Here you can safely learn of one aspect of the hidden philosophy behind Trump and far right fascist Republicanist movement and the propganda techniques at play. Many of us had already figured out much of what was written in this book. Especially the connections between chaos magic techniques, new thought, paradigm shifting, word viruses, advertising, and fascist propaganda. ( )

Very interesting book. I was exposed to a lot of concepts I really had never considered. Look forward to reading more from this author. ( )

This is a peculiar book: interesting, informed, but ultimately disappointing, and even a bit silly. Imagine, if you will, a former rock guitarist trying to write a serious book on politics and culture while driven to distraction by orbital mind control satellites pouring into his head an endless loop of Shadilay.

The author begins by noting that he'd previously written a book against the idea that occultism was intrinsically right-wing – a notion widely peddled for a few decades after WWII by people looking for any stick they could use to whack Nazis and Fascists that couldn't be just as readily used to whack Communists. Now he comes to write specifically about dark right-wing occultism, but manages only to produce a rather distracted mash-up of an extended essay on Russian nationalist Traditionalism, an essay on Donald Trump and Norman Vincent Peale (with some preliminaries on Peale's New Thought influences), and a marvelous exercise in self-panicking about how votaries of Pepe and kek (now it can be told!) just may have used meme magic to dream Donald Trump into the presidency, where he can exercise his dark demagogic powers by sending his gangs of black-masked thugs to beat up any public opposition, get people fired from their jobs for being related to someone who has expressed an opinion he doesn't like, force people to participate in activities to which they have strong conscientious objections, making it impossible for businesses he doesn't like conduct transactions on the internet, forcing social media to ban people who don't agree with him, and having his critics assassinated, because Trump is just like Putin.

Although the author is an American, he has lived for a long time in London, and thus has perhaps become even more dependent for his understanding of the US on reports from people who already have little sense of what goes on in the country outside their own coastal urban compounds. Pauline Kael legendarily remarked about Ronald Reagan's election that she couldn't understand how he could have won, since no one she knew had voted for him. Our author goes one step beyond: he is so perplexed at Donald Trump's electoral victory that he feels it must have been witchcraft – or, rather, Chaos Magick (with special k). Really.

There is something interesting in his tracing of New Thought influences on Donald Trump, but there are much more sensible and less hyperventilating treatments of the subject available – Roy Anker's Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture, for example. It doesn't quite reach to Peale, but it gets close enough.

The whole silly stew of insinuendo about Pepe and meme magic goes absolutely nowhere. Silly people have been slinging spells and curses back and forth for a long time – it's easy enough to find people out to organize mass exercises in putting binding spells on Trump, for example. The best thing to read in this connection might be Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, if only because it wickedly shrinks political magic into the world of academic rivalries, where "the stakes are so small".

Perhaps the most useful part is his tracing out of the various ways Traditionalism has entered into, and been expressed in, the Russian political world, providing some updated journalistic supplementation to Mark Sedgwick's Against the Modern World. But the world of Russian esotericism and new religions is much, much wider than that small slice portrayed in this book, and really deserves an in-depth treatment.

In sum, this book is readable, undemanding, and has some interesting material in it, but I would recommend looking for a library copy. I've just sent mine to a friend. I hope he takes it in good part. ( )