Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House review – in search of a rightwing rabble

Mike Wendling's history of the political group provides plenty of information, but doesn't get to the root of its hatred

The best thing about Mike Wendling's new book is the cover. It is extremely clever - a digitised, mashed-up, almost-but-not-quite swastika, which is both artistically striking and a reflection of the book's central argument: that the "alt-right" represents a novel form of extreme rightwing thinking that is at once familiar and confusing.

Most people first heard of the "alt-right" around mid-2016, as the internet-savvy rabble that got behind Trump hammered out frog memes, worshipped Milo Yiannopoulos and loitered around the Breitbart website. No one was entirely sure whether this was a new combination of internet libertarians and youthful nationalists or simply old-fashioned racism repackaged. According to Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House, it's a bit of both and very hard to pin down: "an incredibly loose set of ideologies held together by what they oppose: feminism, Islam, the Black Lives Matter movement, political correctness, a fuzzy idea they call 'globalism' and establishment politics of both left and right". Unsurprisingly, then, writes Wendling, "it's a movement with several factions which shrink or swell according to the political breeze and the task at hand".