It was with some disappointment that I closed my copy of Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Extreme Right, a very short, largely correct, almost useless book by an excellent scholar of political philosophy, the University of Toronto’s Ronald Beiner. The book, to be as fair as I can, seems to have been rushed to press to participate in the vast media circus revolving around white nationalist Richard Spencer and his thousand or so fascism-LARPing Internet acolytes. While a longer, better book might have been more helpful, this one’s glaring failures are illuminating—and can shed light on our contemporary national unease.