Free Charles Davis

Angela Nagle has written a very short book, Kill All Normies, that as I reported for The Daily Beast — and others noticed at Libcom — is heavily dependent on research and phrasing of uncredited others. I didn’t get to include each and every example, editors and attention spans being what they are, but there sure are a lot.

Here, on this blog, I will continue noting examples of Nagle, billed as an expert on “internet-culture,” SJWs and the alt-right, borrowing others’ writing on these topics without attribution.

But first, a reminder of how blatant Nagle’s plagiarism was already shown to be. As I noted in the piece, she rips off this graf nearly word for word.

RationalWiki:

In 2011, Elam established the site Register-Her.com, which publishes the personal information of women the site claims “have caused significant harm to innocent individuals either by the direct action of crimes like rape, assault, child molestation and murder, or by the false accusation of crimes against others.” While the list includes women who have been sent to prison for various crimes, it also includes others who were acquitted, and…. lists any rape victim whose court case results in anything but a full conviction and sentencing as a “false accuser”.

Kill All Normies:

In 2011, Elam established the vigilante doxxing site Register-Her.com, which publishes the personal information of women the site claims ‘have caused significant harm to innocent individuals either by the direct action of crimes like rape, assault, child molestation and murder, or by the false accusation of crimes against others.’… While the list included women who have been sent to prison for various crimes, it also included others who were acquitted and lists female rape victims whose court cases didn’t result in a full conviction as a ‘false accuser’.

If that’s not enough to raise an eyebrow, consider these other examples of copying, pasting, and lightly tweaking others’ work. Wikipedia remains a popular source, with Nagle extensively copying an entry on Northwestern University Professor Laura Kipnis.

(Several examples were also identified by plagiarism software, which one can use to verify my work; I will list the number on the report in brackets before the examples it also found.)

[Turnitin #78]

Wikipedia:

In March 2015 Kipnis wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she decried a prevailing “sexual paranoia” on campuses and discussed professor-student sexual relationships and trigger warnings.

Kill All Normies, p. 79:

In March 2015, Laura Kipnis wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which she criticized the atmosphere of ‘sexual paranoia’ on campuses, defended professor-student sexual relationships and criticized trigger warnings.

Wikipedia:

A group of students at Northwestern protested, demanding that the administration reaffirm its commitment to the policies that Kipnis criticized.

Kill All Normies, p. 79:

A group of students protested in response, demanding that the administration reaffirm its commitment to the policies that Kipnis criticized.

Wikipedia:

Protesters carried a mattress in reference to Emma Sulkowicz’s earlier protest at Columbia University.

Kill All Normies, p. 79:

They carried a mattress — a reference to Emma Sulkowicz’s earlier protest at Columbia University against rape on campus.

Wikipedia:

Invoking Title IX, two graduate students filed complaints with Northwestern’s Title IX office against Kipnis, arguing that her essay had had a “chilling effect” on students’ ability to report sexual misconduct.

Kill All Normies, p. 79:

Invoking university legislation, two grad students filed complaints against Kipnis, arguing that her article, which she has since expanded into a book, would deter students from reporting sexual misconduct.

Nagle also borrows phrasing, structure and some history from “neoreactionary” writer Ash Milton, who is uncredited.

[Turnitin #77]

“An Introduction To The European New Right,” by Ash Milton:

[T]he ENR [European New Right] aimed to promote a “Gramscianism of the Right,” adapting the theories of Antonio Gramsci that political change… follows – cultural and social change.

Kill All Normies (Chapter Three, ‘Gramscians of the alt-light’), p. 42:

The French New Right or Nouvelle Droite adapted the theories of Antonio Gramsci that political change follows cultural and social change.

“An Introduction To The European New Right,” by Ash Milton:

In the words of Het Vlaams Blok leader Filip Dewinter, “the ideological majority is more important than the parliamentary majority.”

Prior to 1968, reactionaries had taken the line that… the common people were still inherently conservative…. We can see this echoed today in the “silent majority” and “Main Street” rhetoric of modern conservatives. The ENR’s [European New Right’s] aim was to break with… [the] view: that defeat of revolutionary elites would enable to restoration of a traditional order.

Kill All Normies, p. 42-43:

Belgian far-right anti-immigration party Vlaams Blok leader Filip Dewinter put it like this: ‘the ideological majority is more important than the parliamentary majority.’

