In the latter case, Nagel favors the right by downplaying their influence, which is worrying when she herself acknowledges their ties to fascism, and spends the better part of an entire chapter (“Entering the manosphere”) exposing the rampant misogyny in certain online right spaces.

By suppressing him, the rioters granted Milo his supreme victory, confirming his taunt that they couldn’t oppose him on the level of ideas because they’d castrated their own capacity for critical thought, while elevating him to historic status into the bargain. By treating the legislation this way, Nagel may be framing Peterson’s refusal on the terms he insists, which Canadian legal scholars have been quick to debunk. Their view was that the dominant ideology now was liberalism, so if you wanted to be transgressive that’s what you transgress against. Rather than get abused because they didn’t know the subculture well enough, or because they appealed to a defining feature or the more massified networks, women in these places get abused because the entire subculture rejects women from the get-go. In the radical identity politics laboratory of Tumblr, hundreds of new genders were announced, of which Nagle offers a two-page sample list.In academia, the ‘cultural turn’ saw a radical shift in scholarship whereby universities made culture the focus of contemporary debates. However, once again, Nagel’s justification for her claims is weak to non-existent, so they suffer for it.

Building on that, much of the influence that one might think to attribute to this strain of Tumblr-leftism is far more reasonably seen as the result of groups bringing their policies into line with more modern understandings of medicine. In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as they’re 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. p.3) Trump himself has often tweeted memes born in these circles [8] [9] [10], and several people in the administration have partaken in memetic dog whistles [11] [12] which are the bread and butter of the alt-right.These groups, the alt-right and Tumblr liberals have, according to Nagle, a symbiotic relationship, needing one another as much as the monstrous spectres each joyously opposes. The leap from that state of affairs to these people exemplifying a concerted movement to change culture is not insignificant, and unfortunately, not one Nagel seems to attempt to bridge. Where the actions of one (the right) are explicitly and obviously anti-free speech (they wanted to censor pornography, e. The contradictory, tormented males of the Manosphere might have crawled from the pages of a Michel Houellebecq novel. Nagle’s treatment of Judith Butler – who is found guilty, after a kangaroo court trial lasting a single paragraph, of being the reason why some teenagers online self-identify as plants and ‘Otherkins’ – is especially grating and ridiculous.

That is, it is far more correct to say that these women are not abused because of anything to do with failing to meet countercultural standards, but instead, they are abused merely because they are women. To do this, Nagel first sets about describing what first appeared to be an apolitical internet culture, deeply seated in transgressing societal norms. That is, if both Sam and I wanted the same Twitter follower, they could follow both of us without any issue. Further, at least if you are victim of the alt-right mob the left feels sorry for you, but when the new identitarians come after you, well, it was your fault for oppressing the poor lambs. There is a great deal of collated data about the alt-right’s makeup and activities, but much of the analysis seems limited to quotations of statements made by the alt-rightists themselves.

While some of them are incidental, some are far more central to her theses, which makes this, in my mind, inexcusable. Clinging to relevance and personal ambition appears as fundamental for the alt-right as they are for left commentators who are unwilling to tackle the tough questions Nagle does.