The US fascist movement, like most fascist movements, is subject to vicious infighting. If you observe their chatter you will see the expression ‘don’t punch right’ used frequently. This means focus your attacks on the real enemy. For them this is the left. Kill All Normies while providing a somewhat useful introduction to the new internet driven fascism unfortunately punched left and down with far more intensity than it punched right. Its taxonomy of the alt-right was sabotaged by often mean spirited attacks on the author’s (Angela Nagle) left enemies. Throughout the book she attacks women game developers who dare to insert feminist themes, obnoxious tweeters, intersectional feminists, gender rebellious Tumblrs and even anti-fascists who recognise the need for physical confrontation.
Kill all Normies is thus best understood not so much as a book about the alt-right but as a collection of polemical essays, mostly directed at the radical left, making use of the moment of crisis that was the Trump election. This piece should not be seen as a simple ‘is it worth reading’ review. Instead I use KaN as a starting point for a number of important discussions for the left and to explore modern fascism as well as looking at some of the events involving the US far right that occurred after it was published and what they have to tell us about the real weaknesses of that movement.
The US fascist movement, like most fascist movements, is subject to vicious infighting. If you observe their chatter you will see the expression ‘don’t punch right’ used frequently. This means focus your attacks on the real enemy. For them this is the left. Kill All Normies while providing a somewhat useful introduction to the new internet driven fascism unfortunately punched left and down with far more intensity than it punched right. Its taxonomy of the alt-right was sabotaged by often mean spirited attacks on the author’s (Angela Nagle) left enemies. Throughout the book she attacks women game developers who dare to insert feminist themes, obnoxious tweeters, intersectional feminists, gender rebellious Tumblrs and even anti-fascists who recognise the need for physical confrontation.
Kill all Normies is thus best understood not so much as a book about the alt-right but as a collection of polemical essays, mostly directed at the radical left, making use of the moment of crisis that was the Trump election. This piece should not be seen as a simple ‘is it worth reading’ review. Instead I use KaN as a starting point for a number of important discussions for the left and to explore modern fascism as well as looking at some of the events involving the US far right that occurred after it was published and what they have to tell us about the real weaknesses of that movement.
That said, and to open on a positive note Kill all Normies did a useful job of providing a quick summary of what some of the alt-right are and where some of its origins lie to those who don’t want to wade into the online alt-right sewer themselves. I’d only recommend reading KaN alongside the critical reviews though in order to avoid being misled by its many bad faith polemical claims.
Nagle writes from a position that is on the one hand hostile to anti-oppression politics and which on the other refuses to recognise how changes in work and technology have disrupted the formation of class consciousness. . Many of the essays in Kill all Normies are related to these themes. Having read many reviews it’s very apparent that reviewers embrace or reject the book based on where they stand on those questions.
There is a soft and hard way to read Nagle’s text. In the soft reading she is saying that the formation of the alt-right, driven by misogyny, was in part a reaction to the limited gains of feminism. In the hard reading she is claiming the alt-right and Intersectional Left are partially responsible for, if not as bad as each other. Both the text and various interviews she has done since publication are not consistent in terms of which is her argument, she moves between the two.
There have been a lot of angry responses to the hard reading, with Nagle and her defenders then suggesting people are inventing the hard reading and getting angry with people for doing so in turn. On the other hand the fact that two of the most prominent US far-right figures Richard Spencer and Mike Cernovich have both recommended the book to their followers suggest they too see (and like) that hard reading.
The heat around that discussion has served to bury other fundamental flaws in the text. These are firstly the idea the alt-right are more attractive for young people than the left, and secondly the general discussion of networked activism and organising which is far too narrow.
Nagle produces a strange potted history of networked activism in which Tahrir square only gets a brief dismissive mention while Harambe goes on for pages. If you understand what I mean by Tahir but are scratching your head at Harambe that’s a clue as to the depth of the problem. [1]
A final and necessary local disclaimer. The left in Dublin is not very big so not only do I know Nagle but our circles of friends overlap considerably. Years back we had a couple of conversations about the Living Marxism / Spiked trajectory, conversations which I now understand as trains passing in the night as I was very much moving away from their style of politics while she has embraced it. In any case that adds a particular difficulty to writing this piece, the knowledge that at least some friends will be very annoyed with me for having published it.
This in fact is why it is quietly appearing in the aftermath of the Christchurch New Zealand fascist mass killing rather than mid August 2017 when I had finished the draft. I spent quite a bit of while considering how to be as generous as I could with a text that I consider to be nastily partisan and dependent on bad faith argumentation. There is irony here as a central theme of KaN is the way political differences are often escalated to personal nastiness. KaN is yet another of those texts that only recognises this behaviour in the other side of a debate and goes on to deploy these methods itself. I’d hope I have avoided repeating that pattern here.
THE PERILS OF A NARROW FOCUS
As an academic, Nagle has spent years staring through a virtual letter box at the goings on at 4chan and on 4chan’s impression of the rest of the world – the core of KaN comes out of that research. The nature of all academic research is that you end up knowing a huge amount of fine detail about a small part of social reality. And the isolation of formal study means you are always prone to standing in the point of viewpoint of what you are studying, even when you are hostile to the conclusions it draws.
The rise of Trump and spotlight on the alt-right meant that in the last year I’ve read several classic studies of fascism including Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’. When you read the early chapters on anti-semitism they are shocking because Arendt fell into telling the history of anti-semitism through the eyes of the people, and in particular the Nazi’s, she was studying. After a few dozen pages I had to stop and google to see if it was just me noticing this, turns out it wasn’t. The point is not that Arendt become a fascist but to recognise that the point you view something from will have a major impact on how you describe it – hopefully the example of Arendt, a very respected scholar of fascism, also makes it clear that falling into the viewpoint of those you study doens’t in itslef make your work worthless or you a terrible person. For a more pop culture reference the character of Saruman in Lord of the Rings also falls under the influence of his limited point of view.
Nagle’s narrow focus on the role of internet culture also means that there are very important elements of both the Trump and related neo-fascist growth that are entirely absent from Nagle’s account. For instance the Tea Party movement only gets a passing mention on p46 and Birtherism [2] doesn’t appear at all. If the book had remained a niche cultural studies publication these shortcomings would hardly matter, the problem is that a general audience could well mistake its account of Trump and the rise of the alt-right as a complete account rather than a fragment of the story and a polemically told one at that.
This narrow focus is probably what led Nagle to genuinely believe the alt-right version of why Trump won the election along with watching it unfold through their eyes. However she’s not alone in this. Many people on the Nostalgic Left embraced what amounts to the alt-right thesis of victory that claimed ‘ordinary working class people’ were alienated by ‘political correctness’ and so voted for Trump. As the alt-right expressed things it was clear and often openly stated that by ‘ordinary working class people” they meant whites, sometimes with a minimal attempt at deflection as in the Proud Boys calling themselves ‘western chauvinists.’
Alt-lite or alt-right?
Nagle’s text accept’s Richard Spencer’s alt-lite and alt-right division without serious interrogation. From an anti-fascist perspective I’m not sure this is useful. A distinction between the alt-right and what could be termed traditional fascism probably does a better job of capturing the divide without accepting Spencer’s PR rebranding of what are traditional enough fascists. The term alt-lite is itself part of that rebranding, it originated as the term traditional fascists used to mark off those they perceived as softer than them, specifically to mark off those who criticised the use of Seig Heil style salutes at the November 2016 far right gathering in Washington DC.[3]
The other major problem with Nagle’s use of the alt-lite label is that, when combined with her tendency towards free speech absolutism, it leads her to separate the likes of Milo from the harder alt-right and so to argue against shutting down their recruitment efforts. More on this below but it’s worth noting here that in the aftermath of their Charlottesville debacle fascists were posting instructions telling their supporters to in future ‘hide their power level’. This is a gaming reference that in this case meant to pretend to be what Nagle refers to as the alt-light. IE to talk in terms of European Identity and to even disavow any ‘alt-right’ fascist who was too open as to their intent. The softer end of the alt-right play the role of recruiters for the naked fascists – something Nagle recognises p49 – and should be treated as such.
