AFTER CONSERVATISM, SADISTS AND LOST BOYS. A review of Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right:
Sex and power are inseparable for both this online left and online right in a strange codependency. For the male-dominated rightist subcultures—especially and explicitly in what is called the “manosphere”—the idea of, desire for, and act of sex becomes the primary currency of power and status.
Meanwhile, as Nagle explains, in feminized spaces like Tumblr and the contemporary education system an economy of victimization has been created through intersectional theory. Here, limitless self-defined gender identities (e.g. “Omnigay – Genderfluid, with one’s attraction to other genders changing with one’s gender, so that the individual is always attracted to the same gender) allow bourgeois white kids, who would not normally have currency to spend in such a market, to compete with minorities and the poor through marginalized sexuality.
Nagle observes that contemporary reactionaries are driven to using the trolling tactics of online life by Tumblr-liberalism’s victim fetish. For those of this alt-right who claim a modicum of conservatism, trolling is a paradoxical attempt to protect the interior of the Overton Window by smashing its frame. And for all trolls it is a gleeful display of the “if you are going to cry I will give you something to cry about” mindset. Comparative disadvantage, safespaces, trolls, harassment, antifa, and the rest work together to create a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Read the whole thing – Nagle has written a very timely book, and perhaps in the rush to get it into print, not very well edited, according to Micah Meadowcroft of the Washington Free Beacon.
Back when he was writing for the original, earlier, funnier Saturday Night Live, which, arguably, was the spearhead for the far left’s march through institutions such as NBC, and television in general’s radical change in tone and content, former National Lampoon co-creator Michael O’Donoghue was fond of quoting his hero William S. Burroughs’ catch phrase that “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” which neatly foreshadows the rise of postmodernism in academia.
As Kurt Schlichter is fond of reminding them, the left’s not going to enjoy living under the rules they created.
Earlier: THE KIDS ARE ALT-RIGHT: Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies Explores Alt-Right’s Roots & Rise.