The factual errors that start in the very first paragraph of the book – glaringly (claiming a book published in the nineties was written about George W. Bush) – and continue throughout? Why, these dialectics rival Lukacs, Dietzgen, Engels and even Heraclitus, for fuck’s sake!

I will remain silent on Liu, clearly a co-thinker of Nagle in the so-called “dirtbag left”, when she conflates feminist, queer and anti-racist socialist thought with the “professional managerial class.” As I say, “lelz.” Park MacDougald, in New York Magazine, quite rightly acknowledges that one does not really learn much new from this book, and is at least somewhat honest that it is less about the alt-right than it is a critique of the Left and “liberalism.” Nagle finds humanity and “folksiness” in some of these alt-right figures, not unlike Wolfe’s cartoon character portrayals of astronauts, Black nationalists and acid-droppers. To an extent, one can speculate that in humanizing them, she is making them all the more unappealing. But contrast how Nagle writes about, say, Men’s Rights Activists, with how she writes about those victimized by fascism. In her account of so-called gamergate, Nagle can’t help but inform the reader that she hates videogames, and that the cultural producer first attacked within the gamergate fiasco made bad videogames. Her account of gamergate as the foundational moment of the modern alt-right is likely quite accurate – a battle within a subculture. Yet she humanizes the fuck out of the perpetrators in Gamergate, while writing about female cultural producers in a sneering, scornful way.

Then there’s Tumblr. Tumblr has been a fascinating social phenomenon, in which young people discover and imagine new subjectivities – and yes, along with these new subjectivities, they foster and collectively interpellate new identities beyond the gender binary. To transgender folks and anyone who falls outside of normativity (and not just young people) Tumblr culture has genuinely been helpful. It has, in turn, yes, led large corporations – especially those used by said demographic – to allow people to identify beyond the gender binary. It used to be that it was considered at least a partial victory – “recognition” if not “redistribution” – when this sort of thing takes place. But Nagle finds it funny that Facebook now allows for non-binary identity. Thus, mutatis-mutandis: Tumblr, Trans issues, gender, all of it is “Tumblr liberalism.”

And let’s not stop there. Nagle, generally speaking, treats LGBTQI people in derisive ways. This is not some kind of “call out.” Nagle is quite open about her belief that her version of left politics is a politics of exclusion, a sort of workerism without workers, as she doesn’t seem to orient to the working class either. In fact, the book doesn’t really seem to have politics. At least not on the surface.

But underneath it all the book does have politics, and this is a classic sleight of hand – to attack those to one’s left by associating them with those to one’s right. The politics Nagle is espousing are that of a parlour trick. She repeatedly throughout the book will combine in a single paragraph or even a single sentence a perfectly reasonable and defensible left position – let’s say Justin Trudeau being a white supremacist – with an absurd one – Hillary Clinton being a feminist and “Bernie Bros” being anti-feminist. So, to be clear, Nagle is saying to Indigenous people and the great swathe of the Left that have finally come to support Indigenous social movements that they are the equivalent of a liberal because they justifiably argue that, even if personally Justin is a nice guy with a tattoo, he is not your friend, he is an upholder of white supremacy. Opposing Justin Trudeau and the Canadian Liberal Party’s history of white supremacy is the same as supporting Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. Okay.

But to many people on the Left, those still smarting from losing an argument on Twitter, or from being “called out” in a dramatic way, her work is a salve. She is telling her readers “I understand, you are a real leftist, those meanies who called you a transphobe are just meanies!” And she thus serves to reinforce this politics of exclusion. And this politics of exclusion, I will add, has nothing to say about transformational social change. She pays some lip service to Marxism, but, as noted, she has nothing but negative things. She is particularly vicious towards feminist and queer socialism of the type, for example, found in Holly Lewis’s work. It is a challenge to her and her co-thinkers to actually have a substantive critique of liberal identity politics that also engages, renovates and focuses on the importance of a Marxist politics of identity.