A well-researched and well-written report on the growth of fascism and far-right terrorism in the United States. It's a bit strange to see the flood of books about this topic published since 2016 - many crime and thriller authors (e.g., David Baldacci) have been writing about the threat of right wing violence for some time. I guess it's nice that everyone else has finally woken up to take note.

Neiwert, however, has been writing on the topic for years, and he brings his experience and knowledge together in this authoritative book. He covers the violence perpetrated by these right-wing factions, and more, using the election of Trump as a hook upon which to hang his research.

America is going to be grappling with the legacy of Trump's presidency for years, and in particular the forces of white nationalism it unleashed (or, in reality, emboldened and brought to the centre of one half of the American body politic). Recommended.

A book on politics that gives a lot of insight to how American politics have played out the way they have.

Normally, I find political books to be dry and boring. This was an engaging read that I thoroughly enjoyed. Politics, in general, isn't my cup of tea, but the history and rise of the alt-right was very interesting.

I wish Alt-America were fiction, I would like it so much better if it were telling the story of what happened in another multi-verse, but it’s all terribly true and so it is depressing. However, if we want a just and decent society, we have to look at reality no matter how sad, depressing, and frightening it may be.

David Neiwert has spent decades reporting on rising extremism on the right. When the rhetoric of talk radio became increasingly violent, he coined the term eliminationist to avoid calling them fascist since many of them were not fascists in ideology, just using fascistic communication styles and means. In this book, he notes that the various movements among the right have coalesced into the alt-right, weaving together true fascists and neo-nazis with white nationalists, misogynists, racists, and dominion theologists into a movement that threatens democracy and our system of pluralistic government.

Since I follow the news and Neiwert’s blog closely, many of the events in this book were familiar, but even for me, there were many eye-opening things. Of particular interest for me was how the media narrative often erases the political motivation of mass killers. Even when they have political tracts, books, and their own manifesto, if they are white, they are often reported as troubled and singular, their motives found in mental illness rather than in response to stochastic violent incitement. When Sarah Palin tweeted, “Don’t retreat, RELOAD” she was playing with fire and she knew it, she was appealing to those who applauded Michael Douglas in Falling Down and make millions for vigilante films.



I think Alt-America is an important book, but dang, is it depressing. The alt-right is coalescing several different extremist movements united by a sense of grievance, a taste for violence, and a love of authoritarianism. They are gaining power.

I wish there were more information on how to combat the alt-right and rising extremism. Neiwert is right that conversations are where we must start and includes some advice on how to start and what to avoid. This is useful.

What disappointed me was his acceptance of caricatures of liberals that are generated from the right, you know the elitist latte-drinking, merlot-sipping elites who despise the ignorant hayseeds. I know they exist. They are called the Real Housewives and some of them are Republicans, too. But demographically, conservatives are whiter and wealthier than liberals. So who is more likely to be elitist? He also talks about the neglect of rural areas, though the Democratic Platform was full of programs to help rural America and one of the first things slated for cuts from Trump’s budget is the subsidy for high-speed internet in rural America.

I also would like to know what he thinks about the philosophical dilemma of tolerating the intolerant. When does speech go from protected first amendment speech to unprotected yelling fire in a theater speech? Are universities obligated to give a platform to hate speech? After Richard Spencer’s recent speech in FL, three men fired at protesters. Can the argument be made denying him a platform because he is dangerous?

Nonetheless, these are minor flaws in a strong and important history that everyone needs to read. Neiwert is scrupulous about using the terms Nazi and fascist, but when reading this book, I could not help thinking that the Nazis did not start out with concentration camps, they started out with firing teachers.

I was provided an e-galley of Alt-America by the publisher through NetGalley

Alt-America at Verso Books
David Neiwert Author Site

Scary! How the heck do these clueless people survive? While the rest of society grew up, these morons still believe in the monsters hiding under their beds. And now they have their leader who will play to their most extreme views. God help our country!

