Review: Talia Lavin's "Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy" (Patreon)

This was what you'd expect from Talia Lavin: concise, brilliant, erudite, apopleptic, funny, and searingly vicious towards white nationalists. Lavin's been chronicling the online far-right for a few years now, and those of us who've followed her work have come to expect top-tier journalism on the rise of petit-fascism in America. She's far from alone in performing this work: Jack and Daniel just interviewed Lavin on I Don't Speak German (please go listen to her calling Nazis "chodes"). But Lavin is something of a gold standard for anti-fascist writing: cognizant, scathing, and righteously angry. Go support her work.

Culture Warlords is predictably brilliant in that light. Lavin provides a deeply personal overview of far-right trends in recent years, delineating the workings of white supremacism through both careful research and harrowing accounts of her own clandestine adventures on alt-right forums. It's as nauseating as you'd expect: even when withholding her identity as a bisexual Jewish woman from far-righters, she witnessed astounding declarations of hate and unhinged bigotry. The range of far-right depravity shown by Culture Warlords is remarkable, manifesting itself in everything from chatrooms dedicated to planning a second Civil War, incel subreddits populated by scores of young men who believe sexually active women cause through sexual promiscuity their labia to resemble "roast beef," and WhiteDate.net, which is exactly what you think it is. (My "favorite" part of the book is the chapter where Lavin talks about adopting a "tradwife" persona on WhiteDate, leading to a series of astonishing proposals from Nazis that read like "a car crash between Nicholas Sparks and Mein Kampf.") 

Lavin's stories amuse and horrify in equal measure, as does most historical and sociocultural phenomena. Her personal anecdotes, though, exist to animate a finely-tuned, well-researched survey of the Internet far-right. Different corns of the far-right are covered extensively, dealing with the phrenologist/"race realist," Christofascistic, incel, ehtnostatist, and Gamergate movements that have all bled into the United States' latest outburst of outspoken racism. Lavin's historical research is excellent, which of course means fascists accuse her of lying on podcasts they record between attempted readings of neo-Nazi James Mason's book Siege while trying to separate pages glued together with cum. Doubtless Lavin's accounts of the primary sources and material conditions white supremacism formed under have Chris Cantwell once again screaming at Skype because he can't tell the difference between a cursor and his own scrotum. Nazis gonna Nazi, principled journalists gonna journalism with principles.

Culture Warlords particularly nails the parasociality of the alt-right and adjacent movements, and how how cultural conditions and a genuinely terrifying proliferation of online rightwingery has created a media-savvy generation of George Lincoln Rockwell cosplayers. Texts and history are treated with equal gravity. The current generation of far-right malefactors has formed pretty naturalistically from a collation of online hate. Some people witness that up close, whether online or in person. It's frightening and it's the world we live in now. Culture Warlords is a deft weapon against this culture. Bear it well.