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Angela Nagle seems fearless. Who else would dive deep into the Alt-Rights swamp of Pepe the Frog memes, conspiracy theories, and anonymous depravity unified by a hatred of PC culture, feminism, and multiculturalism, and a love for Donald Trump? Her new book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, documented this section of the internet at a time when most on the left dared not lookwhen just mentioning 4chan or Gamergate seemed like an open invitation for a slew of misogynistic and racist hate mail.

Yet after Trumps election, every mainstream news source suddenly had to get an interview with those involved in the new edgy, nihilistic youth subculture dubbed the Alt-Right, a deviation from the right wings conventional National Review bow ties and Evangelical Christian moralizers. Whether covering former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos campus speaking tours or framing white nationalist Richard Spencer as a surprisingly dapper fascist (as if Nazi leaders werent from the suit-wearing elite), the liberal media class came off looking decidedly unprepared to combat the truly horrifying, utterly contradictory ideas this new wave of Alt-Right/Alt-Light espoused.

Kill All Normies provides much-needed context for the violent rise of a fringe internet subculture of mens rights activists and gamers into the public sphere, and it does so without undeservedly praising the liberal left. Instead, the book argues that the materially empty slacktivism and virtue signaling of liberals helped inflame these reactionary politics. She begins with the election of Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the re-emergence of cyber-utopian visions on the left. An intense fervor of optimism surrounded new technology and social medias leaderless revolutions that would make the world more democratic and better off. But what followed were cycles of momentary outrage, fizzling passions, and mockery as seen in internet campaigns like Kony 2012 and #JusticeForHarambe. The same 4chan poised to lead the anonymous hacktivist tide did wind up making cultural waves, but they came from the far right.

Nothing typifies the culture wars more than late Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbarts statement that [p]olitics is downstream from culture. Though the phrase was popularized by those on the far right, Nagle comes to attach it to the liberal Tumblr view of politics. In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as theyre 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, she writes. Nagle counters the false dichotomy of the culture wars, and Trump has so far disproven Breitbarts thesis. Material policy comes before culture. The millions of Americans primed to lose their healthcare so some hemophiliac old-money Republican trolls can get a tax cut make Sean Spicer getting called fat by a white nationalist ghoul like Steve Bannon seem pretty trivial.

While Kill All Normies may be a critique of liberal involvement in the culture wars, it is by no means purely cynical. Rather, its a call to organizenot just to #resist Trump, but to dismantle the culture and structures that allowed him to rise in the first place. For the left to move forward in a meaningful way, it must shed the faux pragmatism of centrist-liberal narratives like America Is Already Great. Nagle posits that the only way out for the left is to refocus energy onto improving the material conditions imposed by capitalism on working people. That might take the form of granting all people access to healthcare and education, ending the mass incarceration of Black and brown people in the United States, or divesting from imperial proxy-wars in the Middle East. Nagles call is a weighty oneshe asks readers to look beyond the individual actors that the culture wars assign blame to and instead toward the structures built to enable violence. Its a difficult turn, but its one we must take. After all, the Alt-Right cannot be the other option.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle (Zero Books)

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Slouching Toward the Beltway in Kill All Normies - The Portland Mercury

The United States Congress is trying hard to defund Planned Parenthood, once and for all. For a period of one year, the proposed American Health Care Act would prohibit federal funds from going to non-profit organizations that provide family-planning services, including abortions, and get more than $350 million in reimbursements under Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the poor, the elderly, children, pregnant women, and people with disabilities. When the Congressional Budget Office evaluated this clause of the bill, it identified only one organization that would be affected: Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates and clinics.

If this bill goes through, it would represent an existential threat for Planned Parenthood. The organization would be less able to serve poor women who are covered by state Medicaid programs, and it would likely have to close clinics or reduce its services because of the loss of funding. The main motivation behind this provisionand others like it that have come up at the state levelis opposition to abortion. This has lead some, including Ivanka Trump, to wonder why Planned Parenthood doesnt just spin off its abortion services into a separate organization.

Cecile Richards, the organizations president, will have no such thing. The minute we begin to edge back from that is the minute that theyve won, she said during an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Monday. Despite the renewed push in Washington to stop the organization from getting government funding, Richards believes Planned Parenthood can win the culture wars and make abortion widely acceptable in America. Weve got to quit apologizing or hiding, she said.

Technically, the federal government already prohibits funding for most abortion services. Under the so-called Hyde Amendment, first passed in 1976, organizations like Planned Parenthood cant get reimbursed by Medicaid for performing elective abortions. But pro-life advocates often argue that Hyde doesnt go far enough. Since Planned Parenthood can get public money for some of the other services it provides, taxpayer dollars still effectively go to fund abortions, they say.

