In early November of 2020 I heard a National Public Radio interview with journalist and anti-fascist activist Talia Lavin. She was discussing her recently published book Culture Warlords: My Journey Into The Dark Web of White Supremacy (New York: Hachette Books). Lavin's story of spending a year infiltrating the Internet chat rooms of neo-Nazi, incel ("involuntarily celibate"), and other anti-Semitic, white nationalist, and misogynist clans almost sounded funny. Her description of how she assumed a white supremacist femme fatale persona as "Ashlynn" to get racist, hate-filled buffoons to let down their guard and reveal their motivations in "love letters" to her had a Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" quality to it. I ordered the book, but with President Trump's defeat and with still learning how to teach during a pandemic, I did not treat it with much urgency. Surely, I thought, the election results represented at least in part a desire to move toward the national unity necessary to tackle the profound public health, economic, and other crises we are facing. Obsessing over hate groups would just be a huge waste of time and energy.
Video: Talia Lavin interviewed on CBSN
But then as November rolled on it became clear that neo-fascist elements in the country were energized by the Trump/Giuliani "Stop the Steal" rhetoric. On January 6th, 2021 a number of self-described Nazi and white supremacist organizations participated in the Capitol insurrection. The New York Times of January 16th cited law enforcement and domestic terrorism experts warning that the insurrection could "fuel extremist recruitment for years." Meanwhile, Republican legislatures throughout the country--acting on distortions fed them by Trump/Giuliani after the election--are poised to pass a range of ballot access restrictions in what's looking like Jim Crow 2.0. The Brennan Center for Justice has tracked more than 250 bills that restrict voting access across 43 states. Georgia's recently passed legislation actually makes it a crime to give food or water to voters waiting in line.
Suddenly Talia Lavin's book seems urgent.
Starting on June 1, 2019 and continuing for a year, Lavin joined more than
ninety far-right groups on the Telegram messaging app. She writes that “My
intent in joining these groups was to gain a fly-on-the-wall view of far-right
rhetoric, surveilling its violence, racial animus, and anti-Semitism in an
environment in which contributors felt safe to speak freely, embracing the new
platform on which they found themselves connecting enthusiastically with one
another.” The chats she joined ranged from 22 to over 5,000 members, and she estimates that the chats collectively hosted about 32,000.
Lavin found that people in the chats did not meet the stereotype of the hard working salt-of-the-earth patriots distressed and left behind by neoliberal trade and other economic policies. She certainly came across such types, but there were also huge numbers douchebaggy, secure professionals; i,e. people not struggling in the modern economy. During the Trump Administration, Stephen Miller--a Duke graduate with little personal connection to white victims of post-NAFTA trade wars-- brought white nationalist ideas to the highest levels of power. Lavin found lots of Miller-type individuals in the chat rooms.
White supremacists on the internet are skilled at finding and sharing anti-Semitic and other hate texts dating from the middle ages to modern times. As stated by Lavin, "Everything old is new again online, and the worst of history, freed from its paper bonds and any context, floats in a void, to be plucked up and championed by hatemongers." Across all chats she infiltrated, she found persistent and disturbing allegiance to fabricated anti-Semitic texts like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and more modern hate such as New Zealand mass murderer Brenton Tarrant's "The Great Replacement Manifesto". Among hardcore white supremacists she found repeated mentions of the late David Lane's "14 Words:" "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." David Lane was a member of "The Order," a 1980s white supremacist terrorist organization.
Before setting out to infiltrate the fascist side of the Web, Lavin was already known as an outspoken antifascist. Her Jewish identify made her the target of especially virulent hate, including death and rape threats. In 2018 along with many others on Twitter, she mistakenly claimed that an ICE agent had a Nazi tattoo. The ugly reaction to her mistake was one of many factors that sparked her to investigate the depth hate in networld. In the introduction to the book, she claims that after a year of immersing herself in the dark world of online fascists, she began to feel rage not just at them but at white moderates; "The people who say: Ignore them! Let them march! Let them tweet, let them speak on campus, let them have their say and they will be defeated in the marketplace of ideas. The people who bill themselves as reasonable, who say: Let them air out their arguments. But the effect of these ideas when they are aired out is much like Zyklon B. Studying them as deeply as I have has made me realize no amount of such rhetoric is acceptable in the country's discourse, just as there is no acceptable amount of poisonous gas to let seep into a room."
