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

by Angela Nagle

tracing the online culture wars that have raged on below the line and below the radar of mainstream media throughout the period over feminism, sexuality, gender identity, racism, free speech and political correctness.

the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility,

Earnest, feel-good, easily shared concern had been replaced in a matter of days with the darkest side of the return of a more native, pre-monetized, anonymous Internet-culture – Schadenfreude, deep cynicism and the now unstoppable force of public humiliation as viral entertainment.

Every bizarre event, new identity and strange subcultural behavior that baffles general audiences when they eventually make the mainstream media, from otherkin to far right Pepe memes, can be understood as a response to a response to a response, each one responding angrily to the existence of the other.

One of the things that linked the often nihilistic and ironic chan culture to a wider culture of the alt-right orbit was their opposition to political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, etc., and its encroachment into their freewheeling world of anonymity and tech.

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.

Just a few years ago the left-cyberutopians claimed that ‘the disgust had become a network’ and that establishment old media could no longer control politics, that the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user-generated social media. This network has indeed arrived, but it has helped to take the right, not the left, to power.

The ease with which this broader alt-right and alt-light milieu can use transgressive styles today shows how superficial and historically accidental it was that it ended up being in any way associated with the socialist left.

Just like the style of the rightist chan culture, interpretation and judgment are evaded through tricks and layers of metatextual self-awareness and irony.

The following are just a few of the ever-expanding list of genders, now in the hundreds, all taken directly from Tumblr: Alexigender – Gender identity that is fluid between more than one gender, but the individual cannot tell what those genders are. Ambigender – A feeling of two genders simultaneously, but without fluidity/shifting. May be used synonymously in some cases with bigender. Anxiegender – A gender affected by anxiety. Cadensgender – A gender that is easily influenced by music. Cassflux – When your level of indifference towards your gender fluctuates. Daimogender – A gender closely related to demons and the supernatural. Expecgender – A gender that changes depending on who you are around. Faegender – A gender that changes with the seasons, equinoxes and moon phases. Fissgender – A gender experience that is in some way split, similar to bigender or demigenders. Genderale – A gender that is hard to describe. Mainly associated with plants, herbs and liquids. Kingender – A gender somehow related to being otherkin. Levigender – A lightweight, superficial gender you don’t feel very much. Necrogender – A gender that used to exist but is now ‘dead’ or nonexistent. Omnigay – Genderfluid, with one’s attraction to other genders changing with one’s gender, so that the individual is always attracted to the same gender. Perigender – Identifying with a gender, but not as that gender. Polygenderflux – Having more than one gender, which intensity fluctuates. Technogender – Only c...

The Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement is a straight male separatist group whose members have chosen (ahem) to avoid romantic relationships with women in protest against a culture destroyed by feminism, and to focus instead on individual achievement and independence from women. The rhetoric suggests punishment and revenge are at the heart of their motivations, as their advice is usually peppered with references to a ‘bitch’ who will cheat, leave, use you for your money and so on. They like to discuss women ‘riding the cock carousel’ throughout their twenties, and then entering their thirties and finding that their ‘stocks’ on the dating scene have started to fall. Like the alt-right they believe feminism has destroyed Western civilization, etc., etc., and that women will either trick them into raising children that aren’t theirs, get pregnant intentionally in order to trap them, or falsely accuse them of rape.

Years before the whole 4chan troll culture became a central force behind the entire aesthetics and humor of the alt-right, it was teeming with racism, misogyny, dehumanization, disturbing pornography and nihilism.

It was the utterly empty and fraudulent ideas of countercultural transgression that created the void into which anything can now flow as long as it is contemptuous of mainstream values and tastes. This is what allowed a culture that has now been exposed in all its horror to be romanticized by progressives as a counter-hegemonic force. The truth I think it reveals is that both rightist chan culture and ultra-PC academic culture understood the countercultural dog whistle of disdain for anything mainstream.

When we’ve reached a point where the idea of being edgy/countercultural/transgressive can place fascists in a position of moral superiority to regular people, we may seriously want to rethink the value of these stale and outworn countercultural ideals.