ALT America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, written by investigative journalist and reporter David Neiwert who has studied political science for decades. This highly informative and expertly researched book defines the powerful forces that shape and define the ALT political movement-- its vision, agenda and ideology.

The history and rise of ALT politics began in the 1990’s with the gun enthusiastic far right “Patriots”. Eventually the movement would turn into the “Tea Party” fringe of the Republican Party. On June 15, 2015, Donald Trump began his presidential campaign blasting the incompetent political leaders that allowed our great nation to be beaten down by foreign trade. What was really apparent was his bigotry towards Latinos and other minorities in his boastful, arrogant, unapologetic narrative.

By 2015, domestic acts of terrorism had spiked considerably, the vast majority of these acts were committed by American right wing extremists. The most damaging was the attack and bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Most Americans identify terrorism with radical Islam or Al Qaeda, associated with 9/11. Neiwert pointed out that the Justice Department does not officially report or record acts of domestic terror committed by neo-Nazi’s, environmental extremists, militias, war groups or other isolated madmen.

The unusual views of the ALT include: Barack Obama is a secret Muslim conspiring with terrorist radicals to impose sharia law on Americans. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and a vast majority of politicians are a part of the elite that favor a New World Order and global government. Global Climate Change is a hoax, and a large amount of other conspiracy theories where white people are targeted by those who favor minorities that “suck away” taxpayer dollars and bring crime and disease to the USA. They favor a border wall that Donald Trump has proposed to keep them out.

The powerful prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities including the LGBT population and religious minorities are the backbone of the ALT agenda. The white supremacists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, xenophobes, misogynists and paranoid conspiracy theorists were embraced by Donald Trump, drawn from the fringe, and into mainstream politics. However, when a barrage of the anti-Semitic hate mail and messages appeared on social media, Trump remained strangely silent.
**With thanks and appreciation to Verso Books via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.

After the election of Donal Trump as the new American president and the outburst of populist and far right discourses into the mainstream media, alt-right is a term widely - and not always correctly used - in referrence to the concotion of conservative trends predominant in the heart of the Capitol and beyond. However. as usually in the case of such movements, they did not appear from nowhere, being in fact the final result of radicalisation in American politics starting early in the 1990s.
David Neiwert is an expert in extreme right movements in the USA, and I personally expected a throughout analysis of the phenomenon, and eventual connection with the similar phenomena in Europe and elsewhere. However, most of the book is offering a very detailed repertoire of the genesis and orientation of the various movements and mental patterns associated with the alt-right. Especially if you are not familiar with the actors and movements, radio hosts and Internet tools spreading the news and fake-news. From this point of view, the book is a very valuable database that can be used for further analysis and evaluations.
The theoretical approach is made only in the last chapter where the patterns of American 'fascism' are identified and the need for a change of the liberalist approach is recommended. 'Donald Trump may not be a fascist, but with his vicious brand of right-wing populism, he is not just empowering the latent fascists elements in America, he is leading his followers merrely down to a path that leads directly to fascism. If the final result is fascism, the distinction between right-wing populism and fascism is not really significant, except in understanding how it happened in the first place'. I have my methodological reservations about various terminological implants and extension, preferring rather terms that better describe the reality, although it might involve the creation of new terms. Especially the reliance on new media and the various targets aimed at minority groups, plus the strong religious basis in many cases made it completely different from the usual European-based movements typical for the WWII period.
The US radical right is getting a first row on the political stage and both the theoretical approach and the activist-oriented actions are needed.
A book recommended to political scientists and curious scholars about the historical trends of the radicalization in the USA, as well as for knowing both the main actors and the pawns of this new political trend.

Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert is a book I requested from NetGalley and the book's publishers and the review is voluntary. I want to thank them for the chance to read this great book. This book shows the reader that although the 'Alt-Right' seems to have popped right up out of thin air, it has been around for a long time. This takes you back to the the 1990's and follows many of the extremist as the movement grows. Many I have forgotten for a reason, and some I just didn't know that much about at all.

