The Men Who Stare At Horses - Part III

The Genesis of the Bronies.

Now, I’ve written about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the surrounding fandom, and the infamous Brony community several times before.

It’s something that I keep finding myself stumbling back to, wondering how I got there and why I continue to return to this place where no man should tread. Equestria is basically my own personal Silent Hill. Why? Even I’m not sure, but I have my suspicions.

For one, it is, quite literally, a gift that keeps on giving. A bottomless well that never runs dry. A mountain spring that forever burbles pure, distilled pferdescheiße¹ of the sort that could only ever come from the internet of yesteryear. The Era of the Bronies was a long one; by internet standards, where weeks move like years, the decade that it was at it’s most productive was tantamount to an epoch. That was a lot of time for a lot of shit to happen. The annals of Brony lore offers no shortage of material to study, analyze, and discuss, and an abundance of stories that are near mythical in size, scale, and plain insanity that beggars belief with an almost magnetic quality to aficionados of the weird such I.

For another, all these years later… I still can’t quite wrap my head around it. Even though I was there to watch its explosive birth, meteoric rise, and quiet, grinding decline into the mists of obscurity and legend, strapped down to a front row seat as if being subjected to the Ludovico technique, the phenomenon still vexes me to this very day. Many questions still linger. So many unanswered why’s still remain. And, like any seeker of the truth or paranoid schizophrenic with a leaning towards the esoteric, what I do not know, I am compelled by a Faustian desire to understand. Like the eponymous doctor, this is often to my own detriment.

Thusly, you can expect me to revisit the topic about, oh… once a year? Maybe biannually? I don’t know if I have the bandwidth to tackle the topic of Bronies quarterly, and, frankly, I doubt you do, either. Time will tell.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Brony community is not what happened during its golden age, but what happened after it. Make no mistake - the community itself is still lumbering along in a much diminished state, sloughing followers with every passing year as it trudges down the long road into the dustbin of internet history. It’s apogee, however, has long since passed. As a cultural force, it’s spent; much like a coelacanth, it’s a living relic of a by-gone age, ponderously mucking about by its lonesome in the darkness, content to be ignored and ignore the world in turn.

This is to say that a lion’s share of those who once considered themselves part of the Brony community have moved on to other pastures. It’s become something of a running joke within the community and among its veterans that most of the Bronies followed one or two paths; they either became transsexual, or fascists.

I mentioned this phenomenon in my first article on Bronies, and explored some of the reasons that I believed so many of them took the former path in my second, but I didn’t really touch on the latter.

A lot of people say that these bronies became fascists, but, over the past decade, the term fascist has been so flippantly used with no regard to what it actually means or what constitutes genuine fascist ideology, because, you know… Orange Dorito Hitler and what not, that it’s basically lost all real meaning outside of a general pejorative against anyone more right-leaning than Mitch McConnell.

From what I’ve seen in my own research, the contingent of Bronies that went on to be described as fascist crib a lot of iconography from the preeminent posterboys of fascism² for obvious reasons, but, much like the average Neo-Nazi prison gang, their ideology is more simple White Supremacy/Nationalism than it is serious fascism as philosophers such as Evola or fascist politicians like Corneliu Zelea Codranu would understand it (yes, Virginia - there were other fascists aside from Hitler and Mussolini). Perhaps this is splitting hairs, since there’s not-insignificant overlap between Neo-Nazism, Fascism, and White Supremacist movements, but I think it’s important to make the distinction that they’re not all the same thing for the sake of getting the full picture. This is to say that, when you see HuffPo or some such outlet hand-wringing that some Bronies became dedicated, goose-stepping brownshirts, know that it’s somewhat true, but not entirely. I doubt more than a scant few ever picked up a copy of Ride the Tiger.

Now, this is a topic on which much ink has been spilled over the years. I’m far from the only person to try and connect the disparate dots that form the highway between Bronies and Neo-Nazism, mostly because the very concept of a show about cartoon horses extolling the virtues of friendship, tolerance, and general positivity being baby’s first introduction to Fascist and White Supremacist ideology is inherently and mind-bendingly absurd. Yet, it isn’t untrue.

Il Duce of Equestria, Principessa Celestia.

For some, the door that Princess Celestia opened led to a hallway where, at the end, George Lincoln Rockwell sat there smoking his corn-cob pipe, waiting for them.

While the general strokes between the various think-pieces and analyses of the topic are similar, everyone naturally has their own opinion as to the why of the matter.

