Oh boy, a chance to talk about my favorite Something Awful poster! Prester Jane (formerly Prester John) was a poster on the Debate & Discussion subforum of SA. He is a self-described schizophrenic who came up with an idea he calls the "narrativist framework" about how people form their political beliefs. It's essentially the idea of "dog-whistle politics" as viewed through the eyes of a schizophrenic. The theory goes that people, who just so happen to have right wing political ideas, view the world through some grand story where they're horribly persecuted by an enemy that they will one day overcome. This may be Satan, the government, another race, economic collapse, what have you. They truly believe this overall story, what Prester calls an inner narrative, but they can't say these things out loud. So instead you get an outer narrative, something like "we need to cut taxes" or "marriage is between a man and a woman" so they can covertly discuss their beliefs with other narrativists.
As these narrativists group together, inevitably conflicts arrive in the group, which leads to what is referred to as a compaction cycle. This stage is where less committed members of the group are pushed out due to infighting, while the true believers within the group recommit themselves to believing in a new, more extreme version of this inner narrative. As these compaction cycles play out over and over in some group, the theory is that the groups will radicalize and grow violent, or at least elect Donald Trump.
All this theory initially came together in a thread that ended around 150 pages in in the D&D forum, then Prester was banned for some drama with the D&D mod. The thread was then closed and a new one was opened in a subforum of D&D, the mod followed him there and banned him again. I'm not sure what exactly the drama was there, I think Prester went around to a number of different politics threads not shutting up about this theory and people started hating him.
As mentioned, Prester has
two Something Awful
threads, as well as a
blog. The threads were funny to me, as a weird group of true believers formed around this theory, helped him expand on it, and encouraged him to shop it around to academics, rather than suggest the self-admitted schizophrenic get further treatment. I've actually been meaning for a while to dig through and get some material for the Something Awful thread here, but it's a whole lot of pages of kinda dense material if you weren't actively following it and I haven't had to time to read through again and pick some of the funnier stuff. That said, I've spent a lot of effort writing this up, so here's my favorite exchange from the original thread, right after Trump's inauguration, a perfect example of a compaction cycle in the wild!
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