Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
First Posted Aug 2017
Once I started Black Pill, I felt pretty sure I was going to refer back to Kill All Normies. But then I didn’t finish Black Pill so I didn’t remember to repost this. But then I saw this referenced in the april 13th 2026 New Yorker and I was like, “Dang, let’s ride the hype.”
Adjacent regrets: skipping out on writing up It Came From Something Awful. That was my major pandemic concession—yes, I certainly had time to write about things, but I didn’t want to. In my memory that book feels like a capstone to this whole genre of subcultural reporting.
I, like most millennial people who like to write things on the internet, was a big SA guy (not a poster). It was as they say, “Modern times, baby.” I knew most of Kill already. As time continues to march forward, I have less and less personal, or relevant, ties to online subcultures: do I know what’s going on with the pump.fun livestreams? No. (even this feels dated). Neither do the people writing about the internet now—they are my cohort. But in 20 years, a bunch of current teens will write about their online nonsense—or trauma, or whatever it ends up being—and I will, hopefully, read about it.
Good luck, current teens!
book by Angela Nagle
Sisyphean is a term with which I play fast and loose. The more I think about it, the more I recognize futility as the aspect of Sisyphus’ punishment that I tend to ignore. He offended the gods with hubristic craftiness and deceitfulness, so a Groundhog-Day-like frustrating repetitiousness wouldn’t fit the crime, you know? Really, it is the knowledge that there is no hope and nothing he can do to change rolling that damn boulder that is the crux of it; to steal the conceit of the last book I reviewed, the gods have destroyed the cruel optimism that a bad situation might eventually get better if one were to simply work harder or be luckier. Without folding in the surety of guaranteed futility, applying Sisphyean as an adjective swings wide of the mark.
It is with this in mind that I begin to suspect most the books I have chosen lately have been some sort of Sisypheomasochistic punishment for my apathy regarding the nihilism infecting my particular social strata—the global précarité—of late-modern capitalism. These books keep saying the same damn things in different ways: the world has been broken open and plundered; community bonds have been snapped; our culture has been sold off for a chance at a mass-market luxury that is always one step out of reach.
The pattern continues with Kill All Normies, which began for me as a Baffler article torn loose from a book that wasn’t available at the library. The book was still pretty new so I bought it with the intent to be, for once, on the cutting edge of the cultural commentariat. Cruel Optimism had other plans; it took me $2.25 worth of late fees [note from 2024: remember late fees?] longer than expected to finish, and by that time, there was already a follow-up article by the author regarding Charlottesville:
At the risk of putting my own work out of date, I believe that chapter of the alt-right story that my book was about—the anonymous online trolling culture, the constant evasions and ironic styles, the hodge-podge of disparate groups united by the “anti-PC” crusade—is over and a new one has begun.
I still read the book, though, and the thesis didn’t turn out to be out of date. At least, not in the way the author posited. The first theory from the book, that the alt-right was transgressive for the sake of transgression and any percolation of white nationalism or supremacy would be overwhelmed by shitposting and general fuckery would seem woefully naïve once true Nazism reared its head, can be summed up by ex-frontman Milo Yiannopoulos:
As for genuine non-ironic white supremacists on the alt-right, he insisted: ‘There’s just not very many of them, noone really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.’
This “just for the lulz” position was nuked from orbit by C-Ville, which was what the second article optimistically posited: surely the now-exposed Nazis and those that cynically platformed them for an easy ride to fame with rhetoric unmoored from any true belief and bereft of any real merit would be smashed down by the horrified—and embarrassed—masses.
But smashing down isn’t what happened, in part, at least, because of the incredibly milquetoast denunciation and eventual recant of said denunciation by the acting President of the United States of white supremacist nationalism. A plurality of white Americans are continuing to do nothing because our ne plus ultra seats at the twilight struggle aren’t threatened quite yet, so why rock the boat if it means we might get wet? And establishment liberals still have the perfect cover to not really get upset about a bunch of literal Nazis marching with guns; transgression was the bleeding heart of 1960s progressive and identity-based politics, so it’s just, like, what they believe, man:
It was the utterly empty and fraudulent ideas of countercultural transgression that created the void into which anything can now flow as long as it is contemptuous of mainstream values and tastes. This is what allowed a culture that has now been exposed in all its horror to be romanticized by progressives as a counter-hegemonic force. The truth I think it reveals is that both rightist chan culture and ultra-PC academic culture understood the countercultural dog whistle of disdain for anything mainstream.
It was good for me, I think, to read a book that didn’t pull punches on what I consider my position along the political spectrum—very left. Political identity has become yet another personal brand to manage, so any critique of it can feel like critique of self; but Kill All Normies is correct in its assertion that in the rush to avoid being conformist, mainstream culture has created a sort of void into which anything goes as long as it is prefaced by the statement that it is “true for me.” And that “true for me” ethos seems right and just and good when it supports the things you support—gender-neutral bathrooms, gay marriage, open access to and non-performative hang-wringing about abortion—but really, really bad when it is employed to support absolutely proven-to-be-false claims of genetics-based intelligence [note from 2026: what could this have been??] or extrajudicial detention and deportation of undocumented human beings. Anyway, counter-hegemonic transgression is a lot like the office of the president: if it is your guy, it doesn’t seem to matter that the checks and balances designed to stop the consolidation of power (like, say, thousands of drone strikes without the approval of Congress) in a single person have been routinely undermined.
It is not repetition that makes reading books about modern culture feel Sisyphean, but the inescapable pall of cultural futility. Each boulder is different but they all still end up rolling back down the hill. Kill All Normies is unique among the current hot take business by making a critique against the tactic that has brought left-leaning politics so much success:
The socially and morally permissive, transgressive, nonconformist cultural project within the US New Left had emerged triumphant and, as it turned out, coexisted quite comfortably with the scorched-earth free-market economics of the right, when a non-conformist cultural gesture could still cover a multitude of economic sins.
This isn’t horseshoe theory nonsense that the left and right are interchangeable, or both-sides-are-dumb-for-believing-in-something South Park centrism, but critical thought about events that, even if you don’t recognize gamergate or Rebecca Watson or 4chan, serve as a nice reminder that there was a whole lot of shit happening online before we got to the hellscape that is 2017. It paints with a broad brush but functions as an excellent primer.