When I was younger, I had a picture presented to me of the hippies and other Democrats of the decades between WW2 and when I was born. There was little distinction made between people like LBJ, MLK, any of the Kennedys and the various unionized workers at factories around the country. The picture presented was a caricature of monotone Democrats, arrayed against a similarly two-dimensional portrait of Republicans. There was a cartoonish battle over the soul and direction of the country by these two groups. Time and experience has slowly taught me that the variance between people on either side was vastly greater than the cartoon allows. I grew up on the Republican side of the cartoon and it was decades before it really sunk in to me that not everyone on my own side agreed with me, much less that I may have more in common with some of the people on the other side. I could not get far enough from 'my side' to have this truth revealed to me. I certainly had no historical perspective to tell me where all of the strains of thought had come from. Michael Malice's "The New Right; A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics," is a primer on the intellectual traditions in the postwar era that have led to this major splintering of the rightmost side of American politics. From Lysander Spooner in the 19th century, to Patrick Buchanan and Murray Rothbard in the 1990s, all the way to Jared Taylor, Mencius Moldbug, Ann Coulter and Donald Trump at the present - Malice tackles the ideas that evolved into the New Right. But as importantly, he gets into the details of various aspects of New Right culture, including memes, trolling and the general anti-Progressive attitude of the movement. His research consisted, at least in part, of being alive and aware at the time this movement was forming. As a writer, he was moving in the right circles to meet and be a part of social groups that included a few of the figures. However, many others were sought out for interviews that were not granted to many more mainstream journalists. It is not correct to claim that he was an uninterested, dispassionate chronicler of the events; it would not be honest to claim that for any journalist. But he makes clear throughout the book that his perspective is as Jewish immigrant, born in the Soviet Union who was not exactly welcome in all parts of the New right. He sets his task before the reader very clearly in the first chapter: "As such, I present this intellectual time capsule of the New Right as it burst into the popular consciousness. As the Virgil in this Inferno, I will be attempting to present logical, rational explanations for the New Right's foundational beliefs. They're not crazy. They're not suicidal. They're as American as apple pie." If you are willing to seriously consider why the New Right believes and acts as it does, then you will find this book helpful. If you wish to categorize the New Right as a monolithic Racist and Ignorant bunch of losers, there is no shortage of sources for confirmation bias available elsewhere. **** Malice is best known as the author of the excellent book about North Korea - "Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il." in that book, he tells the history of North Korea (DPRK) alongside the lives of its despots, from Kim il Sung to Kim Jong il.