Charles Petzold

On January 6, I turned on the TV to watch the Senate certify the results of the 2020 election. Customarily this is a routine exercise in human-assisted paperwork, but I knew that some Senators were persisting in the deception that Trump had won the election. I wanted to see how they planned to contest the results, and I thought it would be fun watching Mike Pence squirm under his conflicted duties and loyalties.

As it turned out, the day wasn’t fun at all. A mob of domestic terrorists stormed the United States Capitol, resulting in several deaths and numerous haunting images. At this time, it’s not quite clear if these terrorists would have kidnapped or killed members of Congress or even Mike Pence himself, but there are indications that was the intent of some of them.

Every individual in that insurrection likely had his or her own personal agenda for being there, but judging from the flags that they brandished, the slogans and symbols they wore, and the backgrounds of those who have been identified and arrested, these were people deeply immersed in a sickening brew of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and the glorification of guns and violence.

Anti-Semitism and white supremacy have been around for centuries, ebbing and flowing throughout history. But the upsurge in recent decades has been frightening. Some of this upsurge was a reaction of shock and outrage to the phenomenon of a Black President. It then built more with the Presidency of Donald Trump, who has not only tolerated racism among his followers but emboldened them. Trump’s own racism has a long history. His 2016 run for the Presidency was preceded by his promotion of a ridiculous (but widely believed) theory that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen, and hence was occupying the White House illegally.

American history is full of attempts to limit United States citizenship to white people: It was a foundation of slavery, and Dred Scott v. Sandford even denied citizenship to Blacks who were not enslaved. The limitation of citizenship was also enabled through voting restrictions during the Jim Crow era, continuing with attempts to disenfranchise Black citizens to the present day. Indeed, Trump’s contesting of the 2020 election was itself a blatant attempt to nullify African American voters in swing states.

Along with the Trump Presidency, another factor has contributed to the upsurge in white supremacy, and that is the internet.

The internet is where people of various persuasions can find others who share their interests and obsessions. Some use the internet to find new friends who enjoy miniatures or dachshunds, and others meet up those who stew in their violent hatred of Blacks, Jews, Arabs, gays, and women. These latter corners of the web are where journalist Talia Lavin conducts her courageous online undercover work documented in the book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.

With both passion and humor, Lavin documents her encounters with the far-right. This is an important book that helps us ordinary advocates of Enlightenment principles, multiculturalism, and democracy understand the forces that are trying to tear it all down. As a reader of history and as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Lavin knows how fragile civilization can be, and how susceptible its stability can be to hate and violence. Through her research into white supremacy, she has witnessed this hate firsthand. The first chapter begins with a description of an online chat where men debate whether Lavin is “too ugly to rape.” (p. 9)

We all saw photographs of the man at the Capitol insurrection with the sweatshirt “Camp Auschwitz.” On the back of that shirt was the word “Staff.” The anti-Semites among today’s far-right seem to have abandoned Holocaust denial, and instead adopted Holocaust celebration. Another popular tee-shirt among today’s white supremacists reads “6MWE,” which stands for “6 million wasn’t enough.”

Along with an historical context of anti-Semitism in Europe and particularly America, Lavin identifies the link between it and white supremacy:

Racial animus in and of itself, while a powerful and fatal force, demands a broader intellectual framework in which to flourish; the white supremacist requires the Jew to create a holistic system of depravity, against which he is engaged in brave and suppressed struggle. … To the hammer, everything looks like a nail; to the white supremacist, every evil looks like a Jew.” (pp. 44–48)

Racially motivated mass shootings in America and other countries are so frequent that they sometimes seem to blend in with each other. You might not remember the names of the young men who killed people at the Black church in Charleston, or the synagogue in Pittsburg, or the Walmart in El Paso, or the New Zealand mosque, but in online hate groups, these men are heroes. Their names are praised, their tactics are studied, and their manifestos are circulated.

These online white-supremacist sites and channels are dominated by men, so Lavin often assumes a male persona to fit right in. But sometimes she does something a little more, let’s say, classical when she sets out “to seduce some lonely bigots. After all, I was at war with white supremacy. And seduction has been part of warfare since at least as far back as the Bible.” (p. 78)

In a chapter entitled “Operation Ashlynn,” Ms. Lavin explores a whites-only dating site that features an “Ancestry” dropdown to specify one’s own shade of whiteness or that of a desired mate: “Afrikaner, Belgian, Croatian, English, German, Italian, Manx, Romanian, Swedish” (p. 82) Not surprisingly, she discovers that almost all the profiles on this site are those of men, so she gives them what they crave: a blonde country girl named Ashlynn with an online name of ashlynn1488, combining two numbers of special significance in white-supremacist circles.

