One reporter takes an immersive dive into white supremacy's explosive online presence, exploring the undercurrents of propaganda, racism, misogyny, and history that led us to where we are now.
Talia Lavin is every skinhead's worst nightmare: a loud and unapologetic Jewish woman, acerbic, smart, and profoundly antiracist, with the investigative chops to expose the tactics and ideologies of online hatemongers.
Culture Warlords is the story of how Lavin, a frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News), dove into a byzantine online culture of hate and learned the intricacies of how white supremacy proliferates online. Within these pages, she reveals the extremists hiding in plain sight online: Incels. White nationalists. White supremacists. National Socialists. Proud Boys. Christian extremists. In order to showcase them in their natural habitat, Talia assumes a range of identities, going undercover as a blonde Nazi babe, a forlorn incel, and a violent Aryan femme …
One reporter takes an immersive dive into white supremacy's explosive online presence, exploring the undercurrents of propaganda, racism, misogyny, and history that led us to where we are now.
Talia Lavin is every skinhead's worst nightmare: a loud and unapologetic Jewish woman, acerbic, smart, and profoundly antiracist, with the investigative chops to expose the tactics and ideologies of online hatemongers.
Culture Warlords is the story of how Lavin, a frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News), dove into a byzantine online culture of hate and learned the intricacies of how white supremacy proliferates online. Within these pages, she reveals the extremists hiding in plain sight online: Incels. White nationalists. White supremacists. National Socialists. Proud Boys. Christian extremists. In order to showcase them in their natural habitat, Talia assumes a range of identities, going undercover as a blonde Nazi babe, a forlorn incel, and a violent Aryan femme fatale. Along the way, she discovers a whites-only dating site geared toward racists looking for love, a disturbing extremist YouTube channel run by a fourteen-year-old girl with over 800,000 followers, the everyday heroes of the antifascist movement, and much more. By combining compelling stories chock-full of catfishing and gate-crashing with her own in-depth, gut-wrenching research, she also turns the lens of anti-Semitism, racism, and white power back on itself in an attempt to dismantle and decimate the online hate movement from within.
Shocking, humorous, and merciless in equal measure, Culture Warlords explores some of the vilest subcultures on the Web-and shows us how we can fight back.
This is more a compilation of essays rather than a cohesive book, and while it derails too much to the personal on the author side, it shows devastating proof of how the hate support groups organise in the Internet depths.
I think the title is not really accurate and a bit bait when they refer to “dark web”, as obscure Telegram chats and Facebook groups do not really qualify as dark web in my opinion. In that aspect I found the reading and investigation quite superficial.
Overall is a quick read and brings you up to speed on white supremacist groups, their origins and attitudes, specially in the US.
Note: I did read the Spanish translation of this book, which I found quite inaccurate at stages.
This book is a memoir of the author's experiences reporting on white supremacy. It is not an analysis of white supremacy, nor does it offer any insights into how it became such a driving force in modern American politics.
I was hoping to come away with a better understanding of why people turn to hate groups and some ideas about how to combat a dangerous movement, but that's not what this book is about. It's an interesting memoir and I think it's valuable to see how senseless hate affects its targets, so I do think this book was worth reading.
Intense but excellent account of a mixture of personal experience with white supremacists (usually but not always under an assumed identity, via the internet) and 19th and 20th century and contemporary history.
