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Over the last few years, a cottage industry has emerged attempting to explain the ascendancy of a new style of far-right politics characterized by a countercultural sensibility and trafficking heavily in memefied versions of the sort of overt racism and sexism long thought to have been banished from the civilized world an intellectual and political movement that has come to be known as the alt-right. While a number of entries into this genre have attempted to uncover the alt-rights deep ideological roots, Angela Nagles newly published book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right makes the alt-right into something both more recent and familiar a spawn of the internet, as well as a bastard child of the counterculture.

As her subtitle suggests, Nagles book places the alt-right within a broader context of the online culture wars of the 2000s and 2010s, from which a number of contemporary political currents emerged. Although the alt-right draws somewhat eclectically on European reactionary philosophy and the work of older white nationalists like Jared Taylor, it is, Nagle argues, in many ways a thorough product of the 21st century. Much of the movements sensibility, characterized by a taste for anonymous and often abusive pranksterism wrapped in dense layers of self-protective irony, originated in 4chans anarchic /pol/ and /b/ forums, while many of its characteristic ideas about gender intense anti-feminism; a disillusioned view of sex; and a preoccupation with male sexual hierarchies were ported over from Manosphere hangouts such as r/TheRedPill and Return of Kings, themselves offshoots of mid-2000s pick-up-artist culture. Nagle also distinguishes between the alt-right proper open white-nationalists like Richard Spencer as well as mostly anonymous 4chan and Twitter users and the alt-light, a rogues gallery of trolls and media manipulators such as Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos, who act as the movements bridge to the mainstream while attempting, usually unconvincingly, to play down its hard edges.

Of course, to say that the alt-right is a recent creation is not to say it is sui generis. In terms of explicit intellectual influences, Nagle points to Nietzsche, the Italian fascist Julius Evola, and French New Right theorist Alain de Benoist, among others. But her book is a welcome rejoinder to the common-enough notion that the alt-right has merely repackaged old or discredited ideas about race and masculinity in a newer, edgier form. There is some of that, especially in the revival of intellectual anti-Semitism, yet Nagle is also sensitive to the fact that not only are the alt-rights outward cultural signifiers of recent origin, so too are many of the particular social pathologies that have contributed to its rise, including social isolation, millennials perpetually extended adolescence, the Darwinian dating world fostered by Tinder, and a general lack of meaning in life. (Nagle doesnt make this explicit, but it is no surprise that many of the alt-rights favorite thinkers tend to denigrate materialism and advocate a return to the transcendent and spiritual.)

Nagles origin story here will be familiar to people who have followed the alt-right Rosie Gray, David Auerbach, and others have long pinpointed its debt to chan and Reddit culture. Yet more than most writers on this issue, Nagles account of the alt-right puts a heavy emphasis on the extent to which it emerged alongside, and defined itself in opposition to, an analogous left-wing subculture that over the last five years came to exert a powerful influence in online political discourse. This subculture, which Nagle calls Tumblr liberalism but whose members are better known by the pejorative term social justice warriors, developed on Tumblr, social media, and in certain sections of the academy before spilling out into the mainstream during the late Obama years, thanks in part to signal boosts from websites like Salon, Upworthy, and BuzzFeed. Nagles book is as much a polemic against the unforced errors committed by this brand of left politics as it is an assault on the new right, which, for the unconverted at any rate, tends to discredit itself.

Tumblr liberalism, as Nagle calls it, had a number of strange outward markers, including hyperconstructionist gender politics, a fixation on pop culture, and a penchant for the public call-out. It became most famous, however, for something with the evocative name of crybullying, or, in Nagles words, 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. Nagle gives a number of examples of crybullying in action, many of which will be familiar to those who spend a lot of time reading about politics online. Perhaps the most indicative example, although it isnt mentioned by Nagle, was the cringeworthy Jacobinghazi scandal, in which Megan Erickson, a female editor of the socialist magazine Jacobin, was hounded for being a rape apologist (an accusation that made it into Newsweek) after defending one of her authors from the baseless charge of having mocked another writers rape threats.