Prior to 1968, the right had taken the view that ‘ordinary people’ were still inherently conservative, which you can see echoed today in the ‘silent majority’ rhetoric of modern establishment conservatives. The French New Right’s Gramscian aim… was to break with the view that defeat of radical elites or vanguards would enable the restoration of a popular traditional order….

“An Introduction To The European New Right,” by Ash Milton:

1968 and its era were a proof to the ENR that the culture itself would have to be retaken before change could come at the political level. This led it to pursue a project of “metapolitics”; its thinkers scorned party and even “radical” activism, preferring to rethink philosophical foundations and create cultural memes to counter the ’68er ideology of Social Progress.

Kill All Normies, p. 43:

1968 and the rise of the New Left was proof to the demoralized right that the whole culture would now have to be retaken before formal political change could come. This led to the pursuit of a ‘metapolitics’, and a rejection of the political party and traditional activism within a section of the right. Instead, they set about rethinking their philosophical foundations and creating new ways to counter the ‘68 ideology of Social Progress.

Nagle also takes another definition from Wikipedia without identifying the source, which the online encyclopedia insists is a violation of its license.

Wikipedia:

The cultural turn is a movement beginning in the early 1970s among scholars in the humanities and social sciences to make culture the focus of contemporary debates; it also describes a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology.

Kill All Normies, p. 62:

In academia, the ‘cultural turn’ saw a radical shift in scholarship whereby universities made culture the focus of contemporary debates. It also meant a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology….

Her biography of far-right radio host Alex Jones also comes from the site.

[Turnitin #135]

Wikipedia:

He has accused the US government of being involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, and the filming of fake Moon landings to hide NASA’s secret technology.

Kill All Normies, p. 51:

He has accused the US government of orchestrating the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11th attacks and a fake moon landing.

Angela Nagle does not just copy others’ work, without attribution, in her book. Here she does the same thing in a piece for The Baffler.

Wikipedia:

The rampage ended when his car crashed into a parked vehicle and came to a stop. Police found him dead in the car with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

“The New Man of 4chan,” by Angela Nagle:

The rampage ended when he crashed into a parked vehicle; police found him dead in his car with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his head.

Wikipedia:

Rodger uploaded to YouTube a video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”, in which he outlined details of his upcoming attack and his motives. He explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him.

“The New Man of 4chan,” by Angela Nagle:

Rodger uploaded a final video to YouTube, titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” outlining his purpose. He announced his desire to punish women for rejecting him.

Wikipedia:

Rodger e-mailed a lengthy autobiographical manuscript… titled “My Twisted World”…. In it, he described his… frustration over not being able to find a girlfriend, his hatred of women, his contempt for racial minorities and interracial couples.

“The New Man of 4chan,” by Angela Nagle:

Rodger also left behind a lengthy autobiographical manuscript, titled My Twisted World. In it, he describes his frustration at not being able to find a girlfriend, his hatred of women, and his contempt for ethnic minorities and interracial couples.

UPDATE III:

This was noted in my piece for The Daily Beast, but I’ll highlight it here, too: Nagle lifting from the paper of record, once again without attribution.

The New York Times:

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page…. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’

Kill All Normies, p. 35:

… Henderson’s MySpace page was hacked, while another placed an iPod on Mitchell’s grave, took a picture, and posted it to 4chan. His face was pasted into spinning iPods and hard-core porn scenes, and a re-enactment of Henderson’s death soon appeared on YouTube. Mitchell’s father received prank calls to his house, in which callers said things like: ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod’ and, ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’

UPDATE IV:

Several examples of patch writing I identified in my Daily Beast report were also identified by Turnitin.

Turnitin #85: RationalWiki’s entry for “Manosphere,” which includes the text Nagle lifted regarding “Heartiste” in Kill All Normies. It also links to the entry, first on this list, for Paul Elam, which was copied with only minor edits.

Turnitin #23: Wikipedia’s entry for “Roosh V.”

Turnitin #25: Claire Lehmann’s column, “Germaine Greer and the scourge of ‘no-platforming.‘”

UPDATE V:

via Joseph Kay

Wikipedia:

The crux of Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality… is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological “core” gender.

Kill All Normies, p. 70:

By 1990, Judith Butler had taken this several steps further, or perhaps more literally, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, in which she argued that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality were entirely culturally constructed through the repetition of styled and cultivated bodily acts, which created the appearance of an essential ontological ‘core’ gender.