This characterization is completely inaccurate, Richards said. Other health-care organizations, including many hospitals, provide abortions, she argued, and they, too, get reimbursed under Medicaid for their other services. Somehow, Planned Parenthood is being held to a completely different standard, she said.

Richards believes the political discourse around abortion has become toxic in recent years. There was a time when the Republican Party embraced individual liberties, she said. In fact, many of our Planned Parenthood affiliates were founded by Republicans. While more Republicans used to consider themselves pro-choice, she said, their ranks have been significantly been reducedRichards name-checked Maine Senator Susan Collins and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski as the only two left in the Senate.

Weve got to pull the curtains back and be open and honest about this procedure.

Even in the face of so much opposition, Richards isnt willing to have Planned Parenthood separate abortion from the rest of its health-care servicesquite the opposite. She believes Planned Parenthood can and will win the culture wars to end the stigma of abortion.

Its more important than ever that we stand loud and proud for the ability of any womanregardless of her income, her geography, her immigration status, her sexuality, her sexual orientationto access the full range of reproductive health care, Richards said. Weve got to pull the curtains back and be open and honest about this procedure that one in three women will have at some point in their lifetime, and their right to make that decision.

Richards cited the way pop-culture depictions of abortion have changed in recent years. Ill shout out Teen Vogue and Cosmo and Glamourwomens magazines that are putting abortion stories into their magazines. Thats never happened before, she said. Or abortion will show up on television: Shonda Rhimes, who recently joined Planned Parenthoods board, featured abortion in an episode of Scandal, dealt with not in hysterical terms, as Richards put it.

Richards repeatedly claimed that the vast majority of people in this country believe that abortion should be safe and legal, and thats even more true today than its ever been. The available polling does not necessarily back up this assertion. As of 2016, about 57 percent of American said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Centera level that has been roughly consistent over the past two decades, and slightly lower than what polls on this issue found in 1995.

Gallup found that half of Americans said abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances in 2016, and that 46 percent of Americans identify as pro-life. The numbers also dont differ radically by generation: According to Pew, between 37 and 42 percent of all age groups said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases in 2016.

Ill fight until the end of my days for every woman to make that decision themselves.

Richards sees the recent legislative efforts to end funding for abortion as the first battle in a long war. A cautionary tale: These folks arent just against Planned Parenthood, she said. Theyre against birth-control access. ... Anyone who thinks that if we didnt provide abortion services, somehow, they would quit this attack on womenIm sorry. Its just the beginning.

Her answer is to commit to abortion: to stop hiding, de-stigmatize it, and most of all, keep performing the procedure. Having been pregnant myself, my children are the joy of my life, she said. But that was my decision to make. And Ill fight until the end of my days for every woman to make that decision themselves.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the people most likely to be affected by the AHCAs one-year ban on reimbursement for family-planning services have low incomes and live in areas without a lot of health-care options. About 15 percent of this population would lose access to reproductive-health care, the CBO projected. Despite Richardss confidence, a clear majority of the House has voted to defund Planned Parenthood. If the Senate follows its lead, the organization will struggle to survive.

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Planned Parenthood Still Believes It Can Win the Culture Wars - The Atlantic

As the crusade to classify more and more points of view as hate speech marches apaceincluding the view that it is wrong to exclude individuals because of the color of their skin First Amendment supporters are resorting to a familiar rhetorical defense: The solution to bad speech is more speech.

The position appears commonsensical on both philosophical and practical grounds. John Stuart Mill, the classical defender of free speech, argued that the best way to understand your own position is to understand the intricacies of your opponents.

This mutual intellectual engagement not only benefits individuals by refining their own thinking, the process of give and take also benefits everyone by enabling the best ideas to float to the top, producing authentic moral, political, and economic progress over time.

This embrace of the fray has taken the colloquial form the marketplace of ideas. It evokes an energetic scene in which soap-box-perched defenders of diverse viewpoints compete for the loyalty of discerning listeners based on the strength of their arguments alone. It is a form of old-school inclusion: no idea is denied entry prima facie because the marketplace has faith in the virtue of civic and cultural patience, recognizing that ideas that may be considered inconceivable today may end up being celebrated tomorrowand vice versa.

Of course some of the barkers in the square are selling ideological snake oil, peddling viewpoints that should end up in the dust bin of history. But the reason the public can know when its being sold a bill of goods is because it can critically weigh the seductive, curly moustached claims against the positions of their soberer competitors. There may not be a winner every time in the exchange, but the vision assures us that, in the long arc of history, that capital-T Truth will always emerge as victor.

