by Angela Nagle
Zero Books
06/30/2017, paperback
SKU: 9781785355431
Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression.
Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.
Reviews:
"Amidst the chaos of our times, it is a relief to have a brilliant and fearless critic like Angela Nagle to turn to. Unwilling to stomach the liberal shibboleths that fail to adequately explain the emergence and significance of right-wing subculture, she's the only one willing to descend into the grimiest of Internet grottos and give us the benefit of her incisive and cool-headed analysis." --Amber A'Lee Frost of Chapo Trap House
"Angela Nagle is one of the few writers anywhere who has consistently refused to hold a double standard for virulent racism and misogyny even when it came in edgy countercultural packaging. Kill All Normies is a brilliant expose of the new faces of online nihilism and fascism, which can no longer be explained away as doing it "for the lulz." --David Golumbia, author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
"This short head-butt of a book taught me more about recent political events in a single rich evening of reading than I've learned in this entire last and very unpleasant year of obsessively monitoring cable TV, and confirmed for me something I've been feeling for a while now, namely that social media is a toxin we are gleefully and cluelessly injecting into ourselves, even as we ask, "Why are we getting so mean and stupid?" --George Saunders, author, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize "Guardian Review Books of the Year 2017