Frankly, I believe many of them are over-thinking it. The connection between the two was baked into the ultra-sugary, rainbow-colored cake topped with pony figurines from the beginning. There are several reasons why that I’ve isolated. The first and most obvious answer is where the Brony community first took shape, how it came to be, and even why it exists.

This brings us to my first point of connection between the Brony-to-Far Right pipeline…

Exhibit A
In the Beginning…

It is widely agreed that the beginnings of the Brony phenomenon can be traced back to a singular event.

Remember what I said about the history of the Brony community being mythical? I was used that term in a literal sense. The following events are events now considered legendary in the long, storied, and rich history of 4chan. The Genesis of the Bronies, in many way, befittingly biblical.

You’ll see what I mean.

It all began with a single, innocuous post on 4chan’s /co/ board, dedicated to comics and cartoons; one so simple and pedestrian that not a soul who saw it could have ever foresaw the tectonic change in internet culture that it would trigger. Even the faceless individual who posted it had no way of knowing that they were effectively lighting a fuse that would change so, so many lives. One must wonder - do they felt guilt? Or does their ignorance absolve them of sin?

I’d estimate that 99.999% of the Brony community were not present to see this post, but that’s largely irrelevant. The events that it set into motion would ultimately and irrevocably alter the trajectory of their lives all the same, as the unknowable winds of fate are often dictated by distant events of which we have no awareness. For many, though they did not know it, their existence could be neatly divided in two that day.

There was every day before October 2nd, 2010. And there was every day after it.

Yes, this really is THE first post in which My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was ever mentioned on 4chan.

On /co/, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic discussion would first begin as a General thread, which were threads dedicated to a single topic to keep said topic from over-saturating the board. The idea was that, if you wanted to talk about ponies - fine. But you were gonna do it in your own little corner where you weren’t going to bother everyone else with it. Like a kid’s table, of sorts. This is was³ pretty common operating procedure on most 4chan boards; for instance, the Disney movie Frozen had a general thread that ran for several thousand iterations. Homestuck had one as well, which, er…

That’s a story for another time. But, as you can see in the above image, these threads were often insular and formed distinct sub-cultures within the greater 4chan ecosystem, with their own memes, shibboleths, notable personalities, and lore.

That’s really why no one thought much of the Bronies as /mlpg/ - My Little Pony General - took shape; they were just another eclectic band of passionate fans bouncing around on /co/ with dozens of others.

Their numbers, at first, were few, and their threads largely lost amidst the hustle and bustle of one of 4chan’s busiest boards. Yet, gradually, more and more /co/mmandos, as users of the board affectionately referred to themselves, were drawn into the gravitational pull of My Little Pony General, until the threads were so overstuffed with posters that they lived, died, and were born anew within hours.

“In the beginning, the /mlpg/ threads were spaced by twenty-four weeks, then twelve, then six, then every two weeks. The last one was a week ago. In four days, we could be seeing a new /mlpg/ threads every eight hours until they are coming every four minutes.”

It was around this time that the name Brony became a title by which these fans of the show identified themselves in the thread. As the General thread became an over-crowded ghetto, other threads relating to the show began to pop up. First as a trickle - then as a steady rain. As more and more of the Bronies strayed from the pen of their General thread, the term took on a pejorative connotation. Other users who were not quite so taken in by the colorful horses were having their patience tested as the ranks of the Bronies swelled, and their presence rose from quiet chatter in the background to a dull roar.

Ponies began infecting unrelated threads, where any and all conversation would be effectively and efficiently derailed and hijacked with pony-centric content. All that was necessary to do it was a single image of Twilight Sparkle, and the thread was for all intents and purposes Brony territory. This, of course, pretty much everyone else did not appreciate. It was a violation of the unwritten but unanimously agreed concept of, Keep it in it’s own thread; a breach in protocol that was met with the kind of hostility that one would expect. Bronies, in turn, met this aggression with an outwardly antagonistic attitude. Spurred by this antipathy, it became common place for them to derail threads by spamming pony content just for sake of being a nuisance and raising hackles. This burgeoning conflict drew in those with an inclination towards trouble making like a moth to a flame; out-and-out trolls began to join in on the pony-posting, again, just to watch people descend into frothing, inchoate rage at the sight of a pony’s pink muzzle.

