He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.

Few thoughts: in context it's not nuts at all:

- moot was fundraising for his VC backed startup during the years the emails are in, and he was likely connected via mutuals in USV or other firms. These meetings were clearly around him trying to solicit investment in his canv.as project.

- /pol/ was /new/ being returned; the ethos of the board had already existed for a long time and the decision to undo the deletion of /new/ was entirely unsurprising for denizens at the time, and was consistent with a concerted push moot was making for more transparency in the enforcement of rules on the site and fairness towards users who followed the rules. /pol/ didn't start a culture war at this time any more than /new/ had previously - it just existed as a relatively content-unmoderated platform for people to discuss earnestly what would get them banned elsewhere.

I always wondered how much of a cultural etc influence 4Chan actually had (has?) - so much of the mindset and vernacular that was popular there 10+ years ago is now completely mainstream.

Just to substantiate this a bit: I remember a gleeful consensus in certain circles being that /pol/ and /r/the_donald had "memed Trump into the White House". It's much more complicated than that, but there's certainly an element of truth there.

Given the "nature" of 4chan (only a few hundred posts and a few thousand comments at a time, the vast majority of it shitposts and spam), it just can't do that. The imageboard format and limits basically prevent any scaling and mainstream success. If you follow any of the general threads in pol or sp for a while, you'll spot the same few people all the time, it's a tiny community of active users.

I don’t agree with this analysis.

The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.

And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.

Which meeting are you seeing? That search doesn't seem to work for me, I'm only seeing the one Jan 2012.

/pol/ in no way started the American culture war. It was brewing for a while.