Like the alt-right, this brand of leftism was primarily a creature of the Internet and social media, with its most vocal supporters and critics concentrated among the young, the college-educated, and those working in the media and the academy a small but influential population that exerts a heavy influence on the shape of online discourse. Originally, this worked to make certain pathological tendencies seem more widespread than they actually were sectarian fights that a generation ago would have been fought out in the offices of small magazines were now out in the open for all to see. But once the pattern of destructive behavior had been established, the alt-right, realizing the propaganda value of such left-wing hysteria, did what it could to amplify it, as seen with Milo Yiannopouloss Dangerous Faggot campus-speaking tour and the riots it provoked in Berkeley.

Nagle, of course, is herself on the political left, and Kill All Normies reflects her frustrations with intra-left political disputes of the last five years, which have tended to pit identitarians against a more explicitly socialist left. At one level, Nagle suggests that there was a symbiosis between the social-justice left and the alt-right: The lefts tendency to focus on racial and sexual identity while explicitly demonizing privileged groups notably straight white men may have pushed members of these groups into the arms of the alt-right, while the stronger the alt-right became, the more it confirmed the social-justice left in the belief that its critics, even those on the left, were either Nazis or Nazis useful idiots. But aside from such direct symbiosis, Nagle suspects rightly in my view that the real damage of the Tumblrization of left-politics may have been to spur a brain drain from the left, as people fled from a political brand increasingly associated with hysteria, witch-hunting, and intolerance of dissent. She writes in her conclusion that the lefts embarrassing and toxic online politics have made it a laughing stock for a whole new generation a dynamic typified by the recent student protests at Evergreen State, which, to outsiders at least, look totally insane.

Nagles criticisms of the left are harsh and will no doubt anger some, but they will also find grateful readers, especially in segments of the left where frustration with the Tumblr liberals has been bubbling under the surface for some time now. Yet aside from her account of the online culture wars, there is another, deeper line of argument running through Kill All Normies that is both more radical and more conservative than most critics seem to have noticed. In addition to tracing the alt-rights conservative and reactionary predecessors, Nagle makes an intriguing connection between its nihilistic, transgressive sensibility and the antinomian creed of aestheticized revolt characteristic of the modernist avant-garde and, more importantly, the New Left counterculture that arose in the 1960s, and which still exerts a heavy influence on contemporary thought.

Building on Joy Press and Simon Reynoldss work in The Sex Revolts, Nagle traces this sensibility from its roots in the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche to its explosion in the youth movements of the 1960s, noting how the basic form of revolt transgression against the dominant morality for its own sake stays the same even as the nominally left or right political content changes depending on the morality it rebels against. When the dominant morality was that of the white Christian America of the 1950s or even the moral majority of the 1970s, transgression assumed a progressive air. Yet in the last two decades or so, the moral code preached by the commanding heights of American culture has been a sort of neutered Baby Boomer liberalism, one that champions multicultural tolerance, a soft, health-conscious hedonism, and the entrepreneurial spirit a marriage between 60s social progressivism and the conservative economic turn of the 70s and 80s. Many of the values of the alt-right, including its ethno-nationalism, slacker shitposting ethic, and antipathy to the sexual revolution are best understood as negations of this progressive status quo.

For Nagle, this is not a coincidence but rather the logical culmination of elevating transgressive revolt to the status of a value in itself. (Not coincidentally, given the alt-rights misogyny, moral conformity is often gendered as feminine a sort of overbearing mother against which real men must rebel.) Channeling Christopher Lasch, she writes that for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one.

This gets to another unity that Nagle sees between the descendants of the New Left and the alt-right, the latter coming to look, in her telling, like a heretical sect of the former. Amoral transgression, after all, is always an expression of a certain form of elitism; an aversion to the rules and tastes of the herd that, as Nagle argued in a 2016 essay for The Baffler, bridges our partisan divide. Right-wing message-board subcultures, with their hatred of normies and basic bitches, are radicalizing albeit with a much different political valence a contempt for normality inherited from the champions of Piss Christ.

