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

by Angela Nagle

This online backlash was able to mobilize a strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls whose dark humor and love of transgression for its own sake made it hard to know what political views were genuinely held and what were merely, as they used to say, for the lulz.

the de-anonymized social media platforms, where most young people now develop their political ideas for the first time, became a panopticon, in which the many lived in fear of observation from the eagle eye of an offended organizer of public shaming.

Jared Taylor from the site American Renaissance who refers to himself as a ‘race realist’ and figures like Kevin B. MacDonald, editor of Occidental Observer, described by the Anti-Defamation League as a primary voice of anti-Semitism for far-right intellectuals.

cuckservatives’ for their soft Christian passivity and for metaphorically cuckholding their womenfolk/nation/race to the non-white foreign invader.

The idea of the Cathedral closely resembles Marxian critical theory’s understanding of ideology, as an all-encompassing system and prison of the mind.

Peter Theil’s

The culture of the site was not only deeply and shockingly misogynist, but also self-deprecating in its own self-mockery of nerdish ‘beta’ male identity. Cultural touchstones included war-based video games and films like Fight Club and The Matrix. There was no registration or login required, so posts were typically all under the username ‘Anonymous’.

Feminist blogger and activist Cath Elliot wrote: If I’d been trying to keep a tally I would have lost count by now of the number of abusive comments I’ve received since I first started writing online back in 2007. And by abusive I don’t mean comments that disagree with whatever I’ve written – I came up through the trade union movement don’t forget, and I’ve worked in a men’s prison, so I’m not some delicate flower who can’t handle a bit of banter or heated debate – no, I’m talking about personal, usually sexualised abuse, the sort that on more than one occasion now has made me stop and wonder if what I’m doing is actually worth it. […] I read about how I’m apparently too ugly for any man to want to rape, or I read graphic descriptions detailing precisely how certain implements should be shoved into one or more of my various orifices.

masculinist and neomasculinist anti-feminist online subcultures.

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.

All of this was done, remember, to prove that sexism was definitely not, as she had so outrageously claimed, an issue in the ‘gaming community’. Tactics such as DDoS and doxxing (exposing the person’s

These brought in to the fold people like Christina Hoff Sommers, the classical liberal who started a video series called The Factual Feminist, which aimed to expose faulty statistics within feminism.

The dramatic and knowingly cinematic tone was typical of the online style that hides itself from interpretation through a postmodern tonal distance,

If further proof that the anti-PC taboo-breaking culture of 4chan is not just ‘for the lulz’ is needed, after the November 2015 shooting of five Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis, a video emerged of two of the men involved, wearing balaclavas and driving to a Black Lives Matter protest, saying: ‘We just wanted to give everyone a heads up on /pol/… Stay white.’ Just

bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress.

Marquis de Sade, surviving through to the nineteenth-century Parisian avant-garde, the Surrealists, the rebel rejection of feminized conformity of post-war America and then to what film critics called 1990s ‘male rampage films’ like American Psycho and Fight Club.

precedents. Joy Division, whose singer Ian Curtis was on the political right, named themselves after the Freudenabteilung, the name of the German camp brothels in WWII.

trolling is the more high-minded business of what Cochrane calls ‘aggressive rhetoric’, a tradition that goes back to Socrates, Jesus and the trickster god Loki, from Norse mythology. Auernheimer likens himself to Shakespeare’s Puck. Cochrane aspires to Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman. They talk of culture jamming, the art of disrupting the status quo to make people think. They talk of Abbie Hoffman.

Literary critic Daniel Fuchs has argued that the novel was part of a literary style, following on from Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, which used notions of transgression and sexual sovereignty from de Sade, and applied them as a form of rebellion and liberation through sexual aggression and violence.

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 cult of the moral transgressor as a heroic individual is rooted in Romanticism.

French writer Maurice Blanchot’s dictum that ‘the greatest suffering of others always counts for less than my pleasure’.

