Nagle presents her work as an attempt to map the online
culture wars that occurred in the early 2010s and how it resulted in the development of
alt-right which played a major role in the election of Donald Trump. Nagle introduces the 2010s as a period in which "cyber utopianism" began to emerge with the rise of internet-based social activism such as the
Arab Spring,
Occupy movement,
WikiLeaks,
adbusters, and
Anonymous which were based on decentralized leadership and online organization. This internet-based activism was immediately embraced by much of mainstream
liberalism without any rigorous analysis or appraisal of the organizational structure and limitations of these internet-based movements, which all resulted in consistent failure and eventual collapse. Many of these movements began on image-based online forums such as
4chan and
8chan. These forums, organized on the basis of
anonymity, developed a subculture among the users that combined extremely transgressive and dark humor with a deeply
misogynistic and
racist attitude. In the second chapter, titled "The Online Politics of Transgression", Nagle observes how political transgression historically is associated with the political Left, specifically that of the
New Left, which was adopted by the
Alt-Right. Nagle frames this adoption of transgression by the political right in relation to the concept of
moral transgression, which can be traced to the eighteenth century figures of
Marquis De Sade,
The Surrealists,
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Punk subculture, and contemporaneously in the 1990s 'male rampage films' like
American Psycho and
Fight Club. This 'transgressive anti-moral style' of the Alt-Right, according to Nagle, is their attempt to completely break away from the
egalitarian philosophy of the Left and the
Christian morality of the Right. In chapter three, "Gramscians of the Alt-Lite", Nagle focuses on the popularity of the
French New Right within the circles of the Alt-Right. ==Publication and reception==