Kill All Normies is an important book, albeit one whose conclusions are likely to prove unflattering and potentially unpopular. In it, the alt-right emerges as something not quite as alien as many would like to think. Rather, it is a bastardized version of the cultural currents that most of the books likely readers myself included participate in and valorize. And although there may be no easy way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into stabbings in Portland, riots in Berkeley, and Trump in the White House the books indictment of our elitist culture wars does point toward an inevitable, if slightly horrifying conclusion: Perhaps the normies arent so bad after all.

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The domino effect is hard to watch.

Then I dont need a jacket.

Itll hit stores next year.

The FCC and Congress have a lot of reading to do.

Conclusion? No collusion.

Angela Nagles Kill All Normies is among the best examinations of the origins of the alt-right.

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The Unflattering Familiarity of the Alt-Right in Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies - New York Magazine

Speaking to Salman Rushdie at a recent PEN World Festival event in New York, controversial Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan asked how the celebrated author continued to write after facing life-or-death persecution (a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini) over his 1988 work The Satanic Verses.

Although Rabinyan has never had a price on her head, the Israeli government censored her novel All the Rivers, a Palestinian-Israeli love story, when it was published in Hebrew in 2014, making her a punching bag for right-wing zealots in the country.

"You have to learn how to think, 'Fuck them,'" Rushdie told her.

With her book just released in English (Penguin/Random House), she's trying to learn to care less and to put the past behind her. But it's hard to shake the shock of being at the center of one of Israel's biggest arts scandals, a symbol of the internecine culture wars between right and left.

"It was so delicate [that there seemed to be] no chance that it would be controversial," she thought while she wrote the novel, in part a tribute to Palestinian artist Hasan Hourani, who drowned in 2003 sometime after their love affair in New York City. "It's such a sweet memory of love. Sweetened by the forbidden color we were both very young," Rabinyan tells Rolling Stone of the romance.

But the Israeli government didn't see it that way. Benjamin Netyanyahu's conservative regime has increasingly taken to meddle in non-state matters; its cultural minister, Miri Regev, has said she wants to overthrow the liberal, secular European elite, denying public funding to any projects that don't support her Zionist values.

Upon the book's release, Rabinyan woke up one morning to find herself on the cover of every newspaper in her country. "The education system does not need to promote values that are against the values of the country," Education Minister Naftali Bennett said of her decision to remove the book from the country's compulsory high school reading list in order "to preserve the identity and heritage of the students. Intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threaten individual identity."

International media camped out on her doorstep in Tel Aviv. Rabinyan got spat on at her local minimart. Literati like David Grossman, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua threw their support behind her, fearful of the fate of the arts.

Book sales skyrocketed.

It all overwhelmed her. Rabinyan, now 44, found early fame when she published her first novel, Persian Brides, at 22 in 1995. She had no idea that All the Rivers would cause such a stir.

And to the American reader, it might be similarly perplexing. This Romeo and Juliet tale opens in post-9/11 Manhattan, with a chance meeting between two Middle Easterners: 29-year-old Israeli Liat and Hilmi, a Palestinian painter two years her junior. The two bond over being expats, hating the brutal winter, missing their families and the sweet smell of jasmine back home. While their past and backgrounds color almost all their interactions, this is not a political novel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That's why the censure took Rabinyan by surprise. "[It wasn't] provocative, or trying to inflame conservative thought," she says, pointing out that Liat never really considers a long-term relationship with Hilmi because of her own deep-rooted prejudices. In fact, when the book first came out, Rabinyan got flak from the left because they thought it went too easy on Israelis. Only months later, when the Education Ministry banned it (the government denies the term, only admitting they removed it from the curriculum) did Rabinyan begin to understand their problem.

"Why the hostility?" she wonders now. "The same reason witches were hunted in medieval times. They were practicing magic. Literature is our magic. Our potion is identification, this ability to step out of your own skin and your own realities to ... to sink into an identity that is foreign to you, to wear the gaze of the other." Her book's crime, she muses, is that it presented Palestinians with empathy. "In Israel today, to prove your patriotism, you need to carry only one perspective. Otherwise it's considered disloyal."