Whether the West has ever fully lived up to this ideal, it certainly looks quaint nowadays, if not dangerously nave. Whatever once existed of a shared space for good-faith ideological engagement has now been carved into territorial plots, each encircled with hyper-vigilant guardians of purity ready to prevent any potential heresies. The shared pursuit of a common truth, premised on an implicit social contract that recognizes the possibility that they might be right and I might be wrong from time to time, appears to have been abandoned, leaving even toleration itself as an intolerable option.

One of the epistemological and cultural transformations that has enabled this devolution takes the form of the claim that arguments cannot be evaluated independently of the person making them. The moral and political question is no longer What is being said? but rather, Who is saying it?

Ad hominem assessments of a positionthat is, either condemning or praising a viewpoint based upon the identity of the speaker rather than the soundness of the argumentused to be considered a logical fallacy. Now character deification or assassination, which becomes alarmingly less metaphorical by the day, determines both the victor and the spoils. Rallies engage in hero worship. Protesters in equally religious acts of demonization. And all of us get swept towards an ever-greater vulgar sophistry, one that has a major political party launching rhetorical attacks on the back of the F-bomb while its target gleefully troll-tweets like a teenager.

The upshot? Eighth graders14-year-oldshave been weaponized.

As the skirmishes blunder closer to total war, perhaps we can hope that a silent majority between the battle lines will rise up and demand a return to a Millian principle of free civil discourse as a way back to sanity. It is an encouraging thought. But it is also a credulous one.

The problem with the culture wars isnt that we arent talking to each other enough. Its that we are not talking to each other at all. In short, the greatest casualty of the relentless ideological tit-for-tat of the past decade has been the very grammar of moral argumentation itself, that which makes debate possible.

For a marketplace of ideas to function both as means of supplying diverse viewpoints and as a space that enables consumers to make educated decisions among them, there must be some set of shared rules and conviction that make the market itself possible. Indeed, it is these very rules that allow for the concept of comparative value at all: if we do not have a shared pricing structure, then all ideas are equally worthless and brand-loyalty can only be determined by arbitrarily grabbing whatever beliefs advance our interests.

What might some of these basic rules look like? Let me suggest a few.

A shared commitment to the search for truth as truth. Every vendor and consumer in the marketplace should recognize that what they are ultimately after is the truth; even those who come to the conclusion that there is no universal truth have, as any introductory philosophy course will highlight, embraced a belief they believe to be universally true. It is impossible to debate any point of view that refuses to acknowledge that it is a truth claim.

A shared commitment to demonstrating how your beliefs can and should be universalized. Merely asserting a position, without explaining how and why others could possibly assent to it, makes the position impossible to evaluate. For example, claiming that a belief, by definition, can only pertain to an individual or a community (e.g., only a man can understand this) is to admit, up front, that those outside the group have no reason to assent to anything you say.

A shared commitment to coherence. Saying, for example, truth is always perspectival or judging others is always wrong then proceeding to lament that someone is evil and must be resisted signals to others that the foundation of your beliefs lies in some form of emotivismi.e., I believe/feel it; therefore it is true, independent of any other logical consideration. Emotivist positions, especially those that are unapologetically incoherent, also cannot be evaluated or debated.

A shared commitment to methodological transparency and consistency. If you wear a shirt that says Dude, Do You Even Science? and cite Bill Nye as one of your intellectual heroes while also saying things like all human beings have an equal voice and should be respected or abortion is morally acceptable based on your scientific beliefs, you are engaged in methodological inconsistency, and it is likely that you are also embracing some form of emotivism. Science can certainly be a tool in moral reasoning, but it cannot, by itself, generate moral norms. This kind of methodological incoherence also prevents a position from being evaluated or debated.

A shared commitment to live according to your own beliefs and their implications. A sine qua non of any moral position is that those who espouse it both can and are willing to live according to its precepts. If, for example, you believe that all politicians who engage in sexually inappropriate behavior should be deemed unfit for office, then you should call for the ouster of everyone who engages in such behaviornot only those from opposing political parties. Debating someone who wants to profess one ideal and live according to another makes it hard to pinpoint what exactly they think and why they think it, which makes the evaluation of the position exceedingly difficult.