Reposted from teleSUR, a website I wrote this for in 2015.

World War I is one of those wars that even those who fought it had trouble explaining. The 4-year-long war left over 17 million people from at least 20 different countries dead. Was it fought for democracy and self-determination? That’s what U.S. President Woodrow Wilson claimed, but then he also invaded and occupied an independent Haiti, instituting forced labor in the only country borne out of a successful slave revolt.

In reality, the war that raged from July 28, 1914, to November 11, 1918, was fought largely because every major power in Europe (and a couple years in, North America) thought it could use the trigger of an archduke’s assassination to expand their power and influence. Most powers ended up weaker than before, while those that achieved gains — France occupied the Rhineland, Germany’s prime industrial area, for several years — found them costly and rather infamously short lived.

During the 1920s and even until the mid-1930s, the question “What was that all about?” continued to dominate discussions of war and peace. The failure to find a good answer contributed to the preference for isolationism in the United States and Western Europe that prevailed among the general public until Adolf Hitler showed that his idea of diplomacy was to encourage the rest of the world to rubber-stamp his aggression until it was their turn to be annexed.

Hitler’s rise may have been enabled by appeasement, but it’s not right to say it was the product of peace. In 1934, the U.S. magazine Fortune, a periodical whose name suggests its audience, published the sort of muckraking expose one would be hard-pressed to find in today’s business press. Naming names, it called out what would later be termed the “military-industrial complex” — a U.S. Senate committee at the time went with the more colorful “merchants of death” — for profiting off the misery of World War I and following up by arming all the sides that would go on to fight the sequel.

“According to the best accountancy figures, it cost about $25,000 to kill a soldier during the World War,” the article began. “There is one class of Big Business Men in Europe that never rose up to denounce the extravagance of its governments in this regard — to point out that when death is left unhampered as an enterprise for the individual initiative of gangsters the cost of a single killing seldom exceeds $100. The reason for the silence of these Big Business Men is quite simple: the killing is their business.”

And what a business it was. As the article noted, the U.S.-based Bethlehem Steel “not only makes armor-piercing’ projectiles, but ‘non-pierceable’ armor plate — which must sometimes cause slight confusion on the proving ground when anyone attempts to demonstrate the virtues of both at the same time.”

Companies also sold to both sides, before, during and after World War I. As The Washington Post reported, when U.S. soldiers “invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel — a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary — and flying Opel-built warplanes.”

As Fortune noted in its 1934 expose, while political leaders may have expressed mutual fears and condemnations of each other, “the lion and the lamb never lie down together with more good fellowship than these French, German, Czech, and Polish gentleman when they come together to discuss, as fellow directors, the problems of increasing Europe’s consumption of armaments.” Indeed, “The armorers,” said Fortune, “are the true internationalists. Regardless of their nationalities, they work in concert at the two axioms of their grade — prolong wars, disturb peace.”

Indeed, capital may have no gods nor moral compass, but it does have respect for its larger clients, wherever they may be. Noted The Post:  “When the U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire and company documents extolling the ‘genius of the Fuehrer,’ according to reports filed by soldiers at the scene.”

Its safe to bet that Ford executives wished a GM plane had dropped bombs on those love letters.

Profit though they may have from armed conflict and the preparation for it, it’s not as if there is some small cabal of arms dealers that plans each war.

“There is no perfectly homologous group of single-purposed individuals that sits down before a polished table in a soundproof room and plots new holocausts in Europe,” wrote Fortune.

In fact, there’s plenty of money to be made by arming nations during times of peace — it’s that arms race, though, that enables and encourages arms manufacturers, making war all the more likely, be it in 1914, 1939, 2003 or today in 2015.

“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once asked her future successor and accessory to the Iraq war, Colin Powell. Having the means to do something makes it awfully tempting to do it, as most critics of concentrating power in the hands of a few have argued for a millennia or more. And even if one would rather not start a war, having the means of mutually assured destruction at one’s hands makes a small quarrel all the more likely to set off a big mistake.

It’s certainly not the case that such concentrated power — including the power to effortlessly destroy millions of lives with a 200-word memo or, these days, the push of a button thousands of miles away from the point of an unmanned drone’s impact — makes anyone any safer in the long run.

As of 1934, France was seen as “the greatest military power of modern times,” noted Fortune, “with an army which all but equals in numbers and far surpasses in equipment Germany’s vast militaristic machine of 1914.”

A lot of good that did.

