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

Product Information

Seven years ago she began tracing the evolution of a range of weird and offensive online communities, from the nihilistic trollish denizens of 4chan to more bitter anti-feminist communities scattered around the internet. Review of Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right". 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. Dissecting the partly antagonistic, partly symbiotic interaction between these two tendencies should surely be an urgent priority.

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. Despite attempts to use the anti-postmodern language of real conservatives at times, Milo and his 4chan troll fans are in many ways the perfect postmodern offspring, where every statement is wrapped in layers of faux-irony, playfulness and multiple cultural nods and references. Stavri then fell back on an appeal to sentimentalised victimhood, telling those who admonished her that she was on new mental health medication. Novelist George Saunders listed Kill All Normies as one of his ten favorite books helping him through the "current political moment". 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.Nagle’s explanation for their omission is that she ‘just didn’t think they were that important’ — surely representing the worst imaginable scenarios for alt-right membership. The problem is, this identity and gender radicalism leaked out of the Internet, first onto American campuses, and then into mainstream life around the world – and its ideologue-enforcers behaved with a vicious intolerance that tended to evaporate any such sympathies. A shield of sentimentality, not emotional honesty, apology or genuine exchange, summoned to excuse sadism. Take, for example, the free-floating assertion that the Bushite neoconservatives ‘had their origins in the materialism of the anti-Soviet left’ (this follows an assertion only one page previously that all politics in the last several decades has been ‘purely cultural’).

A tenured male university professor is as likely a target as a young single mum who administrates for Mumsnet message boards.Nagle describes the alt-right as a dangerous movement, but she also criticizes aspects of the left that have, she says, contributed to the alt-right's rise. Camille Paglia’s work, greatly admired by Milo, is preoccupied with this same causal link between homosexuality, promiscuity, gender fluidity and civilizational decline. Even if you took everything that they were saying as true it was still this absolutely outrageous and absurd overreaction.