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

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When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn’t, but also that they couldn’t. They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon.”

This is the trend she’s seeing now. The more transgressive irony of the original 4chan trolls is giving way to no less offensive but more conventional far-right ideologies. She also thinks the time of figures like Yiannopoulos are over.It made the reputations of several people who later became figureheads, most notably the now-disgraced former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos and others, like the former men's rights activist and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, wrapped their more offensive opinions in slippery layers of irony, and Nagle refers to them as "the alt-light". 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.”

Nagle, Angela (26 May 2018). "Angela Nagle's Statement Regarding the Daily Beast". Zero Books Blog. Archived from the original on 14 July 2018 . Retrieved 23 August 2019. These days it is not uncommon to see the Alt Right regularly mentioned by major media commentators, both Left and Right. Yet virtually all portrayals of this “movement” by the media are off base if not outright false, and typically strewn with the same old slurs of “racist,” “white supremacist,” “nazi,” etc. So when a new book comes along attempting to give a more carefully studied perspective about the Alt Right, it is worth considering even if that perspective comes from the Left. The book is Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to the Trump and the Alt-Right by Irish writer Angela Nagle, whose work has appeared in The Baffler and Jacobin magazine. Nagle presents her work as an attempt to map the online culture wars that occurred in the early 2010s and how it resulted in the development of alt-right which played a major role in the election of Donald Trump. Nagle introduces the 2010s as a period in which "cyber utopianism" began to emerge with the rise of internet-based social activism such as the Arab Spring, Occupy movement, WikiLeaks, adbusters, and Anonymous which were based on decentralized leadership and online organization. This internet-based activism was immediately embraced by much of mainstream liberalism without any rigorous analysis or appraisal of the organizational structure and limitations of these internet-based movements, which all resulted in consistent failure and eventual collapse. Many of these movements began on image-based online forums such as 4chan and 8chan. These forums, organized on the basis of anonymity, developed a subculture among the users that combined extremely transgressive and dark humor with a deeply misogynistic and racist attitude. The more interesting aspect of Nagle’s analysis is found in her description of the alt lite as “transgressive” and this is one of her major themes. She points out that the transgressive stylistic response to culture is typically associated with the Left, emerging most distinctly in the culture wars of the 1960s as a way to criticize the establishment at that time. As Leftist revolutionaries marched their way through the institutions, they used transgressive irreverence to deconstruct the symbols and norms of the dominant culture, appealing to the rebellious spirit of youth and an emerging libertine sense of independence. But now that the establishment is in their hands and new taboos have been put into place, the Left finds itself on the defensive against this same rebellious spirit of youth and libertine sense of independence, both of which have only grown stronger and more chaotic.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’?