As 4chan is known to be somewhat of a… caustic environment, to say the least, where civility is largely eschewed in favor of knee-jerk reactions and blind hostility, tempers flared from embers to infernos on both sides. It became a game of trolls trolling trolls, and all of them getting mad about it.

You definitely saw this image get a lot of use at the time.

This is the nature of things on a site once widely known as the internet hate machine, and it proved to be an environment that provided all the necessary ingredients to serve as an ideal pit of toxic waste for madness to flourish like an aggressive fungal infection.

The situation rapidly escalated into what could rightly be called a civil war between the nascent Bronies community and literally everyone else on the /co/ board. /co/, for all intents and purposes, became unusable. After months of grinding wars of attrition - attriting people’s patience, that is - there was enough of an outcry from users on /co/ to restore a rough semblance of the tenuous order that 4chan normally operates under, that the almighty and powerful moderators descended from the digital heavens to intervene. So great were the pleas of the people for deliverance from the pony menace that even the Great Mootleberry - my own personal nickname for the site’s founder and then-supreme authority, Moot - was summoned to rise from his odinsleep and actually fucking do something for once.

Christopher Poole, a.k.a., Moot, once named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people on the planet.

The solution posed by the moderators and Moot was as simple as it was brutal.

Any and all discussion of ponies, posting of ponies, Hell, even thinking about ponies was summarily banned. Even their General thread, once meant to contain them, was declared as an enemy of the state and outlawed. They couldn’t play by the rules, so they were taken out of the game⁴. Like Nebuchanezzer II expelling the Jews from the Holy Land, God-King Moot too sent the Bronies into exile out from the land from which they came.

And like Nebuchanezzer II, as well, Moot, perhaps in his arrogance, had little way of knowing the fresh candy colored Hell that this decree would bring upon himself and his kingdom.

One of the most iconic relics from the time.

Cast out from their home, wandering and stateless, it did not take long for the Brony diaspora to begin to set up shop on other boards. And it took even less time for them to become a problem.

I remember you quite literally could not browse another board on 4chan without seeing a pony. The small equines’ friendly grins became mocking sneers. The Bronies wore out their welcome on these other boards, assuming they ever had it, in record time; I distinctly remember browsing /a/ - the board dedicated to discussion about anime and manga - and seeing a thread that asked, What would their favorite anime be?, with a picture of the main pony crew attached. And that’s not what anyone who was looking for manga recommendations like me, or, as most of /a/ was wont to do, seeking to indulge in verbal bloodsports who was best girl from any given series, wanted to see.

Go to /ck/, the cooking board, and you’d find threads about Pinkie Pie because she likes to bake.

Go to /o/, the car board, and there’d be posts about Rainbow Dash, because… she’s fast, I guess.

Go to /fa/, the fashion board, and, because Rarity is the token fashionista - there she is.

Wherever there could be ponies - and especially where there shouldn’t be ponies - there were.

Even the notoriously chaotic, and perhaps 4chan’s most infamous and iconic board, /b/⁵, did not escape unscathed. Now, /b/, at the time, was the dark, pulsating heart of 4chan⁶. The throbbing, Azathothian nucleus of madness from which all else spawned. When people with no history with 4chan think of the site, they think of what was happening on /b/. It was, quite literally, the roughest and rowdiest saloon of the internet’s original Wild West boomtown. Yet, this board, too, was unable to cope with the sheer deluge of manic pony-posting that sweeping across the site, and, like /co/, descended into a pony-induced state of delirium. Given how generally fucked /b/ normally was, it cannot overstate how bad the situation had become by this point.

I was there. I remember.

“I was there fifteen years ago. I was there when the strength of anonymous failed.”

The moratorium on ponies on /co/ was escalated to a site-wide damnatio memoriae on cartoon horses. Posting anything even tangentially pony-related on any corner of the site was grounds for a permanent eviction from 4chan.

And make no mistake - the Bronies are not the aggrieved party in this story. The hostility directed towards them was not unjustified. Their presence on other boards was unwelcome and intrusive. They were often combative and actively reveled in the trouble that they caused. They had been given opportunities to stop. They had been given a space on /co/ to do their thing and routinely flouted the rules set in place for them. This state of site-wide anarchy was absolutely a hostile takeover borne from a place of malice.

