7,432 words

Talia Bracha Lavin
Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
New York: Hachette Books, 2020

A new book by Talia Bracha Lavin has emerged offering an in-depth take on the Dissident Right, mostly regarding its online presence. This is Culture Warlords, with the spooky subtitle My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. The author is a dilettante journalist perhaps best known for contributions to the Village Voice until that august publication went belly-up.

The opening matter includes brief inspirational quotes by Dolores Ibárruri[1] and Emma Goldman. Already it’s shaping up to be a doozy. If nothing else, the book should make the reader wonder what journalism professors have been teaching college kids lately about journalistic ethics.

Buttinski begins

Early on, the author describes herself:

In order to look as deeply as I could into the world of white nationalism, I had to leave my own identity behind as often as not. In real life, I’m a schlubby, bisexual Jew, living in Brooklyn, with long brown ratty curls, the matronly figure of a mother in a Philip Roth novel, and brassy personal politics that aren’t particularly sectarian but fall considerably to the left of Medicare for All.

Hi, Talia! My name is Beau, and I’m an alcoholic. Where’s the keg?

More confessions soon follow:

I fabricated. A lot. Spectacularly. I invented identities from whole cloth purely because I needed to enter communities where my real self — Jewish, a journalist, a well-known fascism-hating Twitter loudmouth — was extremely unwelcome. And so I had to become other people, and invent them as I went along.

In plainer words, that’s called being a liar. (Other than that, I’d never heard of her before. Perhaps she isn’t as well-known as she imagines herself.) She lists a number of false identities, the first of which was “a slender, petite blond huntress who’d grown up on a white-nationalist compound in Iowa, looking for suitors on a whites-only dating site.” Envy much? Then she describes a number of deeds while undisguised. My fave was this: “I was rejected from joining a white-supremacist pagan ritual in the Albany area by the elders of a weight-lifting pagan cult called Operation Werewolf.”

Good one! I needed a chuckle. Unfortunately, the book provides no further details.

The problem is that she became deeply traumatized from what she immersed herself in online. Thus spake Friedrich Nietzsche:

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

I can see how much strain her hobby put on her already. It’s as if agony drips from her like sweat. Might I suggest some lighter reading material — Regency romances, perhaps? (Actually, I can relate; my college years involved getting hardcore cultural Marxism shoved in my face, which was royally irritating.) Assuming that the basics are accurate, she chose to spend much time intruding in cyberspace forums with the very farthest-out-there nazbols, skinheads who eat raw meat for breakfast, and probably some fedposters using fake identities like she did. She calls them Nazis, but the genuine article such as Heinrich Himmler would’ve considered them plus royaliste que le roi:

They’re people. Just people, mostly men and some women, all over this country and this world, who have chosen to hate, to base the meaning of their lives on hate, to base their communities of solidarity on hate, to cultivate their hate with tender, daily attention. They are just people, people with an entire alternate curriculum of history, who operate within an insular world of propaganda, built to stoke rage and incite killings and for no other purpose at all.

Now that she mentions it, that’s approximately how I regard the mainstream media’s presstitutes, activists pretending to be professors and teachers, and the various Narrative-enforcers in other converged opinion-forming institutions. They’re trapped inside their Leftist ideological bubbles, usually having no idea how the ideas got inside their soft heads, and suffering from extreme cranio-rectal impaction. If they get what they want, their next act will be to dance on our graves. The difference is that I’d pretty much have to climb a mountain to get away from all the poz these NPCs have polluted our culture with — but Talia must dig deep into cyberspace to find the most highly potent and uncensored content whenever she wants to get her kicks by enraging herself.

Then she says she’s angry with people who don’t want to censor the people she wants censored. This begins an often-repeated theme, complaining that the Internet doesn’t have enough censorship for her liking. Then she goes off on a Karl Popper riff with some purple prose that I must admit is fairly impressive in its vehemence. Still, I hate to say it, but she’s living down to the “they cry out in pain as they strike” stereotype. They go absolutely berserk whenever they get back even a tiny fraction of the criticism routinely thrown — often by them — at ordinary whites. Then, whoever committed lèse majésté is supposedly a potential mass murderer who must be silenced and punished. Get over yourselves, already!

Hating “hate”

The first chapter begins with her intruding into an obscure chat room (I’d never heard of it before) which she had “been informed by a source that it was filled with particularly violent rhetoric.” Not only did they happen to be talking about her — a strange bit of timing, surely — it was sexually-oriented hyperbole in very bad taste. However, she also was offended that the majority of them found her appearance too displeasing to consider.

Note well that most of the bad-optics stuff she discusses throughout the book isn’t hyperlinked or screen-captured. (I’ll take the liberty of adding some hyperlinks and pictures of my own.) Therefore, we only have her word to go on, and she makes it clear that she despises the people she’s writing about. In fact, she hates them as much as I hate Brussels sprouts. She admitted to lying extensively during the research about who she was and what she was doing, which tends not to inspire my confidence in the final product’s veracity.

