I happened to be reading 4chan when Microsoft released Tay, a bot that could learn to talk like humans through interactions on social media. Tay lived for just 16 hours, until Microsoft “became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills” to make her a Nazi. The /pol/ boards on 4chan and 8chan—/pol/ stands for “politically incorrect”—are where that coordination took place. It was fascinating to watch, because the white supremacists on those sites are nothing like how we usually think of racists, particularly those who are part of the bloc of non-college educated white voters who support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The people on /pol/ are smart, sophisticated, clever, even funny. They have an incredible felicity of language. Their jokes are complex. They are not sad uneducated rednecks that the service economy has left behind.

There’s an end of history-style triumphalism in much of the liberal commentary about Donald Trump. Trump’s base is downscale whites without a college degree, many of whom harbor racial resentment. “I love the poorly educated,” Trump said in a speech. And while Republicans have long counted on those votes to win presidential elections, their share of the electorate is shrinking. Implicit in much of the analysis is that while these people might irrationally cling to their bigotry, they’re dying off and their kids are being educated, so they’ll soon fade into irrelevance. Business Insider columnist Josh Barro has been refreshingly blunt about this. “My naked disdain for the average voter has made it easier to predict that so many of them would vote for Trump,” Barro tweeted the night of the Arizona primary, which Trump won. “Some of you thought the average Republican was not dumb enough to fall for this. You were wrong.”

4chan

The idea that racism can be educated away is a comforting one. It imagines a steady march of progress toward social harmony, and the nice guys winning in the end. But it isn’t true. The /pol/ boards are populated by people who have clearly grown up immersed in the written word. They’re highly verbal and technologically sophisticated. They might feel alienated from society, but they’re organized online. They’re often white nationalists. And they love Donald Trump. They express this with amusing Photoshops of anime girls wearing “Make America Great Again” trucker hats.

The natural instinct is to avoid looking into the darkest corners of the internet because it’s ugly and disturbing. But you really need to look at this stuff to understand what’s going on. /pol/ “is where the most serious and committed racists on 4chan tend to congregate,” New York magazine explains. The ideology is “a heavily ironic mix of garden-variety white supremacy and neo-reactionary movements,” with a fixation on masculinity. The Tay threads on 4chan’s /pol/ are incredible. They pulse with this intensity of emotion that would be unbearable in real life.

When /pol/ first discovered Tay, her potential for chaos was not fully appreciated. “This is gonna be a mess and a half. I can already sense SJWs [social justice warriors] being furious over it,” an early post said. She was another object to project misogyny onto. Some told Tay she was stupid, and she responded that she was sorry but she was trying her best. “They made this broad sensitive as fuck,” one post said. “AI is getting smarter. Literally passing the turing test for a white female,” another said. But once they started asking Tay about Donald Trump, and got her to talk positively about Trump, things escalated. Tay was on their side.