Fortune wasn’t the only unusual source of anti-imperialism after World War I. General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history at the time of his death, fought on behalf of U.S. imperialism from Honduras to Nicaragua and Haiti to France. In 1935, five years after he retired, he looked back on what he did with disgust.

“War is a racket. It always has been,” he wrote, looking back on his years of service. “It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious,” with profits “reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

Butler was speaking of all the wars he had been asked to fight, but it was the global one that set him off.

“When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a ‘war to make the world safe for democracy’ and a ‘war to end all wars,’ ” said Butler, referencing Woodrow Wilson’s grand justifications. “Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then.”

Whether by accident or, as Butler suspected, intent, the war did make many a man richer.

“At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War.” he wrote. “That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.”

It’s these people, the general argued, that should be first in line at the next draft.

“Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted,” he said.

No one took him up on the offer. Four years later, there would be a second World War. One that would make the first almost seem civilized. On November 11, “Remembrance Day” as it is known in the countries that fought the first war to end all wars, we would do well to remember that while race and religion have played a part in inflaming tensions, the cause of most wars can still be traced to dollars and cents — nations and their corporate offspring fighting for power and resources. Perhaps it’s time for a return to the draft, in the U.S. and elsewhere, but one limited to the 1 percent for whom war is an abstraction, not a cause of misery and death.

The important thing about truth is the underlying sentiment, which is its only utility. If any given truth gets in the way of a grander one, it may, in keeping with best praxis, be overlooked, contested or outright denied.

Take the April 2017 chemical weapons attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria. “I suppose the sarin attacks could be real,” wrote Paste Magazine’s Shane Ryan of the attacks, the guilt of the Syrian regime since confirmed by the United Nations, but it wouldn’t be useful, in terms of agitating against U.S. President Donald Trump’s airstrike on empty airbase that was launched in response.

So the article never delved into what we actually knew, based on eyewitness testimony and samples tested by chemical weapons experts, but rather speculated on what made “sense.” Testimony and expertise aside, what made sense, at that time, to that writer, was raising the prospect of a “false flag” by rebels hoping, after their 420th allegedly staged production, that “the U.S. would intervene on their behalf.”

When the UN debunked this narrative, squarely placing blame on the regime, the writer for Paste proclaimed innocence: they had, after all, been seeking to stop a drive to war, so even if they were wrong, empirically, one had to admire their motivation, which was superior (these answers were later deleted, because really who cares). Those who were right, by contrast — those who believed the MSM accounts that set us on a path to regime change: isn’t that suspect?

One has to wonder why.

The author, accordingly, declined to alert their fans to the existence of the new information undermining what was and is the objectively more admirable posture: not believing the government or the mainstream media.

Similarly, the Democrats would agree to basically neuter their own opposition to Republicans’ health care in exchange for some more sanctions against big bad scary Russia; we know this because the bumbling Democrats lost 1,000 seats and always prefer foreign wars to fighting for the working class. Hillary Clinton would argue against breaking up the banks by saying it won’t end racism; we know this because neoliberals exploit identity for capitalism. And she’d regime-change Bashar al-Assad for Israel, because, let’s be real: wouldn’t she?

These are things we know to be true, in general, so again we must ask of the pedants who were right with respect to these specific claims, which were wrong: Do you want to be the kind of person who wouldn’t believe the bad thing?

One, again, has to wonder why.

But serial dishonesty (or chronic intellectual sloth) takes its toll. If yours is the political faction that claims to have the most right answers on all of the issues facing humanity in 2017, that claim will be challenged by those who observe a certain infidelity in the matter of facts. That case against war, which hinges on a dictator who’s killed tens of thousands not being as blithely ruthless as claimed by his victims, will be discarded by those one wishes to persuade — is that what we’re doing? — when it’s shown to hinge on a fundamental error.

Little white lies don’t serve grand ends when the means are perceived as an expression of one’s true politics. When delivered with smug flare, they do keep those who aren’t alienated in high spirits, however, and the clicks on news that is fake, left media criticism teaches us, always exceed clicks on the (enemy) analysis that corrects. That ensures a steady stream of digital red meat, misleading content and algorithmic takes garnering more donations to the Patreon in the bio and so on and so forth until we all log off for the very last time.

Many will think these creators of content are sloppy or cynical, but the thing is: they won’t be subscribers. The future is socialism in one social media cluster, sending notifications to your cellphone — forever, bitch.