Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi

Some thought the Internet would cure cancer by uniting great minds in instant transglobal communication. The actual endgame involved sites that merged porn and political thought. 4chan is bananas, an online massage parlor where white guys tell Black jokes and onanize to Mein Kampf. A typical 4chan post is a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, next to a question: “Are there women who aren’t nagging c—ts . . . ? Have they ever shut up? How do you make them, short of beating them or divorce?” The conspiratorial connective tissue on a lot of these sites, ostensibly about an insider named Q with access to the White House, reporting on Trump’s secret war against a cabal of child-importing pedophile elitist Democrats who may also worship Satan, was insane and hard to follow. It was also mostly beside the point. The core parts of the story were more like emotional themes, i.e. “leftist elites bent on destroying us are cheating their way to despotic rule.” The specifics were increasingly interchangeable, a great fit for Trump’s kaleidoscope mind. As with porn, the customers didn’t show up for the scripts. The payoff was in pure furious spewing, politics fused with forbidden impulses—rape, murder, whatever—in a gurgling mass of “Us. vs. Them” energy. The urges rising from this collective Id are often denounced as populism, a ludicrous betrayal of the term’s original meaning. Whatever the real term for this “movement,” Trump knew how to talk to it. We saw this from the beginning of ...