That said, if her recollection about this chatroom was true and conveyed accurately, then it’s my Mormon opinion that those guys should wash their mouths out with soap. However, for her part, those who go places where they’re not welcome may find some things that they don’t like. That’s exactly what she was looking for, wasn’t it? Actually, these observations pertain to the entire book.

The chatroom’s banter about her continued, including speculations about her foot odor. Apparently that was a bridge too far, and she snapped:

Feeling distressed, I texted Kelly Weill, a friend who works as a reporter on extremism for the Daily Beast, telling her my doubts about my own worthiness as an opponent to white supremacists. But Weill’s response indicated just how small the cadre of journalists and activists who engage with the American far right is — and how such work or speech can attract obsessive attention from extremists. “These people see us as antagonists in the big character drama of their lives,” she wrote to me.

Yep, just a few embattled activists and intrepid reporters keeping a horde of Huns from smashing through the city walls. Eat your heart out, Leonidas! Other than that, I’m curious what exactly is meant by journalists “engaging”; aren’t they, like, only supposed to provide objective, unbiased commentary on current events? Any clarification on what that means, specifically?

Ten hefty paragraphs follow, extensively discussing her Jewish background. Hey, it’s important to keep in touch with one’s own heritage, right? I thought I was doing pretty well at that myself through reading lots of ancient classics and studying my ancestral languages all the way back to the Middle Ages. However, it turns out that Ms. Lavin has me beaten by a long shot. After she describes all her Jewish cultural street cred, I realized that I’m hopelessly assimilated. I’m merely a generic American Person of Uncolor, and I have a long way to go toward really discovering my roots! To get to her level, I’d have to live in a castle and wear chainmail or something.

Note well, I wouldn’t have remarked on her background one way or another if she hadn’t made such a big deal about it. Since she brings up her ethnicity frequently, it’s hardly surprising that others speculate about how her upbringing shaped her viewpoints. I can see that she’s pretty distressed about anti-Semitism, so I’ll give her a tip. Unfortunately, she’s being a lousy ambassador for her people. They’d be a lot more popular if they’d just stop doing that.

After that, she describes how being a moderator for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency led her into the new hobby that seems to have taken over her life. She ended up becoming a keyboard warrior battling other keyboard warriors. (Yawn . . .) Still, she does get pretty melodramatic about it. Five years later, it got personal. Somebody was mean to her on the internet. Specifically, an 8chan user called her a Neanderthal — as in literally, lengthily arguing the point using pictures of her physiognomy.

Attempting to demonstrate the seriousness of her hobby, she describes a couple of anti-Semitic shootings. Indeed, the people who committed those were idiots and belong in prison. However, she remains oddly silent about deadly black-on-Jewish violence. Do golems get a free pass when they inevitably turn on their creators, or is she afraid of being called a “racist” for discussing black crime?

The chapter winds down anticlimactically. The last atrocity is the meme that briefly flourished in late 2019 in which photos were color-coded blue to indicate prominent Jews’ ethno-religious background. It seems that they dislike standing out.

Talia Lavin’s favorite topic

Chapter Two is called “The Jews.” After a long warmup:

Unwilling to believe that black people and other racial minorities are intellectually capable of organizing for their own betterment and producing positive social change, white supremacists pin any advance in racial equality on a cunning plot engendered by Jews. To the white supremacist, the Jew is most dangerous because of his adjacency to whiteness, and a desire to destroy it, with crafty malice, from within.

Whoever developed the common talking points recapped in that last sentence was engaging in psychological projection. Zionists may behave as atrociously as they want in the name of collective security, even if the pretext is remarkably flimsy and self-serving. This becomes self-fulfilling paranoia. The rest of us aren’t supposed to notice that we’re being dispossessed, much less to draw correct conclusions about a major force behind it, and certainly not to defend ourselves. However, the obvious bad behavior inevitably gets noticed and the Zionists are caught off-guard, shocked and offended by this development. Really, I’d prefer not to go into all that, but the author brought it up and it demanded an answer.

Then there’s a long section describing the origins of anti-Semitism. The basic idea is that it began as a long-standing conflict between native Europeans and Jews which spilled over into America. As usual, it cleverly focuses on a single angle; get used to that kind of thing in this book. What it doesn’t say is that they’ve had thousands of years of friction with Middle Eastern populations too, and really almost everywhere else their long peregrinations have taken them. The omission borders on disingenuousness, since there’s nothing uniquely white about anti-Semitism. I hope they haven’t talked themselves into believing there is, since it would greatly complicate any attempts at de-escalation.

