I want to help them with their research, so chapos of the "post hog" and pigpoopballs poster variety, what are your thoughts on counter trolling the fash and the terf? What techniques do you use to identify the foe when they try insidious entry into a community (e.g. how norse mythos got stolen by nazis but witch aesthetic is repelling them)? What level of engagement do you use? Do you know of any other academic writing on the topic?
If you're in a community with strict and enforced anti-fascist moderation, report and move on. Fascists use public arguments to try and make more fascists. Not out of the people they're arguing with, but out of the people watching it. If it can just be nipped in the bud, that's the best way to handle it.
If you're not in a community like that, you might reply to them. Don't actually engage in an argument with them. They're not coming to the table in good faith, they don't actually believe a lot of what they're saying, and you'll end up running in circles in the same arguments. You want to embarrass them. They give you a lot of the tools to do this themselves. They obsess over their masculinity, but they aren't the perfect masculine figure in their head. That's why post hog and post wrist work so well; they're already embarrassed of themselves, that's part of why they're fascists. You're just bringing it out into the open. Another way, and this works better for the fascists who try and put on a veneer of respectability that were more popular when Richard Spencer was going around trying to do a speaking tour, is to preempt what they say and point it out as bullshit before they say it. Once you've seen a fascist's talking points a few times, it's pretty easy to do. After they say some bullshit, skip to the talking point after that with "Are you a dumbass that believes x?" or "Don't tell me that you believe the conspiracy theory that x." Also, for those types of fash, getting them to admit that they're further right than they're trying to appear to be can push away the more apolitical or moderate people that they're trying to attract. A fascist "just asking questions" will draw people in that a fascist talking about Blood and Soil and Clean Wehrmacht will not.
Identifying them is easy, even though they think it's not. They're not clever. Usually, when you've got anti-trans memes being posted regularly and positively engaged with by a group of the same people all of the sudden, you've got the start of fash trying to do entryism in your online community. It'll be night and day. One day, you'll just be shitposting in a forum about a TV show, and the next there'll be like ten anti-trans posts. And they usually start with anti-trans posts. They'll play coy, saying that they're just jokes and you don't need to make everything political. But come back a couple months later, and if they weren't banned, there'll be just Nazi shit.
If you all haven't already, you should really watch Innuendo Studios' series The Alt-Right Playbook. It explores a lot of what fash and reactionaries do online, and why they do it.