There was one paragraph that sums up the whole book for me :
"Ladies and Gentlemen: In Amercian public life there is an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia. Welcome to Alternative America---Alt-America, for short."

It goes on to list what Alt-America believes such as... Obama not an American citizen, a Muslim who is a terrorist and with Clinton is part of the New World Order to impose global government.
Global Climate Change is a hoax.
These same global elites want to gut the second amendment to take all the guns away.
Our current government is really illegal.
Prejudice and oppression against white people now is greater than ever.
Minorities, especially blacks and illegal immigrants are sucking up taxpayers dollars through welfare programs while homeless veterans go hungry.
Illegal immigrants, especially Latinos, are in with liberals and Democrats to overwhelm the country with welfare-dependent parasites to vote liberal agenda.

You have to be so stupid or so racist to believe any of this nonsense! But, Trump got elected and the weak majority in Congress are doing his bidding. What a shame for the once mighty America. Taken down by a bunch of fools! May the 2018 elections bring some sanity to the country if Mueller hasn't restored order by then! Wonderful book to remind us of what happened and why.

The Alt-right has always existed in America but Donald Trump had given them mainstream attention and a huge platform from which to broadcast their views. This interesting, engaging book explains the origins of the new alt-right movements and how they have used social media to bypass mainstream media and reach the general population, making extremist views far more common place and accepted. The authors does not judge but instead sets out the facts and leads us to our own conclusions about the future of the USA.

"This was not an overnight phenomenon. The dumpster Donald Trump's campaign set on fire in the 2016 election had been slowly filling for many years."

Alt-America is an alternative universe that has a powerful resemblance to our own, except that it's Alt-America, the nation its residents have concocted and refigured in their imaginations. It is not the America where the rest of us live. In this other America suppositions take the place of facts, and conspiracy theories become concrete realities. Its citizens live alongside us in our universe, but their perception of that universe places them in a different world altogether, one scarcely recognizable to those outside it.""

Some of the common, core beliefs include that Barack Obama is a Muslim conspiring with foreign powers and radical terrorists to impose sharia law on America; that Obama, Hillary Clinton and other mainstream politicians are under the control of a New World Order intending to enslave the world's population and confiscate Americans' guns in order to have no hindrance to their tyrannical dictatorship takeover; climate change is a hoax of said New World Order; "prejudice and oppression" against white people is a bigger threat than any bigotry against minorities; said minorities and illegal immigrants consume taxpayer money through welfare while homeless veterans starve.

That's the tip of the iceberg, but these are some of their loudest and perhaps most recognizable beliefs. As unlikely or eyebrow-raising as some may sounds, these ideas are very much entrenched in the belief system of this sector of America, and there's a lot of anger and rage tied up in the ideology, which often gives vent in horrific ways, of which we've already seen far too many.

Another in a long list of books published this year in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, journalist and prolific writer on right-wing extremism topics David Neiwert takes us back through some of the most significant events of recent years that if read now like tea leaves clearly foretell the rise of Donald Trump.

Neiwert focuses on the strengthening throughout America of what most are referring to as the "alt-right", but which many others are calling bluntly, "Nazis." I happened to be reading an advance copy of this book over the weekend of August 11-13, which was when the Charlottesville white supremacist protests over the Robert E. Lee statue occurred and by the time the smoke cleared, three people were dead, one of them murdered.

It was extraordinary to me, and yet it wasn't extraordinary at all. This book had already gone to print, and the news keep happening, the situation keeps escalating, the incidents keep rolling out with a fresh one popping up in the news as soon as the furor over the previous one is dying out. It's exhausting. I can't think of another word to describe it.

I think regardless of when this went to publication, it was sadly always going to be incomplete, or made obsolete quickly. However, as a primer on the history and significant events that contributed to this faction's rise and eventually their leadership under the likeminded "Emperor Trump," it's quite valuable and certainly contains a wealth of collected information.

