joe Rogan interviewed Donald Trump. This was a significant event since Rogan, like many others, had resisted having Trump on the show for some time. Now Rogan, like many others, had decided that Trump posed no threat. The Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views. But very shortly after its release, YouTube and Google—two tech platforms that are still considered Leftist territory—tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover.
A new and particularly disturbing aspect of this is the increasing removal of archived Internet content. One of the implications of this new “endless scroll” mechanism is that old content is no longer needed and can be erased. This creates a totally ethereal Internet. An “infinite now” where content is displayed to the user, then erased from existence as soon as it is consumed. This old content had presented a problem for elites who wish to manipulate the masses. If today the elites say that wearing a mask will not protect you from Covid, but tomorrow they say that you must wear a mask to protect yourself from Covid, it is very inconvenient to have a bunch of old articles that say that wearing a mask will not protect you from Covid online for all to read. The masses need to believe that we “have always been at war with Eastasia,” so these old articles need to be memory-holed.
This is precisely what is being allowed to happen. The “Wayback Machine,” operated by Internet Archive, preserves old Internet content explicitly for historical and research purposes. However, it has recently faced several obstacles.
The first was a 2020 lawsuit, in which major publishers—including Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and John Wiley & Sons—sued the Internet Archive, alleging that its practice of scanning and lending digital copies of books through the Open Library violated copyright laws. The Internet Archive defended its actions under the doctrine of fair use and a concept known as “controlled digital lending.” However, in March 2023, the court ruled against the Internet Archive, determining that its activities constituted copyright infringement.
In August 2023, leading music companies—including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Concord—filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive. They claimed that its Great 78 Project, which digitizes and preserves recordings from 78 rpm records, infringed on their copyrights. The plaintiffs sought substantial statutory damages, potentially amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. The Internet Archive argued that its activities fell under fair use, emphasizing the project's focus on preservation and research. As of January 2025, this case remains unresolved, with ongoing discussions between the parties. Nevertheless, these and similar lawsuits are not a trivial deterrent for a small private company, and would have the potential to be weaponized against it if one chose to do so.
In October 2024, the Internet Archive experienced significant disruptions due to cyberattacks, including a data breach and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These incidents led to the temporary unavailability of the Wayback Machine. This lasted from October 8-25, a fairly long amount of time to recover from a DDoS attack.
That meant that during the outage, no one was backing up any content on the Internet. The Internet Archive is a single private organization, one single point of failure. This outage proves just how vulnerable this single point of failure can be.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
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What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
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Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
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The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
— Brownstone Institute, Oct 30 2024 “They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now” (https://brownstone.org/articles/they-are-scrubbing-the-internet-right-now/)
Previously, Google also cached Internet content, but discontinued doing this earlier in 2024. Perhaps allowing the Internet Archive to be a vulnerable single point of failure could be considered negligence by the Big Tech companies (who are well aware of what the ecosystem of the Internet is like on account of the nature of their business). However, this move by Google can not be rationalized away as mere negligence. It is a deliberate decision. Clearly, the trend is moving away from caching historical content, and towards an ethereal internet.
During the Wild West Era of the Internet, a common meme was “the Internet is forever.” Now, it seems this is completely reversing. According to Pew Research, “38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later” (https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/).
Did the Censorship Era End?
Elon Musk has been credited with moving the Internet away from censorship, which he should be lauded for. But was his interest purely an altruistic one of protecting free speech, or did he have other goals in mind?
On December 27, 2024, while most people were preparing for New Years Eve, a civil war within MAGA suddenly erupted on Twitter. It all started on December 22, when President-elect Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan—an Indian-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz—as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence. Krishnan was a naturalized citizen who initially came to the United States from India to work at Microsoft on a work visa.
The announcement sparked considerable debate and controversy., with critics expressing concerns over Krishnan's views on immigration. Critics expressed concerns over Krishnan's views on immigration. Krishnan had previously advocated for removing country caps on greencards to unlock skilled immigration, which some interpreted as not aligning with Trump's “America First” protectionist policies. This led to accusations of him favoring foreign workers over American ones. Controversy was so widespread that it even included mainstream conservative accounts who were usually loath to contradict Trump in any way.
The controversy evolved over time, and in the end began to revolve around H1B visas—with those siding with Krishnan supporting H1B visas, and those opposed opposing H1B visas.
