A lot of Chap fans swear there's no meaningful overlap between their fanbase and racist online communities like r/stupidpol.

Well, it's not just fan overlap. There's MOD overlap.

The mod in question appears to be Nazi-friendly Nick Mullen of the CTH-promoted podcast Cum Town. https://twitter.com/noirscape_/status/1257358929513848832

As you may recall, both Cum Town and Mullen have strong ties to Nazis.

Mullen has been friendly with the Nazi hacker Weev (best known for his work on the Nazi website Daily Stormer) to the point of having publicly praised him on Twitter.

Cum Town's fanbase, meanwhile, is full of capital-N Nazis.

Some of their fans ran a Telegram fan channel largely devoted to explicitly Nazi content, with a subscriber count of somewhere around 2000. https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1256312965264900098

When first I tweeted about this, Cum Town's Nazi fan channel deleted all its content, then made the channel private.

These guys consider Mullen a hero.

They protected him, even though the other Nazis (like the faux-Christian Nazi below) made fun of them for it.

Their legacy lives on, though, in the form of the explicitly Nazi and deeply hateful memes they created that other Nazi channels shared.

(the red squares on slurs are my work; the original spells these words out completely)

The Cum Town fan channel wasn't the only explicitly Nazi channel that understood Nick's podcast to be a fash-friendly space.

Here's that faux-Christian Nazi linking to a Cum Town video and saying, "This is why I don't hate all Leftists - they are so close to being on our team."

This Nazi fan of Mullen's podcast isn't some random guy.

He runs one of the largest Nazi Terror Telegram channels in existence, one that actively promotes content actively pushing for "Boogaloo," (Nazi slang for the race war they're hoping to incite).

Mullen's Nazi fan also operates a side discussion channel, where other Nazis tell each other to read Siege (the pro-terror book about how Charles Manson had the right idea, but just wasn't extreme enough) and exterminating women.

It appears it isn't the first time that a major Cumtown fan community has become a Nazi haven and gone private after getting caught.

According to users of this Reddit channel, r/Cumtown on Reddit also went private after getting caught harboring pro-race war/pro-terror material.

Later in the thread, another user shares some history:

r/Cumtown started out as a community where podcast listeners imitated the host and used racial slurs, thinking being ironic made it okay.

Gradually, the alt-right infiltrated & started to "ironically" pitch race war.

Folks, this is the problem with "ironic" antisemitism and racism.

When you create a community that thinks this shit is okay if it's ironic, the Nazis that say those words unironically will eventually infiltrate, build relationships, and slowly drop the mask.

It doesn't matter if the hosts are genuinely being ironic.

The Nazis will put on that ironic mask and slowly push their new "friends" into accepting more and more "edgy" humor until everyone's "ironically" sharing Nazi stuff.

Then it's, "lmao, but also, they have a point"

That's how fash work.

This isn't theoretical, and it's already happening.

It's already happened with Cum Town fans, at least twice.

Their "ironically racist" fan communities have now twice turned into openly alt-right propaganda zones.

The Cum Town fanbase and r/stupidpol are the last stops before full-on Nazi Town on the train from Chapo Trap House to openly Nazi online communities.

More than once, their fanbase communities have turned INTO Nazi Town.

Mullen knows this.

He plays to it, and not even coyly.

Meanwhile, the Chapo Trap House hosts openly embrace Mullen.

He's close friends with two of the hosts.

He's appeared on the show three times.

They've retweeted his rape jokes.

They've promoted his podcast, literally saying it had their "seal of approval."

Felix, one of the Chapo Trap House hosts, has even joked about CTH and Cum Town being basically an Avengers Assemble-style team together.

This is a close relationship.

Chapo Trap House has repeatedly invited its fans, implicitly and explicitly, to join Cum Town's fanbase.

