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

The problem with the contemporary style of Tumblr-liberalism and a 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 like Berkeley in 1964

Similarly, the idea of the inherent value of aesthetic qualities that have dominated in Western pop culture since the 60s, like transgression, subversion and counterculture, have turned out to be the defining features of an online far right that finds itself full of old bigotries of the far right but liberated from any Christian moral constraints by its Nietzschean anti-moralism

There is no question but that the embarrassing and toxic online politics represented by this version of the left, which has been so destructive and inhumane, has made the left a laughing stock for a whole new generation. Years of online hate campaigns, purges and smear campaigns against others – including and especially dissident or independent-minded leftists – has caused untold damage. 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. When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn’t, but also that they couldn’t. They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon

In One Flew Over the Cuckoos’s Nest the rebellious inmate Harding warns against the evil nurse Ratched: ‘We are victims of the matriarchy here my friends.’ Conformity in this imaginary is feminine and rebellion is masculine

I want to return again to Fight Club. 4chan’s original set of 50 ‘Rules of the Internet’, which listed ‘tits or GTFO’ and ‘there are no girls on the Internet’, also lists the first two rules as ‘You do not talk about /b/’ and ‘You do NOT talk about /b/’, mimicking the first two rules of Fight Club: ‘You do not talk about Fight Club’.
Tyler Durden, the lead character from the movie, embodies the reassertion of rebel masculinity against the emasculating conformity of consumer culture and the post-industrial feminized timidity of white-collar office life. Edward Norton’s character is the conformist, emasculated, consumerist beta male while his alter ego of sorts, Durden, is the countercultural alpha because he is free from needing or being controlled by women. The Pink Soap he sells is made from the reconstituted fat of women who had undergone liposuction and then had their fat ‘sold back to them’, which fuses rebellion against consumerism with a disdain for feminine vanity and crushing conformity – perhaps the central theme in MGTOW culture. It also constructs a rebel masculinity that rejects both traditional male roles and pro-feminist new ones as its anti-conformist antidote

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

It was the utterly empty and fraudulent ideas of countercultural transgression that created the void into which anything can now flow as long as it is contemptuous of mainstream values and tastes. This is what allowed a culture that has now been exposed in all its horror to be romanticized by progressives as a counter-hegemonic force. 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

Chad and Stacey bring to mind the more feminine but similarly frowned upon ‘Sharon and Tracey’ in cultural critic Sarah Thornton’s study of ‘subcultural capital’ in pop subcultures and countercultures. In her book about club cultures, she wrote:
If girls opt out of the game of hipness they will often defend their tastes with expression like ‘it’s crap but I like it’. In doing so they acknowledge the subcultural hierarchy and accept their lowly position within it. If, on the other hand they refuse this defeatism female clubbers and ravers are usually careful to distance themselves from the degraded pop culture of ‘Sharon and Tracey’; they emphatically reject and denigrate a feminized mainstream

While the Trumpians are busy quickly rewriting history, it is important to remember that behind the ‘populist’ president, the rhetoric of his young online far-right vanguard had long been characterized by an extreme subcultural snobbishness toward the masses and mass culture

On this last point, I think he’s getting to the central issue driving this kind of reactionary sexual politics, perhaps even the central personal motivation behind the entire turn to the far right among young men. The sexual revolution that started the decline of lifelong marriage has produced great freedom from the shackles of loveless marriage and selfless duty to the family for both men and women. But this ever-extended adolescence has also brought with it the rise of adult childlessness and a steep sexual hierarchy. Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and a growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order. Their own anxiety and anger about their low-ranking status in this hierarchy is precisely what has produced their hard-line rhetoric about asserting hierarchy in the world politically when it comes to women and non-whites. The pain of relentless rejection has festered in these forums and allowed them to be the masters of the cruel natural hierarchies that bring them so much humiliation