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

by Angela Nagle

YouTube vloggers produced an abundance of popular commentary videos and ‘SJW cringe compilations’, while alt-light celebrities like Milo built careers from exposing the absurdities of the kind of Tumblr identity politics that had gone mainstream through listicle sites like Buzzfeed and anti-free speech safe space campus politics. Meanwhile, ironic meme-making adolescent shitposters formed a reserve army of often darkly funny chan-style image-based content producers, who could be easily summoned in moments like gamergate or whenever big figures like Milo needed backup, to swarm and harass their opposition.