So in that sense, this is an important book. Beginning with South Carolina teenager Dylann Roof's racially-motivated massacre in an African-American church, the chapters lead up to Donald Trump and Co's most recent gaffes and ham-fisted attempts at explaining themselves away from what's obviously racism, nationalism, and general ignorance of what it means to be leaders and administrators in the modern age especially with respect to race tensions.

This chapter about Roof was one of the strongest. Neiwert details the incident as it was reported by survivors, plus information about how his thinking evolved. It was disturbing and upsetting, and I took a break from the book for some time after reading it, but it remains one of the strongest examples, for me, of what's going on in the so-called "alt-right universe." Roof is a microcosm of this type of domestic terrorism, which Neiwert points out is rarely called out as such, and tiptoed around by many politicians and media, as they manage to murder and terrorize far more Americans than foreign terrorists are doing. The shooting of politician Gabby Giffords and other horrifying, headline-grabbing incidents are also covered in detail, focusing on the ideology that drove these attacks.

Something particularly helpful was the focus on identifying and explaining certain memes or imagery used by the alt-right, like their ubiquitous symbol Pepe the frog, and of course one of the early symbols, the Gadsden "Don't tread on me" flag.

A large portion of the book covers the homegrown militia men and "minute men", the Bundy Ranch types. In fact that incident gets extensive coverage here. This was one new thing I learned a lot about in this book - there are so many militias made out of disgruntled citizens banding together under this alt-right ideology across the country. I don't know how or why I'm surprised, but I am. Also scared. Very.

"By the summer of 2015, the alt-right was gaining significant momentum as an online movement. But it lacked a real leader - a charismatic political figure around whom it could finally coalesce, whom its members could devote their energies to electing to office. It was the perfect time for Donald Trump to come along."

So it was all leading up to that, obviously. The chapters about Trump were quite good, and I liked the many instances where Neiwert highlighted Trump's beloved tendency to "dance away" from issues he doesn't want to discuss, particularly those so strongly affiliated with his alt-right supporters. Reading them laid out here in narrative form was striking. I mean, we already know how he handles them, but Neiwert retold the incidents quite well.

Unfortunately, there's just not a lot that's new here. If you're any kind of regular news reader/watcher, most of these incidents have long received plenty of air time. His analysis is often helpful in understanding some of the developments, but in other sections I found myself bogged down in too much information and reporting-style storytelling, or boring blow-by-blows of things like the Bundy ranch ordeal. As much as I've been craving commentary on the state of government, political parties, and race relations in America over the past year, this felt more like collected information and rehashed news stories than something fresh or enlightening.

Not that any of it isn't important - it absolutely is, and despite Neiwert's call for empathy in conclusion, I don't think that's what the far right wants at all. As we see here in example after example, the divide has grown so huge and so unhinged, so purposely severed from reality and facts that I have no idea how it's ever going to be bridged. Neiwert seems optimistic, but nothing I read here made me feel the same way.

A detailed balance-sheet of American extreme right.

One thing that is tedious for a non-American reader is to keep up with all the names of the white supremacists and Nazis that the book mentions. After all, we the rest of the world don't have Fox News in our homes. On the other hand, it is a good primer to understand how and why the alt-Right transitioned into American mainstream politics.

The one danger that the books about how Trump got elected and his relationship with alt-Right is that they are becoming outdated in an incredible pace. Angela Nagle whose book "Kill all Normies" has created a storm on U.S. left Twitter, has already called her book obsolete after a month or so of its publication. Yet, Neiwart's book is not threatened by the same problem because of its structure.

One little discrepancy in the book in my opinion is the constant invoking of an "alternate universe" of the Alt-America and the call for empathy at the end of the book. Yes, to face with and counter the "alternative facts" looks like a difficult task, but on the other hand, the righteous argument of an "alternative universe" of alt-America pre-emptively harms such an rapprochement of two U.S of Americas over the notion of empathy.

Well, there is no easy answer to such a question. Just log onto Twitter to see for yourself how Anglophone Left accuses each other on a hourly basis.