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

by Angela Nagle

To understand the seemingly contradictory politics of 4chan, Anonymous and its relationship to the alt-right, it is important to remember that the gradual right-wing turn in chan culture centered around the politics board /pol/, as compared to the less overtly political but always extreme ‘random’ board /b/. Along the way left-leaning ‘moral fags’ who had gravitated towards AnonOps IRCs suffered from a degree of state spying and repression during the height of Anonymous’s public profile from around 2010 to 2012. This absence of the more libertarian left-leaning element within chan culture created a vacuum in the image boards that the rightist side of the culture was able to fill with their expert style of anti-PC shock humor memes.

In their emotionally underdeveloped way, lack of Internet-culture knowledge is always license on 4chan for any level of cruelty.

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. The irreverent trolling style associated with 4chan grew in popularity in response to the expanding identity politics of more feminine spaces like Tumblr. This, itself, spilled over eventually into ‘real life’ in the ramping up of campus politics around safe spaces and trigger warnings, ‘gamergate’ and many other battles.

One can feel the life draining out of the body at the thought of retelling or rereading the story of the gamergate controversy, one which involved internal controversies, hit pieces, hate campaigns, splits and a level of sustained high emotion more fitting for a response to a genocide than a spat over videogames.

Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention or differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, its ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture, transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about the nature of its appeal and about the liberal establishment it defines itself against.

However, for some feminists the id of their transgressive male peers proved a little too free. Criticisms of the inequities of ‘free love’, and the hypocrisies and inequalities experienced by women in anti-war and other activist movements in the 60s and 70s, started to emerge from feminist writing as a kind of critique of the counterculture. The pornified culture produced by the sexual revolution soon came under its harshest criticisms from feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon by the 80s, and soon the war-on-porn feminists even aligned with conservatives, who had previously denounced feminism as central to the debauchery of the 60s.

In this brave new world of clicks and content, their alternative came in the form of the often-sentimental feel-good clickbait sites like Upworthy and listicle sites like 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.

His writing style comes across as that of a person who might wear surgical gloves when leaving the house.

Nagle on Richard Spencer.

Similarly today, the troll-y version of the right that Milo represents is able to fight the new online identity politics in a way that actual conservatives are not able to. They understand the value of transgression, edginess and counterculture often better than their left-wing opponents.

The alt-right also seeks to destroy more than it proposes to build, unlike the institution-building and tradition-preserving ethos of the Burkean conservative movement, and seeks to smash some of the most treasured parts of US conservatism in particular, namely US exceptionalism – the notion dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America of the US’s unique founding on an idea rather than a blood and soil national identity.

The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.

Other similar niche online subcultures in this milieu, which were always given by the emerging online right as evidence of Western decline, also include adults who identify as babies and able-bodied people who identify as disabled people to such an extent that they seek medical assistance in blinding, amputating or otherwise injuring themselves to become the disabled person they identify as. You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale – that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.

Camille Paglia later wrote: ‘French theory is like those how-to tapes that guaranteed to make you a real estate millionaire overnight. Gain power by attacking power! Call this number in Paris now!’

Interestingly also to the contemporary context, after the Sokal affair an academic conference was called, with Judith Butler as a leading speaker, to deal with the emergence of something dubbed ‘left conservatism’. This included figures like Sokal, who identified as on the left, and his left-wing supporters, including Barbara Ehrenreich, an idiosyncratic and independent-minded leftist who has always tended to write accessibly about issues of poverty and working-class life in books like Nickle and Dimed. The term ‘conservative’ here was of course meant pejoratively to expel certain people and thoughts – and those that might have been privately sympathetic to them – from respectable academic discourse.

The entire discourse around ‘normies’ and ‘basic bitches’ who ‘don’t get’ the countercultural styles of the amoral subculture takes me back to my adolescent days of rival music subcultures, but now it’s with grown men and some more serious political stuff at stake.

This anti-free speech, anti-free thought, anti-intellectual online movement, which has substituted politics with neuroses, can’t be separated from the real-life scenes millions saw online of college campuses, in which to be on the right was made something exciting, fun and courageous for the first time since… well, possibly ever.

They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon.

The problem with the contemporary style of Tumblr-liberalism and a purely identitarian self-oriented progressivism that fomented in online subcultures and moved on to college campuses is that the very idea of winning people over through ideas now seems to anguish, offend and enrage this tragically stupefied shadow of the great movements of the left, like the one that began on campuses like Berkeley in 1964. Milo may be vanquished but not through a battle of ideas.