On Kill All Normies

In this short piece, Angela Nagle pulls no punches when talking about Millennial politics. Although she dedicates one chapter to discussing the Left, the vast majority of this book is about the Right, although not necessarily the alt-Right. As articulated in the title, this work is about the continuing culture wars as they’ve moved to the internet. The people she references are a who’s who of the Millennial Right, although not all figures are given the same treatment. Milo Yiannopolous is perhaps the most frequently referenced figure, where others (Vox Day, Roosh V, Gavin McInnes, Elliott Rodgers, Mike Cernovich, etc.) are given briefer mentions.

It must be mentioned that this is a deeply American-centric book. This is unsurprising, as the four concepts mentioned in the title are dominated by Americans, but it causes Nagle to miss the larger conversation that the Millennial Right is a part of. Most significantly, Nagle fails to discuss the rise of Identitarianism in Europe at all. This is baffling, given the amount of attention that the Millennial Right pays attention to current events in Europe. The 2015-16 New Year’s Eve Sexual Assaults in Cologne, grooming gangs in Bradford, the post-Arab Spring refugee crisis, and Parisian “no-go zones” have all been enormous rallying points for the Millennial Right. Her failure to mention Russian nationalism is another elephant in the room. This brings me to the next point.

In my opinion, Angela Nagle does not quite get the Millennial Right. Although she alludes to it on a number of occasions, the most important rallying point for Millennials Rightists is over the perceived degeneration of Western Civilization. To many of them, Western society has already passed the “tipping point” where conservative Europeans and Euro-Americans become outnumbered by Leftists and racial/ethnic/religious minorities. In response, some of the most important advocacy is around population issues. While Nagle discusses the “manosphere” rather heavily, she misses the larger picture. She is right that many in the manosphere are opposed to feminism because they feel threatened by independent women, but a great deal of the Millennial Right’s anti-feminism emerges out of their fear of being unable to procreate. Today, marriage and child-bearing ages have been pushed back and couples have fewer children. For the Millennial Right, this is an existential threat because they perceive immigrants—particularly those from the Global South—as being stupid, lazy, and dirty. Much of their rhetoric circulates around paranoia that the West is becoming the Third World (willfully ignoring, of course, that the “Third World” does not exist as a unified space in any meaningful sense). As those with any kernel of common sense understand, the premises for this conclusion are absolute nonsense, as is the conclusion itself. Yet, recognizing the importance of population and demography is fundamental to understanding the alt-Right and the Millennial Right more broadly, but Nagle seems to miss this.

However, her understanding of Millennial-Right tactics is sound. Nagle is absolutely right in arguing that the unrepentant culture of subversion on the Right is a product of the counterculture movement and has little in common with the culture warriors of the 90s. She also recognizes that the development of the Millennial Right comes out of a disillusionment with neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and even paleo-conservatism. Instead, the Millennial Right has more in common with the fascist movements of the interwar years than other post-war American political groups. Between its unabashed nationalism, populism, and desire for rebirth, many elements of the Millennial Right are thoroughly fascist. Yet, other right-liberal groups like Turning Point USA are also part of the Millennial Right, but these groups seem to be more of a meme among the subcultures that Nagle describes.

Another weakness is her failure to examine women on the Millennial Right. She talks to some extent about Camilla Paglia (who certainly does not fit this designation) and Ann Coulter (who is not a Millennial but in some ways resembles them), but the only significant woman of the Millennial Right that she mentions is Lauren Southern, who is given less than a paragraph. What is it that draws women like Lauren Southern, Sydney Watson, Lana Lokteff, Nina Kouprianova, etc. to the Millennial Right? How are they so influential? These are important questions that Nagle ignores entirely, instead depicting the Millennial Right as a uniquely male phenomenon (it is certainly dominated by men, but it surely is not exclusively male).

I do think that Nagle understands the identitarian left and I appreciate that she is not afraid to tackle this group, so I won’t speak much on this at all. Her list of “genders” from a Tumblr page is a bit overkill, and she cites Wikipedia a bit on this, but she’s much more familiar with the Left, given her writing for Jacobin. I especially enjoyed her apologetics on Mark Fisher.

All this being said, the book felt rushed and did not quite meet my expectations. It is worth looking at for those completely uninitiated to Millennial politics and the culture-wars that shape them, but it is by no means exhaustive.