Angela Nagle

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Angela Nagle
Angela Nagle, November 2017.jpg
Nagle in 2017
Born1984 (age 3839) [1]
Texas, U.S.
Alma mater Dublin City University
GenreNon-Fiction
Notable works Kill All Normies

Angela Nagle (born 1984) [1] is an American-born Irish academic [2] and non-fiction writer who has written for The Baffler , [3] Jacobin , [4] and others. She is the author of the book Kill All Normies , published by Zero Books in 2017, which discusses the role of the internet in the rise of the alt-right and incel movements. [5] [6] [7] [2] Nagle describes the alt-right as a dangerous movement, but she also criticizes aspects of the left that have, she says, contributed to the alt-right's rise. [2] Since 2021, she has been publishing articles on a wide range of personal, political and cultural topics via the online publishing platform Substack.

Contents

Life

Nagle was born in Houston, Texas to Irish parents, then grew up in Dublin, Ireland. She graduated from Dublin City University with a PhD for a thesis titled 'An investigation into contemporary online anti-feminist movements'. [8]

The alt-right and the culture wars

Nagle's book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right discusses the role of the internet in the rise of the alt-right and incel movements. [2] [7] [5] She describes the alt-right as a counterculture of young men who reject taboos on race and gender. [2] While many young people in the alt-right started simply as trolls, she says the movement has developed into something much more serious. [2] While she supports identity politics in general, she says that some on the left have contributed to the rise of the alt-right with their "performative wokeness", which often involves censoring people and ganging up on them. [2] She has also expressed concerns about "the woke cultural revolution sweeping Irish society". [9]

The book received many positive reviews, and Nagle became a welcome commentator on the topic of online culture wars. [10] Columnist Ross Douthat of The New York Times praised Nagle's "portrait of the online cultural war". [11] Another New York Times contributor, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Kill All Normies had "captured this phenomenon". [12] Novelist George Saunders listed Kill All Normies as one of his ten favorite books. [13] A highly negative review was written for the anarcho-communist Libcom.org , which took issue with Nagle's supposed bolstering of right-wing narratives around trans issues and trigger warnings. [14] Fusion TV's documentary Trumpland: Kill All Normies directed by Leighton Woodhouse was based on the Nagle's book. [15]

Open borders

In November 2018, American Affairs published Nagle's essay "The Left Case against Open Borders", in which she voiced opposition to immigration from a left-wing perspective. [16]

The Nation responded with a critical essay, calling it "just one of the volley of pieces by liberals and people to the left of center who have derided the out-of-touch utopianism of open-borders advocates." [17] Author Atossa Araxia Abrahamian identifies former Harvard president Larry Summers, author John Judis, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton as others promoting similar views. [17]

Writing in The Independent , Slovenian philosopher and academic Slavoj Žižek commented on the "ferocious attacks on Angela Nagle for her outstanding essay." [18] American cultural theorist and author Catherine Liu defended Nagle, considering her to be "one of the brightest lights in a new generation of left writers and thinkers who have declared their independence from intellectual conformity". [19]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RationalWiki</span> Wiki criticizing religion and pseudoscience

RationalWiki is an online wiki whose stated goals are to "analyze and refute pseudoscience and the anti-science movement, document 'crank' ideas, explore conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism, and analyze how these subjects are handled in the media." It was created in 2007 as a counterpoint to Conservapedia after an incident in which some editors of Conservapedia were banned for vandalism. RationalWiki has been described as liberal.

The Occidental Observer is an American far-right online publication that covers politics and society from a white nationalist and antisemitic perspective. It is run by the Charles Martel Society. Kevin B. MacDonald, a retired American professor of evolutionary psychology, is its editor. It is an offshoot of The Occidental Quarterly.

The manosphere is a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism. Communities within the manosphere include men's rights activists, incels, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUA), and fathers' rights groups.

The slang term Chad originated in the UK, where it was used to describe a particular humorous ad-hoc cartoon, and later in Chicago it was used as a pejorative term for young, upper-class, urban males. In modern internet slang, the term can be similar to "bro" and generally refers to an "alpha male" or otherwise obnoxious hyper-masculine yuppie male.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alt-right</span> Far-right white nationalist movement

The alt-right, an abbreviation of alternative right, is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity during the mid-2010s and establishing a presence in other countries, and then declining since 2017. The term is ill-defined, having been used in different ways by alt-right members, media commentators, journalists, and academics.

Virtue signalling is the expression of a moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character.

<i>Woke</i> Term meaning alert to racial or social injustices

Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.

Alpha male and beta male, or simply put alpha and beta, are pseudoscientific terms for men derived from the designation for alpha and beta animals in ethology. They may also be used with other genders, such as women, or additionally use other letters of the Greek alphabet. The popularization of these terms to describe humans has been widely criticized by scientists.

The alt-lite, also known as the alt-light and the new right, is a loosely defined right-wing political movement whose members regard themselves as separate from both mainstream conservatism and the far-right, white nationalist alt-right. The concept is primarily associated with the United States, where it emerged in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Kälin</span> Swiss lawyer

Christian H. Kälin or Kaelin is a Swiss lawyer, an author, and the chairman of Henley & Partners, an architect of citizenship-by-investment programs that allow wealthy individuals to obtain additional passports. Dubbed the "Passport King" by the media, he is credited with making citizenship by investment "a legitimate, largely above-board industry".

