Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right

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I believe this book has the highest standard deviation of review scores of any book I’ve read on Goodreads, which for movies is a good indicator of a cult classic. They tried to weaponise moral transgression as a way of bringing down oppressive social structures, but this was a deal with the devil, argues Nagle. Liberalism is inherently moral and social, whereas transgressive edgelord types are fundamentally solipsists, rejecting all society and morality. I also recommend these two podcasts where Ms. Nagle (and Ms. Frost in the 2nd one) discuss the book and related themes in the context of socialism.

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. If you know nothing about the alt-right, its allies, predecessors, etc., you may get some value out of this book. You’ll have to get through a lot of sloppy writing and jabs at transgender people to get to it. The history of the Alt-Right and how the left can fight it is a topic that should be looked into, but it deserves to be written about by a better author than Nagle.

Society changed significantly between the 2012 and 2016 elections, mostly as the result of online subcultures breaking into the real world (from the Left and Right) and stealing ground from the center-left and center-right.

Angela, Nagle (November 2015). "An investigation into contemporary online anti-feminist movements". doras.dcu.ie. Archived from the original on 9 March 2018 . Retrieved 14 March 2018. Nagle discusses the ongoing (or lost?) cultural war between Tumblr liberalism vs. 4-chan inspired alt-right while both of the terms comprises of highly heterogenous elements. Internet, once lauded as the free, “horizontal” space of a new kind of anarchical democracy (not long ago but around 2013 many of the liberal left still saw and hailed the new “democratic” terrain of the Internet) today has been dominated by the misogynistic, Nazi-sympathizing Man’s Rights activists. Davis, Charles (20 May 2018). "Sloppy Sourcing Plagues 'Kill All Normies' Alt-Right Book". The Daily Beast . Retrieved 28 November 2018. This book was so weirdly organized that I really could not figure out who her audience was. I assumed it was someone like me who is addicted to the internet and already knows who all these people are, because she was dropping names with no explanations. This was fine as I said, but then she did explain them later so I was like ??? The book was not aimed at converting anyone and I think it would honestly just offend both 4channers and Tumblr users. And there was no class/material analysis so that turns off a bunch of the left. Anyone who is a "normie" would probably not be interested in the topics at hand especially since as I said they are talked about with the assumption that the reader already knows. The only thing I can think of is maybe Red Scare types who think that culture is the only force worth looking at. Culture is very important and I think the topics in this book are really important to talk about, but I can't say it enough: this was going too shallow on too many angles. Anyway 3/10 bc I suppose I don't have vehement disagreements on the surface but the argument is so shallow and messy that I was not entirely sure what to take away in the end, and I think she was overly sympathetic to the AltRight without extending the same nuance to the denizens of Tumblr.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. I was expecting to be interested in this, but I didn't expect to be so impressed by it. Angela Nagle writes so even-handedly and with such a fair critical eye about recent iterations of disruptive political groupings on both the right and left. On the right is the now-notorious alt-right, divided between the 'alt-light', typified by meme-making/gleefully antagonistic trolling/use of 4chan-derived argot, and the more genuinely fascistic tendencies often masked by the headline-grabbing behaviour of alt-light figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos. On the left is what Nagle sometimes refers to as 'Tumblr-liberalism', the extremely performative culture of calling-out, victimhood and competitive identity politics that seems driven by (and here I will quote Nagle quoting the late Mark Fisher, as it couldn't be paraphrased any more perfectly) 'a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd'. It seems to me that the book could have been an important and momentous document of the internet „wars“ of recent times, but that it got rushed and a little hamfistedly thrown into publication before reaching a decent level of finishedness. Some reservations toward this book. It seems mostly just as if it's unfinished; typos abound, strangely wrong quips about PTSD, unclear and sporadic theses, repeatedly bafflingly caricaturistic presentations of Friedrich Nietzsche, etc. It felt like the book was in dire need of a good editor most of the time. It's an argument that's been done to death and I'm not going to rehash it here because Nagle didn't bother either. There's an interesting but undercooked theory about how the Tumblr-Left try to create "outrage scarcity", treating their oppression as a value commodity.

The left didn’t get rid of Milo. Rather than debating Milo and crushing him and his lame straw man ideas, the left worked to “deplatform” him and rioted when he came to UC Berkeley. Bill Maher had him on his show and actually compared him to Christopher Hitchens(!!). Eventually the right got rid of him when he crossed a taboo and was no longer useful to him. It could have been longer, for example, and could have touched upon many things that I felt should deserve more detail (e.g. the growing sphere of nu-atheistic pseudo-rationalism; the whole of neoreaction; accelerationism as it appears online, etc.). 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] Nagle does a good job of laying out and explaining many of the alt-right's pet tropes and running jokes, but her analysis is really disappointing and ultimately buys into the right's same errant argument that "politics is downstream of culture". For a lot of the '90s and '00s, that assertion seemed to be true, as neoliberal aims took over both parties and so much of the material basis of politics went off-limits. When culture war is the entire game, of course it's going to seem like the most important thing and what ultimately decides elections.

This is what cultural criticism should be: it draws on academic theory while remaining readable, is capable of impassioned polemic and clear partisanship while remaining relentlessly fair regarding matters of fact, and in general, it knows its stuff. (Like Nagle, I am perhaps overly familiar with the forms of online discourse she describes; and that she was able to do so so accurately makes me trust her on everything else - for instance, on the fascinating history of how representations of "the mainstream" have been gendered.) A pretty great bit of critical theory about how the alt-right have arrived to they are, although it's let down by some bizarrely vituperative passages about the identity politics of Tumblr.

Nagle draws a line through history from the 'culture wars' of the 1960s to those of today, arguing that the transgressive, countercultural spirit historically embodied by the anti-establishment left has been sublimated much more effectively by the modern right. She also undertakes an in-depth (though concise) review of the many, many factions of what is often sweepingly referred to as the alt-right, from 'chan culture' to the alternately pathetic and terrifying 'manosphere'. Not only is this pretty fascinating in itself, it also brings to light the serious theoretical and academic roots of certain strands of this movement – something often ignored by liberal pundits who concentrate instead on clutching their pearls at the outrageous antics of high-profile figures like Milo and Alex Jones. The idea of a handful of demagogues and professional trolls riling up people who essentially don't understand politics has been a common theme (deployed with varying levels of sensitivity) in analysis of the Trump and Brexit victories; Nagle's study shows this to be dangerously reductive.

I don't really know who Nagle is, but my guess is that she falls into the same dirtbag left camp as like Anna Kachiyan and Aimee Terese etc. I guessed this because she name drops the same people like Lasch and Paglia and the like, who I haven't read but I barely even gained any insight into here because it seemed like more of a name drop as an in-group signifier rather than any real engagement. But anyway, I'm guessing since it's published by zero books and she talks about Mark Fisher a bunch that she's a leftist but there is no class analysis or discussion of material conditions anywhere in this book. Online is important and online and real life impact eachother, but you would never know that from reading this. While you could treat Trump's victory as the big win, she didn't spend too much time analyzing the ways in which the Alt Right aided his election and I think stuff like Charlottesville might not have happened at this point. First of all: Holy shit. This is a book that I have been waiting to read for quiet some time now, but the level of insight and highly comprehensive discussion of what is going on in the cultural wars on the Web by Nagle exceeded my expectations. It reminded me of early works by Naomi Klein which combined the journalistic approach to the material at hand with detailed, but still accessible discussion of the theoretical aspect of the subject. Even if the on-line right didn’t vote, they shifted the Overton window of acceptable discourse, which has had a large impact on politics. 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, 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.