Kill All Normies:
The online culture wars
from Tumblr and 4chan to the alt-right and Trump
by Angela Nagle
Zer0 Books 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78535-543-1
Irish writer Angela Nagle has gone to the dark side of the
Internet to research Kill All Normies:
Online Culture Wars from 4chan adn Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, delving
into toxic online cultures and websites of the conservative misogyny and
racism. I can't imagine what spending what spending a lot of time in the /b/
section of 4chan, looking at "things you can't unsee" could do to
anyone's pysche, but Nagle did it, and wrote a series of articles for, among
other places, The Baffler, in which she comes to the
conclusion that Trump's victory is, at least in part, due to the 'alt-right',
and therefore the Right, winning the culture wars.
Her theory is based around the idea of transgression, the
over-steeping of societal mores or morality for sexual pleasure, and/or to
rebel against authority, and/or for the simple pleasure of irreverence for its
own sake (or the 'lulz'). Since maybe the Marquis de Sade up to the 1960s, Nagle
claims that transgression has been the domain of liberals, but that starting in
the 90s, liberal concern with political correctness and identity politics (rather
than actual politics), conservatives have moved into the role of the
transgressors online. The problem, according to Nagle, is that this, or rather
these (and she goes into various of them and how they sometimes don't get
along) subcultures have not only ended up influencing the mainstream conservatives,
like the conservative website like Breitbart, run by Steve Bannon, who went on
to support and advise Trump for a while, but that they're (liberals) are making
conservatives look like the voice of reason to regular people, or at least
Trump voters.
My favorite 'chapter', which originally was an essay,
"From Tumblr to the campus wars: creating scarcity in an online economy of
virtue" in which she skewers identitarians, sometimes simply by quoting,
at length, some of their ideas about gender choice, and reminding readers how
some of those demanding respect and the right not to be 'triggered' are the
very same who shout down free speech and even physically attack those who think
differently.
I'm with Nagle, I
share her progressive politics and her disdain for the so-called liberal
identity politics and its disdain of free speech, its disinterest in, say, our
country's economic policies, and, say, that the Democratic Party's foreign
policy isn't much different from Republican foreign policy, i.e. we're invading
other countries with impunity and killing people. But Kill All Normies is just not, unfortunately, a good book.
Kill All Normies
is short, 120 pages, making it more like a pamphlet, and collects essays by
Nagle, some of which appeared at The
Baffler (and which you can find for free online if you want). I had thought
that the book would expand on those esssays, but no. They're in slightly
different form, but not much. And, while they touch on interesting ideas, and
introduce us to interesting-if-horrifying people involved in the alt-right
movement, they, and the book, read more like what in graduate school is called a
'lit review,' which is the first stage of writing a longer thesis, in which you
summarize a source in a paragraph or two, collect these summaries in one
document, with the idea of expanding on the sources later, of adding more,
especially of one's own ideas and thoughts. Instead, in Kill All Normies, all of the chapter/essays paragraphs and ideas go
by quickly, sometimes (many times) with no real context or connection to the
paragraphs around them. I'd quote a paragraph here, except it would only appear
as it appears in the book, without much context.
In addition, Nagle doesn't seem to care about citation too
much. Quotes and summaries and even unique ideas are used and, while she will
give a person's name, she often will not tell us who that person is, or why
they're an expert, or even which text of theirs she's quoting from. Nor is
there any kind of Works Cited or References page, nor even an index. Plus, when
she's talking about a text, she annoyingly uses the past tense rather than the
traditional present tense (unless they do that in Ireland?) Which is partly on
her, though also partly on her publisher, Zer0 Books, which claims to want its
books to be "intellectual without being academic." That's fine, but
not having some kind of way for
readers to check sources is intellectual sloppiness.
In addition, Nagle seems not to understand certain texts and
writers except through the lens of alt-righters, nor even to have even read
those texts. For example, she states more than once that the animated tv show South Park is conservative, maybe
picking up on a Time review a few
years back that claimed the same thing, but it's not, it's just irreverent: the
writers of South Park with make fun of everybody,
conservative or liberal. Nagle could
use that in her argument that the alt-right has co-opted the use of
irreverence, and therefore anything irreverent nowadays is concervative, but she
doesn't.
Also up for critique by Nagle, slightly, kind of, are the
philosopher Nietsche and the book Fight
Club by Chuck Palahniuk (though I swear she never actually cites his name
in talking about it). Her argument being, because again I don't think she's
read them, that if/when the alt-righters quote from them and/or espouse an
anti-mainstream/anti-the-masses attitude, doing so must means that those texts must
be conservative, when an anti-mainstream philosphy/attitude is shared by those
on the far Left, like me, and, I thought, her. And if I'm wrong about that,
well, this is where Kill All Normies
would have benefitted by a more detailed, and longer, analysis.
Is Kill All Normies
still worth reading? Yes, even if as a sort of lit review of sorts, as
a way to explore this huge topic (or, topics), though you'll have to do your
own research to find some of the texts and people she talks about. Nagle's main
idea, discussed above, is important: conservatives are winning the culture
wars, and those who control culture control politics. She offers no solutions,
but you'll get a glimpse into at least some of the reasons how and why Trump
won (Hint: it's not Russia).