Now, some of the Brony faction was, indeed, simply looking for a place to chat about their favorite pony in peace. This much I will concede. But, by this point in the story, this faction had accepted their exile with a modicum of grace and established their own websites on which they could talk about My Little Pony until the titular little equines came home. There were several notable pony-centric sites, but Equestria Daily, founded in 2011, would soon become the center-most locus for the Brony community. This parallel network of sites built around Brony culture would ultimately be where the majority of what most would associate with the phenomenon came from. From this point on, it would be the prime engine behind the Brony sub-culture.

Many also migrated to Reddit (basically exchanging one shithouse for another), where they evangelized the good word of Friendship is Magic, converted many to their new fandom, and in the process ignited another cycle of technicolor, cartoon chaos like what was happening concurrently on 4chan, albeit on a lesser scale.

But some were still not finished with 4chan.

Back on the boards, the situation was escalating to its eventual climax. Those that refused to leave dug their heels in and intensified their efforts to co-opt the entirety of 4chan.

The moderators, also called janitors⁷, attempted to curtail the issue, but there were exponentially more Bronies than could be managed by 4chan’s notoriously ineffective moderation staff (remember: they do it for free). Site-wide bans were circumvented by a simple change in IP address, which is not a difficult feat to achieve for anyone with a working knowledge of an internet router. The Brony Mujahideen would organize off-site and orchestrate dedicated raids, picking a board and descending on it like a wailing horde of steppe nomads atop bright, cartoon ponies, washing away any and all threads with those of their own. They even began to utilize spambots in order to overwhelm entire boards with a nonsensical deluge of pony-content, rendering them completely dysfunctional.

I don’t need to tell you that people who would dedicate this much time and effort to fucking with the internet’s biggest den of sin (you’ll never come out the way you went in) were, to put it mildly, not the most well-adjusted people. While plenty of original Bronies were still chafing from being hunted down by the moderators and made public enemy #1 on 4chan, the sheer scale their little rebellion and the chaos it caused naturally, as I stated before, attracted bad actors who didn’t give a fuck about ponies - they just wanted to see the site burn.

You know. Like the Joker.

There always been a lot of anarchic shit-stirrers like that on 4chan, especially at that time. If you ever used the site, you know this, and if you didn’t, I’m sure you can figure out why.

This one time, I will give the jannies their due credit - they actually tried. For perhaps the first time in 4chan’s history, they actually, y’know, did their job. Ultimately, however, their efforts were about as fruitful as trying to piss upwind in a hurricane. The Brony Partisans were nothing if not tenacious.

In 2012 - two whole years after the fiasco began - Moot would announce the creation of a new board dubbed /mlp/: a board specifically dedicated to My Little Pony. Ponies were still verboten on every other board, and the global ban on their posting was still in effect, but within the quarantine zone set up for them, the Bronies were free to wallow in all the pony goodness they could tolerate.

This move was not well received by the majority of the site’s users. To grant the Bronies with their own board smacked not only of betrayal by the Great and Mighty Moot, but actively rewarding the Brony’s Butlerian Jihad against the site and everyone on it. Yet, in time, most would come to understand that there was simply no other recourse. It was an unfortunate but necessary measure. It was less of a containment zone and more of a septic tank put in place to keep ponies from seeping out into the site at large. And believe me - it was a septic tank.

Don’t believe me? Watch the first of the many installments of a video series called Pony Thread Simulator: you’ll begin to realize very quickly what the average pony thread that popped up during this time looked like, and exactly why everyone was keen on keeping them to a minimum.

This peace offering would, for the most part, sate the blood lust of the Bronies. Of course, trouble would flare up every now and then as a handful of bronies would breach the cordon sanitaire, but most were content to stay within the confines of the little slice of 4chan they’d been granted.

And they all lived happily ever after…

And cue the music.

As Frank Herbert of Dune fame said; There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

But it is quite the tale, no?

I hope that I illustrated for those without the extensive, first-hand knowledge of the phenomenon as to why the Bronies were so widely reviled and held in poor regard in a way that I just hadn’t before.

Like Reddit, many other websites suffered their own Brony Invasions in the aftermath of Moot’s decision to purge them, both from /co/ and the site writ large. Like the Umman Manda of antiquity, they would come screaming in from the digital wastes, raise Hell, and, like many steppe nomads, calm the fuck down after a bit of slaughter and assimilate with the locals. Or, in some cases, their antics would trigger a Pony Pogrom that would drum them out to the last… to varying degrees of efficiency. Though I don’t believe that any other iteration of this pattern was nearly as intense as that which played out on 4chan, it still happened.