I do not wish to dwell too long on the uses of terminology, as I don’t think terminology is all that key to defeating these sellers of hate. From an anti-fascist perspective the alt-right and alt-light are part of a single movement, recruiting to a single cause. I’m mostly not going to use the alt-right / alt-lite distinction and instead talk of the alt-right as the new, mostly online, element that the traditional fascists are trying to get into the streets and trying to recruit from. In terms of fighting fascism I think online V traditional is the most useful division to make, in particular as getting the alt-right on the streets is the key goal of the traditional fascists and what anti-fascist mobilistions from Berkley is Charlottesville have been countering. This is the key battleground, some more on this below.
DID ALT-RIGHT MEME CULTURE REALLY DELIVER TRUMP?
Nagle’s argument the alt-right won the election for Trump because they had more appeal to young voters than Tumblr liberals is testable. For it to be true we would expect the alt-right’s greatest influence to be on young voters, as they are statistically the population group most exposed to memes and Tumblr. In her interview on the Baffler podcast, she argues that the alt-right is winning youth support in an anecdote which offers the imagined choice faced by a 16 year old between what she presents as terrible Tumblr liberalism & Milo’s charm. She declared “I mean come on like, what 16 year old is even going to have to think about which one of those two is more attractive.”
In case it’s not clear she meant Milo was the obvious winner, but as we shall see the available evidence says this is not the case.
In Kill All Normies she argues that the alt-right has a much greater appeal to the young and that this delivered the election. As early as page two we are told,
The triumph of the Trumpians was also a win in the war against this mainstream media, which is now held in contempt by many average voters and the weird irony-laden Internet subcultures from right and left, who equally set themselves apart from this hated mainstream.
This continues over the page with,
… the bursting forth of irreverent mainstream-baffling meme culture during the last race in which the Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash Facebook page and The Donald subreddit defined the tone of the race for a young and newly politicized generation, with the mainstream media desperately trying to catch up with a subcultural in-joke.
Again also on page three,
The year 2016 may be remembered as the year the media mainstream’s hold over formal politics died. A thousand Trump Pepe memes bloomed and a strongman larger-than-life Twitter troll who showed open hostility to the mainstream media and to both party establishments took The White House without them.
Page 9 concludes: “However, offline, only one side saw their guy take the office of US president.”
Right at the end she returns to argue that the youth faced with the ‘Tumblr liberals’ fled from the left when she writes that the behaviour of the Tumblr liberals “has made the left a laughing stock for a whole new generation" (p.117)
In November 2016 Trump won in enough places to win the electoral college vote, Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. If Nagle is correct we can presume that Trump did best with the segment of the population most exposed to Tumblr and those ‘dank alt-right memes’ mocking the left – that is the youth – while Clinton swept up the pensioners for whom such memes would be mostly not seen or understood.
Exit polls clearly disprove this hypothesis. 55% of 18-29 year olds voted for Clinton, only 36% for Trump, a massive 19 point divide. In fact if the youth alone had voted Clinton she would have won every single state.
Clinton also won the 30-44 age group. Trump took the 45-64 and 65 and older groups. These are not the people who spend their days consuming the spiciest meme’s. [4]
THE UK EXPERIENCE OF BREXIT AND CORBYN
The experiment ran for a second time in the UK in June 2017. Again, with the same result, far from voting for the anti-politically correct Tories the youth voted 4:1 for what The Sun’s election day headline described as the ‘open immigration marxist extremist friend of terrorists’ Corbyn. [5] If you dig into youth attitudes shown in the polls it looks awfully like the Tumblr left were campaigning and voting for Corbyn. UK alt-right characters like Paul Joseph Watson were making the same claims to be influencing the youth that their equivalent made in the US, but few young people voted Tory and much fewer UKIP.
Another significant study was run in the UK in the form of the Brexit referendum. Again, if it was down to the youth Brexit would have been overwhelmingly defeated. In fact the age structure of the anti-Brexit and Corbyn votes are very similar as are the social attitudes revealed. [6]
The best data we have from the US, UK elections and the Brexit referendum show that in the largest population centres of the Anglophone sphere that Nagel confines her analysis to her central thesis about youth attitudes is drastically wrong. They are voting left rather than right. So unless you are going to advance the claim that those horrified by Tumblr and consuming dank meme’s were in the 65+ age group rather than the 25 and below ones the entire basis of Kill All Normies is false. In fact if you accept Nagle’s framing of the argument within the left the imagined 16 year old chose what she lumps together as ‘Tumblr liberalism’ over Milo.
It’s not just that the youth voted left. In the UK election and Brexit on a range of social attitude questions the youth opt for Tumblr liberal positions while its the elderly who embrace the alt-right ones across a range of issues including the core ones of migration and feminism. The social media effect is the reverse of what would be expected from Nagle’s central thesis. In both the US and particularly the UK the section of the population most exposed to Tumblr and Milo are left leaning, those least exposed are right leaning.
WHAT IS A TUMBLR LIBERAL ANYWAY
Nagle’s central thesis is that the alt-right are winning the culture wars and as a result young people are fleeing the left. It is simply wrong. The available data, for example the election results discussed above shows it is wrong. There is a hard-held belief by a shrinking faction of the left that imagines economic struggles will somehow be stronger if we downplay how privilege and marginalisation divides the working class. I’ve written about this faction as the Nostalgic Left.
This is probably a good point to try and break down what Nagle means by the Tumblr liberals. It’s clearly intended as a degrading, dismissive label. She couldn’t really use the alt-right’s preferred term of Social Justice Warriors, especially as she freely uses some of their other terminology, in particular the obnoxious solidarity destroying phase ‘virtue signalling’.
She writes
By the early 2010s, Tumblr had put Butler’s theory into practice and created an entire subcultural language, set of slogans and style to go with it. The most marked preoccupation of Tumblr’s cultural politics has been identity fluidity, typically but not exclusively around gender. It was the subcultural digital expression of the fruition of Judith Butler’s ideas (p.69).
She is a little more specific on the following page about who on the left she sees as the problem and that it is the same group the alt-right targets when she adds,
The main preoccupation of this new culture (the right named them SJWs and snowflakes, let’s call it Tumblr-liberalism) was gender fluidity and providing a safe space to explore other concerns like mental ill-health, physical disability, race, cultural identity and ‘intersectionality’ – the now standard academic term for recognition of multiple varieties of intersecting marginalizations and oppressions.
As I’ll discuss below Nagle’s method above is an intellectual bait and switch where a possible critique of Judith Butler’s ideas is quickly swapped out for sneering at a “ever-expanding list of genders, now in the hundreds, all taken directly from Tumblr”. This along with anecdotes about online abusive behaviour is used to attack ‘intersectionality.’ The term Tumblr liberalism is an invention necessary to attack the Intersectional left without having to actually discuss its critique or why it developed in the first place.
RACISM AND MISOGYNY ARE A HELL OF A DRUG
As I show in the linked pieces above Brexit and the Trump election in particular are far better understood as a retreat to old fashioned racism, colonialism and white supremacy. For instance Trump’s vote was overwhelmingly white, 55 of his 62 million voters were white. The one aspect of a reaction that can be detected in the Trump vote to ‘Tumblr liberalism’ are the many mentions of white resentment at perceived ‘line cutting’ in journalistic write-ups from the abandoned rust belt areas that tipped the election his way. Understanding this metaphor and who it mobilises is far more useful in understanding the alt-right that the creation of a catch all ‘Tumblr liberalism’.
