An Undercover Trip Into the Rageful Worlds of Incels and White Supremacists (original) (raw)
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- Oct. 14, 2020
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About halfway through “Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy,” Talia Lavin introduces Tommy O’Hara, who at 21 has never been kissed, much less had sex. Tommy is shy and socially awkward; a junior in college, he considers himself a smart guy, yet he’s surrounded by young women who are utterly mysterious to him, “all hips, breasts and unknowable minds.” His confusion pushes him to seek knowledge and commiseration online, where he learns the reason for his plight: Tommy is “involuntarily celibate” because women are shallow, foolish creatures who have been brainwashed by a malevolent feminist movement to deprive him of the sex and affection that he rightfully deserves.
Tommy O’Hara is an incel. He also doesn’t exist, though others like him do. Tommy is Talia Lavin’s creation, an identity that allowed her to infiltrate the online chat rooms where lonely men find succor in misogyny and white supremacy. Lavin wanted to learn how these men became radicalized. She says she could relate to the “social isolation and erotic frustration” that seemed to drive them, before their vulnerability got twisted and deformed. As Tommy, Lavin immersed herself in message boards and chat rooms, where the rage she encountered was so violent and self-pitying that it eroded — “word by word, post by post” — whatever stirrings of empathy she had felt.
“Culture Warlords” isn’t one of those books in which an intrepid author journeys behind enemy lines in order to write plaintively of our shared humanity. Yes, Lavin says, the people she encountered were human — ordinary individuals who eat, drink, sleep, and feel sadness and joy like anyone else. But it’s precisely their humanity that angers her; their hatred is “the culmination of dozens or hundreds of small human choices.” Studying the far right made her more knowledgeable about and less patient with those who tolerate it. Her research, she says, “taught me how to hate.”
But she doesn’t leave it at that, and one of the marvels of this furious book is how insolent and funny Lavin is; she refuses to soft-pedal the monstrous views she encounters, and she clearly takes pleasure in cutting them down to size. She is aided in her mission by the fact that the language of extremists tends to occupy the space between risible and profoundly dumb. Contemporary white supremacy is a mishmash of old anti-Semitic tropes, racist pseudoscience and bizarre fantasia — what Lavin calls a “bigot’s pastiche.” The people who promulgate it often toggle between cruel, inane jokes and a fastidious humorlessness. “Anything,” Lavin writes, “an errant wind, a dumb tweet, a conspiracy theory invented from whole cloth — can drum up the forces of white grievance.”
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Talia Lavin, author of “Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.”Credit...Yonit Lavin
So Lavin went undercover, not just as Tommy but as Ashlynn, too — a blonde, gun-toting Iowan looking for love on a dating site for white supremacists. Lavin got to know the subculture to the point where she became fluent in its language, with its self-important feints at Norse mythology and a rudimentary numerology. (Neo-Nazis famously love to use “88,” because the eighth letter in the alphabet is H, and 88 signifies “Heil Hitler”; I learned from Lavin’s book that some enterprising Christian neo-Nazis have also started using “83,” for an oxymoronic “Heil Christ.”)
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