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

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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. There are also fault lines between the subversives and geniune friends of The West. For example, I...

Zero Books 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?’ But that’s an economic problem… I think a lot of the answers to the problems they’re looking at should actually come from the left.”

Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on 31 July 2017 . Retrieved 14 March 2018. Her celebratory tweet did have some traction. For example, it remains retweeted by ‘genderqueer’‘performer’ Ray Filar, who is friends with queer theorist, Sara Ahmed, formerly at Goldsmiths, author of Living a Feminist Life. Nagle, Angela (12 July 2020). "Will Ireland survive the Woke Wave?". UnHerd . Retrieved 14 December 2021.

Both exist as differing camps in what Nagle frames as today’s most brutal online ‘culture wars’, but they certainly share cultural practices and unfailingly need one another as ludicrous misshapen enemy. Worse still is the fact that Nagel also refers to some on the right as “anti-free speech,” (p. 66) when talking about the conservative culture wars that led up to the current political climate, but the context is completely different. Nagel describes those people correctly as anti-free speech because these people did, in fact, want to institute federal law restricting certain forms of speech, something that, to my knowledge, has not occurred in any meaningful way among those she characterizes as the “anti-free speech” left. The inconsistent framing of what it means to be anti-free speech that Nagel adopts ultimately serves to draw a false equivalence between the right and the left in this regard. Where the actions of one (the right) are explicitly and obviously anti-free speech (they wanted to censor pornography, e.g.), but the actions of the other are at best arguably so (seeing safe-spaces and campus deplatforming as actual violations of someone’s free speech is questionable). It made the reputations of several people who later became figureheads, most notably the now-disgraced former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos and others, like the former men's rights activist and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, wrapped their more offensive opinions in slippery layers of irony, and Nagle refers to them as "the alt-light".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.

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. 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. A similar merging of sadism and sentimentalism is mirrored in what Nagle calls ‘Tumblr-liberalism’. 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.The current "meta" in war has also changed and ZOG's profiteering military industrial complex has... That's about it for the usefulness of the book, and to get to it you have to power through her complaints about trigger warnings and gender identity sprinkled throughout these chapters. Nagle clearly knows more about 4chan and the alt-right than Tumblr and internet left subcultures, since she really drops the ball when talking about the left. She lumps the left into one big tent, and obviously misunderstands the various factions and arguments being made. Among the few distinctions she makes among the left, she hilariously claims that the ‘real left’ consists of members such as The Young Turks, Owen Jones, Jacobin, and Chapo Trap House. You don’t hear about Marxists, Anarchists, ‘Anti-Imperialists’, and others, Nagles idea of politics left of ‘Tumblr’ stop at Chapo Trap House or Jacobin. She also scolds the left for ‘crying wolf’ when some called Trudeau a white supremacist and defended Hillary Clinton by calling those who disagree with her sexist, to her the Alt-Right is the real wolf. Aside from the ridiculous implication that the Prime Minister of a settler-colonial state like Canada can’t be a white supremacist and it’s just ‘crying wolf’, I’d be very surprised if there is any large group of people who would call Trudeau a white supremacist but also say not supporting Hillary is misogynist. There are NGO-careerists and bourgeois liberals who appropriate social justice theory to support people like Clinton and say that not being pro-Clinton is sexism. These are not the same ideologies that consider Trudeau a white supremacist, which includes marxists, anarchists, and whoever else. Nagle lumps anything she doesn’t like on the left into one big basket labelled ‘Tumblr-Liberalism’, she doesn’t bother making ideological divisions among the left, beyond Tumblr and the ‘real left’ mentioned above, despite doing so for the Alt-Right. Of course the primary enemies of the chan right and the alt lite are the enforcers of political correctness, those bastions of hypersensitivity we refer to as social justice warriors. Perhaps Nagle is most honest when she is criticizing the Left for going too far with political correctness. She describes this absurd faction of the Left as an internet subcultural counterpart to the transgressive Right of chan culture.