Ashlynn is comfortable with guns and candid about her bigotry, allowing Lavin an anthropological study of the white supremacist looking for love. (Later in the book, she resurrects the Ashlynn persona to identify a reclusive leader in a Ukrainian far-right militia; she describes what’s she’s doing to a journalist colleague as “antifascist catfishing.” (p. 192))

Even in a website dedicated to finding mates, Lavin discovers an undercurrent of misogyny. Some of the men on the site refuse to talk with a woman who is talking with more than one man. They are seemingly fearful of hypergamy, a belief that women will routinely trade up to a more desirable man at any opportunity, with “the imputation that women are evolutionarily programmed to shallowness.” (p. 89–90)

Of course, feminism is a common target:

The animosity that white supremacists display toward feminists — and, by extension, women shaped by a culture suffused with the tenets of feminism — is continual, and often the locus of some of the ugliest rhetoric in the movement writ large. For diehard white supremacists, feminism — with its birth control, its careerist women, and its ethos of sexual choice for women — represents an existential threat to the future of the white race. (p. 94)

The misogynist undercurrent of the whites-only dating site comes to the forefront when Lavin explores the phenomenon of incels: the young men who self-identify as “involuntarily celibate” because no women will date them. The incels are sometimes dangerous in themselves — their rage and self-hatred can manifest itself in suicide missions to kill women — but misogyny can also function as a “gateway hatred” (p. 112):

Radicalized misogyny had led users straight into the arms of white supremacy, with its anti-Semitism, its specious and violently expressed concern for the survival of whiteness, its willingness to engage in pseudo-science and racial abuse. … Having rejected social norms surrounding the personhood of women, they were willing to degrade other personhoods, in service of their identification as a uniquely marginalized and imperiled group. … No hate is an island. (p. 122)

There has long been a strong Christian element in white-supremacist movements, historically epitomized by the burning cross used in terrorist campaigns of years gone by. Yet, among today’s white supremacists are some who reject Christianity entirely because of its Jewish roots and its Jewish founder. As Lavin notes, “This is perhaps the ultimate example of how difficult it is to transcend anti-Semitism; you can literally be Jesus Christ and it won’t be enough for some people.” (pp. 144–5)

Anti-Semitism has also resulted in a more ambivalent attitude towards Donald Trump than might be expected. Lavin writes, “It’s difficult to overstate just how excited white supremacists were at the moment of Trump’s election. It was a white-hot shot of adrenaline into the arm of white nationalists nationwide.” (p. 55–6) But ultimately, Trump was something of a disappointment. Trump “was ideologically aligned with them but not extreme enough, too surrounded by Jews, too willing to make mealy-mouthed concessions to the social norms of pluralism they abhor.” (p. 55)

The perception that Trump was enslaved to the Jewish agenda grew in intensity in 2017 and 2018, and white supremacists began to portray Trump’s Jewish advisors — particularly his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was perceived as taking and corrupting the pure-white femininity of the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump through interbreeding — as pernicious, crooked influences. (p. 57)

While it might be convenient for white supremacists to have a sympathetic ear in the White House, the intent is not to support candidates who will win at the ballot box. The ultimate goal is a violent clash that results in nothing less that a racial civil war. Pushing America in that direction through violence is termed accelerationism.

White supremacy is where the cult of racism, the cult of anti-Semitism, and the cult of the gun fuse together, creating an environment filled with people preparing themselves for a civilizational collapse they view as inevitable. And, increasingly, as less radicalized, more staid and political sectors of the far-right flail, fail, and fall away, a radioactive core of accelerationists remain. This is the story of the far-right since 2016: a winnowing away of most of the factions that yearned for respectability and mainstream acceptance, until those who remain are poised on the bring of explosion. (p. 185)

There is a name for this fusing of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and violence, and that is fascism.

“I consider myself an antifascist,” Lavin writes, “because I’ve met antifascists, and I’ve met fascists, and I know which I prefer.” (p. 215) Towards the end of the book, she offers a spirited defense of the political movement known as antifa.

One thing to make clear at the outset, when describing antifascist activity, is that the vast majority of it is nonviolent. In fact, antifascism is a defensive posture — it rises as fascism rises, and falls as fascism falls, in a well-documented pattern that has lasted for decades.” (p. 223)

I personally am one of the “pearl-clutchers” that Talia Lavin refers to on page 230 who are uncomfortable with the street brawls that sometime erupt when antifa groups offer protection or resistance against the fascists. I would certainly prefer a more principled allegiance to nonviolence.

But that attitude makes me applaud all the more the antifascist activism of Culture Warlords.