The dirtbag left thinks "Chapo-to-fash pipeline" is a silly phrase, but this is an object lesson in how a problematic but not fascistic form of entertainment with a dedicated fanbase can send their fans into a Nazi recruitment zone, like these Nazified Cum Town communities.

People are like "well Gwen did you listen to all the episodes ever, how can u say that?"

What these people are missing or deliberately pretending not to see is, this isn't about the actual content of the podcasts.

It's about the communities that form around them.

It's not even about what the hosts believe in their heart of hearts.

It's about how they engage with those fan communities, what endorsements they make to their fan communities, what behavior they encourage in those communities, and what behavior they ignore there.

Speaking from personal experience, Chapo Trap House absolutely encourages their fan community to engage in ableist, misogynist behavior.

They don't provide explicit instructions, but they are well aware of what happens when they make fun of a person they see as a threat.

With the hosts' approval, the CTH fanbase has formed a community where callouts on sexism, ableism, or racism are seen as "idpol" and invalid.

Any criticism of that kind of behavior gets mocked.

Meanwhile, the hosts train their fans to believe "ironic" hate speech is okay.

That doesn't mean the CTH train their fans to be fascists.

The problem here is, they've created communities where "ironic" hate speech goes unchecked and ironic-but-not-really hate speech can't be called out because, lol idpol.

That's problematic, but not a pipeline by itself.

It's the endorsements they make to their fanbase, both explicitly and by virtue of warm association, that turn their creation of a toxic fan community into the entry point of a to-fash pipeline.

Like, say, endorsing Cum Town.

We can argue about whether Cum Town hosts harbor fash sympathies or whether they're just reactionary nihilists who don't give a shit, but again, what's in their heart-of-hearts doesn't matter.

This is about impact, not intent.

Not all CTH fans will end up in the Cum Town fanbase, but some *will* follow the CTH hosts' advice, start listening to Cum Town, and join the online fanbase.

That's kind of the point of endorsements.

It's not even like joining Cum Town's fanbase full of Nazis automatically turns those Chapo Trap House endorsement-follower fans into Nazis.

They may really think that the Nazis disguising their Nazi-ness & pretending "kill the Jews" are just doing edgy ironic humor, CTH-style.

After a while, some of those Chapo Trap House-sent new members of Cum Town will start to view that fanbase as a home, a community where they've built strong relationships and made friends, where they feel safe and don't want to leave.

That's not conspiracy.

It's just how fanbases work.

The more linked two entertainment sources are to one another, the more overlap their fanbases will have, especially if they repeatedly endorse one another.

And since Cum Town does not consider itself a political or leftist podcast, new, Chapo Trap House-sent fans who were more into Chapo's "edginess" than its political content are likely to identify even more strongly with Cum Town and its fanbase than with CTH.

That means the CTH fans that stick around in Cum Town's fanbase will be those least likely to have internalized any leftist values and most likely to get excited because saying the N-word is "edgy" humor.

The ones least likely to be able to detect fucked up, anti-left politics.

It's not "Leftist CTH fans all magically become fascists."

It's, "CTH fans who like getting to make jokes about Jews follow the hosts' advice and find themselves in a community where everyone's making jokes about Jews and Black people all the time."

Those CTH fans that find a new home in Cum Town's online fan community aren't going to be the dedicated leftists.

They'll be the "it's fun to say the N-word" guys, and they are not going to be very good at telling the difference between irony bros and mask-on Nazis.

Those Chapo Trap House fanbase-to-Cum Town fanbase endorsement followers are not going to want to leave their new home, even as Nazis there begin to slowly let their masks drop.

The Nazis do the ideological equivalent of slow-boiling the frog so it doesn't notice it's cooking.

When the "ZOG Jewish New World Order, lol but also it's kinda true" equivocating starts, they'll be so embedded and comfortable with these words and suggestions that it won't seem *that* weird.

That's when some of them start saying to themselves, "yeah lol it is kinda true."

This process of "ironically" indoctrinating irony bros into the alt-right isn't something I'm making up.

