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

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Honestly, I think that if this book had not been rushed to press, it might have been a lot better. The organization is schizophrenic and it often reads like a last-minute thesis, with tons of pretentious theories thrown in, quoted, and not really discussed or examined, just taking up space. Takes one to know one: It's good to know I'm not the only one who writes that way, I guess. But I'm not published. Even a few very simple editorial changes, like offering embedded links in the eBook edition or a glossary of some of the otherwise inscrutable terms, could have made this a better book. Further, she does not have a clear argument, other than both extreme sides are reactionary. I don't think she's asking productive questions, such as why people want to identify as victims or what can be done to correct this situation. Nagle was born in Houston, Texas to Irish parents, then grew up in Dublin, Ireland. She graduated from Dublin City University with a PhD for a thesis titled 'An investigation into contemporary online anti-feminist movements'. [8] The alt-right and the culture wars [ edit ]

Nagle, Angela (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right. Alresford, UK: Zero Books. ISBN 978-1-78-535543-1. 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. Insofar as Kill All Normies has a consistent argument, it is this: the so-called alt-right – a loose constellation of overlapping white nationalist, anti-feminist, illiberal and Islamophobic tendencies largely based online – has successfully adopted an edgy, ‘counter-cultural’ appeal over the last two decades. The reason it has been able to do this – at least, the only reason which Nagle thinks worth mentioning – is because of its mirror image on the left, a demographic of censorious ‘Tumblr liberals’, the practitioners of a shrill and self-absorbed ‘identity politics’ which has repelled a whole new generation from the political left. Nagle brings a lot of valuable research and firsthand reporting to helping people make sense of the various facets of the alt-right, but it wasn't nearly as compelling as I was expecting from a book about the internet communities that have emerged in the past decade. The best parts are the really detailed outlines of the various factions of the right's anti-feminist and white supremacist groups, as well as the philosophical explanations of the anti-moral subversive nature of 4chan.Building on that, much of the influence that one might think to attribute to this strain of Tumblr-leftism is far more reasonably seen as the result of groups bringing their policies into line with more modern understandings of medicine. The Canadian bill C-16 is a good example of this, as is the state of New York’s effort to include more gender identities on official state forms. Both received widespread support from medical professionals and organizations, so it should hardly be surprising that they were enacted into law. Attributing this to the political success of a niche Tumblr subculture is therefore questionable. a b Gais, Hannah (6 July 2017). "What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021 . Retrieved 14 March 2018. Nagle presents her work as an attempt to map the online culture wars that occurred in the early 2010s and how it resulted in the development of alt-right which played a major role in the election of Donald Trump. Nagle introduces the 2010s as a period in which "cyber utopianism" began to emerge with the rise of internet-based social activism such as the Arab Spring, Occupy movement, WikiLeaks, adbusters, and Anonymous which were based on decentralized leadership and online organization. This internet-based activism was immediately embraced by much of mainstream liberalism without any rigorous analysis or appraisal of the organizational structure and limitations of these internet-based movements, which all resulted in consistent failure and eventual collapse. Many of these movements began on image-based online forums such as 4chan and 8chan. These forums, organized on the basis of anonymity, developed a subculture among the users that combined extremely transgressive and dark humor with a deeply misogynistic and racist attitude.

A great example of how this kind of culture works, in practice, came out of an exposé on the way Riot Games, a video game publisher for the hit game League of Legends, treated women in the company’s employ. [6] Riot exemplified the kind of hierarchical gate-keeping that Nagel describes as the usual reason for women’s abuse in these spaces. However, the exposé revealed how, even if women perfectly met these transgressive counter-cultural standards (or even far and away exceeded them!), they were still met with the same kind of harassment. Clearly, just “slipping up and ‘not getting’ subcultural conventions” is an unsatisfactory explanation for the abuse women face in these communities.It is perfectly understandable that those who want to live in healthy communities might become angered and frustrated by the fact that so many around them make self-serving and self-destructive sexual choices without a care in the world about the destiny of their people. It is naturally upsetting when the political establishment, academia, and mainstream popular culture (all greatly influenced by a tiny Judaic minority) promote unhealthy sexual choices and condemn attempts to reestablish our people’s traditional understanding of male and female relationships. It is downright infuriating when calls to create a separate polity free from the oppressive state-sponsored decadence of the establishment are denounced as hateful, and evil, and dismissed because it might “necessitate violence.”