Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right

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The yellow vest protesters revolting against centrism mean well – but their left wing populism won't change French politics". Independent.co.uk. 17 December 2018. Archived from the original on 7 May 2022. Broadly speaking, Kill All Normies is undone as a serious piece of commentary by Nagle’s blinkered insistence that the alt-right represents something entirely new and unprecedented. This angle may be lucratively sensationalist, but it totally obfuscates any serious consideration of any of the politically pertinent questions socialists should be asking about American neo-fascism. There is no discussion, for example, of how the alt-right intersects, ideologically and organisationally, with pre-existing right-wing political forces. There is no attention to the broader realignments taking place in American politics, or the fact that we are living through an epoch of capitalist political (if not, for the moment, economic) crisis. For a writer who self-identifies as a socialist, these seem like significant questions to consider.

But i don’t debate especially with alt-Rightospherians becuase they tend to be professional arguers and knaves. I dont try to change anyone’s mind. If i said anything of value to anyone- that’s nice. but one must separate themselves from the hoped for outcome. just aver. As per an autocrat. The more interesting aspect of Nagle’s analysis is found in her description of the alt lite as “transgressive” and this is one of her major themes. She points out that the transgressive stylistic response to culture is typically associated with the Left, emerging most distinctly in the culture wars of the 1960s as a way to criticize the establishment at that time. As Leftist revolutionaries marched their way through the institutions, they used transgressive irreverence to deconstruct the symbols and norms of the dominant culture, appealing to the rebellious spirit of youth and an emerging libertine sense of independence. But now that the establishment is in their hands and new taboos have been put into place, the Left finds itself on the defensive against this same rebellious spirit of youth and libertine sense of independence, both of which have only grown stronger and more chaotic. 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. As Trump marched into the White House, terrified liberals scrambled to learn about a demonic new political force known as the alt-right. While the term is applied loosely in the media to cover a broad right-wing movement, strictly speaking it refers to the Internet’s white segregationist, white-nationalist subcultures. The alt-light, on the other hand, denotes a more amorphous, often nihilistic, anti-PC and anti-feminist movement, which includes the /b/tards and trolls of 4chan. The movement as a whole has already had a seismic impact on mainstream culture: Trump probably would not have won without alt-right and alt-light agitation. 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.Published by Zero Books, Kill All Normies uses as its title a slogan promoted on 4Chan’s politics board that essentially derides anyone who has ever been in a relationship or had a job as a ‘normal fag’. Unless still living in your mother’s house you’re not truly qualified sanctimonious loser troll material. 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.

As did, a couple of years later, another major figure now associated with the alt-right: Donald Trump. The appeal of Trump to the online trolls made total sense. If you know nothing about the alt-right, its allies, predecessors, etc., you may get some value out of this book. You’ll have to get through a lot of sloppy writing and jabs at transgender people to get to it. The history of the Alt-Right and how the left can fight it is a topic that should be looked into, but it deserves to be written about by a better author than Nagle.The establishment has taken the side of the globalists; rather they have been bought by the globalists with many shekels. Donald Trump was first and foremost an anti-establishment candidate. For the first time in decades we heard a presidential candidate appealing explicitly to nationalist sensibilities. Although probably most Trump voters would hate to admit it, race is a concept that is central to nationalism. Thus it is not surprising during this election cycle, in which the national question was at the heart of the every issue, that the Alt Right would be raised into the public consciousness as a major point of discussion. Nagle emphasises that the alt-right’s members derive a transgressive thrill from flouting the formal anti-racist and anti-sexist precepts of modern Western society. This fairly mundane insight is wrapped up in a chapter of garbled psychoanalysis and cod-philosophy, which twists both Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade to an extent that even the latter would surely have taken exception to. The fact that alt-right internet culture is often humorous in tone – that much of the horrifying spectacle of alt-right discourse is carried out semi-ironically, ‘for the lulz’ – is also marvelled over as a distinctly 2017 phenomenon. Again, however, the author’s declaration that she has discovered an entirely new strain within the right-wing gene pool falls flat as soon as we look at even a couple of historical examples of other fascist movements. This, for example, is how one former member of the (very crude and conventional) British neo-Nazi gang Combat 18 explains the group’s Holocaust denial:

After the murderous gathering in Charlottesville, there’s a real need for insightful analysis of the American far right – but, argues Lisa LeakKill All Normies fails to provide it. Nagle, Angela (12 July 2020). "Will Ireland survive the Woke Wave?". UnHerd . Retrieved 14 December 2021. Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies represents a break with the usual unwillingness to subject the amorphous left’s internet cultures and identity politics to the same degree of scrutiny as the right’s. This emerging rift on the Left between liberals and materialists is only an underlying issue in Nagle’s book. One wonders if it is similar to the rift within the Right between conservatives who embody Classical Liberalism and the Alt Right who harken to an older sense of the Right as preservers of hierarchical and aristocratic societies. That is to say, do both disputes play out as globalist versus nationalist? This does not seem to be the case. The concept of nationalism appears to be totally anathema on all sides of the Leftist spectrum. Both the materialist Left and the liberal Left are too anti-white to consider nationalism a viable solution to the alienation of global capitalism. This stance will continue to drive typically Left-leaning whites rightward to the point where White Nationalism may no longer be thought of as strictly a rightwing movement.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.” To imagine that all previous fascist movements have been stodgily conservative, and have styled themselves as such, betrays a peculiar ignorance of the history of fascism. What about the neo-Nazi skinhead scene of the late 1970s (still strong and vital in East Germany and much of Eastern Europe)? Many of the original Nazis wanted to abolish Christianity and instigate neo-paganism – hardly a reaffirmation of family-values conservatism. Successful modern fascist movements, like Greece’s Golden Dawn, have grown by becoming fashionable presences on schoolyards, and the classical fascist intelligentsia contained numerous young utopian idealists – Marinetti and the futurists, most famously – alongside conventional reactionaries. Arguments around the definitive features of fascism are often circular and unhelpful, but it is impossible to assemble a definition of fascism in which an ebullient spirit of radicalism does not feature at least in some cases. Nagle provides numerous cringe-worthy examples of anti-female rhetoric found in chan culture and the alt lite. She does not specifically link these examples to the Alt Right, but rather frames the Alt Right as the ultimate evil at the center of this orbit of hateful and ugly thought. To be fair, this book must have gone to print before the White Sharia meme became popularized, which also seems to perfectly exemplify her sexual frustration accusation. Even so, in spite of the Alt Right’s problematic memes there are more complex ideas surrounding sexuality that the movement contends with, which Nagle strategically avoids. These days it is not uncommon to see the Alt Right regularly mentioned by major media commentators, both Left and Right. Yet virtually all portrayals of this “movement” by the media are off base if not outright false, and typically strewn with the same old slurs of “racist,” “white supremacist,” “nazi,” etc. So when a new book comes along attempting to give a more carefully studied perspective about the Alt Right, it is worth considering even if that perspective comes from the Left. The book is Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to the Trump and the Alt-Right by Irish writer Angela Nagle, whose work has appeared in The Baffler and Jacobin magazine. The main preoccupation of this new culture (the Right named them SJWs and snowflakes, let’s call it Tumblr-liberalism) was genderfluidity and providing a safe space to explore other concerns like mental illness, physical disability, race, cultural identity and ‘intersectionality’—now the standard academic term for recognition of multiple varieties of intersecting marginalization and oppression.