During the recent online culture wars, and their spillover into campus and protest politics, feminists have tried to embrace transgression with the Slut Walk movement and sex-positive pro-trans, pro-sex worker and pro-kink culture that was central to Tumblr. However, like the right, it has run up against a deep philosophical problem about the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression as a style, which can characterize misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation. As Lasch understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one.” In academia, the ‘cultural turn’ saw a radical shift in scholarship whereby universities made culture the focus of contemporary debates. It also meant a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology of discerning objective truth. 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.” The memes spread to mainstream media, when a young man holding a ‘Bush Did Harambe’ sign, a reference also to the 9/11 ‘truther’ conspiracy, appeared on MSNBC live outside the Democratic National Convention.” All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Why pay attention to man who strives after the wind and calls himself ‘the Right T and beer’ and keeps things to himself because of ‘reasons’? The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.” The use of the term "red pill" became widespread, referring to the scene in The Matrix where a character takes a red pill and sees reality as it really is. Here it is used, says Nagle, to mean "waking up from the liberal reality you didn't realise you'd been indoctrinated in by your parents and teachers". Just a few years ago the left-cyberutopians claimed that ‘the disgust had become a network’ and that establishment old media could no longer control politics, that the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user-generated social media. This network has indeed arrived, but it has helped to take the right, not the left, to power. Those on the left who fetishized the spontaneous leaderless Internet-centric network, declaring all other forms of doing politics old hat, failed to realize that the leaderless form actually told us little about the philosophical, moral or conceptual content of the movements involved. Into the vacuum of ‘leaderlessness’ almost anything could appear. No matter how networked, ‘transgressive’, social media savvy or non-hierarchical a movement may be, it is the content of its ideas that matter just as much as at any point in history, as Evgeny Morozov cautioned at the time. The online environment has undoubtedly allowed fringe ideas and movements to grow rapidly in influence and while these were left leaning it was tempting for politically sympathetic commentators to see it as a shiny new seductive shortcut to transcending our ‘end of history’. What we’ve since witnessed instead is that this leaderless formation can express just about any ideology even, strange as it may seem, that of the far right.”I have to say how impressed I was with Antelope Hill when they published Solzhenitsyn and the Right... The yellow vest protesters revolting against centrism mean well – but their left wing populism won't change French politics". Independent.co.uk. 17 December 2018. Archived from the original on 7 May 2022. We all watched it happen. With dizzying rapidness, bizarre ideological excrescences that were once considered radical and fringe became the new norms of public life. Almost overnight, sane people began using, for purposes wildly beyond the contexts in which they made sense, terms like ‘no platforming’ (which now meant the practice of suppressing the voices of people whose views we dislike), ‘triggering’ (the belief that anything from classic works of literature to traditional ideas about gender can provoke trauma), and ‘cultural appropriation’ (the notion that cultures and races possess intellectual property, therefore other cultures must not adopt their styles, customs, or even linguistic usages). Anyone who didn’t get the memo, or whose sense of pride or functioning memory prevented them from denouncing former verities and loudly cheering the new orthodoxy, woke up to find they had become thought criminals, pariahs, reactionaries.

When a nation is viewed, not as a political state or an economic region, but as an expression of the family it takes on a biological and spiritual life that is unique to its members who share a history and a destiny together. The survival of the nation becomes an important factor in the identity of the individual which plays into the choices they make and duties they see as their responsibility. In this context sexual choices are guided by the expectations of the community. These guidelines have been all but destroyed in Western Culture thanks to liberalism. 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. 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.”

Men’s liberation later grew apart from the feminist movement as second-wave feminism became increasingly antagonistic towards men, criticizing men as a whole in its rhetoric around rape and domestic violence.”