It’s hard to know exactly how to define the alt-right. The movement, if there really is one, is amorphous, multifaceted, and prone to factionalism and internal squabbling. Last year, the Wall Street Journal defined it as a “loose but organized movement” that united different strains of ultraconservative politics with white supremacy and niche online cultures. To some extent, the paper was saying what the alt-right wanted it to say: It was a movement, it had its 15-minutes of fame, and it was different from the conservatism of Ayn Rand-devotees like Paul Ryan. Months before The Atlantic caught the term’s self-proclaimed founder—Richard Spencer—on camera among a mass of Sieg Heil-ing men in the basement of a U.S. federal building, this once obscure political phenomenon was brought into the limelight.

KILL ALL NORMIES: ONLINE CULTURE WARS FROM 4CHAN AND TUMBLR TO TRUMP AND THE ALT-RIGHT By Angela Nagle Zero Books, 136 pp., $16.95

While this eclectic array of far-right groups might have faded into obscurity under a Clinton administration, Trump has given America’s fanatical rightwing a much needed boost. The “God-Emperor,” as some in the alt-right are fond of calling him, was hardly their ideal candidate or the poster boy for Aryan racial supremacy. But he was the perfect symbolic leader for an online cultural clash that has been years in the making.

In Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, published by Zero Books, Angela Nagle plumbs the depths of the noxious digital morass that fed off Trump’s rise. Where some have seen unfathomable chaos, Nagle—an academic and journalist who’s covered digital subcultures extensively—aims to faithfully document the online culture wars that “may otherwise be forgotten.” By presenting one of the few holistic and sensible taxonomies of the alt-right, Kill All Normies offers a bulwark against desultory assessments of the movement that blur the myriad of ideological differences that make the movement’s origins and goals feel impenetrable. It is also a wake-up call to those on the left-liberal spectrum that it is high time they got their act together.

Nagle approaches the alt-right as a meta-group of semi-divergent subcultures, including the eclectic cadre of feminist-hating chauvinists in the “men’s rights movement,” Pepe-wielding shitposters, “dapper” white ethno-nationalists, pseudonymous neoreactionary theorists, and “alt-light” allies like Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon. (Both men have, in the post-election period, fallen out of favor, specifically with many in the movement’s white nationalist contingency.) As a result, WSJ’s use of “organized” may be questionable here. The alt-right is better understood as a broad coalition of internet and intellectual subcultures—some of which are organized—that briefly came together over a shared goal: to elect Donald Trump to the highest office in the land.

Among this loose coalition includes a hardcore white nationalist contingent, consisting of think tanks like the National Policy Institute and American Renaissance, as well as intellectual figureheads and movement leaders like The Occidental Quarterly’s Kevin MacDonald, AmRen’s Jared Taylor, Daniel Friberg of Arkos Media, and, of course, Spencer himself. While this “big tent” approach comes at the expense of ideological purity, many within the white nationalist old guard have admitted, reluctantly or otherwise, that this doddery coalition has benefited their cause tremendously. As Greg Johnson, editor-in-chief of the white supremacist publishing house Counter Currents, wrote shortly before Trump’s inauguration, while white nationalists need to remain realistic about the fault lines that exist between them and so-called “alt-light,” they ought to treat this brief alliance as an opportunity. Even though the alt-light is driven by “civic nationalism as opposed to racial nationalism,” they ought to be looked upon “as potential converts to white nationalism.” For a movement plagued by websites that look they came from 1997, that is a hefty boost.