Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

by Angela Nagle

meme-making trolls whose dark humor and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz.

we see online the emergence of a new kind of anti-establishment sensibility expressing itself in the kind of DIY culture of memes and user-generated content that cyberutopian true believers have evangelized about for many years but had not imagined taking on this particular political form.

Compare the first election won by Obama, in which social media devotees reproduced the iconic but official blue-and-red stylized stencil portrait of the new president with HOPE printed across the bottom, a portrait created by artist Shepard Fairey and approved by the official Obama campaign, to the bursting forth of irreverent mainstream-baffling meme culture during the last race, in which the Bernie’s Dank Meme Stash Facebook page and The Donald subreddit defined the tone of the race for a young and newly politicized generation,

what came to complicate the detached humor is that, as in so many other similar cases, it also allowed cover for genuinely sinister things to hide amid the maze of irony.

What we now call the alt-right is really this collection of lots of separate tendencies that grew semi-independently but which were joined under the banner of a bursting forth of anti-PC cultural politics through the culture wars of recent years.

Her level of criticism, as a self-identified games fan and someone who sought to reform rather than censor games, would be considered quite normal in literary or film criticism. These other audiences and critics are used to debate and to a relatively civilized adult kind of discourse, in which one can describe an old Hollywood classic as sexist without doubting its aesthetic value and one can disagree without going straight to the rape and death threats.

Those on the left who fetishized the spontaneous leaderless Internet-centric network, declaring all other forms of doing politics old hat, failed to realize that the leaderless form actually told us little about the philosophical, moral or conceptual content of the movements involved.

The forum’s preoccupation with suicide, which became used as a verb to ‘an hero’, often takes the form of painful expressions of anonymous users’ desire to commit suicide themselves, and at the same time it mocks suicide victims and those who express sympathy with the victims.

In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as they’re cool with gay marriage, while on the right, enacting policies that devastate families and stable communities was cheered on at any cost as long as it dealt a satisfying blow to the trade unions,