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

by Angela Nagle

For de Sade, the Surrealists, and later for the 60s anti-repression cultural politics most closely associated with R. D. Laing, insanity was considered a creative source, a rejection of mainstream norms and a political act of rebellion. The surreal became a pre-rational creative expression. The throwing off of the id that

characterized this transgressive countercultural traditional also characterized sites like 4chan, and its culture of trolling and taboo-breaking anti-moral humor, which is often described as insane or unhinged to baffled outsiders.

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. Forum users come to the most arguably unsympathetic place imaginable to tell others of their suicidal fantasies anonymously, where they will probably be half-jokingly told to do it. They thus reject the perceived sentimentality of the mainstream media’s suicide spectacles and instead remake it as their own dark spectacle, in which pity is replaced by cruelty.

Bataille revered transgression in and of itself, and like de Sade viewed non-procreative sex as an expression of the

sovereign against instrumentalism, what he called ‘expenditure without reserve’.

For him excessive behavior without purpose, which also characterizes the sensibility of contemporary meme culture in which enormous human effort is exerted with no obvious personal benefit, was paradigmatically trans...

In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White considered the carnivalesque to be a form of radical transgression against hierarchy and hegemony: ‘The grotesque tends to operate as a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms designating what is high and what is low.’ This is very much how 4chan has long self-described and how it was described by its early ‘progressive’ boosters,

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.

The Blakean motto adopted by the Surrealists, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’, dominance as sexual ‘sovereignty’ and the freeing of the id from the constraints of the conscience have all descended from this transgressive tradition. Just as Nietzsche appealed to the Nazis as a way to formulate a right-wing anti-moralism, it is precisely the transgressive sensibility that is used to excuse and rationalize the utter dehumanization of women and ethnic minorities in the alt-right online sphere now.

The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII. The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the

The French New Right or Nouvelle Droite adapted the theories of Antonio Gramsci that political change follows cultural and social change. Andrew

is the alt-light. They were the youthful bridge between the alt-right and mainstream Trumpism.

think of a better term than Gramscian to describe what they have strategically achieved, as a movement almost entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton window through media and culture, not just formal politics.

Buzzfeed. Other liberal sites like Everyday Feminism, Jezebel and Salon delivered a strange mixture of ultra-sensitivity, sentimentality and what was once considered radical social constructionist identity politics.

liberal, millennial-oriented and openly propagandistic.

It seems to me that politics, on the contrary, has been hollowed out too much into little other than a purely cultural politics over the last half-century, which the ugly spectacle of the Trump-Hillary race represented the logical conclusion of – politics as culture war.

winning. In this style of politics, what a political leader actually does often seems entirely secondary to what cultural politics they profess to have. 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, as we saw during the Reagan and Thatcher years. For both Yiannopoulos and his online liberal enemies in the culture wars, essentially two rival wings of contemporary identity politics, to be said to have purely cultural politics would not be considered particularly pejorative. Nevertheless, Yiannopoulos’s comparison is an interesting one. Buchanan is perhaps most famous for his declaration of ‘a war for the soul of America’ during his