They got in early. I remember researching the Holocaust for a school assignment in the late nineties/early aughts and the top result was a conspiracy theorist/Holocaust denial screed. An openly racist one with slurs and epithets throughout, no less. The early internet was wild.

There was also Stormfront, a white supremacist forum with hundreds of thousands of accounts. Members openly detailed their plans to infiltrate police precincts and federal agencies by having fellow Stormfronters already employed there vouch for them, with the goal of creating a network of supporters throughout the entire law enforcement apparatus to advance their supremacist agenda and sabotage any investigations into them. Looking at the news, it's not hard to imagine they succeeded.

"Legitimately the Internet was a better place before ..." it became more like TV and a corporate shopping mall, and less like a Library and a village fair.

so...never?

just because they weren't old boomers doesn't mean the nazi 14 yr olds were somehow not conservatives. If you could find any of the old longbeards from early unix forums and asked them their opinions on minorities I'm sure you'd get fun responses. They were always here, the difference is that they didn't feel legitimized.

Before nerds made it easy enough for conservatives and normies to use it. We did this.