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by
Angela Nagle
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March 16 - March 18, 2018
also meant a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology of discerning objective truth.
layers of faux-irony, playfulness and multiple cultural nods and references.
loomed large in the conservative imagination as part of a declension narrative of Western civilization.
Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century text that tied Rome’s collapse to sexual decadence. Camille Paglia’s work, greatly admired by Milo, is preoccupied with this same causal link between homosexuality, promiscuity, gender fluidity and civilizational decline. Neocon Gertrude Himmelfarb also used her scholarship of Victorian Britain to suggest that Western civilization had weathered the storm of modernity only because of its Victorian values, which had collapsed in the 60s owing to gay liberation and the sexual revolution.
‘Negroes With Guns’ by Robert F. Williams, which influenced the Black Panthers and other black self-defense militants.
the institution-building and tradition-preserving ethos of the Burkean conservative movement,
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America of the US’s unique founding on an idea rather than a blood and soil national identity.
everything people like Buchanan are supposed to stand against. 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.
Professor Adolph Reed Jr. has often said liberals don’t believe in actual politics anymore, just ‘bearing witness to suffering’. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics, as it is enacted in spaces like Tumblr.
The online dynamics of this call-out culture were brilliantly described by Fisher as, ‘driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.’ I would add to this that the key driving force behind it is about creating scarcity in an environment in which virtue is the currency that can make or break the career or social success of an online user in this milieu, the counterforce of which was the anonymous underworld
William F. Buckley founded National Review as a ‘counterestablishment’ to the academic one and famously said: ‘I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.’
Phyllis Schlafly’s book Child Abuse in the Classroom
Frantz Fanon
from the Wall Street Journal to books like The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, Illiberal Education by Dinesh D’Souza and Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education by Roger Kimball.
Central to the undermining of the Western canon was the relativism of figures like literary theorist Stanley Fish, who undermined the idea of the stable meaning of texts and of a literary canon having objective timeless value: ‘The only way we can hope to interpret a literary work is by knowing the vantage point from which we perform the act of interpretation.’ Filled with like-minded academics, Duke University’s English department became known as ‘the Fish tank’, that also promoted French theory in which universal claims about truth were represented as serving the interests of the powerful.
intellectual resistance to one’s own time and its passions’… ‘This total surrender to the present and abandonment of the quest for standards with which to judge it are the very definition of the closing of the American mind and I could not hope for more stunning confirmation of my thesis.’
Todd Gitlin,
Judith Butler
They are correct to argue that many feminists, a movement to which I belong, have often been intolerant and dogmatic on these issues. And yet, observing these online spaces, it is simply impossible to deny the rampant hateful misogyny, bitterness, conspiratorial thinking and generally foul character that seems to run through them.
Robert Bly, which searched for a male authenticity lost by life in a modern, feminized, atomized society.
One of the dominant and consistent preoccupations running through the forum culture of the manosphere is the idea of beta and alpha males.
After several months of advertising this law throughout the land, rape would be virtually eliminated on the first day it is applied. He claims that the piece was ‘satire’.
knowing tone
Voice for Men
The site often reads like a catalog of the very worst rhetorical excesses in the history of feminism but with the sexes reversed.
he has only been able to make A Voice for Men his full-time job because of the women who have financially supported him
pickup artist (PUA) forums often comes from self-identifying ‘nice guys’, whose commentary on women suggests their sense of self may be a little lacking in honest reflection.
SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. Like all of the anti-feminist alt-right, he also believes that
an unconvincing voice of ultra-rationality to conceal what seems like a great deal of bitterness and hurt at rejection.
they want the benefits of tradition without its necessary restraints and duties.
They simultaneously want the best of the sexual revolution (sexual success with pornified women, perpetually dolled up, waxed and willing to do anything) without the attendant insecurities of a society in which women have sexual choice and freedom.
Nietzsche’s fetish for physical male strength, hierarchy and the exertion of will, which his Nazi followers were attracted to in his writing, contrasted in a similarly pathetic way to the reality of his physical state – myopia, nervous prostration, chronic ill-health, digestive disorders and of course the bitter rejection by women. Celibate and romantically
‘ordinary people’ who felt ‘left behind’.
We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.
In reality they had been making pro-inequality, misanthropic, economically elitist arguments for natural hierarchy all along.
Gustave LeBon, the misanthropists’ favorite theorist of the masses.
long been characterized by an extreme subcultural snobbishness toward the masses and mass culture.
David Auerbach
argot and complex conventions and elite technical knowledge polices the boundaries of the subculture to inoculate it from massification.’
subtle nod of approval, to me this goes to the very heart of how vile and misanthropic the whole culture around the chans is and has always been, not in spite of but because of its countercultural style and sensibility. That it eventually fused so completely with the alt-right makes perfect sense.
Trolling is basically Internet eugenics.
Malthusian
This misanthropy and anxiety over the breeding of lower orders is one of the most dominant features of alt-right discourse from the foul-mouthed chaos of chan culture to the more serious long-form theory of the alt-right proper.
Literary critic John Carey wrote about Malthusian, eugenicist and other elite prejudices against emerging mass society and mass culture.
trolling styles and much of the current anti-feminism is generated – a mix of the Nietzschean misanthropic sensibility and the more counterculture-tinged Fight Club referencing one.
Nietzsche, by far the most influential thinker across all of the strands that make up the alt-right, warned that ‘a declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed’ to dominate ‘the superfluous’.
‘encoded solipsism’ of the social network itself.
ing] in counter-hegemony’ and ‘undermining established media narratives’ and the ‘mindless histrionics of the modern 24-hour news cycle’.
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.
Sarah Thornton’s study of ‘subcultural capital’ in pop subcultures and countercultures.
