Pol Pot
Article
Pol Pot is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 10, 2021 and October 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “It would be like if you woke up one day and everyone on Twitter was a Pol Pot supporter”; “To Pol Pot?“. It most often appears alongside America, Trump, “How do you do, fellow kids?“.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 10, 2021
- Last seen: October 10, 2025
Appears In
- The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
- Fascism Can’t Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target
Related Pages
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- “How do you do, fellow kids?” (1 shared issues)
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- NotAllMen (1 shared issues)
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- TheResistance (1 shared issues)
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- 1950s - 1990s (1 shared issues)
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- 2000s (1 shared issues)
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- 2010s (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- 11 (1 shared issues)
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- Aaronson (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
External Links
None.
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
We can't review the history of the alt-right without mentioning the online message board 4chan, infamous for being racist and anti-Semitic and every other thing it is bad to be. 4chan's trajectory is a another great mystery. In 2010, geeky extremely-online young people were almost universally liberal democrats. Racism was associated with elderly white Southerners who would presumably die off in a few years anyway. 4chan had no connection to them or any other historical racist tradition. It was annoying and trolled people a lot, but that was it. Its conversion to full-on bigotry was unexpected, at least by me. It would be like if you woke up one day and everyone on Twitter was a Pol Pot supporter.
Is violence justified when we get to FDR-level court packing threats? When we get to Orban? To Chavez? To Xi? To Putin? To Hitler? To Pol Pot? I think I land somewhere between Orban and Hitler, but I can’t say for sure, nor can I operationalize the distinction. And the last person to think about these questions in too much detail got a (mercifully polite) visit from the Secret Service, and even if we disagree with him it’s poor practice to hold a debate where it’s impermissible to assert one side. I will be punting on the deep cosmic question here, at least publicly.
Inline links: visit from the Secret Service