George Hawley

This is probably the best objective, non-partisan, and fair account of the rise of the "Alt-Right" in American politics. Regardless of your politics, this is worth understanding. I'm pretty familiar with the topic, and I learned a few things about the early origins of Alt Right which I didn't know before.

If you're not familiar with the material, more information about "Internet troll culture", forums like 4chan/8ch, you probably will want to look into those to really understand the movement.

A few missing elements from the book were somewhat unfortunate, but probably could be addressed in other books:
1) The disillusionment of a lot of the right wing libertarians, especially those of a certain age (late Gen X), after Ron Paul was effectively marginalized by the Republican Party.
2) The private edgy libertarian forums (like the TRS Facebook group) which pretty directly moved the movement from libertarianism to explicit white identity politics
3) More details about specific highly influential memes (the "Helicopter Rides", "Snek" and "Physical Removal" (Hoppe) stuff
4) Censorship on specific platforms and how it has caused the movement to evolve (this was mentioned about Twitter, but YouTube and other platforms were equally relevant)
5) Charlottesville and the problems with the leaderless collection of movements, probl
6) The "Shoah-ing" of The Daily Stormer by GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Google, and tens
7) The Richard Spencer/Whitefish/lawsuits, now involving not just Spencer but also Anglin, DS, etc.
8) Russian connection (intelligence agencies, expatriation of some of the more famous personalities like Anglin/weev, etc.)
9) Sex/gender and the movement (The "THOT Patrolling"/"White Sharia" thing with various alt-lite female personalities vs. some of the MGTOW/hardcore alt-right people
10) Religion -- while it's claimed the movement is highly atheist, there has definitely been a reference to both more "traditional" forms of Christianity, and paganism -- this was mentioned in the book, but not in particular detail.
11) The "skeptic community" and "atheist community" and how they merged somewhat with the alt-right
(I received this book from NetGalley as an ARC for free, although I would have likely purchased it otherwise.)

Overall, I'd highly recommend this book.… (meer)

Hooboy, not sure how well this will age, especially as it seems to have been sent to print before the events of Charlottesville which definitely places blood on their hands. But for now, it's a good academic snapshot of the alt-right, what it is and what it isn't (I think to the larger populace many of the alt-lite examples are still under the broader umbrella of alt-right, though I get the unrepentant white nationalists are going to have the stricter definition of who's in their club). Traces genealogy of the movement and compares it to other conservative branches.… (meer)