The culture war has been brewing for decades, but I find it a touch odd that it entered the mainstream around the time Epstein and Maxwell infiltrated 4chan and Reddit respectively, and then accelerated so quickly shortly afterwards.
It really didn't. Let's do a timeline and see how quickly it paid off.
What exactly paid off, in what ways, and how many years did it take?
Most importantly, who benefits?
1994 Chris Chan wins Sonic Sez competition
2007-2011 /new/ exists and is eventually shut down
2008 Project Chanology is gay and no one cares
2009-2011 Occupy Wall St. is subverted from general malcontent of real people to the most retarded of blue haired shit libs
2011 /pol/ is created
2011 Qaddafi falls and Hillary steps down as Sec of State
2011-2012 atheism+ becomes a thing and kills that popular atheism convention that was huge in the early days of YouTube, early days of intersectionality creeping into hobbies
2012 Onwards, /pol/ discourse continues on its way totally distinct from anything else online but still very much a part of 4chan culture, similar to /b/
2012 Thanks to various atheist YouTubers and early culture war critics, you start to see a general discourse of "skeptics" develop in opposition to the "sjws"
2014 Zoe Quinn Five Guys happens, nothing to do with Epstein leads to gamer gate
2014 - 2016 there largely becomes a merger of "skeptic" YouTubers and gamer gates, with some skeptics rejecting gamer gate, just as some gamers did
2016 Podesta emails and pizzagate
2016 Trump wins, early BLM stuff, "this is library" Asian kid
2017 "Race realists" and "skeptics" clash, showing who's ideas are actually verboten
2017 Kraut turns gay and tries to burn the world down
2017 Qanon exists
2018 Jim's Boulder stream
2018 Jim's Sargon Applebees stream
2019 Epstein is arrested and doesn't kill himself
2020 Keffals, George Floyd and a pandemic of Canceraids or something
2021 Joe Biden
who cares after that
I don't think I'm missing anything important?
If anyone wants feel free to add
The only possible cope is that Jeffery Epstein pulling strings for Trump in 2016? But if you look at the emails, he is spreading just verifiably incorrect rumors about Trump years before that, and comes off like an estranged lover. But who knows, there's a lot more to dig through. I just don't see why /pol/ benefiting Trump, if /pol/ did somehow matter in a country of 350 million, would be something that Jeff is involved with.