There is prior content pertaining to Nagle found within articles presented by our resident curator, AD, on this (and related) topic(s); I pass along snippets from her book as it bears repetition here.
Excerpts from Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies.
While the alt-right regard these and the Guardian, BBC and CNN as the media of ‘the left’, espousing ‘Cultural Marxism’, it became obvious when the possibility of any kind of economically ‘left’ political force emerged that liberal media sources were often the most vicious and oppositional. Liberal feminist journalist Joan Walsh called Bernie Sanders’s supporters ‘Berniebot keyboard warriors’, while Salon was one of the main propagators of the Berniebro meme with headlines like, ‘Bernie Bros out of control: Explosion of misogynist rage…’ and, ‘Just like a Bernie Bro, Sanders bullies Clinton…’ Meanwhile Vice, a magazine that made its brand on the most degenerate combination of vacuous hipster aesthetics and pornified transgression, published things like ‘How to spot a brocialist’. Before the elections The Guardian newspaper ran a piece with the comically cultish wording: ‘Time to hail Hillary Clinton – and face down the testosterone left’. Despite overwhelming evidence of Bernie’s popularity among young women, the myth was relentlessly peddled until it passed into the realm of Internet truth. The old liberal establishment then weighed in; for example, when feminist Gloria Steinem claimed that these numerous female Bernie fans were merely trying to impress their male peers. In the UK, an almost identical phenomenon occurred when the British liberal media establishment, particularly The Guardian, joined forces with their more youthful online offspring in smearing Corbyn and his supporters as being motivated primarily by this nefarious tide of brocialism, despite his squeaky-clean track record on women’s issues in the UK.
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[D]espite the constant accusations of ‘Cultural Marxism’ by the Trumpian online right, the countercultural aesthetics of anti-conformism in the US were later cultivated by the US government as part of a culture war against communism. Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a covert cultural soft-power initiative, it was the Cold War anti-communist liberals who used non-conformism, self-expression and individualism to rival the collectivist, conformist, productivist and heavily restricted Soviet Union, which still revered the uniformed pre-60s anti-individualist forms of culture like army choirs, marching bands, orchestras and ballet. By the time Buchanan gave his speech in 1992, the Cold War was over and the economic program of the Western democratic left had suffered a catastrophic defeat during the Reagan and Thatcher years. However, the socially and morally permissive, transgressive, nonconformist cultural project within the US New Left had by then emerged triumphant and, as it turned out, coexisted quite comfortably with the scorched-earth free-market economics of the right – a fusion that reached its fullest expression in the Blair/Clinton era, when a non-conformist cultural gesture could still cover a multitude of economic sins.
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Although one could trace various threads to a multitude of different online and offline points of origin, Tumblr was one of the most important platforms for the emergence of a whole political and aesthetic sensibility, developing its own vocabulary and style – very much the reverse mirror image of rightist 4chan in this way. It was here that what Walter Benn Michaels criticized as a liberal preference for ‘recognition of diversity over economic inequality’ reached its most absurd apotheosis with a politics based on the minutia and gradations of rapidly proliferating identities, and the emotional injuries of systemic cultural prejudices. Symbolic representative diversity and recognition became its goals, as it admonished transgressors for ‘erasing my identity’ and urged white/straight/male/cis people to ‘listen’ and ‘believe’. If the generation of college-going millennials that followed the rise of this online culture could be described, as they are today by the conservative press in particular, as ‘generation snowflake’, Tumblr was their vanguard.
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Professor Adolph Reed Jr. has often said liberals don’t believe in actual politics anymore, just ‘bearing witness to suffering’. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics, as it is enacted in spaces like Tumblr. It is also common in communities with a strong focus on gender fluidity to openly identify themselves as having disabilities and mental health issues that make them, by their own admission, extremely vulnerable and suffering. Some of the disabilities they describe can often be either psychological in origin or are unrecognized by modern medicine.
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[A]mid all the vulnerability and self-humbling, members of these subcultures often behaved with extraordinary viciousness and aggression, like their anonymous Pepe-posting counterparts, behind the safety of the keyboard. Jonathan Haidt’s famous Atlantic essay in response to the mainstreaming of this sensibility on college campuses in the years that followed ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ brought a discussion of ‘generation snowflake’ into mainstream discourse. But long before that obscure Internet spaces, subcultures and identifications fostered a culture of fragility and victimhood mixed with a vicious culture of group attacks, group shaming, and attempts to destroy the reputations and lives of others within their political milieu, later dubbed ‘cry-bullying’.
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It seems to me that politics, on the contrary, has been hollowed out too much into little other than a purely cultural politics over the last half-century, which the ugly spectacle of the Trump-Hillary race represented the logical conclusion of – politics as culture war. It was just that until Trump and the emergence of the new online right, the liberals had been resoundingly winning. In this style of politics, what a political leader actually does often seems entirely secondary to what cultural politics they profess to have. In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as they’re cool with gay marriage, while on the right, enacting policies that devastate families and stable communities was cheered on at any cost as long as it dealt a satisfying blow to the trade unions, as we saw during the Reagan and Thatcher years. For both Yiannopoulos and his online liberal enemies in the culture wars, essentially two rival wings of contemporary identity politics, to be said to have purely cultural politics would not be considered particularly pejorative.
(hat tip to runesoup for the excerpts)