The Nazi website Daily Stormer made a style guide explicitly detailing this strategy of disingenuous irony. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/inside-the-daily-stormers-style-guide

This isn't horseshoe theory.

It isn't about Nazis and leftists being ideologically close to one another.

It's about what happens when Chapo Trap House fans who liked their "edginess" but not the leftism find a new home in the Cum Town fanbase, which is more "edgy"/not leftist.

Cum Town's fanbase and r/stupidpol appeal to the people who embraced Chapo Trap House's class reductionism and "ironic" hate speech-- not because they wanted economic equity, but because it gave them an excuse and space to be shitty and racist/ableist/sexist & get away with it.

Those are the people that Nazis look for.

The angry, disaffected white dudes who feel cheated out of their racial/gender entitlement to wealth, who are looking for someone to blame, who get a thrill shitting on "SJWs" who practice anti-racism and other anti-oppression work.

It's not that *all* of Chapo Trap House's fans are like that.

Radicalization pipelines by definition rarely funnel more than a small fraction of the relatively-mainstream entrypoint audience to the radical exit point.

It's not that the entry point personalities even want or intend for any of their audience members to make it past the next stage they're pointing them to.

Often, they just don't think or care about what lies past that next stage.

If you send someone into a fanbase where Nazis are successfully radicalizing and recruiting, though, you're making a decision to direct at least a chunk of your audience into a space where at least some of them are likely to get radicalized and not realize it until it's too late.

That's what it means when we say that Chapo Trap House is fash-enabling.

It's not like they have SS uniforms hidden in their closets at home. That's not the implication.

Fash-enablers are folks who continue to make it easier fascists' work easier even after they've been warned.

The Chapo Trap House have been warned about the dangers of this pipelining again and again and again.

Instead of doing something about it, they've doubled down & mocked the very idea & continued to lead their fans towards online fanbases rife with Nazis.

That's fash-enabling.

And as @fohfuu pointed out, that enabling has led to an incredible overlap between the cryptofash-packed r/stupidpol & Chapo Trap House's fan community on Reddit.

r/stupidpol users are nearly 20x more likely to post to the CTH fan reddit, and vice versa.

AND, as we've seen from the tweet I quoted at the beginning, this overlap extends to the mods, and the mod with that overlap appears to be none other than Nick Mullen, host of Nazis' favorite "left" podcast, Cum Town, and known fan of at least one Nazi. https://twitter.com/noirscape_/status/1257358929513848832

It's not my imagination.

It's not some wild delusion.

Chapo Trap House and their friends encourage and lead their fans down a road that ends in Nazi-infiltrated Reddit and (until recently) Telegram communities that are so racist and antisemitic that Nazis blend in perfectly.

The Nazis get it, and it isn't just Third Positionists.

The terror Nazis specifically are drooling at the opportunity that the dirtbag left has created for them.

They're already working the floor.

(That's a Siege Nazi skull mask and a Nazi Sonnenrad on Homer there, fyi)

Think I'm being paranoid?

They've been self-admittedly watching and targeting Bernie-empathizing Reddit communities for months, and likely much longer.

It scares the shit out of me that folks think a dirtbag left-to-fash pipeline is laugh out loud funny.

Nazis are in these subreddits now, deliberately stirring up anti-Black and coded antisemitic hate.

And CTH is encouraging its fans to go mingle with them.

Nazis are infiltrating our spaces, looking for the places they can "ironically" recruit and spread propaganda, and specifically targeting the "edgiest" and most angrily anti-"idpol" spaces.

Sending fans into those spaces materially widens their recruitment pool.

Don't be naive.

(the end, for now)

PS, I forgot to cite-- the telegram content and reddit screenshots are from me, but the Twitter stuff was found by someone else, it's from this article and not original research: https://medium.com/@arisechicken6667/what-happened-i-virgil-texas-5482bd83832c