Later in the book she revisits the question of whether it might be best just to ignore the haters: "Aren't these just losers pontificating and arguing on the internet? . . . The thing about hate, though, is it metastasizes. The thing about channels that are filled, twenty-four hours a day, with stochastic violence--testosterone filled megaphones shouting for blood--is that, sooner or later, someone is going to take them up on it. From Robert Bowers to Anders Breivik to Brenton Tarrant, racist networks have proven over and over again that the steady dissemination of murderous propaganda leaves a trail of blood behind it. And when that happens, being about to trace, isolate, and identify these ideologies means that racists can't hide behind slippery code words or private vocabularies. In identifying their inspirations, and their ideological and theological motivations, we give them less room to operate in the shadows . . . The chat rooms would continue without my sock puppet or with it. But if I'm there, I can tell you about it, you can help me strep the shadows away, and disinfect these crusty dens of hate with a blast of much-needed sunlight."
Perhaps the major value of Talia Lavin's book is that it is an antifascism primer; a kind of "anti-fascism for dummies." In an accessible and easy-to-read format, the book presents a history of hate, making clear links between old school anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and modern versions. She also shows clearly that resistance to hate has a long history. "Antifa," which in conservative media is a nefarious cabal of violent extremists bent on destroying America, is in Lavin's view a foil for real far right violence. Alt-right activists and their apologists and enablers in media need to portray antifascists as violent extremists so that their own anti-social actions might seem tame by comparison.
According to Lavin, antifascist activity does not usually occur in the streets or in active physical confrontation with alt-right wingers. Rather, much of antifascist activity "takes place in the form of research, infiltration, and perhaps most of all 'doxing'--revealing the names, locations, and occupations of members of hate groups." She argues that "while antifascism itself is roughly a century old, it has evolved, in the twenty-first century, to embrace novel techniques and technological advances. In some ways it has never been easier to participate in everyday fascist work, provided you have a good internet connection, a measure of patience, and the ability to engage in painstaking amateur detective work." She also claims that the majority of active antifascists she has met are women and people of color--quite the contrast with the mainstream media image of antifascists as young, masked middle-class white guys dressed in black.
There is no easy answer to the question of how to curb the spread and impact of internet hate. The actor Sacha Baron Cohen, in his viral speech delivered upon receiving the International Leadership Award from the Anti-Defamation League, argues that social media companies have been slow to control hate on their platforms because their business models require large scale engagement. Lies, conspiracies, and outrage generate such engagement. Cohen wants to see government aggressively pressure social media companies to do what is necessary to reign in hate. He argues that such action does not offend the First Amendment, since the social media companies are private entities and thus are free to purge hate from their platforms.
Full Speech: Sacha Baron Cohen Takes On Social Media Companies
Lavin is on the same wavelength as Cohen, though she is wary of the idea that fascism can be defeated by government action. She believes that the rise of fascism will not ultimately be dismantled by "punitive measures of the state" or by "lone vigilantes" like herself. Fascism will be dismantled by "people working together to stamp out hate wherever it arises." I agree.
Talia's Lavin's Culture Warlords is in some ways a reminder that, if you claim to be a sincere believer in democracy and human rights, then you are by definition an antifascist. And if you truly are antifascist, then you are obligated to do what you can to support others doing genuinely antifascist work. The challenge is immense; years of propaganda and uncontested nonsense have too many people thinking, for example, that fascists are those who support mask mandates to protect public health. Sometimes what we are up against seems so big that there is a temptation to just want to give up. Yet just in Wisconsin in the last few days we have learned that we've got Nazi statues in Baraboo, while the Jewish Community Relations Council in Milwaukee recently reported that 2020 saw a 36 percent increase in reported incidents of anti-Semitism across the state.
Clearly now is not the time to give up.
Anti-Hate Resources:
*Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Group Tracker
*Political Research Associates' Tools For Action
*Hours Against Hate (Milwaukee)
*We Are Many--United Against Hate
*Lone Wolves Connected Online: A History of Modern White Supremacy by Laura Smith (New York Times, January 26, 2021
*The New Yorker Magazine White Supremacy Archive
