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

by Angela Nagle

Gavin McInnes’ subscriber show on Rebel called How’s It Goin’, Eh? mixed politics and comedy. His free-to-view shows typically featured a 10-minute piece about current events in the culture wars. McInnes, who was born in England to Scottish parents, has a kind of South Park conservative political sensibility. He started his creative life in a punk band called Anal Chinook and now calls himself a ‘free-market capitalist’ and ‘anarchist’ with a somewhat unconvincing or at least conflicted moral conservative streak. He advocates porn abstinence and traditional marriage, despite using the kind of vulgar sexual language that many of his conservative role models would have had his show banned for in previous culture wars. His role as an editor at Vice led to him being referred to as one of the ‘primary architects of hipsterdom’, but he went on to make his name on the right through his anti-feminist arguments that life in the modern workplace had made women miserable and that the dominant media ideology teaches women to be fat, single and childless. He had to step down as chief creative officer of Rooster, an advertising agency start-up he cofounded, following the publication of an essay entitled ‘Transphobia is Perfectly Natural’.