A shared commitment to factual accuracy and to recognizing the limitations of facts as a basis for moral reasoning. If you choose to live by fact, you should also be willing to die by the fact, no matter what narrative you want to advance. Likewise, you should recognize that facts, including polls, can certainly tell us empirically what is the case, but they can never tell us what should be the case. This means that non-empirical arguments, including religious arguments, must be part of the debate. The marketplace cannot function without them.

A shared commitment to listen carefully to each position, an openness to being wrong, and a rejection of ad hominen attacks. It pointless to enter a debate if the base starting point for all those involved in it is: There is no way you are right, and no way I am wrong. A marketplace implies that allegiances can change. Absent this possibility, the exchange of ideas is a purely academic exercise with no moral or civic value.

While these rules are not self-evident, they are necessary for any marketplace of ideas to exist and function. If we cant agree on the pursuit of truth as truth, universalization, coherence, consistency, and a commitment to abide by our own principles and listen to each other as the necessary buy ins to create and enter the market, its not clear a) how anyone could engage in debate if there are no fixed rules to what counts as an argument, and b) how anyone could possibly make a rationally defensible choice among the ideas in the marketplace.

The problem, however, is that we live during a reign of epistemological paradigms and political platforms that deliberately reject these foundational principles. Whatever other consequences that entails, it ultimately renders the claim the best solution to bad speech is more speech as completely meaningless. It doesnt matter how long or how much we talk if there is no shared basis for what constitutes rational speech. If this trend continues unchecked, it will eventually kill what remains of the marketplace. And when civil means of exchange collapse, its only natural for people to start fighting with weapons rather than words.

Matthew Petrusek is an assistant professor of theological ethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and the founder of Wisefaith Ministries.

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How To Rescue The Marketplace Of Ideas From The Culture Wars Before It's Too Late - The Federalist

What if you were faced with a challenge to your faith by the full weight of politics, culture, and popular opinion? What if your entire livelihood came down to one choice between right and wrong? This is whats happening to my friend Jack Phillips, a baker. He is happiest when he has flour on his face and a wedding cake to decorate.

For years I was in a mens Bible Study with him. He is quiet, simple and completely without guile. We never knew that he would one day be at the forefront of the culture wars.

Yesterday the Supreme Court decided to take up his case.

Jack and his decades-old business, Masterpiece Cakeshop, are under tremendous fire. If you dont knowthe story, Jack was approached four years ago to make a cake for a gay couple who were wed in Massachusetts but had come home to Colorado. Jack said no. He politely told them it was against his belief, as a Christian, and he couldnt make the cake.

The State of Colorado Attorney Generals office filed a formal complaint. Even though the state didnt legally recognize the marriage (at the time), they are coming down on Jack for not catering to it. He was fined and his employees were forced to undergo reeducation training.

The question is simple. Should a private business owner be able to live out his faith and not violate his core principles, even when they go against popular culture? In America we used to be able to be different, to be protected.

It should be noted that Jack has also turned away cakes requested by those who want explicit language, violent images, and even Halloween themes. So he is an equal opportunity advocate for righteous living.

If Jack is forced to make gay cakes, would we also expand this logic to other businesses? Would we make a Muslim Halal butcher sell pork chops? Would we make a Jewish butcher sell bacon? Would we force Indian vegetarian restaurants to sell hamburgers?

And one other issue that screams out to me. Some are demanding respect and acceptance. But what about respect and acceptance for Jack Phillips and his strongly held beliefs?

Do we now force Quakers to take up arms and join the military? Should we force Jehovahs Witnesses to take blood? Should we take the hijabs away from Muslim women? If nothing else, our country was founded on the ability to live out your beliefs.

This is not Jack persecuting homosexuals. He would sell them anything, including a cake. He just wouldnt decorate it with those words. This is society persecuting Jack for his faith.

As David French writes in National Review,creative professionals should never be required to lend their unique talents to express any form of message they dislike. Dont make black lawyers oppose civil rights, dontmake liberal fashion designersdesign clothes for conservative politicians, anddont require racists to design cakes for interracial couples. Some people use liberty wisely. Some people abuse liberty for immoral ends. But we cant limit liberty only to the wise and just.

Many of you are small businessmen. What if you were faced with a similar dilemma? Or what if your employer asked you to do something that clearly violated your faith? Would you risk your livelihood for your position?Unlike too many of us, hes willing to turn away money if it goes against his principles.

Pray for Jack. Hes a good man, soft spoken, and not one for controversy. Hes not a crusader. Hes not a firebrand. Hes a simple baker who loves God and wants his business to reflect his principles. Hes an unlikely hero if Ive ever seen one. I need him to know that hes not alone. Locally, we are standing with him, giving him encouragement. The withering assaults of those on the other side are brutal.

