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Just a few years ago the left-cyberutopians claimed that ‘the disgust had become a network’ and that establishment old media could no longer control politics, that the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user-generated social media. This network has indeed arrived, but it has helped to take the right, not the left, to power. Those on the left who fetishized the spontaneous leaderless Internet-centric network, declaring all other forms of doing politics old hat, failed to realize that the leaderless form actually told us little about the philosophical, moral or conceptual content of the movements involved. Into the vacuum of ‘leaderlessness’ almost anything could appear. No matter how networked, ‘transgressive’, social media savvy or non-hierarchical a movement may be, it is the content of its ideas that matter just as much as at any point in history, as Evgeny Morozov cautioned at the time. The online environment has undoubtedly allowed fringe ideas and movements to grow rapidly in influence and while these were left leaning it was tempting for politically sympathetic commentators to see it as a shiny new seductive shortcut to transcending our ‘end of history’. What we’ve since witnessed instead is that this leaderless formation can express just about any ideology even, strange as it may seem, that of the far right.” Building on that, much of the influence that one might think to attribute to this strain of Tumblr
Nevertheless, Nagle’s portrayal of chan culture as a transgressive reaction to the establishment similar to how the Left operated in 1960s is astute. She correctly identifies that there is a contradiction between the transgressive chan culture and the traditionalism espoused by the Right, and the Alt Right in particular, but she sees this as a weakness on the part of the Right. In actually, chan culture is not a fundamental part of the Alt Right, but rather one possible gateway. There are many ways to take the proverbial red pill and spending a lot of time in chan culture could lead to this result. But becoming redpilled is about understanding the false narratives that we are conditioned to believe.The Alt Right is not an organization, but a broad confederation of groups and individuals, so please give specific examples of the “lies and obfuscation” you mention so we know what you’re talking about. Amidst the chaos of our times, it is a relief to have a brilliant and fearless critic like Angela Nagle to turn to. Unwilling to stomach the liberal shibboleths that fail to adequately explain the emergence and significance of right-wing subculture, she's the only one willing to descend into the grimiest of Internet grottos and give us the benefit of her incisive and cool-headed analysis. Chapo Trap House - Amber A'Lee Frost The particular incarnations of the online left and right that exist today are undoubtedly a product of this strange period of ultra puritanism.” Jen Izaakson is a lesbian feminist and Marxist. Jen has just completed a PhD thesis on the question of ideology and indeterminacy in Freud and Queer Theory. The rest of the discussion focused around the relation between internet cultures and power, with the alt-right’s direct line to Breitbart and identity politics ability to shape public policy despite any coherence or ability to organise a mass movement.
We all watched it happen. With dizzying rapidness, bizarre ideological excrescences that were once considered radical and fringe became the new norms of public life. Almost overnight, sane people began using, for purposes wildly beyond the contexts in which they made sense, terms like ‘no platforming’ (which now meant the practice of suppressing the voices of people whose views we dislike), ‘triggering’ (the belief that anything from classic works of literature to traditional ideas about gender can provoke trauma), and ‘cultural appropriation’ (the notion that cultures and races possess intellectual property, therefore other cultures must not adopt their styles, customs, or even linguistic usages). Anyone who didn’t get the memo, or whose sense of pride or functioning memory prevented them from denouncing former verities and loudly cheering the new orthodoxy, woke up to find they had become thought criminals, pariahs, reactionaries.While gender non-conformism is nothing new … this is part of the creation of an online quasi-political culture that has had a huge and unexpected level of influence. Other similar niche online subcultures in this milieu, which were always given by the emerging online right as evidence of Western decline, also include adults who identify as babies and able-bodied people who identify as disabled people to such an extent that they seek medical assistance in blinding, amputating or otherwise injuring themselves to become the disabled person they identify as. You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale — that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture. One issue arises in that the prevailing theory of gender in psychology is more consistent with Tumblr’s many genders than it is with a strict binary. The medical profession has been at the forefront of recognizing gender fluidity and the naturally occurring variations in gender and sexuality. The first thing listed in a recent paper on transgender healthcare, for example, talking about things that transgender people needed, was, “These individuals need their identities to be recognized as authentic.” [7] This is essentially the exact same thing that the culture which Nagel is criticizing is attempting to do — to recognize different identities as no less authentic. Davis, Charles (20 May 2018). "Sloppy Sourcing Plagues 'Kill All Normies' Alt-Right Book". The Daily Beast . Retrieved 28 November 2018. I recall this differently. It seems to me that a key landmark in the growth and evolution of the alt-right arrived when “Democrats are the real racists” became a joke, something so laughably stupid that only an NR writer could write it, or someone pretending to be an NR writer:
These rituals, according to Nagle, operate more as a way to keep the groups together by identifying an in and out-group, policing the boundary of who is transgressive and who isn’t pure enough, more then they are simply about bullying. Nagle approaches the alt-right with understanding and patience. Her political taxonomies are careful, her sociological explanations are persuasive, and her psychological evaluations are considerate. She has a genuine sympathy for her subjects and a genuine solidarity with their victims. Most important, she shows that psychological and economic analysis are complimentary rather than at odds. Read Kill All Normies, then everything else Nagle has written. It’ll be time better spent than listening to your favorite podcaster complain about “political correctness” for the nth time. The Humanist - Mark Dunbar Bumpkin: It’s kind of amazing how fervently creative a lot of these troll/supremacist/whatever venues are. It kinda reminds me of the “Cinema of Transgression” from the 1980s, only now the values being transgressed are liberal rather than conservative. Unfortunately, the people who do have ideas are more explicitly racist figures like Richard Spencer (who famously gave a Nazi salute in honour of Trump at a conference), who are increasingly taking their activism into the offline world with rallies and violent campus protests.These groups, the alt-right and Tumblr liberals have, according to Nagle, a symbiotic relationship, needing one another as much as the monstrous spectres each joyously opposes. A lot of these guys are saying 'How come my grandfather was able to have a house and a car on a one-income household?' When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn’t, but also that they couldn’t. They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon.” Psychoanalytically, there is more than a small amount of projective identification taking place between them (wherein a projected fantasy of another group or person is so strong it forces them to succumb to it, similar to a self-fulfilling prophecy). Nagle sets up a model in which the alt lite and perhaps chan culture are merely nets used to catch hapless provocateurs who just want to have some fun with memes.
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