As I wrote about the Trump election “A common metaphor used and reported on is the idea of a line of people queuing for the American dream. Working class white voters are reported as expressing their discontent that others are now being allowed to skip the queue, that they are stuck in place while ‘line cutters’ move in ahead of them. So their outrage is a product of this unfairness and resulted in a vote for Trump. But let’s look at that line a bit more critically. It’s not a newly formed line, but one that has been shuffling along since the formation of the US. Those towards the front owe their position to white supremacy, it was their reward for denying access to the line to the black population, taking the line off the Native American population and keeping others including Chinese and Latinos at the back. Their outrage is that they have been ‘cheated’ of the reward because suddenly not everyone ahead of them is white, and they know that means those people have somehow got there from their rightful position behind them. And in neoliberal America the line hardly moves at all so there is a sense that perhaps they are being backed up.”
The exit polls in the US and UK elections tell us that the right is old, white, rural and to an extent male. So what are we to make of the 4chan & MRA derived far right that Nagle writes of in Kill All Normies? It’s certainly not an invention of hers, these guys exist, you can see them on Twitter or in the comments section of Youtube & Facebook. But where she is wrong is to see them as people who have been won from the left or who were even considering the left. Misogyny created them, anecdotally their few left converts are all men already known for their misogyny who we can build a better left without.
HATRED OF WOMEN ISN’T A REASONABLE REACTION
The alt-right has a significant online presence because it’s brought together young white men who have a resentment against feminism (and indeed women ) and people of colour. Trans people are also a particular target for their hate. The imagined 16 year olds that choose Milo are the not representative of 16 year olds in general but of the minority open to these resentments. And it’s not so much those imagined 16 year old but their older selves, the minority who never escape the mouldering swamp of misogyny the developing teenage brains often briefly pass through.
The alt-right leadership understand this – they have created a positive feedback loop of conspiracy based theories that not only justify this resentment but paint there audience as the ‘real victims’ who under their leadership will rise up to reclaim their rightful place. This isn’t new, it’s the typical methodology that fascism uses to build a mass base of angry alienated young men willing to use or at least justify violence to restore their ‘proper place’. In the 1920s the message was that Aryans were being threatened down by Jews and Communists. In the 2010s it’s that white men are being held down by Muslims and Social Justice Warriors.
In this manifestation the far right is largely a collection of podcasters and youtube stars who stir up that resentment – they literally make money out of constantly stirring the pot of hate. A illustrative example is Stefan Molyneux’s July 16th tweet asking “Was there such a thing as the friend zone before the existence of the welfare state.” Those 84 characters also illustrate well the way hostility to women is weaponised into hostility to anything even slightly left of centre. These men literally want a return to women being barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, they are not going to be appeased by feminists being gentler with their criticisms. [7]
The alt-right are not ‘caring and sharing’ types alienated by mean feminists but men who have swallowed hook, line and sinker the central outlook of the traditional fascist right, that everyone is out to do as well as they can at anybody else’s expense and in that context you should team up with those like you and then anything goes. Very often the individuals who make up the alt-right are the losers in this game of toxic masculinity, it doesn’t take long reviewing the Youtube podcasts of those making money out of this to realise that this is a modern day equivalent of the ads that used to appear in the back of men’s magazines promising muscle stimulants were the answer to ‘getting the girl’ rather than getting ‘sand kicked in your face’.
In fact some of the alt-right Youtubers including Alex Jones make a lot of their money out of advertising the modern day version of these products. Jones even produced hilarious before and after images of himself that show no real change apart for the fact he is red and sweaty in the after shot. The Golden One, perhaps the strangest Youtube alt-righter, seems to make his entire living from bodybuilding and supplement selling. And there is the particularly strange and obnoxious the alt-right aligned ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ who at the extreme shun all relationships with women.
The traditional fascists are seeking to recruit out of this alt-right pool and get it out onto the streets. They do so by positioning themselves as the real men, the serious fascists as opposed to the online world of cucks and beta males. They tell their online targets they have to dress properly, go to the gym and even put them through weird initiation rituals where they have to take low levels of physical violence to prove themselves worthy. This again is not far removed from old school 1920s fascism with its uniforms, military drilling and street violence. They also present themselves as the ones with intellectual vigor as opposed to the clowning antics of Alex Jones.
Richard Spencer is obviously cultivating an image as well dressed intellectuals, an image that Nagle chooses to boost on page 51 writing of him;
“He held a certain fascination for the media as the full ugliness and horror of the alt-right was exposed after Trump’s election. This was in part because he was surprisingly young, even ‘dapper’, articulate and well dressed for an Internet fascist – obviously a modest compliment, but he was certainly far from the typical ‘neckbeard’ stereotype. … Spencer started out as a scholar of Leo Strauss and his MA thesis was on Adorno and Wagner, but he later dropped out of his Duke University Ph.D. You can still detect in his writing and public speeches that he longs for a more intellectual European style of blood and soil nationalism and he said in an interview that he used to want to be an avant-garde theater director. He speaks with spitting disdain about the vulgarity of the US consumer culture-loving, Big-Mac munching, Bush-voting, pick-up truck owning pro-war Republican style. His writing style comes across as that of a person who might wear surgical gloves when leaving the house.”
Others like neo-Confederate groups compete for recruits by cultivating an image as the ones willing to openly use racist terminology, celebrate slavery etc rather than soft peddling hate in the manner of the Proud Boys ‘western chauvinism’. Overall its most useful to view all these groups and individuals as a complex self-reinforcing network that from its most clowinish elements to the nazi uniform cosplayer extreme all contribute towards trying to rile up angry white men to ‘fight back’.
HOW MANY
Back in August 2017 a Washington Post poll revealed that in the US some 4% of those polled said they strongly supported the alt-right and 3% said it was strongly acceptable to hold white – supremacist or Nazi views. The same number again somewhat supported them. You have to suspect that this figure might have been much higher in the past, at least in relation to white supremacy but unfortunately the poll size was too small to break it down into age groups, locations etc which would have provided such information.
Close to 10% in the survey giving some support to white supremacy especially when the question couples it with neo-fascism is a hell of a lot of people. It’s a product of white supremacy being the ideological bedrock of capitalism in the US, something that a single Black president or many Black mayors and police chiefs does not change. Presuming the survey was limited to over 18s that amount to about 20 million people, a similar number that we find in the exit polls who voted Trump and wanted to deport all undocumented (that was 28 million). The US is very polarised, on the positive side after the defeat of the alt-right at Charlottesville and Trump’s remarks supporting them his popularity plumetted another 4% to 39%[8].
The 200,000 members of the reddit red pill forum or the accumulated Follower count, Likes & Retweets of the YouTube alt-right stars can seem like we are facing a huge movement but those are coming from the pool of 3 billion people on the planet that have somewhat regular internet access. There has never been a shortage of men who appear to hate women, these have often been a fertile recruitment ground for fascism and a negative of the internet is that it has become very easy for these guys to find each other and group up.
Opinion polls and online forums show here is a large pool of potential recruits for fascism. But this is thankfully not yet a mass movement. The attempts by the alt-right and traditional fascists to physically mobilise in the US after the triumph of the Trump elections did not bring many out given the online hordes. From those who were identified at gatherings (and from the posts of the stars) we know that those who did turn out were often travelling very long distances to attend what they saw as ‘showdowns’ with their ‘SJW’ and ‘Antifa’ enemies. Sometimes enough of them travelled to win a brief local victory where the left had done a poor job of mobilizing but more often they were defeated and sometimes sent home bloody. These defeats are what has limited their ability to mobilise and here we reach one of the major problems with Kill All Normies.
Nagles opposition to physical anti-fascism
Nagle ends her book with a very dismissive account of one of these defeats, Milo being physically driven out of Berkeley. It’s worth quoting this at length to illustrate the depth of the problem with the way her study means she has become virtually, in both senses of the word, embedded in the alt-right viewpoint. Her description of what happened at Berkeley is exactly what you would have seen if you watched the alt-right videos and listened to their accounts but paid little or no attention to those of the ’Tumblr left’ who chased them off campus.