Rabinyan says what happened to her should serve as a warning in the U.S.. "Israel has never had been so tribal, so fundamentalist, so chauvinist, so isolated, so self-righteous. This is the spirit of our times walls and barriers and buffers and obsessing about your national identity being preserved, the fear of letting in outside influences; I can see it happening in America," she says.

But the author also has trenchant advice for Americans struggling to cope in the Trump's era where, on her current book tour, she sees how our own culture wars are tearing us apart, just like in her homeland."First, take a deep breath," she suggests. "Acknowledge there's going to be some time of alienation, that the people who govern, who decide your future and the next generation's don't reflect any of your common values, what you consider to be American." She counsels patience and community not devastation. "[That's] a privilege you cannot indulge in or you will be defeated."

She continues, "We have to engage with the other side, the one that you're so hostile to, and is so annoying to you, the obstacle to everything you aspire [to]."

Now, she adds, it's more important than ever for artists to continue to create.

"This is the only thing that literature can do: it makes us humanistic creatures," she says. "People know this intuitively, they know that empathy is the cure."

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Banned Israeli Author Warns Americans: It Could Happen Here - RollingStone.com

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Bolshoi Ballet Swept Up in Russia's Cultural Debate Wall Street Journal (subscription) MOSCOWIt was supposed to be the hottest ticket of Moscow's theater season: A ballet based on the life of legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Instead, critics say it has become a casualty of Russia's culture wars. Days before a scheduled Tuesday premiere ... and more »

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Bolshoi Ballet Swept Up in Russia's Cultural Debate - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Liberals have won enough big battles in Americas culture wars in recent years most notably the growing support for same-sex marriage that they may have persuaded themselves that their views were universal and their victories would continue. But as two new Supreme Court decisions relating to religion made clear, conservative forces are far from down and out. Last Monday, the high court used a unanimous unsigned opinion to announce it would take up the constitutionality of President Trumps proposed temporary ban on incoming travelers from six mostly Muslim nations. In so doing, justices overruled several federal trial and appellate courts and allowed the ban to take effect. Liberals who say its irrational for Americans to worry about domestic Islamist terrorism havent gotten far in the court of public opinion one poll showed one-third of Democrats are for Trumps travel ban and now theyve been rebuffed by the highest actual court as well. In the second decision, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the state of Missouri could not exclude a Lutheran religious school from receiving a grant from a government program that reimburses the cost of rubberizing the surface of playgrounds to make them safer. In writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it was odious to exclude a religious organization from public benefits available to other groups. But in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor depicted the decision as a profound break with American legal tradition by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church. In another decision, the court confirmed it would hear a case involving a Christian bakery owner who declined to make a cake for a gay couple indicating at least some sympathy for the argument that religious freedom may extend to business owners decisions on whom to serve. How will the court rule? Thats unclear. Whats clearer is what impact Trumps Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch could have. If the 15 cases in which he has ruled are any indication, the Fivethirtyeight website found that Gorsuch may settle to the right of the conservative lion he replaced, Antonin Scalia. In each of these cases, Fivethirtyeight noted, Gorsuch has sided with the courts most conservative member, Justice Clarence Thomas. Gorsuchs selection may also be driving the swirling rumors that the courts swing vote libertarianconservative Justice Anthony Kennedy may soon retire. If Kennedy is confident his replacement would be someone he finds as impressive as Gorsuch, his former clerk, that might make retiring an easier decision. If that happened, the court could swing substantially to the right. If Kennedy retires, CNN wrote, Donald Trumps legacy is set. Time will tell if last weeks opinions are as farreaching as they seem. But theres no disputing the decisions reflect a view of the world much closer to one shared by millions of Trump voters.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

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Culture-War Victories In Supreme Court - The Daily Record (registration)

I recently re-watched the classic movie Chariots of Fire. Scottish missionary-to-be Eric Liddell is chosen to run in the 1924 summer Olympics. When he discovered that he must run a qualifying heat on Sunday, he refused. His religious belief was that running on Sunday would violate the commandment to honor the Sabbath. Even in 1924, Liddells decision and his beliefs were met with disbelief, criticism and confusion. Whats the big deal about running a race on Sunday? How quaint to have such an old-fashioned religious restriction.

