This book deals with the emergence, aesthetics, and mechanisms of new, politically right-wing movements in the United States. It tells of a right-wing “culture war” that is organized and radicalized in a decentralized and often anonymous way in online forums such as “4chan”. And at the center of which, in addition to a very heterogeneous mixture of racism, anti-feminism, masculinism, and homophobia in stretches, seems to be the ironizing, threatening, insulting of people, discourses, and language policies.
The author Angela Nagle describes this strategy of communication with the term “transgression” – and draws a precise picture of media representatives of the so-called “alt-light” current, such as Gavin McInnes, Lauren Souther or Milo Yiannopoulos to the countless troll armies on the Internet to the ideologically more coherent, even more extreme right-wing actors of the so-called “Alt-Right” current.
However, the book was also controversially discussed and widely read because Nagle includes in her analysis and (sometimes fundamentally) criticizes dearly held views, discourses, and forms of communication of politically leftist movements. Author Bernhard Pirkel wrote about this in the weekly newspaper Jungle World:
“If at first glance it is an essay about the birth of Trumpism from the spirit of Internet culture, Kill All Normies also contains provocative theses about what Nagle sees as the left’s problematic fixations: drawing on dissident exponents of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies such as Sarah Thornton, Nagle questioned the left’s nexus between subculture and counterculture, transgression and progressivism.”
Also worth reading is this interview with Angela Nagle; her book is also discussed in the radio feature “The Kids are Alt Right?” by Klaus Walter, which we have already presented elsewhere.
Angela Nagle 2018: The Digital Counter-Revolution .Online Cultural Struggles of the New Right from 4chan and Tumblr to the Alt-Right and Trump. Bielefeld: transcript.
If you don’t have a bookstore worth supporting near you, you can also buy the book from the alternative non-profit online bookstore links-lesen.de, which supports political projects with the profits. The link to the book can be found here.