She writes
In February 2017, before the spectacular collapse of his career, Milo had planned to give the closing talk of his tour on the campus of UC Berkeley, home of the free-speech movement of the left in 1964. Many have commented on the irony of the Berkeley riots that took place – the historical reversal of the left now censoring the campus to cleanse it of the right – but it is also significant that it was on what was scheduled to be the final night of his tour. It was on this night, at the end of a yearlong tour throughout which the US campus left spectacularly failed to challenge him on the level of ideas, that it chose to riot. Like the now famous Richard Spencer getting punched meme, it felt as though a giddy display of momentary muscle provided a temporary relief from the unfamiliar feeling of relentlessly losing. Video footage quickly emerged on Twitter the night of the riot of a young female Yiannopoulos fan being maced in the face, another young woman being struck on the head with a flagpole and a man lying on the ground unconscious being beaten by several people while a voice off-camera screamed ‘beat his ass!’ The glass walls at the ground floor of the building were smashed, fires were started and Yiannopoulos was evacuated, canceling the talk. On this night the right was on the receiving end of violence, but on another, an anti-Milo protester was shot (p.119).
The shooting Nagle ends with had in fact taken place the previous week when a pacifist protester was trying to defuse an argument that looked to be about to turn physical, In what appears to be a premediated act he was shot and almost killed by a Milo fan.[9].
Anyone familiar with fascist accounts of the aftermath of physical confrontations they lose will recognise in Nagle’s account the ‘women being hit’ storytelling that always appears to distract from defeat. If you have followed alt-right accounts of that night you will recognise other ones, in particular the idea of Berkeley as the ‘home of free speech.’ This is a concept Nagle repeats which doesn’t recognise that the student resistance to management defining who could and could not speak and what they could say was exactly what happened in 2017 as well as the 1960s. Berkley at the end of the 60s was a zone where students had defeated management efforts to restrict their speech but those students had also chased the Reserve Officer Training Core off campus. There was no more time for ‘free speech’ to recruit for the Vietnam war then there should have been for Milo’s attempt to mobilise students to harass trans people.
One of the campus managers from back at the Vietnam War ROTC protest time remembers,
being holed up in campus buildings all night, breathing in loads of tear gas, seeing Sproul Plaza as a war zone with many broken windows in adjoining buildings, experiencing the Wheeler Hall fire and other serious campus damage, having a dean spit upon, and generally being worn out. [10]
To be clear the problem here is not that Nagle is alt-right, that would be a ludicrous claim (see updated opinion on this at end). The problem is that on physical anti-fascism she is a liberal and her view of Berkeley is clearly a view obtained from the alt-right side. Not through being physically present with them but through studying their Youtube and other accounts. You can get a confirmation of this when you read first hand accounts from the side of the anti-fascists like this one that tell a very different story of how things looked that night[11].
This is also the problem of Nagle’s alt-lite division coupled with her free speech absolutism that extends to her opposing disinviting speakers. Milo’s speaking routine was designed around being an ‘only joking’ version of hate speech that targeted what are probably the most marginalised group, trans people. He threatens to sue people who call him a racist, and somewhat bizarrely his fans point to the elements of his routine built around the objectification and sexualisation of black bodies. His impact was clearly to create audiences for the alt-right in general just as much as holocaust denier David Irving attempted in British and Irish universities in the 80s and 90s.
Buzzfeed published a very useful expose of Breitbart that demonstrates in detail the role Milo played in building the ‘alt-right’. It’s worth reading the entire piece but a snippet captures it, Buzzfeed revealed a “previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.” Milo reacted to Buzzfeed with his boilerplate disavowal of Spencer, anti-semitism etc and the rather odd excuse that “during his karaoke performance, his "severe myopia" made it impossible for him to see the Hitler salutes a few feet away.[12]
The ideas of fascism have a rather limited appeal when clearly explained which is why fascists seldom do this and never to a mass audience. Left liberals love the idea of debating fascists to ‘prove them wrong’ but for the fascist such debates are only an exercise in recruitment through reaching the resentful and stoking their fears and hates. Some of them have been at this for decades and as with most other things these are skills and methods you accumulate, they are often capable of running rings around journalists who simply imagine them to be clueless and so have failed to put the work into researching the lies they will tell.
The ‘marketplace of ideas’ doesn’t exist in any sort of absolute sense where conclusions are only reached through the careful weighing up of opposing viewpoints. Intellectuals frequently overestimate the importance of the formal debating chamber in opinion forming and from that make the further error of treating every political performance as it can be reduced to the logic of the arguments that are made. Milo isn’t part of some debate orientated marketplace, he’s a clown whose performance itself is what spreads hate, the words spoken are almost incidental.
In his theatre, Milo plays on people’s fears and prejudices to create an in-group of belonging targeting an out-group of the already marginalised (in the form of trans people). That’s a technique that is as old as far right politics which is designed to bypass rational analysis of the arguments made. All that changes is who is in the out-group: previously it’s been made up of jews, muslims, black people in general, latinx or even Irish catholics. Entering into an argument as to whether trans people or previously jews ‘deserve’ not to be oppressed accepts the logic of fascism in accepting its claim to the right to arbitrate such questions.
Fascists don’t like losing and the alt-right can’t cope
If taken seriously Nagle’s version of events at Berkeley would lead us off entirely in the wrong direction. She tries to present the much milder property destruction and skirmishes at Berkeley that night as counterproductive when in fact it set back Milo and the alt-right considerably. With Milo down other alt-right leaders used the space to turn on him using his comments on pedophilia which had after all been known about for some time. The alt-right are sharks towards their own, at the first hint of blood in the water they tore Milo apart[13].
That night in Berkeley demonstrated that the alt-right were not capable of mobilising large numbers to defend what was then their biggest star. At that appearance and others in the same period first hand accounts, including from their side, made it very clear that alt-right basement dwellers who had turned out and so were exposed to physical confrontation discovered they were not the supermen they had imagined and fled the scene, vowing never to repeat the experience.
Increasingly those who continued to turn up looked like the miltarised traditional fascists we saw defeated in Charlottesville. Physical confrontation denied them the numbers and all their weaponry and formation training, along with the swastikas and ‘Jews will not replace us’ chants, just exposed them for what they are,.
Left wing journalist Laurie Penny made the very questionable decision to physically embed herself with Milo and his crowd in this period. But she produced some very useful writings from the inside, including from that night in Berkeley,[14]
Penny spent that time there with,
“The sort of young men who are very brave behind a computer screen and like to think of themselves as stalwart fighters for the all-American right to say whatever disgusting thing they please, but who are absolutely unequipped to deal with any suggestion of real-world consequences.
She elaborates,
They’re not the flint-eyed skinheads that many anti-fascists are used to fighting. I’m not a brawler, but I’d wager that these kids could be knocked down with a well-aimed stack of explanatory pamphlets, thus resolving decades of debate about whether it’s better to punch or to reason with racists.
She describes how on the 45 minutes drive after fleeing Berkeley most of the “journey passes in horrified silence as everyone listens to Fox News or scans their phones for video feeds of masked protesters tearing up the building we just left. From time to time, somebody says a four-letter word.”
In the context of Nagle’s declared hostility to people calling out errors it’s also illuminating that in the aftermath of Charlottesville Penny has written of the hostile reception her embedding herself with Milo received and concluded the people were essentially correct in giving her grief at the time.
Penny wrote,
Many people argued that in conducting those interviews, I normalized the message of neo-fascism. Staying in the room with that critique has been extraordinarily instructive. It has once and for all taught me that history doesn’t give a damn how well you meant. The important question here is not, I repeat, not whether you are still a good person. Being called a fascist sympathizer when you’re not a fascist sympathizer really sucks. Having your good intentions ignored sucks. But fascism sucks a lot more, so I’m sucking it up, and I suggest you do, too".[15]
I can’t believe they are racist
At the time Kill All Normies was written the limited ability of the alt-right to turn out physical numbers was not yet clear. But as we approached the 2018 anniversary of Trump’s election victory their repeated failures suggests their mobilisation ability is very, very limited. Indeed that may be why they seem to have retreated to infighting and why some of their ‘on the streets’ leadership have given up on the movement, often using the escape of discovering its racist! If the end of 2016 appeared to be a great year for the US far right 2017 spectacularly failed to deliver anything but feuds and at times hilarious public punch ups, check out the Cuck Knight versus neo-confederates for a fine pop corn experience.
