This isn’t really an obscure topic so much as it requires obscure knowledge, so here goes. It was inevitable that the political firestorm since the beginning of the 2016 election would spill over into the Internet, but what people don’t really realize is how fractured social media already is. When Hillary Clinton mentioned the Alt Right and Milo Yiannopoulos in her speech, it was many people’s first taste of the history of political commentators on the Internet. The Four Horsemen of atheism are considered to be Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. They were the face of New Atheism, which was a backlash to what was then the backlash to the evangelically influenced status quo in America. The adage is that the Internet is where religion goes to die, and this seemed most apparent in the Bush era, where big name commentators like TJ Kirk and Phil Mason gained a following campaigning for gay marriage and against creationism. Today, however, the argument has shifted to left vs right, with these same commentators now opposing what many would term progressivism. The political buzz on the Internet is generally amorphous, but you can pinpoint important events such as anti-piracy bill SOPA (which would have butchered the Internet as we know it) or the backlash and spread of grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter or the Kony 2012 campaign. Today, however, I would say the political climate online is more charged than ever. Certain right wing or pro-Trump outlets, like Donald Trump’s following on reddit or publications like The Rebel Media or Breitbart(formerly run by now presidential advisor Steve Bannon), are juxtaposed against decidedly left-wing outlets like Vice News and the Huffington Post. Sites like Tumblr have become known for social radicalism (“Go back to Tumblr” is a somewhat common phrase to would-be detractors).  Facebook is for all intents and purposes undecided; its users are too diverse and numerous to place into a single political faction. So why Trump? It wouldn’t be an understatement that his candidacy is where things really exploded, but the truth is that this all-out conflict has been a long time coming. The Internet has had its political commentators for a while now, but these figures are now becoming mainstream. Controversial figures like Milo Yiannopoulos didn’t start as just Trump fans; they started with platforms criticizing college campus politics, the European Union, etc. Corporations are starting to respond as well; YouTube now pulls ads from alternative media, both from Paul Joseph Watson of the infamous “InfoWars” (where radio host Alex Jones calls home) and from the unabashedly left-wing Young Turks, an entirely YouTube-based news network. For now, the lines are drawn in the sand; and as someone who has been watching political trends online and offline for awhile now, I can say with some authority that things are truly heating up more than they ever were before.