Picked up as it was quoted in one of the books I read in the past 6 months but can’t recall exactly which one. The pitch reminded me of Innuendo Studios’s must-watch (and already mentioned here) video How to radicalize a Normie, and I was kind of disappointed of the level of “analysis” in Pop Fascisme. So it looked like a good choice.

What is it about?

Another book about the rise of the far right on the internet, where they recruit, their tactics and so on.

A bit more

I liked how Angela Nagle makes a difference between the alt-right and what she call the alt-light, those who, while not promoting directly far right ideas, lead to alt-right content creators, normalize their talking points and contribute to disparaging liberal ides and those who hold them.

Her comments on transgression were interesting but I have issues with the examples she picks and her position that Tumblr and 4Chan activism is basically the same thing.

That said… the book is extremely us-centric. Both in the examples Angela Nagle picked and the way the book is structured and written, with many, many, many repetitions of the same points, piling examples and detailing them at length just to repeat the point from the start of the section and in the other examples. There is no flow in the book. It reads like a high-school essay, following the us-curriculum-approved essay structure. All I can see is that scaffolding

I should also paid more heed to the comments on the book’s Wikipedia page. Overall, there are some interesting comments. I can’t say anything about plagiarism allegations but some of her positions on the subcultures she described felt wrong. I’m not speaking as someone deep into them, but from what I read elsewhere and my very limited experience of Tumblr in the past, I felt a lot of discrepancies with her analysis. Also, her putting on the same level 4chan far-right content and actions and Tumblr users’ gender positivity activism felt extremely wrong. As if she took both-sideism to the extreme.

Final word

Meh. Skip it.