The 2018 alt-right ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was attempted and effectively routed resulting in yet more infighting with the Proud Boys claiming to have had nothing to do with it and the announcement by the 3% militia that they’d not be in future align themselves with “white supremacists and Nazis”. Charlottesville was a very significant defeat in what the traditional fascists expected to be a good location for them and a strong mobilising topic, the defence of a racist statue in the south. But their mobilisation failed with perhaps only 500 turning up, and those 500 came from all corners of the US to face defeat at the hands of an overwhelmingly local crowd. Physical anti-fascism worked, although at a significant cost with the murder of local woman Heather Heyer by an alt-right rally attendee from far away Ohio who drove a car at speed into a section of the protest in an ISIS-style attack. The consistent physical disruption of Spencer’s attempted US college tour demoralised him so thoroughly that he took to Youtube to declare Antifa are winning.
Overstating the fascist influence
The alt-right do not have the influence Kill All Normies claims for them. Trump & Brexit are not the product of a resurgent youth orientated right but the opposite – an embittered older generation who fear a world where white supremacy and patriarchy appear under threat and where even gender is now contested with increasing success. Unless Trump actually manages to take us all out with thermonuclear war it is likely that both Trump & Brexit will be viewed as the last gasp of a particular form of white supremacy and misogyny. Remove the 65+ voters and the right electoral victories in the US and UK almost vanish along with Brexit. That said they have and will continue to mobilise a layer of young misogynist and racist white men and at the time of writing the mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand has again demonstrated that even individual these hate filled types can be a threat.
As with all fascists there is a real danger to this as even a couple of dozen of these types when blooded can be very disruptive to local organising. And as the numerous far right terrorist attacks of recent years demonstrate it only takes one to kill and seriously injure. Charlottesville for them was a blooding exercise, as revealed in the Vice documentary when one organiser Christopher Cantwell revealed,
We don’t have the camaraderie we don’t have the trust level that our rivals [on the left] do and that camaraderie and trust is built up through activism and that is one of the tactics that we are adopting.[16]
Far from his hoped for building of trust and camaraderie through winning Cantwell will be forever known as the ‘crying Nazi’ when afterwards as defeat sunk in he took to the internet to blubber about how afraid he now was[17].
In the same Vice video Robert “Azzmador” Ray from the openly neo-nazi Daily Stormer site says,
as you can see we are stepping off the internet in a big way.. We have been spreading our memes, we have been organising on the internet and so now they’re coming out .. at some point we will have enough power that we will clear them from the streets forever.
In that context it was particularly important that they lost the day and that very many of them would face severe consequences in the aftermath. This was visible to all the other alt-right basement dwellers who might otherwise have thought about turning up next time. In Boston the following weekend it appears only 50-100 of the alt-right turned up to face 30-40,000 counter protesters. Some of the organiser’s didn’t even turn up – that is what defeat looks like. It wasn’t just Boston Alt-right protests all over the US were cancelled by the organisers, where they went ahead they were massively outnumbered. Physical confrontation worked.
There is still a threat but this isn’t the 30s
Now is still a time of danger not because the alt-right are winning the youth but because Trump is in office and is doing what the the right wing nationalist parties of the Weimar republic did, repress the left while ignoring and even boosting the far right. The Nazis in Weimar Germany didn’t so much win street battles though superior force but because the police and courts would activity repress the left and jail its fighters, while the Nazis were protected, seldom arrested and almost never convicted. The right wing German nationalist parties thus cleared the way for Hitler taking power.
We are seeing differential policing in the US, some 214 anti-fascists were facing up to 75 years in jail each for the relatively low key protests during the Trump inauguration that saw the media capture an image of a burning overturned rubbish bin. In the end after failing to get convictions in the first trials all the charges were dropped. However there were no such mass arrests of fascists after Charlottesville. And Trump has already been signalling to rank and file cops that they should not be gentle with protesters.
Clearly the traditional fascists from Spencer to David Duke fuel their dreams out of this but to date their attempt to build a mass movement has been a spectacular failure. To be fair it’s not hard to see why, Germany of the 1920s was a country with a powerful left and union movement in a period of revolutionary change. German capitalism was willing to risk future profits to see that left repressed. Google, Amazon and Facebook don’t share that attitude because the left and union movement is unfortunately not a threat. For the radical left becoming a threat to capitalism is a goal, not yet a reality and the threat of fascism in that context would be very different.
SOWING DIVISION
Which brings us back to the most counter productive aspect of Kill All Normies for the left. It has reignited the war within the left between what I call the Nostalgic and Intersectional elements. It undermines the very camaraderie and trust we need to fight fascism. Debate and discussion, which sometimes will be heated, is essential to building an effective left but it needs to be in good faith if it is not going to generate the sort of bitterness that leaves people unable to work together.
Search for the title on Twitter or read the reviews and what you will see is not outraged alt-righters or traditional fascists but people on the left furiously tearing into each other. Indeed the traditional fascists, at least in the form of Richard Spencer, love the book. He wrote,
This is some of the best stuff written on the Alt-Right as a phenomenon that I’ve read. Nagle writes from a leftist perspective, but she puts the Alt-Right in its proper context. She "gets" us much more than any conservative critic. Also, her criticism of the Tumblr and Upworthy Left is quite useful.
This agreement may be why someone thought it would be a smart idea to have Nagle and Spencer meet at the end of the video based on KaN, an appearance the fascists used to make a for a full on Strasserite pitch to anyone on the left attracted to their joint hostitlity to the Intersectional left. That segment is almost a ptich perfect example of the inadequecy of her ‘debate the facists and prove them wrong’ strategy. Ironically it is slightly rescued by Spencer forgetting they have him miced up when he goes into a corner to whisper with his goons about the alternative deplatforming strategy having scored the win that day – the venue kicks them out after pressure from anti-fascists.
I rather suspect Spencers enforsement won’t end up on the jacket of the 3rd edition. And Spencer is not the only major figure of the far-right to endorse the book, Mike Cerenovich included it in a stack of 7 books Tweeting “Read all of these, very important works to understand contemporary culture”
Nagle herself observes of left debate that
Years of online hate campaigns, purges and smear campaigns against others – including and especially dissident or independent-minded leftists – has caused untold damage.
But she does not heed her own words. Throwing fuel on the fire was clearly quite deliberate on Nagle’s part. Indeed the conclusion opens with a call back to one of the other recent major left conflicts, the publication of Mark Fisher’s Vampire Castle piece back in 2013 whose impact, whatever the intentions, was disasterious when it came to deepening divisions.
After complaining earlier in the text about how everyone feels monitored constantly online Nagle opens that section with calling out an admittedly obnoxious tweet sent right after news of Mark Fisher‘s death had circulated some 18 months previously. That tweet read “Just because Mark Fisher is dead, doesn’t make him right about "sour-faced identitarians". If only left misogyny would die with him.”
I was curious if the author of the tweet had ever made further comment and so searched out the original.[18] Given the way Nagle has used it, I was more than a little surprised to see the author had apologised only two hours after sending it saying,
^apologies for offence caused with this tweet. (a) wasn’t aware it was a suicide (b) probably could have said "instead" as opposed to "with"
Later on when someone tweets at her that her response,“..shows a lack of humanity & maturity on your part”, she tweets
.. It’s entirely possible–probable even–that I lack both, but I apologise for any hurt.
