Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
Talia LavinTalia Lavin is every skinhead's worst nightmare: a loud & unapologetic Jewish woman, acerbic, smart, & profoundly antiracist, with the investigative chops to expose the tactics & 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 & 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, & 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, & much more. By combining compelling stories chock-full of catfishing & gate-crashing with her own in-depth, gut-wrenching research, she also turns the lens of anti-Semitism, racism, & white power back on itself in an attempt to dismantle & decimate the online hate movement from within.
Shocking, humorous, & merciless in equal measure, Culture Warlords explores some of the vilest subcultures on the Web-and shows us how we can fight back.
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Talia Lavin is a writer who has had bylines in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Times Review of Books, the Washington Post, & the Village Voice.