I'm a white (well, as "white" as someone from Eastern Europe can be) cis straight male whatever other enemy of the people category you want, and a nerd. I started this reblog with the intent to angrily refute it but my recollections (forgive the stuffy language, I'm not trying to sound smart, it's midnight here, I just got off work and English isn't englishing) resulted in something that more confirms what is said above.
I got bullied and ostracized for being a nerd at school (if in America it doesn't happen anymore, well, we're several decades behind.) I don't remember thinking "this shit should be happening to those other people, not to me, I should be Right Up There with the Normal™ bois". But I do remember my only "friend" in elementary. See, maybe I never experienced this type of thinking because there was rarely anyone who was bullied noticeably more than me, and if there were people bullied as much, well, that's how I made friends. But this guy. See, we didn't have the loanword "нърд" (nerd) in the 00s yet, so the first division I heard of was "cool" vs "lame".
So you have the cool kids who are more delinquents than jocks (we didn't have any official sports teams and the like) being all tough guys, playing soccer with our butts just as much as with the football, bragging with their flashy goods (a Sony Ericsson with a color display in 2002, whoa!) and kicking our backpacks across the hallway.
And there's the "lame ones". The dorks. Of course, not all dorks are alike. My "friend" was a dork because he was short, scrawny and with a cleft palate. I was a dork (and a зубър, nerd in the academic sense) because I was a year younger, a good student, wore glasses, and had what tumblr would probably diagnose as audhd. About the only thing we shared was being unathletic.
(Now, no one bullied us for being fans of the popular things - Spiderman, Beast Wars, Goosebumps or whatever other cartoon was on TV, or, well, Star Wars, or Diablo or Warcraft. Not per sé. But the moment, the fucking MOMENT you showed more than a superficial interest, anything beyond "hehe, cool pew pew" or "aaaaa bro my sorc todally crushes on Hell", you would get ridiculed as a nerd. This persisted later in the Game of Thrones decade - cool guys did get to play WoW an watch Game of Thrones, but only to own nerds or to slobber at tiddies and blood and dragons, admiring anything else made you uncool. This is an aside re: "bUt nO oNe mAkEs fUn oF pOp cUlTuRe gEeKs".)
So this guy. See, he wanted to climb up. To stop being made fun of for his cleft palate and skinny build. Understandable. So he starts playing the "cool" guy to fit in. Gangsta rap (a bit of a delay from the west but that's the ruins of the Iron Curtain for you) was all the rage so this guy starts wearing baggy sweatshirts, gets decked out in hip hop sneakers, a color display phone and starts talking in "batka" (a variation of "bro" that later became shorthand for semi-criminal musclehead gym bros) and "took me under his wing". I asked him in 6th grade - who is cool and who isn't? And batka goes "see, they're cool, you're lame and I'm in the middle". Bam, hierarchy established and he's not down on the bottom! End of the year I ask him again - am I cool now or am I still lame? And he says, you're in the middle. I ask and where are you? He strokes his chin and says, yeah, me, I'm sorta above the middle now.
Another example in high school. See, I was at an "elite", more academically inclined high school, so there were more nerdy people. We had a group, and even in that group there was a hierarchy of who was the "coolest". And I mean normie "cool". So there's another guy - scrawny, with some really bad acne, good student, board game fan, the makings of a nerd. He wanted to not be the last nerd, he took me under his wing and started teaching me about rappers, clothes, girls. You know, cool guy stuff. Just to feel superior to someone.
So yeah, I don't think I've ever willingly participated in that stupid nerd/cool hierarchy, but it definitely is a thing.