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

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These rituals, according to Nagle, operate more as a way to keep the groups together by identifying an in and out-group, policing the boundary of who is transgressive and who isn’t pure enough, more then they are simply about bullying. What I consider to be the worst instance Nagel’s apparent bias comes from her treatment of what people often pejoratively term “PC safe space culture.” In general, Nagel rarely, if ever, presents the ideas of left-wing spaces as they are best understood (in accordance with the principle of charity), instead often opting to take on the characterization given to these spaces by the right. Nagel traces a political trend of the left to origins in Tumblr blogs that embraced some more extreme forms of viewing personal expression that grew out of Judith Butler’s gender performative theory. Nagel thinks this is an epicenter of this thought among the American left at large. However, once again, Nagel’s justification for her claims is weak to non-existent, so they suffer for it. Nagel writes:

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 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.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. Sade’s writings emerged at a similar time as the emotive public spectacle. Emotional performativity coinciding periodically with sexual sadism is perhaps indicative of a greater relation. Also, at the beginning, at the train station when the outlaws initially confront the Charles Bronson... 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. 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.

Worse still is the fact that Nagel also refers to some on the right as “anti-free speech,” (p. 66) when talking about the conservative culture wars that led up to the current political climate, but the context is completely different. Nagel describes those people correctly as anti-free speech because these people did, in fact, want to institute federal law restricting certain forms of speech, something that, to my knowledge, has not occurred in any meaningful way among those she characterizes as the “anti-free speech” left. The inconsistent framing of what it means to be anti-free speech that Nagel adopts ultimately serves to draw a false equivalence between the right and the left in this regard. Where the actions of one (the right) are explicitly and obviously anti-free speech (they wanted to censor pornography, e.g.), but the actions of the other are at best arguably so (seeing safe-spaces and campus deplatforming as actual violations of someone’s free speech is questionable). A similar merging of sadism and sentimentalism is mirrored in what Nagle calls ‘Tumblr-liberalism’.Goldberg, Michelle (11 May 2018). "Opinion | How the Online Left Fuels the Right". The New York Times . Retrieved 2018-07-06. I suspect that the hollowing out of our holiday traditions has a lot to do with the rise of atheism... The area where Nagle is most incorrect is in her understanding of how chan culture relates to the Alt Right. Nagle wants to portray chan transgression as the id of the Alt Right, with mean-spirited trolling representing the manifestation of the Alt Right’s deepest self. All the talk of tradition on the Right is merely post-facto rationalization for base and abhorrent behavior that society condemns.