Nietzsche, one of the main thinkers being channeled by rightist chan culture knowingly or otherwise, argued for transgression of the pacifying moral order and instead for a celebration of life as the will to power.

Christian codes that Nietzsche characterized as slave morality.

in the later anti-liberal transgressions of the later /pol/. 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’.

Revolution of Everyday Life by the Situationist thinker Raoul Vaneigem, Mauss’s principle of the gift, originally used to describe reciprocal gift-giving systems in pre-modern societies, was celebrated on the grounds that only the purity of motiveless destruction or ruinous generosity can transcend instrumentalism.

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

Bakhtin

Bakhtin,

ambivalent definition

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.

depiction of human evil as innate was a form of satire directed against the Rousseauist tradition, from which contemporary feminism springs.

The founding desire behind Sadeian fantasy is the active negation of the mother. The Sadeian hero’s anti-naturalism goes hand in hand with his hatred of mothers, identified as the “natural” source of life. That the transgressive values of de Sade could be taken up by a culture of misogyny and characterized an online anti-feminist movement that rejected traditional church-going conservatism should also not be a surprise.

transgressive sensibility that is used to excuse and rationalize the utter dehumanization of women and ethnic minorities in the alt-right online sphere now.

liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII.

detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right.

H. L. Mencken, the deeply elitist but undeniably brilliant anti-New Deal US satirist and cultural critic, who also made Nietzschean criticisms of religion and representative democracy,

Antonio Gramsci that political change follows cultural and social change.

Vlaams Blok leader Filip Dewinter put it like this: ‘the ideological majority is more important than the parliamentary majority.’

the radical upheavals of Paris 1968 and the rise of the New Left was proof to the demoralized right that the whole culture would now have to be retaken before formal political change could come.

Overton window

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ‘manufacturing consent’ thesis has remained quite dominant in left rhetoric ever since it was written. The Frankfurt School and the Situationists remain canonical in university theory courses.

Gramsci’s is perhaps the most influential today, placing media and culture at the center of political analysis and praxis in a mediated age after the decline of the old labour movement.

Ben Shapiro was a key media figure to leave Breitbart over its flirtations with the anti-Semitic hard alt-right. Shapiro wrote that under Bannon’s leadership, ‘Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website… pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.’ This sparked an anti-Semitic hate campaign against Shapiro, which he strongly implied was actively encouraged by Milo. After his second son was born, Shapiro received tweets and comments with wishes that ‘all 4 of you will go to the ovens’. Among Milo’s many digs at Shapiro, he tweeted a photo of a black baby at him after his son was born and wrote, ‘Prayers to Ben who had to see his baby come out half-black. And already taller than he is!’ – a reference to his new status as a ‘cuckservative’.

Spencer started out as a scholar of Leo Strauss and his MA thesis was on Adorno and Wagner, but he later dropped out of his Duke University Ph.D.

political establishment bodies or other institutional support. It appears as though in the online culture wars, those heeding the ideas of the left most closely, from Chomsky’s idea of manufacturing consent to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and counter-hegemony, and applying them most strategically, were the right.

political theorist Walter Benn Michaels has argued, it is the recognition of identity that has triumphed over economic equality as the organizing principle of the Anglo-American liberal left and of mainstream discourse more broadly.

intellectually equipped and rhetorically gifted neoconservatives. Partisan Review magazine, also a project of the anti-communist

As Hartman elucidates in his book, many of the early neocons were New York Jewish intellectuals who had come to politics in the 30s through the City College of New York. These were smart, often working-class Jewish students who started out as Trotskyists and learned their style of debate in CCNY cafeteria’s Alcove No. 1, where they argued with the Moscow-loyal communist students who occupied Alcove No. 2. During their later rightward turn, they worked on magazines Commentary and Encounter, the latter becoming the literary organ for the anti-Soviet soft-power CCF. This period produced writers and polemicists like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol.

They maintained their Marxist style of diagnosing problems in relation to root causes, internal logics and overarching structures.’

They understand the value of transgression, edginess and counterculture often better than their left-wing opponents. What constitutes