We occasionally feel the need to weigh in on matters that concern our magazine as a whole.
The news is this: Charles Davis has helpfully uncovered some undeniable instances of plagiarism of Social Matter (among many other publications and writers) in Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies, which incidentally Hubert Collins reviewed for us in July 2017.
Before we launch in the rest of our piece here, let’s take a minute to appreciate Nagle’s boldness with a couple of comparison paragraphs.
An Introduction To The European New Right:
“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:
“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.”
Before you scroll any further, we recommend you read Hubert Collins’ review linked above. In sum, he argues that Nagle’s very short book is not only wrong, but poorly written, as well. We read the book. He’s correct. Typos and long, awkward sentences abound. We blame the editors, but of course, we also blame her.
And now it turns out she’s a plagiarist, too. That’s nothing new, however. What’s new is the revelation she’s plagiarized us, as well, and it’s even possible she’s plagiarized us more than we are even aware of yet.
So, we’ve put some thought into the whole debacle–and we’ve decided that we’re not that mad. Journalists face a lot of challenges. For example, a recent perusal of salary standards in the industry shows that David Brooks himself, who in 1987 was a young book review editor for WSJ, asked a freelancer for a 900-word review of Donald Trump’s new book The Art of the Deal. The price?—$250, which depending on the outlet is potentially more than freelancers might be paid for that same review in 2018. Have some sympathy for the journalists living on a dollar a day!
In fact, as a gesture of our sincere generosity and understanding of the challenges content generators face, we’re going to write up a quick, three-step guide for future content generators to more effectively plagiarize the material here at Social Matter.
- Actually understand the material
To avoid regurgitating the same syntactical structure and enlarging surface attack area for accusations of plagiarism, it helps to actually understand the ideas as such and grasp the history from more than one source. With a firmer understanding, it becomes possible to rearrange the ideas in your mind, put emphasis on certain points, draw out interesting and unanticipated implications, and perhaps most importantly, put the ideas in your own words.
But what if you’re under deadline and need to spit out a certain number of words to beat out all the other bespoke takes on the Outer Right for a leftist audience? What if comprehension is too demanding to ask for?
Nagle is in luck. Actually, not really, because it’s too late for all that now. But this piece isn’t about Nagle, anyway, it’s about advice for future, would-be writers scraping just above the poverty line by stealing others’ work. How can they do this more effectively? That’s what we’re here for.
We’d like to introduce the keyword method. Get out a pen and a yellow legal pad and squint at the paragraph you’d like to plagiarize on your screen. Identify the five most common, salient keywords in the paragraph. Write them down. Mull them over. Now, using those five keywords (without looking at the screen, you fucking cheater), see if you can reconstruct the paragraph with paper and pen in your own words.
You’ll find that it works. Sure, you’re still stealing others’ work without attribution, but now you actually have some level of plausible deniability because the syntactical structure is quite different. This method works in a pinch when you’re too lazy, too stupid, or too under deadline to bother with actual comprehension of ideas and history.
- Don’t write about material that causes people to suspect your loyalties
Most people have really simplistic models about the study of controversial or sensitive areas and project their models onto everyone else. There’s a common assumption that at the root of study of some subject or phenomenon is actually sympathy for that subject or even total ideological alignment. This usually occurs when the subject is tribally salient: crime, intelligence research, evolutionary psychology, the far-right, etc. etc. And it’s not even the worst assumption: “Hey, Susanne, why are you spending all your time thinking about/researching hated tribe X or hated topic X?”
Susanne: “Oh, just studying how bad and evil it is, of course!”
Convinced? Many are not.
In this case, Nagle’s been widely accused of being a secret white supremacist or having some level of deep ideological affiliation with the far-right, which makes people mad and provides motives for digging into her work to find wrongs. And in fact, Charles Davis and others have found those wrongs in the form of plagiarism. There are probably a host of other works in non-controversial areas that are shot through with plagiarism in even more offensive and blaring ways than Kill All Normies, but who cares about that, anyway? It’s not salient. That person is already on your team. No need to look into work too closely. Scrutiny is for suspected traitors, not loyal allies.
Is Nagle actually deeply sympathetic to the far-right? In reality, when the caricatures are so obnoxiously false and lazy, it’s hard not to gain some amount of sympathy for a group that’s been so hysterically maligned that it makes you laugh and laugh when you discover the truth.
But once you’re in the position of more truly understanding Hated Tribe X and trying to explain this understanding to your ingroup, does it come off as an earnest attempt to impart understanding to your friends so they can more effectively combat X? Or does it come off feeling like Nagle is a sleeper agent of X and trying to soften her friends up into accepting X ideology?
For many on the Left, it’s the latter, and so Nagle must be destroyed.
Of course, it would have helped her case to not have actually plagiarized, but again, must we repeat ourselves, we’re not here to condemn her for writing a shoddy, error-riddled book that merely summarizes others’ ideas while refusing to give credit where credit is due. No, this is a more constructive exercise. We’re about helping future journalists, graduate students, and authors whose real wages have stagnated, or even decreased.
To fuse points one and two together for a moment, we’d like to say something on Nagle’s behalf directly to her friends. An additional reason for not being able to effectively discuss far-right ideas without plagiarism is crimestop, that is, the absolute unwillingness (not necessarily the inability) to engage with the ideas, as the ideas themselves are too much to countenance. Crimestop makes it very difficult to put others’ ideas in your own words, and such work comes off as the product of an apathetic college student uninterested in actual scholarship. Plagiarism is much easier.
- Pick another career
Writing is hard, and it’s difficult to make a decent career out of it. There’s a constant, grinding demand for more words, more content, and at the end of the day, people still hate you. Maybe even for a good reason, as Wholesome Content is often totally orthogonal to content that attracts views. Maybe even for a bad reason, as Kill All Normies has sold really well (it beat other books to the market) and success attracts a certain number of crabs trying to pull other crabs down in the bucket. Such is life, though we wonder if this isn’t a more common tendency on the Left than on the Right.
Plagiarism is a solution to the Writing Is Hard problem, but even being a successful plagiarist is harder than ever before, given new technologies like Google and Turnitin. Would-be writers should start by asking themselves the question: why do I want to be a writer in the first place? Is it because all my friends are writers? Is it because I admire some writer archetype from the past or present? Is it because I want recognition and attention? Is it because I want to attract a husband or a wife, or enter into a series of unfulfilling, but temporarily titillating relationships? Is it because I want status? I think you’ll find with some mental exploration that you can fulfill all your psychological needs and wants with some other plan other than being a writer.
Short of that, practice the five keyword method to plagiarize more effectively.
In the meantime, we wish Nagle the best of luck in her future endeavors, and if she’s looking for other pieces to plagiarize, she’s welcome to peruse the Social Matter introductory reading list available here.
After all, virtually no one else is capable of producing such high-quality political theory and social analysis as our talented writers (and readers!) at Social Matter, so she might as well steal from the best.