Talia Lavin - Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

T heres a classic New Yorker cartoon that I like: Its from the early days of the internet, 1993, and it features a pooch sitting in an office chair at a blocky, Mac-looking computer, talking to another dog whos looking up at him, bemused. The caption: On the internet, nobody knows youre a dog. Well, that may be true. But on the internet nobody knows youre a Jew, either, unless you announce it. And while writing this book, for the first time in my life, I spent a whole lot of time, a full year, not telling people I was a Jew, and listening to what they said when I didnt.

In order to look as deeply as I could into the world of white nationalism, I had to leave my own identity behind as often as not. In real life, Im a schlubby, bisexual Jew, living in Brooklyn, with long brown ratty curls, the matronly figure of a mother in a Philip Roth novel, and brassy personal politics that arent particularly sectarian but fall considerably to the left of Medicare for All. Over the course of writing this book, I had to leave my own skin. And sometimes what I found made me want to never return to it.

Here are a few things I did over the course of working on this book.

I fabricated. A lot. Spectacularly. I invented identities from whole cloth purely because I needed to enter communities where my real selfJewish, a journalist, a well-known fascism-hating Twitter loudmouthwas extremely unwelcome. And so I had to become other people, and invent them as I went along.

I pretended to be a slender, petite blond huntress whod grown up on a white-nationalist compound in Iowa, looking for suitors on a whites-only dating site.

I pretended to be a down-and-out warehouse worker in Morgantown, West Virginia, who had become suicidal after his wife left him, only to be restored to his full self by becoming part of the white-nationalist movementand willing to do anything to support his brothers in the cause.

I pretended to be an incelan involuntarily celibate virgin, radicalized into a deep hatred of women by his lack of sexual success.

I infiltrated a Europe-based, neo-Nazi terror propaganda cell, called the Vorherrschaft (Supremacy) Division, by pretending to be a sexy young woman with an interest in saving the white race through violence, with the screen name Aryan Queen.

I silently observed as neo-Nazis mused about what raping me would be like.

And, as myself, I went to dark places; I spoke to bad people and good people on the front lines of the battle for America.

As myself, I attended a conference for alt-right YouTubers in Philadelphia and was chased out of a casino.

I spoke to everyday antifascists defending their community in Charlottesville, Virginia.

I was rejected from joining a white-supremacist pagan ritual in the Albany area by the elders of a weight-lifting pagan cult called Operation Werewolf.

I listened to a terrible white-nationalist freestyle-rap diss battle.

I watched neo-Nazis post photos of trans children and Jewish children and black children and talk about killing them.

Every day for nearly a year, I immersed myself in chat groups and websites and forums where photos of lynchings were passed around like funny memes. Where KILL JEWS was a slogan and murderers were called saints. On the anniversary of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, I watched them celebrate Robert Bowers, the murderer of eleven Jews at prayer, like a hero and a friend. I listened to strangers talk about killing kikes every day. I listened to strangers incite violence and praise murder and talk about washing the world with blood to make it white and pure. I listened to their podcasts. I watched their videos. I listened to their terrible music and watched them plan to meet and celebrate the racism that was their raison dtre.

And something snapped in me.

I admit it: I started this book angry at the racist right. I set out with the idea of writing a profane but intellectual, impassioned but clear book to spell out just exactly who these people are and what they want to do. Before I started writing, I was already the top Google search result for greasy fat kike, thanks to neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. A hate group called Patriot Front had already sent my parents a postcard with the Nazi-era slogan Blood and Soil. I had already had my relatives names published on Gab, a white-supremacist-friendly social media site used by alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers. I thought I was ready for what researching this book would do to me.

I wasnt.

As I write this now, I feel myself incandescent with the kind of anger that doesnt just last an evening. Its an old clich that lovers shouldnt go to bed angry; well, for the past year I have gone to bed with my anger and woken up with my anger and gone about my day with my anger hot and wet like blood in my mouth.

Its not that I discovered that members of the racist far right are inhuman, or monsters beyond comprehension. Theyre not some entirely new species of being that requires forensic analysis and the dispassionate gaze of the scientist. Theyre not uniquely stupid or uniquely mired in poverty or uniquely beset by social problems or even members of any specific socioeconomic class. Theyre not monsters. Theyre people. Just people, mostly men and some women, all over this country and this world, who have chosen to hate, to base the meaning of their lives on hate, to base their communities of solidarity on hate, to cultivate their hate with tender, daily attention. They are just people, people with an entire alternate curriculum of history, who operate within an insular world of propaganda, built to stoke rage and incite killings and for no other purpose at all. There are rich men and poor men, tradesmen and office workers, teenagers and men cresting middle age. They eat and sleep and sometimes drink too much and sometimes are sober. Theyre lonely, some of them; horny, some of them; sometimes depressed and sometimes confused and sometimes joyful. Theyre people, just like you and me. They could work in the next cubicle over and you might not know it; sit one seat over in class from you and you might not know it; live in your neighborhood, play on your sports team, and you would never know that deep in the night they trade photos of lynchings like baseball cards, and laugh.