Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved 14 December 2021. Nagle is incredibly brave to step forward to broach these matters, however tentatively. This burgeoning will, for honesty and a return to a structural, material analysis that it is so easy to forget exists when online, should be afforded the admiration it deserves.

There's a very telling precursor to the Frankenstein story, which is the legend of the golem. Funny... 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. 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. MacDougald, Park (13 July 2017). "Where Did the Alt-Right Come From? This Book Finds Some Uncomfortable Answers". Intelligencer . Retrieved 6 November 2018. 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.”

Nagle credits the latter with at least being coherent. “One of the interesting contradictions of a lot of these groups is that on the one hand they’re saying they don’t like feminism and they want a traditional marriage and a subservient wife but the way they live clashes with that – they watch porn all day and play video games and harass people on the internet.” Everyone under 80 grew up under some regime of antiracist indoctrination. So in one sense almost all of us are in the same boat. But white men in their twenties belong to the first generation that the System actively hopes will fail. They’re the enemy. They’re expected to see their history as a constant sequence of crimes. They’re not wanted in institutions of higher learning. They’re not expected to become leaders. They’re not even expected to form traditional families. Nagle is the author of an excellent new book Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump. All the anti-Jewish stuff was done because we knew it would offend people… If there is one issue that really winds people up it is the Holocaust. This in itself gave us a real laugh. No-one really believed that the Holocaust didn’t happen… but we knew how people would get worked up about it… It had become such a taboo subject.

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, Angela. Kill All Normies: the Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Washington, USA, 2017. I really have only two complaints, one major, one minor. The major complaint is that, for an avowed materialist, there is very little materialism here - almost all the cultural phenomena are understood in terms of continuations of and/or reactions to other cultural phenomena. Of course, providing an adequate materialist explanation would be a fully separate research project; but Nagle's ontological commitments, and some of the subjects she touches upon (for instance, her discussions of Thomas Frank and "populism,") call out for more nods in this direction, even when her immediate topic (the online culture wars) and thesis (that the valorization of transgression for its own sake is inherently self-defeating and vacuous, and that as a positive political project the left was always stupid to embrace it) are essentially cultural.In this somewhat paranoid and alarmist account, 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. But by-the-by these edgy trolls could find themselves in the heart of darkest political discourse, the place where racial identity matters and the disproportionate influence of Jews on society is viewed with suspicion. The horror! Directly” is too strong. On the hand, without /pol/ hardly anyone outside of white nationalism would have heard of the alt-right. The anons at 4- and 8-chan can make a solid claim to ownership of the alt-right’s growing popularity.

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. 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. Although Israel ceasing to exist would be most beneficial to whites worldwide because it would mean... Kill All Normies is an accessible but unpatronising study, perfectly balancing academic critique, political commentary and assured, intelligent, non-embarrassing writing about the internet and its unique subcultures. It is so refreshing to read something like this, that comes at the topic from a left-leaning perspective but refuses to toe the line with regards to the frustrating, ever-shifting rules of engagement that now seem to define online discourse. The version I read had some typos and needed a bit of tightening up from an editorial perspective, but it was a review copy. And that is genuinely my only criticism. Somehow Nagle also manages to write a conclusion that tears everyone a new arsehole AND ends on a contemplative note.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.” 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.

Overall, while the broad strokes of Nagel’s work are accurate, to say it falters under more harsh scrutiny is probably not going too far. From the issues of consistent mischaracterization of certain positions to the left’s detriment to the bad habit of proclaiming things without substantiating them, the ultimate effect of Kill All Normies leaves much to be desired. If I were to recommend anyone read it, I would only ever recommend they read my personal copy, scrawled as it is with notes in the margin, to hopefully better inform the reader and fill in the sometimes striking gaps in reasoning Nagel leaves unfinished. In a similar way to the alt-right, any challenge to the new cult of identity politics, concentrated once on Tumblr but now spilling out into what Nagle calls ‘campus wars’, leads to a mob baying for the heretics’ blood. Kill All Normies is the first book to really nail the relations of the cultural space of the internet to the real world that, significantly, includes an analysis of potentials and problems across the political spectrum.Nagle's book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right discusses the role of the internet in the rise of the alt-right and incel movements. [2] [7] [5] She describes the alt-right as a counterculture of young men who reject taboos on race and gender. [2] While many young people in the alt-right started simply as trolls, she says the movement has developed into something much more serious. [2] While she supports identity politics in general, she says that some on the left have contributed to the rise of the alt-right with their "performative wokeness", which often involves censoring people and ganging up on them. [2] She has also expressed concerns about "the woke cultural revolution sweeping Irish society". [9] a b Abrahamian, Atossa Araxia (28 November 2018). "There Is No Left Case for Nationalism". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378 . Retrieved 10 January 2019.