- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2142
In Culture Warlords Talia Lavin, a Jewish queer woman, infiltrated the dark side of the internet during President Donald Trump’s first term of office, exposing how the far right works in the United States. Motivated by the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, Lavin analyses insurgent fascism to find what it truly is and where it comes from. White supremacy normalises white nationalism and authoritarianism.
Trump uses culture as a “potent driving force that promotes – and thus erodes the social cost of – misogyny and a range of racism.” What Lavin shows is just how hate-filled are those who Trump called “good people.” The Proud Boys are nothing but a fascist street gang, who were “standing by” on the president’s orders. Trump’s endorsement of the far-right marchers showed “an unsettling degree of comfort with racist violence.” Trump released the Proud Boys from prison the moment he was inaugurated.
Lavin invented her online personae to allow her to expose fascists and white supremacists in online chatrooms and websites. She infiltrated the neo-Nazi Vorrherrschaft (Supremacy) Division, the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, the Patriot Front with its slogan “Blood and Soil,” and other groups. She also looked at Telegram, and “whites only” dating sites.
Lavin’s research showed that the white nationalists’ hatred for women and gender non-conforming people is particularly aggressive online, a seething rage linked to a view of white women, not as people, but as pure, untainted progenitors of the race. “Misogyny was a natural outcome of indoctrination into white supremacy, which sees women purely as vessels for breeding.” Controlling women is an essential image of “Whiteness.” For Lavin, vitriolic misogyny is at the core of these “Culture Warlords.”
Lavin found that these people are ordinary people “who have chosen to hate.” She warns that the far right is “an enemy to whom one must give no quarter,” because they inevitably use that hatred for violent ends. Her exposé raised the ire of white supremacists, and created a torrent of hate towards her, which ended in depression. “It changed the way I saw myself when I looked in the mirror.”
Lavin provides an important insight into Trump’s second term of office. Trump has already displayed strong sympathies for the far right and has been actively hostile to people of colour. The book is well worth reading.