Major conservative accounts such as Ian Miles Cheong, as well as most of the “tech bros” who had supported Trump during the election—such as Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sacks, Sean Maguire, and Elon Musk himself—supported H1B visas, arguing that America should be a “meritocracy” and that favoring Americans over foreign workers was simply a Right Wing version of “DEI.” Elon Musk pinned the following tweet to his profile:
America rose to greatness over the past 150 years, because it was a meritocracy more than anywhere else on Earth. I will fight to my last drop of blood to ensure that it remains that land of freedom and opportunity.
— Elon Musk, Dec 28 2024 (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872862144615838054)
He also called critics of these visas retarded—or “subtards” as he put it—and promised to “go to war on this issue.” In another Tweet, he told those who opposed H1B visas to “fuck yourself in the face.”
The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.
— Elon Musk, Dec 27 2024 (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872860577057448306)
The pro-H1B visa tech bros also accused the anti-H1B side of being “racists.” Suddenly they were beginning to sound a lot less “based” and more like Silicon Valley liberals.
A number of posters in the anti-H1B faction suddenly came to find themselves stripped of their Twitter verification and affiliate accounts, making it impossible for them to monetize their accounts and making their posts less likely to appear in a user’s “For You” feed. These accounts included Laura Loomer, Myron Gaines of “Fresh and Fit,” and “ConservativeOG.” Additionally, there was a large ban wave of Groyper accounts—who, as one might guess, had also been on the anti-H1B side of the controversy—including Dalton Clodfelter, Tyler Russell,, ClassicsGroyp, KaizerRev, Pinesap, and Bookcat. This was one of the first notable ban waves on Twitter since Elon Musk had taken over the platform. At around the same time, Elon posted that “reply spammers” were being nuked, likely referring to these Groyper accounts, which some accused of being a targeted influence operation (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872767639682203785).
On December 30, Sam Hyde posted a 45-minute video called “Dear Elon” where he laid out the arguments against mass immigration via H1B visas, and called out Elon’s censorship of Groyper accounts critical of these visas. A mix of humor and serious commentary, Hyde told Elon that no one expected him to be extremely based and redpilled and that they were fine with him being a somewhat right-of-center Silicon Valley tech geek, but that his recent comments went too far. Hyde said that conservatives did not deserve to be called retards for opposing being “replaced by Indians,” that working 80-hour days (as proponents of the H1B program said Indians were supposedly willing to work) amounted to “slave labor” and something that we should not aspire to as a country, and that people were not “interchangeable economic units.”
Adrian Dittman, a prominent “tech bro” account with ties to Elon Musk—and whom some suspected to have even been Elon Musk’s alt, since his voice sounded exactly like him, and he had similar sense of humor and personality— appeared on several Twitter spaces discussing the controversy over H1B visas and the deplatforming of H1B critics. He once again accused those criticizing H1B visas of being “racist” and said (speaking about the deplatformed accounts) that “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.” Many posters noted that this latter argument was a common Leftist talking point for justifying the censorship of conservative speech online. Keith Woods, appearing on one of these spaces, argued that Elon had implicitly promised a freedom from “this particular consequence” (deplatforming) when he promised to make Twitter a free speech platform. Otherwise, what was the difference between the new Twitter under Elon and the old Twitter that had come before? “It’s a slippery slope,” Woods warned Dittman’s audience.
In the case of the Censorship Era of 2017-2021, it had indeed been a slippery slope. The first accounts to be deplatformed were The Daily Stormer, followed by Alex Jones. But in time, it had come to include almost anyone who dared question the government narrative regarding Covid, and eventually President Trump himself.
On December 28, Trump (once again) came out in favor of H1B visas, siding with the tech bros.
This was no surprise to those who had been following the campaign closely, as Trump had repeatedly stated this throughout his campaign, and was politically aligned with the “tech bros.” But it was a change from his 2016 stance and the general nativist sentiment that Trump represented. Many of his base felt betrayed.
However, there was little that they could do. Elon Musk controlled Twitter, so he controlled the conversation. And he was pro-H1B. Rumble was also controlled by the tech bros of the Right. Everywhere outside of these platforms was more Leftist than these platforms were. The players had changed, but the game remained the same.
The age of the disruptive, Wild West Internet was decisively over. A new generation of technologically adept elites had replaced the old, technologically illiterate ones.