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

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If a university decides to revoke an invitation to speak to someone on account of receiving requests to do so from the student body, that speaker’s free speech has in no way been hindered.

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. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The first thing to say is that any rebuke to Nagle is complicated by the difficulty of understanding her writing in the first place.Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn. A review in The Daily Beast said the book was plagued by "sloppy sourcing", [7] noting an allegation that parts of the book had been plagiarized.

Her first book, Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right was recently released by Zero Books. The book, for example, does not have any citations aside from referencing works or authors in the text. Nothing which doesn’t fit the claim of the alt-right’s absolute novelty is allowed to sully the book’s pages. Arguments around the definitive features of fascism are often circular and unhelpful, but it is impossible to assemble a definition of fascism in which an ebullient spirit of radicalism does not feature at least in some cases. It also meant a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology of discerning objective truth.

So elevated has the virtue of transgression become in the criticism of art, argued Kieran Cashell, that contemporary art critics have been faced with a challenge: ‘either support transgression unconditionally or condemn the tendency and risk obsolescence amid suspicions of critical conservatism’ as the great art critic Robert Hughes often was.

The problem arises in Nagel’s claim that these two things are not just comparable, but “similar in scale” in terms of their political influence. The alternative is a reinforced belief in the infallible righteousness of our own group – and further divisiveness. Among the questions she poses: how did it become possible to claim, not without justification, that conservatism is the new punk? A Spanish edition was published in May 2018 by Orciny Press, [16] and a German edition in September 2018 by Transcript. Nagel concludes that the left has done a poor job responding to the rise of dangerous ideologies on the right in online culture, and that may have been as a result of the ostensible navel-gazing on the part of the left, and a general acceptance of transgression as a cultural value more broadly in society.Now that they are no longer the rebel outsiders but the ideological establishment, liberals find themselves on the receiving end of transgressive and countercultural energies, and they don’t like it. In the work, Nagel explores the birth of online countercultural movements and communities, comparing and contrasting the approach the left and the right take in these environments. 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. These groups, the alt-right and Tumblr liberals have, according to Nagle, a symbiotic relationship, needing one another as much as the monstrous spectres each joyously opposes.

This apparently novel observation makes up the mainstay of the book, the only significant idea that Nagle really manages to communicate in the entire course of her argument. Later, Nagel attributes “sex-positive pro-trans, pro-sex worker and pro-kink culture” as being “central to Tumblr,” with zero evidence to support the claim. Several other reviews of the book have already been published, largely criticising Nagle’s crude and uncharitable portrayals of the liberal-left trends which she variably terms ‘identity politics’ or ‘Tumblr liberalism’. In academia, the ‘cultural turn’ saw a radical shift in scholarship whereby universities made culture the focus of contemporary debates. 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.That’s such an old-white-guy thing to say’ became a common phrase used to dismiss bothersome opinions. That is, Nagel talks about how Conservative media and thought leaders struggled to fight (and largely lost, as she sees it) against the emerging trend of counter-culture and transgressivism that grew out of the 1960s. Unfortunately, the people who do have ideas are more explicitly racist figures like Richard Spencer (who famously gave a Nazi salute in honour of Trump at a conference), who are increasingly taking their activism into the offline world with rallies and violent campus protests. It should be noted that italicized portions, what roughly amounts to Nagel’s thesis for this chapter, are left more or less to hang on their own, without adequate support or justification. Clinging to relevance and personal ambition appears as fundamental for the alt-right as they are for left commentators who are unwilling to tackle the tough questions Nagle does.