Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

A major study of movements that strive to overthrow the U.S. government, that often claim to be anti-imperialist and sometimes even anti-capitalist yet also consciously promote inequality, hierarchy, and domination, generally along explicitly racist, sexist, and homophobic lines. Revolutionaries of the far right: insurgent supremacists.

Intervening directly in debates within left and antifascist movements, Lyons examines both the widespread use and abuse of the term “fascism,” and the relationship between federal security forces and the paramilitary right. His final chapter offers a preliminary analysis of the Trump presidential administration relationship with far-right politics and the organized far right’s shifting responses to it.

Both for its analysis and as a guide to our opponents, Insurgent Supremacists promises to be a powerful tool in organizing to resist the forces at the cutting edge of reaction today.

What People Are Saying

“Drawing on deep expertise and years of experience tracking the shifting constellations of the insurrectionist Right, Matthew Lyons guides readers through the history, ideology, and agendas of these seemingly obscure but increasingly powerful political forces in America. If you want to understand them, you need to read this book.”
—Mark Rupert, author of Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order

“A brilliant exploration of the U.S. far right today and its many different strains. In wonderfully clearheaded, deeply researched prose, Matthew N. Lyons provides a cogent and innovative analysis of far-right movements, using historical examination and his own contemporary reporting to expose surprising truths about the far right’s base, motivations, and ambivalent relationship to capitalism. A vital resource for anyone who wants to fight the alt-right and other ‘insurgent supremacists’ in our midst.”
—Donna Minkowitz, author of Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God, and Fury

“Bold and brilliant in its scholarship and ideological framing, Lyons challenges all of us who yearn for real democracy to step up to meet the challenge of the neofascist threat.”
—Chip Berlet, editor of Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash

“Writing by writing, Matthew Lyons has filled in the face of the new far right for us. It’s facts he brings, not internet hot air. In this strange moment, we all need Lyons’s work more than ever.”
—J. Sakai, author of Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

“Insurgent Supremacists is one of the best overviews of the recent U.S. far right, and a useful corrective to sloppy popular accounts. Lyons takes the reader on a lively tour through the far right’s twists and turns, keeping a critical eye on the role of gender, while highlighting the movement’s unusual elements like decentralization and anti-imperialism.”
—Spencer Sunshine, author of Up in Arms: A Guide to Oregon’s Patriot Movement

About the Author

Matthew N. Lyons has been writing about right-wing politics for over 25 years. His work focuses on the interplay between right-wing movements and systems of oppression, and responses to these movements by leftists, liberals, and the state. He writes regularly for Three Way Fight, a radical antifascist blog, and his work has also appeared in the Guardian New Politics, Socialism and Democracy, teleSUR, Upping the Anti, and other publications.

Lyons contributed the title essay to the book Ctrl-Alt-Delete: An Antifascist Report on the Alternative Right (Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2017). He is coauthor with Chip Berlet of Right-Wing Populism in America (Guilford Press, 2000) and author of Arier, Patriarchen, Übermenschen: die extreme Rechte in den USA (Aryans, Patriarchs, Supermen: The Far Right in the USA [Unrast Verlag, 2015]).

Lyons is cotrustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, which stewards the literary legacy of the late playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry.