Angela Nagle seems fearless. Who else would dive deep into the Alt-Right’s swamp of Pepe the Frog memes, conspiracy theories, and anonymous depravity unified by a hatred of “PC culture,” feminism, and multiculturalism, and a love for Donald Trump? Her new book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, documented this section of the internet at a time when most on the left dared not look—when just mentioning 4chan or Gamergate seemed like an open invitation for a slew of misogynistic and racist hate mail.
Yet after Trump’s election, every mainstream news source suddenly had to get an interview with those involved in the new edgy, nihilistic youth subculture dubbed the “Alt-Right,” a deviation from the right wing’s conventional National Review bow ties and Evangelical Christian moralizers. Whether covering former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ campus speaking tours or framing white nationalist Richard Spencer as a surprisingly “dapper fascist” (as if Nazi leaders weren’t from the suit-wearing elite), the liberal media class came off looking decidedly unprepared to combat the truly horrifying, utterly contradictory ideas this new wave of “Alt-Right/Alt-Light” espoused.
Kill All Normies provides much-needed context for the violent rise of a fringe internet subculture of men’s rights activists and gamers into the public sphere, and it does so without undeservedly praising the liberal left. Instead, the book argues that the materially empty “slacktivism” and “virtue signaling” of liberals helped inflame these reactionary politics. She begins with the election of Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the re-emergence of cyber-utopian visions on the left. An intense fervor of optimism surrounded new technology and social media’s “leaderless revolutions” that would make the world more democratic and better off. But what followed were cycles of momentary outrage, fizzling passions, and mockery as seen in internet campaigns like Kony 2012 and #JusticeForHarambe. The same 4chan poised to lead the anonymous “hacktivist” tide did wind up making cultural waves, but they came from the far right.
