An Expedition Deep Into an Underworld of Online Hate (original) (raw)
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Nonfiction
Talia LavinCredit...Yonit Lavin
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- Oct. 27, 2020
CULTURE WARLORDS
My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
By Talia Lavin
Talia Lavin wants to fight Nazis. And this being 2020, there is no shortage of them.
In her first book, “Culture Warlords,” Lavin takes us down a hate-filled online rabbit hole to visit the world of contemporary neo-Nazis: where they came from, how they communicate, who has turned murderous, what their mixed-up memes mean. When white militiamen called Bugaloo Boys showed up armed and looking for trouble at this summer’s demonstrations for racial justice wearing Hawaiian shirts, did you wonder what they wanted? Lavin has answers.
The author, who is the Jewish granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, knows the cost of spending too much time thinking about these despicable characters. “Writing about hate changes you,” she notes. She is uneasy about the way she and her friends are targeted; she takes measures to shield her family. “I could feel the borders between my life and the hate I studied becoming porous.”
Lavin herself has been a target of the alt-right, so she knows the costs well. In 2018, in an incident that brought her national attention but is not included in the book, she misidentified an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer’s tattoo as being a Nazi symbol. It actually indicated his service in Afghanistan — a mistake that caused such an uproar that Lavin resigned from her fact-checking job at The New Yorker. That kind of online brouhaha can feel big and toxic and inescapable; although Lavin made an error, her book, in some ways, is a demonstration that the neo-Nazi mob she faced is terrible and real.
The communities that she describes are widespread, empowered by the internet, and filled with individuals prone to egging one another on and advocating violence. Lavin visited a number of platforms, from Facebook to Reddit to a private messaging app, Telegram, where she joined 90 different groups.
She explains the particular extremist phenomenon of “accelerationists,” intent on bringing about an all-out race war to achieve the ends they desire, and the various forms of coded language — “All Saints’ Day,” “Day of the Rope,” “the collapse,” “the Hootenanny” — they use to describe this dreamed-of moment. She details the unexpected, unpleasant realities of this movement, such as when Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners in South Carolina in 2015, became a hero to other white supremacists. She delves into the ouroboros of online harassment, where Hebrew words are used to mock Jewish pain.
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