[quote] I don’t know when DL became so right wing.
2015.
Prior to 2015, DL was snarky but also not evil, it was very gay, very liberal, very funny, very obsessed about Old Hollywood.
In 2015, just when the "alt-right" term was coined, Breitbart became a household name overnight, Milo Yiannopoulos evidently posted himself to this site about himself and about other of his pet Nazi topics, and that seems to have opened up the same Pandora's box here that Trump's nastiness did across the country, given people with latent bigotry an excuse to feel entitled about living out the very worst versions of their psyches.
The site was diminished through the election of Trump.
During the first two years of Trump's presidency, there was ebb and flow of Nazi and anti-Nazi commentary here. The periods of silence from Nazis were strangely llng and absolute at times, and then they all flooded back at once.
Then the 2018 midterms came and this site was absolutely taken over by the Nazis as the election approached. I remember the site being locked to non-paying comments for a long time while it became an almost exclusively pro-Trump, pro-Nazi, racist and anti-transgender hatred message board. When it was unlocked, I begged the big M owner to find a way to purge the trolls and I was silenced for a long period.
After Biden was elected, the sentiments softened and it has become a much more hospitable place; however, I don't think Trump and Milo and foreign paid trolls alone get all the blame.
I honestly think the influx of hatred unlocked certain "regular people's" hatred, particularly to the extent that some old DL members who used to pretend to be more liberal and not hateful now feel entirely comfortable spewing vitriolic anti-transgender and some racist sentiments on this website.
I would guess that if data were revealed to us, the majority of the most hateful content is part of some kind of authorized campaign, and a good amount of the otherwise more occasionally sick and hateful content probably belongs to old gay men who present themselves as more kind and decent human beings in real life but found some kind of relief in the anonymity and hateful atmosphere this site's 2015 conversion to MAGAism offered them, and they won't let go of it.