And then a little later again, this is all from the same evening,
I recently started taking some new meds and the first thing to go has been the filter, I think :/
Nagle in publishing this then 18 month old tweet does not mention the apologies.
Nagle also claims that the original tweet,
is a fairly typical example of precisely the sour-faced identitarians who undoubtedly drove so many young people to the right during these vicious culture wars (p 117).
This is probably her most straightforward attempt to clearly blame the ‘Tumblr liberals’ for the alt-right but as far as I’ve been able to tell the obnoxious tweet was unique rather than typical. It also got relatively little positive engagement at the time or since, 5 retweets and 16 likes. In the comments no one is agreeing with the tweeter, it’s mostly people telling her to “fuck off” or saying it was “completely inappropriate timing.”
There is also a reply in kind, “the way in which you suck for saying this can not even be expressed at this moment. May you lose a thousand friends.”
I presume Nagle must have read down the comments before rushing to print. It’s a shame she didn’t pay attention to this reply “This is hateful and over a three year old article essentially about a twitter spat ..”
Early on in KaN Nagle wrote of
the de-anonymized social media platforms, where most young people now develop their political ideas for the first time, became a panopticon, in which the many lived in fear of observation from the eagle eye of an offended organizer of public shaming (p.8).
Yet by the end has she not become the ‘eagle eye of an offended organizer of public shaming’? You would also have to wonder how the people who posted the various gender identities Nagle sniggers at earlier in text, feel about her surveillance and implicit public shaming of them.
Behave to others as you’d like them to behave to you
I don’t think I’m being unfair to call what Nagle is doing above nasty and mean spirited. It illustrates another major flaw of the book – whenever Nagle tunes in on her opponents within what she calls identity politics she turns spiteful. Sometimes it’s comically petty as where she formally refers to “Professor Adolph Reed Jr.” with whom she’d agree while ignoring the academic honorifics of plain old “Judith Butler.” The treatment of Judith Butler in the text is odd, as I quoted above she writes,
By the early 2010s, Tumblr had put Butler’s theory into practice and created an entire subcultural language, set of slogans and style to go with it. The most marked preoccupation of Tumblr’s cultural politics has been identity fluidity, typically but not exclusively around gender. It was the subcultural digital expression of the fruition of Judith Butler’s ideas.
Here we might be expecting or even hoping for a ‘battle of ideas’ with Nagle actually taking on Butler’s writing – which to be fair are famously hard to read. Instead we get that mean spirited listicle of some of the funnier genders anonymous Tumblr users have described. Take that Butler! To be honest this is where Nagle approaches the methodology of the alt right, Making a point through sneering at those outside the gender binary is not a good look, particularly as that gender binary is too often enforced by violence. This is her punching down at its worst.
That bell hooks moment
Earlier on Nagle has used a similar methodology with bell hooks although here it is more comical than harmful. In the chapter on transgression which is otherwise one of the better argued essays in the book she writes,
Transgression has been embraced as a virtue within Western social liberalism ever since the 60s, typically applied today as it is in bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress (p.28).
All well and good but ‘Teaching to Transgress; Education as the Practise of Freedom’ is not in fact an instruction manual for nose piercing, mohawk making, BDSM or the joys of a loud music that the older generation will only consider to be noise. As explained in the introduction it’s a collection of essays on radical teaching methods aimed at both students and professors “offering ways to rethink teaching practises and constructive strategies to enhance learning.” It basically seeks to address, in the context of white supremacy, the problem of students who do not want to learn and teachers whom do not want to teach.
The collection was also not published today but 23 years previously, long before Tumblr.
I’d recommend reading a few pages at random to get a sense of the text which concludes that in the classroom,
We have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine way to move beyond boundaries, to transgress, This is education as the practise of freedom[19].
The transgression of black educators and students entering traditionally white spaces can hardly be dismissed by reference to an argument as to why the Marquis de Sade’s transgressions some 200 years earlier cannot be uncritically embraced. It’s very hard to come away with any explanation for this mis-use of the bell hooks text other than in Nagle’s eagerness to get a dig in at bell hooks – a significant figure of the ‘intersectional left – she came across the book title and read no further. In fact it appears that a lot of KaN seems to be the result of google searches and the slight rewriting of wikipedia enteries and even far-right descriptions of themselves, the Plagarise any Nonsense blog is worth checking out for multiple examples of this. I’m less concerned with the plagarism accusation here than the way this results in Nagle launching remarkably ill informed attacks on feminist thinkers and the problem that many of her readers will probably just accept the misinformaton without further consideration.
Some time after publication, no doubt in reaction to reviews, Nagle has sought to row back on the very broad attack she made in the book saying to Vox for instance that “What I criticized wasn’t identity politics in general but a specific version of identity politics that was about performative wokeness, and in particular the reason I didn’t like it was because it was very inclined to censor and it was very inclined to gang up on people. I hate that, and I think it deserves to be criticized.[20]”
But her treatment of both bell hooks and Judith Butler, neither of whom could be accused of ‘performative wokeness’ or being ‘very inclined to gang up on people,’ suggests that it’s not her readers who misunderstood her target as being the intersectional left in general.
Nagle has taken what could have been a useful taxonomy of the alt-right, an area where she has expertise and ruined it by packaging it with often spiteful sectarian attacks on a set of ideas she clearly doesn’t understand fully. Rather than doing any sort of damage to the traditional fascists their main figure is happy to recommend the book but on our side a harmful and destructive fight has been brought back to life. If Nagle had at least bothered to make any argument beyond ‘ha ha look at the funny people on Tumblr’ there would be at least the traditional ‘opening a conversation’ defence. Her actual approach is more akin to opening a sewer and when challenged affecting a wounded innocence and claiming that was not what was intended.
I’d be the last to deny that debate on the left is often problematic. Elsewhere I’ve looked at why online debate is often more damaging to relationships than when people share a physical space[21]. But Nagle’s attempt to ascribe the bad behaviour to those she disagrees with politically, without ever actually discussing the politics reproduces and deepens the problem rather than breaking from it.
It also has to be said that while the online left debates sometimes become unpleasant the old left she looks back to as an alternative sometimes ended up imprisoning and shooting each other, in extreme cases going so far as to kill family members and friends. We are not just talking of this happening in the aftermath of seizing state power as with Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky but even in relatively small scale movements. When the Workers Party split in Ireland in late 1974 several members and ex members going to the new IRSP group were killed, Nagle was one of their advertised speakers at a 1917 anniversary event.
Solidarity of the same & the misogynist horde
As other reviewers have pointed out it’s very noticeable that Nagle gets the point of anti-oppression politics when they affect white women like her. It’s only when it affects people who are not like her that she finds them ridiculous and to be sneered at. Whether those people are trans, suffering from PTSD, invisible disabilities, or even women gamers. Her treatment of these groups as props for the war within the left shows an extraordinary lack of empathy that defines the worst of the book. What could have been a good essay on Gamergate is seriously spoiled by the nasty go she has at one of the main targets of the misogynist horde, game developer Zoe Quinn.
Without getting too far into the details the accusation that mobilised the misogynist horde was that Quinn had written a bad game that had only got good reviews because she had sex with the reviewers. Nagle takes care to tell us she doesn’t play games, indeed feels that “If you’re an adult, I think you should probably be investing your emotional energies elsewhere.” (p21) Given that the cultural influence of the games industry competes with Hollywood – and she does watch films – this is intellectual snobbery. But what follows is a lot worse.
I’m an occasional gamer, enough to know that like a book or film you can’t judge a game by it’s cover, you can only tell if it’s good or bad by trying it. Yet in the context of the misogynist horde Nagle repeatedly refers to “Quinn’s bad game” and “her dreadful game”. The only explanation she offers for this is that Quinn’s game,
even to a non-gamer like me looked like a terrible game featuring many of the fragility and mental illness-fetishizing characteristics of the kind of feminism that has emerged online in recent years. (p21)
In other words she assumes the central claim of the misogynist horde is correct, because a game she has never played, sounds like it might connect to a feminism (i.e. the intersectional left) she doesn’t like. She could after all have just called it Quinn’s game without any judgement of the quality.
