Before the overtly racist Alt-Right were widely known, the more mainstream alt-light largely flattered it, gave it glowing write-ups in Breitbart and elsewhere, had its spokespeople on their YouTube shows and promoted it on social media. Nevertheless, when Milo’s sudden career implosion happened later they didn’t return the favor, which I think may be setting a precedent for a future in which the playfully transgressive alt-light play useful idiots for those with much more serious political aims. If this dark, anti-Semitic race segregationist ideology grows in the coming years, with their vision of the future that would necessitate violence, those who made the Right attractive will have to take responsibility for having played their role. Racist though I am, I think Nagle is giving the Alt-Right too much credit. As I was reading the comments in a recent Slate article, headed “Trump’s CNN Tweet Appears to Have Originated From Racist, Islamophobic, Misogynist Reddit Troll,” I found the Alt-Right better assessed by a commenter whom, for clarity’s sake, I’ll rename “SJW.” An exchange between SJW and a commenter I’ll rename “bumpkin” was as follows: 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. 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.

Ultimately these online right-wing movements are a destructive perversion of identity politics coming from young men who feel disappointed with their lives. Nagle thinks this is an ineffective prescription for what ails them. Yet even the most earnest explainers tend to avoid looking deeply into what it really happening, that political divisions are realigning, moving away from previously conceived understandings of Right and Left in America and toward a conflict between nationalism and globalism. The first few chapters go over some of the history of what would influence or become the Alt-Right. NRx, Dark Enlightenment, the 'Alt-Light', GamerGate, Richard Spencer, 4chan, Milo, weev, MGTOW, The Rebel, Pat Buchanan, Breitbart, Alex Jones, and Mike Cernovich are just some of the names mentioned. A few are examined further, Nagle is hard to follow as she jumps from point to point, never constructing a good timeline for all this information she throws at you. She writes about some ideological splits between them, and gives many examples of disgusting ideas and actions carried out by some of these people/communities, particularity 4chan and Milo. While I was already aware of most of this, I can see how someone who is unfamiliar with all of this, and doesn’t know where to start, would find this valuable. Over time a general anti-liberal politics began to take shape. They used the transgressive style of the countercultural left “but they changed the content. Their view was that the dominant ideology now was liberalism, so if you wanted to be transgressive that’s what you transgress against.”Nagle, Angela (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and The Alt-Right. Zero Books.

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 ] 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. Perhaps the distinction is less clear for those on the Left who tend to view all Republicans as racist, so Nagle makes sure to point out that there is such a thing as the “ alt light” [sic] defined as “the broadest orbit” of what is more commonly known as the Alt Right. Within this broad orbit is found a “collection of lots of separate tendencies that grew semi-independently but were joined under the banner of a bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics through the culture wars of recent years.” a b MacDougald, Park (13 July 2017). "The Unflattering Familiarity of the Alt-Right in Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies". New York. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021 . Retrieved 28 November 2018. a b Davis, Charles (19 May 2018). "Sloppy Sourcing Plagues 'Kill All Normies' Alt-Right Book". The Daily Beast.Further, at least if you are victim of the alt-right mob the left feels sorry for you, but when the new identitarians come after you, well, it was your fault for oppressing the poor lambs.