An incel is a member of an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. Discussions in incel forums are often characterized by resentment and hatred, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against women and sexually active people. The American Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. Incels are mostly male and heterosexual, and are often white. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Hunt Publishing</span>

John Hunt Publishing is a left-wing publishing company founded in the United Kingdom in 2001, initially named O Books. The publisher has 24 active autonomous imprints, with the largest of these being the Zero Books imprint founded in 2009. The Zero Books imprint was founded with the objective being to combat what they viewed as a trend of anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ContraPoints</span> American YouTuber (born 1988)

Natalie Wynn is an American YouTuber, political commentator, and cultural critic. She is best known for her YouTube channel, ContraPoints, where she creates video essays exploring a wide range of topics such as politics, gender, ethics, race, and philosophy.

<i>Kill All Normies</i> 2017 nonfiction book by Angela Nagle

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right is a 2017 non-fiction book by Angela Nagle published by Zero Books. It focuses on the development of internet culture, the nature of political correctness, the far-right and the election of Donald Trump. Nagle offers a left-wing critique of contemporary liberalism and its role in the creation of the alt-right movement in reaction.

"Exiting the Vampire Castle" is an essay written by the English theorist Mark Fisher for the online publication The North Star in 2013. It argues for increased leftist solidarity by departing from the phenomenon of online callout culture to instead orient activity around organization of efforts around the accountability of one's economic class, rather than around traits in identity and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Responses to the alt-right</span>

Opponents of the alt-right have not reached a consensus on how to deal with it. Some opponents emphasized "calling out" tactics, labelling the alt-right with terms like "racist", "sexist", "homophobic", and "white supremacist" in the belief that doing so would scare people away from it. Many commentators urged journalists not to refer to the alt-right by its chosen name, but rather with terms like "neo-Nazi". There was much discussion within U.S. public discourse as to how to avoid the "normalization" of the alt-right. The activist group Stop Normalizing, which opposes the normalization of terms like alt-right, developed the "Stop Normalizing Alt Right" Chrome extension. The extension went viral shortly after the release of Stop Normalizing's website. The extension changes the term "alt-right" on webpages to "white supremacy". The extension and group were founded by a New York-based advertising and media professional under the pseudonym George Zola.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Fuentes</span> American white nationalist (born 1998)

Nicholas Joseph Fuentes is an American white supremacist political commentator and live streamer. A former YouTuber, his channel was permanently suspended in February 2020 for violating YouTube's hate speech policy. He is known for holding antisemitic views and denying the Holocaust. Fuentes identifies as a member of the incel movement, as a supporter of authoritarian government, and as a Catholic integralist and Christian nationalist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Men Going Their Own Way</span> Anti-feminist, misogynistic, mostly online male-separatist community

Men Going Their Own Way is an anti-feminist, misogynistic, mostly-online community advocating for men to separate themselves from women and from a society which they believe has been corrupted by feminism. The community is a part of the manosphere, a collection of anti-feminist websites and online communities that also includes the men's rights movement, incels, and pickup artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Misogynist terrorism</span> Terrorism motivated by the desire to punish women

Misogynist terrorism is terrorism which is motivated by the desire to punish women. It is an extreme form of misogyny, the policing of women's compliance to patriarchal gender expectations. Misogynist terrorism uses mass indiscriminate violence in an attempt to avenge nonconformity with those expectations or to reinforce the perceived superiority of men.

Extremely online, also known as terminally online or chronically online, is a phrase referring to someone closely engaged with Internet culture. People said to be extremely online often believe that online posts are very important. Events and phenomena can themselves be extremely online; while often used as a descriptive term, the phenomenon of extreme online usage has been described as "both a reformation of the delivery of ideas – shared through words and videos and memes and GIFs and copypasta – and the ideas themselves". Here "online" is used to describe "a way of doing things, not [simply] the place they are done".

References

  1. 1 2 "Angela Nagle". www.transcript-verlag.de. Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Nagle, Angela (12 August 2017). "The roots of the alt-right". Vox (Interview). Interviewed by Illing, Sean. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
  3. "Angela Nagle". The Baffler. 5 March 2016. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
  4. "Angela Nagle". www.jacobinmag.com. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
  5. 1 2 Gais, Hannah (6 July 2017). "What the Alt-Right Learned from the Left". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
  6. Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on 31 July 2017. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
  7. 1 2 MacDougald, Park (13 July 2017). "The Unflattering Familiarity of the Alt-Right in Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies". New York . Archived from the original on 9 July 2021. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
  8. Angela, Nagle (November 2015). "An investigation into contemporary online anti-feminist movements". doras.dcu.ie. Archived from the original on 9 March 2018. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
  9. Nagle, Angela (12 July 2020). "Will Ireland survive the Woke Wave?". UnHerd . Retrieved 14 December 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  10. Davis, Charles (20 May 2018). "Sloppy Sourcing Plagues 'Kill All Normies' Alt-Right Book". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
  11. "Opinion | Columnists' Book Club" . Retrieved 28 November 2018.
  12. "Opinion | How the Online Left Fuels the Right" . Retrieved 28 November 2018.
  13. Saunders, George. "George Saunders's 10 Favorite Books". Vulture. Retrieved 28 November 2018.
  14. "5 big problems with Kill All Normies". libcom.org. 24 May 2018. Retrieved 15 December 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  15. "Trumpland: Kill All Normies". IMDb . Retrieved 1 December 2020.
  16. "The Left Case against Open Borders". 20 November 2018.
  17. 1 2 Abrahamian, Atossa Araxia (28 November 2018). "There Is No Left Case for Nationalism". The Nation. ISSN   0027-8378 . Retrieved 10 January 2019.
  18. "The yellow vest protesters revolting against centrism mean well – but their left wing populism won't change French politics" . 17 December 2018. Archived from the original on 7 May 2022.
  19. Liu, Catherine (30 July 2017). "Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the Culture Industry". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 14 December 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

Further reading