Time would eventually sand the roughest edges off the Brony community, and, like that grade school bully who was an absolute terror that grew up to be a functional adult, their hostile inclinations largely petered out until the Brony community as most recall it took shape. Rightly or wrongly, posterity often remembers them as the be-fedora’d manchildren in ill-fitting t-shirts that carried around pony plushes in public; eccentric, odd, and not really anyone you’d opt to hang around with of your own accord, but mostly harmless.

As I’ve said in my previous articles, I have a friend who once identified as a Brony; perfectly nice guy, though he was introduced to the series while the chaos was winding down, after Equestria Daily has already been established. I’ve met others (just a few) at conventions who were amicable people I didn’t mind throwing back some cold ones with.

Yet, when many were first introduced to the Brony community, they were the 4chan’s own personal Weather Underground. And many could never quite wash the taste of their first encounter with them out of their mouths. First impressions, after all, tend to be the most lasting.

The Brony phenomenon germinated from a bad seed. It was born under a bad sign. It was touched by something unnatural from the very beginning, was brought into the world with birthing pains that nearly brought down one of the most infamous and storied websites in internet history, and baptized in blood.

But it doesn’t quite explain the link between Bronies and Fascism. Well, that’s because this account was more for context than anything else. You can’t really understand where we’re going unless you understand where the story started.

Earlier I said the following: There are several reasons why that I’ve isolated. The first and most obvious answer is where the Brony community first took shape, how it came to be, and even why it exists.

Let’s isolate these elements and answer them.

How the community came to be was through a common interest in a children’s animated program that began innocently enough, but rapidly spiraled into the antagonistic force behind one of the most contentious eras in the long history of 4chan.

Why is came to be was not a simple matter of fans gathering to discuss a show - it was a community that had garnered an identity calcified through conflict and persecution, engendering a strong in-group preference and natural hostility towards outsiders, especially those who showed acrimony towards them.

In my second article on the Bronies, I made the following claim;

I don’t doubt the bulk of the bronies genuinely liked the show… I don’t think they loved it. This might seem a bit ludicrous to say, given that these people made liking a children’s show their entire identity, but here’s the thing about the bronies’ obsession with Friendship is Magic - it was never about the show. It was always about the community around it.

As I finish this article, I feel more validated of this theory now than I did when I posed it. Revisiting this piece of history, it became abundantly clear to me that there were two overlapping but ultimately separate factions in these early days of the Brony community: those who genuinely wanted to discuss and enjoy the show in peace, and those who were just their for the fireworks and adopted ponies not out of love for the source material, but because it was the iconography of the insurgency. Not to say they didn’t enjoy it, I must stress that, but it was tertiary to the movement they’d started.

Which leads us to the final, and perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle - where.

The Bronies are children of 4chan.

This, I cannot emphasize enough, is the most crucial joint on this supposed pipeline between Bronies and Far-Right Ideology. And if you spent any amount of time on 4chan, I know you’re already aware of why. In the aftermath of the almighty Moot’s banhammer coming down upon their heads on /co/, the Bronies dispersed in an exodus that spread them into every nook, cranny, corner, and crevice 4chan had to offer. Almost everywhere they went, discord was soon to follow, and public opinion would sour very quick.

But on no other board would the Bronies find a bigger foot-hold for themselves than perhaps the only board on 4chan more infamous than /b/.

And that place is somewhere we will discuss… next time.

1. German for horseshit, which seems more apropos than feces of a bovine variety.

2. Do I even need to say what it is?

3. When I wrote this piece, the major hack that brought down 4chan in early April of 2025, quite possibly if not likely forever, had yet to occur.

4. I’d like to mention this happened with Homestuck General, as well, but not because they were straying from their General thread, but rather because the General thread became so fucking off-topic and more about Homestuck General in-jokes than, y’know, Homestuck, that the threads were banned. But you know what you didn’t see Homestuck fans do? Well, they didn’t try to do what’s about to happen.

5. /b/ was Random.

6. Most 4chan users did not use /b/. While it was the original point of entry for most users, who were introduced to it by its infamous reputation, many trickled into the other boards once the novelty of /b/’s general state of anarchy wore off. If 4chan was a mansion, /b/ was a room that had been cordoned off for the deformed, inbred freaks of the family to languish in and throw shit at each other like monkeys on crack cocaine. Still, it was by far and away the most well-known of all the boards.

7. JANNIES GET OUT!!!