This lack of tolerance for those who are not the same as us may work in terms of forming in-groups and out-groups for a conflict but the grounds Nagle forms them around have nothing to offer any constructive socialist project. We live in an incredibly diverse world where a ‘solidarity of the same’ approach is what fascism rather than socialism is built around. The ‘ Quinn’s’ bad game’ story if anything illustrates the need for an Intersectional Left that does not imagine it will be composed of identical components with similar recreational pursuits.
THE NETWORKED REVOLUTION
Nagle uses the book to rubbish any serious discussion of networked activism in favour of a return to more traditional methods from union organisation to party building (though she doesn’t actually discuss these organisational methods positively). Hostility to networked organising is a familiar Nostalgic Left theme that dates back at least as far as the late 90s when Socialist Worker (Ireland) felt the need to publish an article saying the internet was not revolutionary. In that case it was because the leadership were banning members from using the internet to set up their own horizontal communications networks (i.e. an email list) because they wanted all communication to be dependent on the vertical communication system of the party that of course meant the leadership could control what the members heard.
In a hard reading Nagle asserts that the alt-right meme wars prove that networked activism doesn’t work except perhaps for the right. But the evidence we have shows the opposite – the youth unlike their elders have overwhelmingly opted for the ‘open border left’ feared by the British tabloids. It’s the old white crowd that voted for the right. With Brexit and the UK election in particular it seems reasonable to say that traditional media influence and smears continued to work with those over 40 but social media meant the smears were successfully counteracted with the under 40s. That’s why the definitive feature of the UK election was the age gap among voters rather than any other factor, including class. In the interests of fairness it should be noted here that Kill All Normies had probably gone to the printers by the time of the UK election and that although her mistaken assumptions should have been visible from the Brexit and even the Trump result it is the June election that really blows them out of the water.
The final theme of Kill All Normies I want to return to is the very dismissal of social media as an organising tool. At the kindest we could view this as combating the worst excesses of some people involved in Occupy. I remember one night at Occupy Dame Street when an obviously stoned young man made a long contribution with the repeated punchline that ‘the answer is on the internet’. There is a whole section of the book where it feels that Nagle is determined to prove that the internet is ‘not the answer.’
She outlines her argument in the following section,
Just a few years ago the left-cyberutopians claimed that ‘the disgust had become a network’ and that establishment old media could no longer control politics, that the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user-generated social media. This network has indeed arrived, but it has helped to take the right, not the left, to power. Those on the left who fetishized the spontaneous leaderless Internet-centric network, declaring all other forms of doing politics old hat, failed to realize that the leaderless form actually told us little about the philosophical, moral or conceptual content of the movements involved.(p.27)
She had touched on this in the introduction, again via Castells writing,
Writers like Manuel Castells and numerous commentators in the Wired magazine milieu told us of the coming of a networked society, in which old hierarchical models of business and culture would be replaced by the wisdom of crowds, the swarm, the hive mind, citizen journalism and user-generated content. They got their wish, but it’s not quite the utopian vision they were hoping for.(p27)
Is what she writes here representative or even accurate though? Was it the case that any number of people on the left felt the technologies of the networked society simply made all other politics irrelevant? Those familiar with Castells’ writings say her summary is very much not reflective of what he writes and given the way we saw her reference bell hooks I’m inclined to take that as likely. This is an example of how Nagle sabotages her own work by showing a poor understanding of her sources – the amount of misleading material in the sections I have a strong understanding of leaves me not giving her the benefit of the doubt when I see someone with apparent knowledge claim she is misleading elsewhere.
A more useful read
I’ve a keen interest in networked organising from personal experience of using the internet for political organising before the web had even come into being and meeting up with others who were doing likewise in 1996 and 1997. Right before reading Kill All Normies I had finished Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci. [22]
Probably because of this Nagle’s writing on online politics and in particular the idea that the right are winning that battle, and is winning through online cleverness, feel quite bizarre. Nagle’s focus seems extraordinarily narrow, she spends paragraphs on the Harambe meme[23] but then summarises what is probably the most massive of the internet influenced revolts as follows;
The Egyptian revolution led to something worse – the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamists ran riot in the streets and stories of rapes in the very public square that had shortly before held so much hope came to light. Soon the military dictatorship swept back into power. (p11)
There is a lot of very good critical discussion of the use of social media in the Arab Spring but what’s above isn’t even a reasonable summary. Tufekci does an excellent job of exploring Tahrir and other revolts, the way social media was used, the impact it actually had and how governments adjusted strategies in the aftermath from outright censorship to distraction and other forms of attention denial. It’s a study in what worked, what sort of worked, what didn’t work and how each of those happened – it’s that study we need rather than sweeping incorrect generalisations about who is winning.
Cash still matters
In terms of her discussion of online organising Kill All Normies leads us over the hills and far away in a direction that clarifies nothing. In terms of her argument that the far right is winning online I’d suggest instead the following. The left got an early lead in the online world when no one was paying it much attention. This meant that the production and circulation of content was an unpaid task carried out by a huge number of activists, very often on time stolen from their boss. We quietly built some of the most sophisticated collective publishing tools in a period before social media emerged in the later half of the first decade of the 21st century. The Indymedia network being an excellent example of both the strength and subsequent weaknesses of this period.
As the internet became a profit making enterprise, we lost ground. This was probably inevitable. Then the networked revolts of 2011, which mostly used commercial social media, shook the compliance of those in power, and woke up the sort of millionaires and billionaires who previously poured money into newspapers, TV and local radio in order to further their agenda.
From this point of view, it’s not the meme wars that delivered influence outside the pre-existing alt-right circles but the 10 million in funding Breitbert received from the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer in 2011. As with other astroturf initiatives the alt-right tries to pretend its funding is popular. This is a claim Nagle repeats. She writes, “Canadian conservative project The Rebel Media produced high production value video shows for YouTube.” She then ascribes funding to “a crowdfunding campaign [which] raised around $100,000.” (p45)
It’s rather clear though that the set up and running costs of the Rebel operation are many times that figure. No one seems to know where the money is actually coming from although speculation is that it may be the fossil fuel industry in Canada. It was founded by multi-millionaire Ezra Levant. Gavin McInnes who was also involved had a net worth estimated at 5 million. To be fair Nagle doesn’t entirely ignore the importance of elite funders, in relation to another Youtuber she points out that
Cernovich admitted that his wife earned millions of dollars in stocks and that he received ‘seven figures’ of her money in the divorce settlement, which explains his ability to build an independent media career (p.50).
Here in Ireland we got a taste of what those sort of resources mean when a pro-choice protest was targeted by an alt-right crew who were linked to Rebel Media. They did an ‘ambush video’ where they threw complex questions at march participants and then made a video using only the segments where people, particularly teenagers, stumbled in their replies. Apart from the costs of sending at least two people from London to Dublin for the day it was clear in the aftermath that a huge amount of money was spent boosting the video on Facebook, probably more than 10,000 euro. As a result it achieved an enormous audience through spending cash to target, for instance, people following the National Ploughing Championship page.[24]
If you were outside Ireland you might see the huge viewing figure of the anti-choice video and mistake that as indicating a large well organised alt-right movement. Instead it was produced by two posh sounding twerps with a camera and tons of cash working with our homegrown and dwindling anti-choice movement that the following year took a hell of a pounding in the referendum that overturned their abortion ban by 2:1. It’s worth noting in passing that despite considerable alt-right intervention in the Repeal referendum Nagle appears not to have played any role in the campaign to get it passed, the bulk of that work being done by the ‘intersectional feminists’ she monsters throughout KaN. The youth voted about 4:1 for Repeal.
