This 'transgressive anti-moral style' of the Alt-Right, according to Nagle, is their attempt to completely break away from the egalitarian philosophy of the Left and the Christian morality of the Right. A remnant of the transgressive left politics of 1960s, actually 1968, how transgression and cynicism is weaponized by the extreme-right vanguard (in the base, only a fierce anti-PC sentiment is prevalent) seems more contingent than it is a necessary trait of this line of thought. Her first book, Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right was recently released by Zero Books.

It does so in an even handed and authoritative manner, and it is evident that Nagle has done her homework and is very familiar with the ins and outs of various movements and cultures. These obscure online political beginnings became formative for a whole generation, and impacted mainstream sensibilities and even language. It seems mostly just as if it's unfinished; typos abound, strangely wrong quips about PTSD, unclear and sporadic theses, repeatedly bafflingly caricaturistic presentations of Friedrich Nietzsche, etc. This is a difficult political fight on the left right now, the split between economic left and identity left, as it feels like the identitarians have been winning by virtue of being loudest online. The problem of course that right wing and the alt-right have been quite adept at using this obsession with identity to their advantage, and they constantly use this seemingly inexhaustible capacity of the left to take the bait on identity politics to dangle morsels that are always swallowed whole.There’s no mention of how the Alt-Right love making up ridiculous fake profiles to mock transgender people, disabled people, women, and non-white people (and frequently can’t detect satire/jokes from serious suggestions). The right took the opportunity to talk directly to those who felt rightly or wrongly alienated by the debate. In WoW there are two factions, Alliance and Horde, and each speaks its own language, Common and Orcish respectively.

Nagles pseudo-horseshoe theory of the Tumblr Left and Alt-Right relies on the idea that the Tumblr Left are also intentionally transgressive like those on the alt-right[3]. In the introduction she marks Kony 2012 and Harambe as significant trends in building the ironic internet mobs that were relatively unknown before recently. This is somehow accurate, but being such an important part of video game culture, and as a WoW player, I thought that it deserves a better explanation.Richard Spencer decries homosexuality and drug use as symptoms of Western decline, whereas both are celebrated by Milo Yiannopolis. Her political taxonomies are careful, her sociological explanations are persuasive, and her psychological evaluations are considerate.

Nagle clearly knows more about 4chan and the alt-right than Tumblr and internet left subcultures, since she really drops the ball when talking about the left.We have wowed our potential clients with animation, left them in awe at our grasp on statistics, and preached on soapboxes to the multitudes about why they . Buuuuut the brevity of the text and the profound lack of sources and editing point to this being a rushed work meant to generate a small bump of income. Kony 2012” videos among others comes to mind in this rush to collect “virtue points” in this scarcity of virtue market on the Web. With a liberal left dangerously lost in the stormy waters of middle class self-flagellation, Angela Nagle is the lighthouse keeper showing us the way out. Ms Nagle: Irony and transgressiveness have been aesthetic tools mostly used by the political left for a long time, certainly they've been ever-present since 1968.

NRx, Dark Enlightenment, the 'Alt-Light', GamerGate, Richard Spencer, 4chan, Milo, weev, MGTOW, The Rebel, Pat Buchanan, Breitbart, Alex Jones, and Mike Cernovich are just some of the names mentioned. The whole book has these little moments where Angela Nagle abandons the pretense of impartiality and decides to be weirdly venomous about innocuous undeserving shit (including a jab at Zoe Quinn that seemed to be totally irrelevant to the topic at hand), but the PTSD comment struck me as pointedly nasty in a way I wouldn't expect in a book from an ostensibly left wing publisher. g. the growing sphere of nu-atheistic pseudo-rationalism; the whole of neoreaction; accelerationism as it appears online, et I thought I knew quite a bit about this topic already, but I learned so much from this book, particularly about the historical context of these movements. The organization is schizophrenic and it often reads like a last-minute thesis, with tons of pretentious theories thrown in, quoted, and not really discussed or examined, just taking up space.

Putting aside for a moment that the book would be entirely opaque to anyone who hasn't lived it; that it is in urgent need of every kind of editing from content to organizational to basic copy ( e. In chapter three, "Gramscians of the Alt-Lite", Nagle focuses on the popularity of the French New Right within the circles of the Alt-Right. The best parts are the really detailed outlines of the various factions of the right's anti-feminist and white supremacist groups, as well as the philosophical explanations of the anti-moral subversive nature of 4chan. that kind of sourcing and documentation is important, otherwise all you really provide is a random, biased, half-assed anecdote.