Many readers will remember that it was not so many years ago that going to a movie on Sunday was forbidden to the faithful. Stores closed on Sunday. Professional sports teams played on Sundays, but most good folks would have been horrified at the thought of kids having organized sporting events on a Sunday. How quaint those days were. Now we have Walmart and Kroger and CVS and countless other stores so routinely open on Sunday that we barely remember a time when it was not so. Tournaments and traveling sports teams for kids also routinely schedule events on Sunday. Many still go to a worship service, but otherwise Sunday is just another day.

I was raised in a church where the accepted belief was that dancing was a sin. (I still have bungling feet if I attempt to dance because of my teenage taboo). When we went to church camp in the summer, boys and girls could not swim at the same time because mixed bathing was a sin. Given the two-piece suits and the amount of skin displayed at pools and beaches, I think I can safely assume that even the most conservative believers have accepted the culture and abandoned the war and the old ideas I was taught about faithfulness and the swimming pool.

At a far more destructive level, a culture war that too many believers fought and lost is that of slavery and racism. The history of slavery is a terrible stain on our national and spiritual soul. Yet in its day there was widespread justification of slavery based on random texts distorted from the Bible. Sermons were preached about the curse of Ham and white superiority was defended as being Gods order of creation. The KKK used a cross, the most central symbol of Christian faith, to make a fiery statement of hatred and intimidation. Though black churches were in the forefront of civil rights activism, white churches were all too often in opposition or guiltily silent. Today only the most radical racists would openly promote slavery, but we still struggle with racism. We have far to go indeed to make a reality of the song Jesus loves all the children of the world.

I write, not to complain about the way Sundays are spent, nor to bemoan swim practices or attire. I write recognizing both the progress made and the great distance yet to go regarding racism in our culture. I write, not to air the dirty laundry of the faithful, nor to make fun of quaint beliefs. I gladly celebrate the positive cultural changes that have come about because people of faith have worked to make a better world.

I write because so many of my evangelical brothers and sisters have enlisted as soldiers in the culture wars. My belief is that culture warriors with short memories have a history of fighting battles in the name of God that have far more to do with defending tradition than defending the faith.

As nearly as I can tell, the culture wars of today swirl largely around the issues of abortion, gay rights, and the role of religion in public life. In fighting the wars, conservative religion and conservative political theory have become inseparable allies. People of faith may well draw conclusions from their reading of the scriptures that they find consistent with their political stance, but these are conclusions and interpretations. Others of good faith and of no faith at all may come to different conclusions. As much as warriors would like the issues to be simple, they are not simple. As much as the warriors may see themselves as taking a faith-based stand, their fierceness is too often an invitation to an extreme posture. In the posture of extremism, they risk the trap Jesus recognized when he warned against trying to remove the speck in anothers eye when one has a 2 x 4 in ones own eye.

Frank Stagg was my New Testament seminary professor. His stated belief was that there is so much of the Bible we understand very clearly and do nothing about that we have no business wasting time arguing about the things we dont understand. What I believe to be lost in the culture wars are Biblical teachings that are absolutely clear. Teachings about compassion, Gods love for all people, humility, love your neighbor as yourself; faith/hope/love these are the heart of Jesus teachings. They are lost when fear, anger, prejudice and self-righteousness rage in the form of culture warriors. People of faith must live out that faith in a culture that is rapidly changing but they must constantly seek the wisdom to know whether they are living their faith or merely following their culture.

The Rev. Gary Batchelor is an ordained Baptist minister and active church member. He is retired after a nearly 40-year local ministry as a hospital chaplain. His particular interest lies in issues of faith and culture.

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GUEST COLUMN: A truce for the culture wars? - Northwest Georgia News