A comparative analysis of left v right online activism that doesn’t base itself on the asymmetrical nature of such resource allocation is going to give misleading answers that will damage rather than enhance future work. There might be the odd fund kid who doesn’t need a wage but the left does not have multi-millonaire or billionaire backers. The people who produce content are very often doing so in their off hours from a minimum wage job at Starbucks or the equivalent. The far right has billionaires and can afford to give fairly fresh & junior faces 30k a year positions to start at[25].
In finalising this review I’m aware that people read texts and view films in very different ways. It’s very noticeable that centrists and those on the left who don’t like anti-oppression politics have tended to be enthusiastic about Kill All Normies. Unfortunately people with limited knowledge of the left have read it and taken its extraordinary one sided descriptions of the left at face value, a process helped because it repeats the centre and right’s talking points about an out-of-control left engaged in ‘witch hunts’ etc. Not surprisingly people on the intersectional left have been hostile to the book.
It has some limited value when you take all this into account. Few people will want to delve into the alt-right in any detail and it does sketch out who some of them are and where some of them come from. But something considerable better needs to be written without the accumulated self-sabotage and intersectional left baiting of this edition. I say this edition because I can imagine a new edition where Nagal provides something useful by either dropping the sniping at enemies on the left or at least properly researching and arguing her case. As it is, any use of Kill All Normies in the meantime has to be a very critical one that highlights these flaws for readers who out of relative ignorance might take them at face value.
A very much more practical text for antifascists is Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook. It’s worth quoting his description of what’s driving the far-right the framing of which strongly contrasts with Nagles. Bray writes “Both Trump and the alt-right have managed to tap into a widespread white conservative anxiety about the rapid demise of “traditional” white America—an anxiety about the fact that they are losing the demographic “battle” and will no longer constitute a majority of the population in a generation, that they are losing the culture war as gay marriage has become legal, that the notion of white privilege is gaining currency, that the black struggle is ascendant, that “rape culture” is being targeted, and transgender identity and rights are increasingly legitimated. Moreover, liberal elitism and neo-liberalism have hardened reactionary sentiments among many working-class whites.[26]”
Or – again to contrast – how he writes about Milo; “Yiannopoulos had become perhaps the biggest celebrity of the so-called “alt-right” by using his identity as a gay immigrant to mitigate his racism, misogyny (“feminism is a mean, vindictive, spiteful, nasty, man-hating philosophy”), Islamophobia (“Muslims rape everyone”), transphobia (he “makes no apologies for protecting women and children from men who are confused about their sexual identity”), and promotion of rape culture (one of his Breitbart headlines read: “ ‘Slut’s Remorse’ is Why Rape Suspects Should be Anonymized”)" [27]
Trump & Brexit are not the product of a resurgent youth orientated right but the opposite – an embittered older generation who fear a world where white supremacy and patriarchy appear under threat and where even the strict gender binary is now contested with increasing success. Unless Trump actually manages to take us all out with thermonuclear war it should be that both Trump & Brexit will be viewed as the last gasp of a particular form of white supremacy and misogyny. Remove the 65+ voters and the right electoral victories in the US and UK vanish along with Brexit.
The danger is that the far-right have and will continue to mobilise a layer of young misogynist and racist white men. These are not some sort of ‘moral majority’ reacting to the excesses of ‘Tumblr liberalism’ but the same reactionary crew that have always stood against the left, standing in defence of their first pick of the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. History tells us that when it suits capitalism such groups can be brought to state power. Recent events have shown they can be defeated and through that defeat a better world is possible.
Postscript; I wrote most of the the above text shortly after KaN appeared in 2017 partially as a method for working through the problems I saw with it. I briefly returned to the draft in the aftermath of the failed if murderous fascist rally at Charlottesville with a view to publishing but time didn’t allow me to complete it. It was the mass murder at two mosques in New Zealand in March 2019 that compelled me to return once more and publish.
In that interval it became clear that the hard readings of KaN are the more accurate one as Nagle’s growing hostility to the Intersection left moved her towards the alt-lite, in particualr through supporting racist migration controls. At a student meeting she shared the platform with Carl Benjamin of UKIP, advising him that “There has to be some way of addressing the obvious economic exploitation and injustice and kind of undermining the moral high ground that open borders people have without actually attacking the migrants themselves, it just seems to me the right is not ever able to do that..they always end up dehumanising”.[28]
Benjamin a Vlogger made famous through Gamergate likes to style himself as a centerist as do many on the ‘alt-light’ but he was banned from Patreon after getting in a row with some on the alt-right and saying “You’re acting like a bunch of n******, just so you know. You act like white n******. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right [29]”
She topped that with an article published in a US right wing magazine attacking the ‘Open Borders left’ before repeating the same arguments in a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlston. [30] I resisted the temptation to make the draft text any harsher in that respect, sufficent to add that I don’t think she has any remaining claim to be on the left and those left groups who promoted her should examine how they got sucked in by her sectarianism towards their left opponents.
It’s sometimes said that arguments against feminism end up demonstrating the need for feminism, Nagle has certainly demonstrated the need for an Intersectional rather than Nostalgic approach to left organising.
WORDS: Andrew Flood (follow Andrew on Twitter)
[1] Harambe was the gorilla shot in May 2016 in Cincinnati Zoo who subsequently, at least according to the BBC as well as Nagle “launched a thousand memes” http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-38383126
[2] The range of conspiracy theories that insisted Obama wasn’t really born in the US
[3] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alt-right-analysis-20161121-story.html
[4] I’m familiar with these numbers as I used the exit polls to produce a detailed analysis of who actually voted for Trump and Clinton and their reasons for doing so. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnflood/trump-myth-progressive-misled-white-working-class
[5] http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnflood/youth-revolt-led-corbyn-victory
[6] As you will probably expect I also wrote a detailed analysis of the Brexit vote, see http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnflood/making-sense-brexit-reaction-racist-vote
[7] Women hating is not new to this generation of fascism but goes right back to its origins, see https://timeline.com/male-fantasies-fascism-study-efe0a2773d1f
[8] http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/23/trump-charlottesville-polls-241917
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/25/milo-yiannopoulos-event-shooting-couple-charged-seattle
[10] http://news.berkeley.edu/2014/09/30/peter-van-houten-fsm/
[11] https://itsgoingdown.org/beating-milo-how-berkeley-defeated-alt-rights-biggest-troll/
[12] https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism
[13]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/21/milo-yiannopoulos-resigns-breitbart-pedophilia-comments
[14] https://psmag.com/news/on-the-milo-bus-with-the-lost-boys-of-americas-new-right
[15] https://thebaffler.com/war-of-nerves/a-letter-to-my-liberal-friends
[16] https://youtu.be/P54sP0Nlngg
[17] https://youtu.be/CD4reaHE83Q?t=123
[18] I choose not to link to it here but google the text and as long as it hasn’t been deleted you’ll find it
[19]https://academictrap.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/bell-hooks-teaching-to-transgress.pdf
[20] https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/7/21/15998246/alt-right-donald-trump-angela-nagle-kill-all-normies-interview
[21] http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnflood/online-conflict-organising-facebook
[22] https://www.twitterandteargas.org
[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Harambe
[24] Incidentally after the defeat at Charlottesville one of the Rebel co-founders quit saying he “had family that fought the Nazis, I never want to be in the same room as one”. In the weeks since the Rebel has torn itself apart with many figures including all those mentioned in this text leaving. https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/life/rebel-media-co-founder-quits-over-companys -perceived-white-supremacist-ties/article35988984/ This was the signal for a string of firings and splits, including a number of personalised attack videos on the multi-millionaire owner.
[25] https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.ydBG0NJyA#.lneLbgMvl
[26] Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook by Mark Bray, p111
[27] Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook by Mark Bray, p
[28] https://youtu.be/pw33NKXQSlc
[29] https://www.businessinsider.com/patreon-crowdfunding-platform-defends-itself-amid-boycott-2018-12?r=US&IR=T
[30] https://youtu.be/X9gPDPXTnIY