Here’s a decent article:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html

But the craziest part is what got Bannon the money to farm WoW gold, was he got a good chunk of Seinfeld syndication rights.

He used that money for the gold grift, then after finding:

What Bannon found was a world “populated by millions of intense young men” who may have been socially maladroit, but were “smart, focused, relatively wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them.” While these were the same players who destroyed IGE’s business model, Bannon saw something he could use. “These guys,” said Bannon, “these rootless, white males, had monster power. It was the pre-Reddit.”

He then took that money. And that knowledge about that group to:

Bannon would go on to aggressively court this audience when brought on to help Andrew Breitbart build out his ultra-right-wing news-and-entertainment site. It was Bannon who hired Milo Yiannopoulos, recognizing him as someone who could whip up disaffected gamers. (Indeed, Yiannopoulos — who previously had no interest in gaming — rode Gamergate and its attendant rage to fame and page views.)

So basically we could blame trump and everything fucked up on Larry David, and while I’m not a fan of Curb, I feel like I’ve seen enough that Larry would find the humor in it.

The important part though. Is the far right are actually doing the groundwork and trying to get the youth on their side, and have been for decades. Dems just don’t do that as a party.

Bill and Obama had amazing youth outreach, and they easily served two terms despite not delivering on campaign promises.

Biden and Hillary didn’t really put effort into the youth, and we don’t really have a large political machine that runs constantly, just huge pushes every four years of “vote for me or they’ll win!”.

People who are surprised with recent elections are just looking at too small of a timescale.

It’s why I’m so hyped for the chance of Ben Wikler for DNC chair, he understands all that stuff and wants to turn the DNC into something that’s constantly running and working instead of a mad push every four years where no matter how much is raised, the party always ends up bankrupt the day after an election.

We need long term planning and strategy, not treating every election like nothing else matter.

Dems focus on the battle, Republicans focus on the war. And that’s why they keep winning despite most Americans disagreeing with them.

Seems to me like they were more trying to say how mainstream it’s become.

Why things happened is often more important than just knowing something happened.

Doubly so when we’re talking about fighting fascism.

It’s mainstream now with people in their 20s, because their entire life online, conservatives have been influencing them in minor ways to groom them.

We can’t just copy the mainstream like Rogan and expect it to work, because the reason that works is decades of prep.

And we already have a decent amount of progressive streamers/podcasters/whatever. And progressive policy has that groundwork and its actual grassroots not AstroTurf.

But the party refuses to embrace it, even tho it already exists and people want it.

They want the passion and votes progressive policy gets them, but they don’t want to actually follow thru.

The issue is “moderate” policy isn’t something people get excited about, but the party won’t drop “moderate” policy because their hooked on corpo donations.