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

by Angela Nagle

they emphatically reject and denigrate a feminized mainstream.

The hatred of the shallow, vain, clueless girl with mainstream tastes trying to infiltrate a geeky subculture has become central to geeky subcultures. A common trope employed across a variety of geek alt-right subcultures is that of the girl who is trying to belong to geek subcultures, but who fails to use the correct markers of belonging, such as correct slang and depth of elite knowledge. The entire discourse around ‘normies’

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.

Music critic Robin James wrote that: ‘Nietzsche’s ascription of feminine characteristics to the masses is always tied to his aesthetic vision of the artist-philosopher-hero, the suffering loner who stands in irreconcilable opposition to modern democracy and its inauthentic culture.’

Women are discussed in a way that presumes their absence,

instead seen as a force for bringing the moral and behavioral constraints and the inauthenticity of the mainstream platforms into the subcultural realm.

The negative association of femininity and mass culture goes back further again. Literary critic Andreas Huyssen traces it back to Madame Bovary. Written at a time in which the fathers of Modernism expressed

Emma Bovary loved to read’, the novel presented an unflattering portrait of a woman addled by romantic fiction.

the reassertion of rebel masculinity against the emasculating conformity of consumer culture and the post-industrial feminized timidity of white-collar office life.

In Fight Club, the cuck theme is also there. The narrator, Jack, tells us ‘like so many others I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct’ as he sits on the toilet looking at an IKEA catalog. Durden later asks him, ‘Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is?’ Like the online right, it incorporates masculinist and anti-feminist politics, as well as rebel angst and a rejection of the domesticating, feminine influence of women. In the discursive style of the new ‘punk’ transgressive online right, nesting is also associated with pacification, while transgression, pornography and depictions of violence are employed as its counterforce in online hate campaigns against women who encroach upon their space.

But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.

liberated from any Christian moral constraints by its Nietzschean anti-moralism.

Half a century after the Rolling Stones, after Siouxsie Sioux and Joy Division flirted with fascist aesthetics, after Piss Christ, after Fight Club, when everyone from the President’s fanboys to McDonalds are flogging the dead horse of ‘edginess’, it may be time to lay the very recent and very modern aesthetic values of counterculture and the entire paradigm to rest and create something new.

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.

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

dehumanizing invective against ‘rapugees’ also follows.

David French of the National Review dared to criticize Trump, for example, he first got attacked by Milo and then the alt-right attack dogs came.

I have contributed to National Review for more than ten years now, and have been deeply involved in many of America’s most emotional culture-war battles for more than 20. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.

On this night the right was on the receiving end of violence, but on another, an anti-Milo protester was shot.

His tour painfully exposed the deep intellectual rot in contemporary cultural progressivism and it found itself completely unable to deal with the challenge coming from the right.

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 ...