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

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It became not only acceptable but fashionable to mock the straight, the white, the male, and the cisgender.

Kill All Normies is a descriptive work by Angela Nagel chronicling the rise of online right-wing counter-culture, and, as she sees it, the struggle of the online left to adequately respond.Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, its ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture, transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about the nature of its appeal and about the liberal establishment it defines itself against. I was delighted not only because I found myself in fervent agreement with almost everything the author said, but because Nagle’s short book is bounteously informative, oh-so timely, and pitched at a tone that mixes condemnation, understanding, exasperation, and conviction in just the right measures. This appears even worse than the latter part of the sentence (discussed above) because it forms an even more foundational aspect for Nagel’s position. As she elucidates point after reasonable point, it feels as if a grown-up has finally entered the room. 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.

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’. Elsewhere, Nagle explores the ‘Manosphere’: the often severely misogynist subcultures of men’s activism and sexual warfare. While the term is applied loosely in the media to cover a broad right-wing movement, strictly speaking it refers to the Internet’s white segregationist, white-nationalist subcultures.Nagel uses this idea — that Twitter alone can boost careers that would, without Twitter, be doomed to irrelevance — as the basis for her main thesis of the chapter. The imagined white global state encompassing North America, Europe and Russia is the key example of this. One issue arises in that the prevailing theory of gender in psychology is more consistent with Tumblr’s many genders than it is with a strict binary.