All of this has me thinking. How deep are my convictions? Could I stand firm in my faith if my job were at stake

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How a simple baker ended up at the front of the culture wars - Patheos (blog)

The new case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, No. 16-111, started in 2012, when the baker, Jack Phillips, an owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., refused to create a cake for the wedding reception of David Mullins and Charlie Craig, who were planning to marry in Massachusetts. The couple filed discrimination charges, and they won before a civil rights commission and in the courts.

This has always been about more than a cake, Mr. Mullins said. Businesses should not be allowed to violate the law and discriminate against us because of who we are and who we love.

Mr. Phillips, who calls himself a cake artist, argued that two parts of the First Amendment its protections for free expression and religious freedom overrode a Colorado anti-discrimination law and allowed him to refuse to create a custom wedding cake.

David Cortman, one of Mr. Phillipss lawyers, said the case concerned fundamental rights. Every American should be free to choose which art they will create and which art they wont create without fear of being unjustly punished by the government, he said.

In 2015, a Colorado appeals court ruled against Mr. Phillips. Masterpiece does not convey a message supporting same-sex marriages merely by abiding by the law and serving its customers equally, the court said.

In a Supreme Court brief, Mr. Phillipss lawyers said he is happy to create other items for gay and lesbian clients. But his faith requires him, they said, to use his artistic talents to promote only messages that align with his religious beliefs.

Thus, the brief said, he declines lucrative business by not creating goods that contain alcohol or cakes celebrating Halloween and other messages his faith prohibits, such as racism, atheism, and any marriage not between one man and one woman.

The brief said Mr. Mullins and Mr. Craig could have bought a cake from another baker and in fact easily obtained a free wedding cake with a rainbow design from another bakery.

In response, the couples lawyer wrote that it is no answer to say that Mullins and Craig could shop somewhere else for their wedding cake, just as it was no answer in 1966 to say that African-American customers could eat at another restaurant.

In a second development concerning gay and lesbian couples, the Supreme Court reaffirmed on Monday its 2015 decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, ruling that states may not treat married same-sex couples differently from others in issuing birth certificates.

The majority decision was unsigned. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., dissented.

The case concerned an Arkansas law about birth certificates that treats married opposite-sex couples differently from same-sex ones. A husband of a married woman is automatically listed as the father even if he is not the genetic parent. Same-sex spouses are not.

The case, Pavan v. Smith, No. 16-992, was brought by two married lesbian couples who had jointly planned their childs conception by means of an anonymous sperm donor. State officials listed the biological mother on the childrens birth certificates and refused to list their partners, saying they were not entitled to a husbands presumption of paternity.

The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled against the women, saying that it does not violate equal protection to acknowledge basic biological truths.

Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 United States Supreme Court decision, listed birth certificates among the governmental rights, benefits and responsibilities that typically accompany marriage.

In its unsigned opinion, the majority said on Monday that the Arkansas Supreme Court had erred in failing to apply the 2015 decision to birth certificates. Obergefell proscribes such disparate treatment, the opinion said. As we explained there, a state may not exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.

Arkansas uses birth certificates, Mondays opinion said, to give married parents a form of legal recognition that is not available to unmarried parents. It continued, Having made that choice, Arkansas may not, consistent with Obergefell, deny married same-sex couples that recognition.

In dissent, Justice Gorsuch said the court had acted rashly in not asking for briefs and argument on the question presented in the case.

To be sure, Obergefell addressed the question whether a state must recognize same-sex marriages, he wrote. But nothing in Obergefell spoke (let alone clearly) to the question addressed by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

The statute in question establishes a set of rules designed to ensure that the biological parents of a child are listed on the childs birth certificate, Justice Gorsuch wrote. Before the state supreme court, the state argued that rational reasons exist for a biology-based birth registration regime, reasons that in no way offend Obergefell like ensuring government officials can identify public health trends and helping individuals determine their biological lineage, citizenship or susceptibility to genetic disorders.

In an opinion that did not in any way seek to defy but rather earnestly engage Obergefell, the state supreme court agreed, Justice Gorsuch wrote. And it is very hard to see what is wrong with this conclusion for, just as the state court recognized, nothing in Obergefell indicates that a birth registration regime based on biology, one no doubt with many analogues across the country and throughout history, offends the Constitution.

Follow Adam Liptak on Twitter @adamliptak

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A version of this article appears in print on June 27, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cake Case Takes Court Back to the Culture Wars.

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Justices to Hear Case on Religious Objections to Same-Sex Marriage - New York Times