Little did I–or any of us–know that the what I used to call the “armpit of the internet” would become a driving force in truth.

Back in the day, when I was first exploring the internet thanks to high-speed connections in my college dorm, I discovered the delightful world of Encyclopedia Dramatica. In retrospect, it was just a giant wiki for jokes and memes from the chans. It’s probably overrun with malware and anime girls at this point.

Let’s be real: I liked it mostly because it was really, really naughty. And while I really enjoyed the writeups, I instinctively knew that I wouldn’t be able to handle the source material directly. (I was a very sensitive child.)

So I kept my distance, but I always appreciated that most of the funniest memes originated somewhere in the chans. It became kind of fun watching memes go through a life cycle, through image hosting services like imgur and then joke aggregation sites and reddit, then on through twitter and facebook and sometimes even real life. I saw an ad on TV recently (I was in a sports bar, sue me) that was basically a mashup of two oldmemes from back in that era.

(These days I have to hand it to twitter, a lot of good stuff originates there too.)

Somewhere along the line, the commitment of the various boards of the chans to shitposting and contrariness made them immune from public shame and questioners of the narrative.

While the rest of the world has become uptight, unfunny, and unfailingly Correct, the denizens of /pol/ solve real-world puzzles and make a game out of trying to make the most offensive comment possible. In the process, they continue to make funny, effective memes and are responsible for opening a lot of peoples’ eyes to the truth.

They’ve even withstood various attempts to infiltrate, astroturf, and otherwise corrupt the operations there.

If you had asked me 10 or 12 years ago if I ever thought that the chans would be doing the Lord’s work, I would have laughed at you. But I think about someone who was into gore back in the day, and wonder if that experience hardened their emotional exoskeleton enough that they could investigate all the pedophilia and sex trafficking rumors going around, and I can’t help but be grateful.

At the end of the day, in a free market, the truth will win. /pol/ is a testament to that.

Long live /pol/.