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

by Angela Nagle

During the recent online culture wars, and their spillover into campus and protest politics, feminists have tried to embrace transgression with the Slut Walk movement and sex-positive pro-trans, pro-sex worker and pro-kink culture that was central to Tumblr. However, like the right, it has run up against a deep philosophical problem about the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression as a style, which can characterize misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation. As Lasch understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one. Equally hated and loved critic Camille Paglia argued that de Sade’s depiction of human evil as innate was a form of satire directed against the Rousseauist tradition, from which contemporary feminism springs. De Sade’s work famously features sexual violence as well as abhorrence for family and procreation, instead creating a violent transgressive sexuality based on the values of libertinism and individual sovereignty. In Juliette one rule of The Sodality of the Friends of Crime was, ‘True libertinage abhors progeniture’. Paglia argued that de Sade’s devaluing of the procreative female body, and his preoccupation with heterosexual and homosexual sodomy, also shared by chan culture, were not merely the product of a homosexual impulse, as argued by feminist Simone de Beauvoir, but a ‘protest against...