Moving closer to the modern era, there are some other mischaracterizations as well, but I’m leaving many of them without comment — unlike the following:

Extraordinary anti-Semitism proved a useful tool for a country steeped in antiblackness from its inception: The two ideologies work in tandem, providing intellectual nourishment and moral justification each to the other, a poisonous wellspring that never runs dry.

Oh, get off your high horse! Soon it gets to a lengthy discussion of Henry Ford. For example: “Anticommunist fervor that arose after the Russian Revolution of 1917 contained intimations that Bolshevism was “Yiddish” in nature.”

Why, golly, how did anyone ever get that idea? More seriously, I’d really like to hear them start saying, “We’ve learned the lesson that Marxism doesn’t work. It was a mistake ever to support it, and now we will stop doing that. We want nothing further to do with Marxism or any of its spinoffs.”

The International Jew was subsequently translated into German and circulated in Nazi Germany, where the book influenced Hitler’s anti-Semitic propaganda campaign. Hitler himself was a vocal admirer of Ford and in 1938 awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honor of the Nazi regime for foreigners. This ushered in an era in which anti-Semitism was a transatlantic export, as American racism and anti-Semitism influenced the rise and actions of the Third Reich, and Nazi ideology, in turn, was embraced by a minority of the US population.

Am I reading this correctly, that Henry Ford radicalized Hitler about Jews? Really?

Instances of anti-Semitism in twentieth-century America are too numerous to count, and such detail is beyond the scope of this book. But there are a number of key figures who illustrate the potential of “extraordinary” anti-Semitism, and laid crucial groundwork for the ideological underpinnings of white supremacy as it currently manifests on the internet.

Aren’t Americans just terrible? Actually, if these innumerable instances were to be enumerated, the vast majority of the persecution would involve things like exclusion from snobby country clubs, ethnic jokes, and (horrors!) criticism. Leaving out hate hoaxes and black-on-Jewish violence would narrow the field further yet. The truth is that Americans have been the kindest and friendliest host population that Jews ever had. I’m very relieved to say that some level-headed Jewish commentators have acknowledged this freely.

Eventually it gets to contemporary times, and online culture in particular. For one thing:

One particularly horrifying example came in the form of a public channel on the encrypted chat app Telegram called The Noticer, which gathered screenshots from Twitter accounts of people who mentioned that they were Jewish, and blasted these screenshots out to an audience of thousands of avid anti-Semites. As of May 2020, The Noticer channel had eleven thousand members, and was open to any Telegram user. Its administrator or administrators had posted screenshots of more than sixteen hundred Jews. . . . The phrase fellow white people was often utilized by the targets; the phrase has become something of a white-supremacist meme, specifically referencing the idea that Jews are trying to pass as white.

Regarding the last item, it seems she’s not getting the point. They’re being mocked for using the tired cliché “fellow white people” as a duplicitous preamble to delivering lectures with demoralizing or destructive messages. They could improve their reputation if they’d just stop doing that.

Anyway, I propose an agreement. How about the ADL and $PLC stop collecting dossiers on dissidents, purge the files, and erase the back-ups? (How many people are they snooping on again?) In return, whoever runs The Noticer will shut down the app and delete the database. Deal? I get what the author is saying about how The Noticer feels like an invasion of privacy, as well as the other items she lists later. Surely those who’ve made the enemies list of the “watchdog” outfits feel the same way about getting doxed, smeared, and ratted out as alleged subversives to law enforcement agencies.

Buttinski versus the Boogaloo

The third chapter begins in full moral panic mode, describing lots of deplorability in cyberspace. This especially includes Telegram channels with militant rhetoric and naughty memes. The breakdown in motivations was unclear and left to the imagination. I’m curious how much of it was in earnest, was tough talk, was contrarian edginess, and was fedposting by glowies and other interlopers. There are also Leftist militants on their own Boogaloo tangent, of course, but you’ll have to read about them somewhere else.

She notes that on these channels, after initial excitement there was growing discontent with the Trump administration. (My take is that he was orders of magnitude better than Cupcake would’ve been, and also the first winning candidate in a century who wasn’t preapproved by the globalists. On the other hand, there’s plenty of room to argue for the “glass half-empty” case, since he was elected on a populist mandate but mostly failed to deliver the goods.) She notes that frustration with lack of results from democracy has increased interest in accelerationism.

The author doesn’t bring it up, but I’ll add that the dangerous Right-wing extremist John F. Kennedy had some words about that: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Who is this JFK guy again? He totally sounds like some unhinged radical militia nut who has a major authority problem and wants to overthrow the government . . . He’d better watch it, or one of those Three-Letter Agencies might take a personal interest in him or something.

Then the discussion turns to the term globohomo, which she expounds upon for several paragraphs, which seems overdone. Really, the term is pretty self-explanatory: that’s an extra-large globaloney hoagie with a side order of GLBTQQIAOMGWTF cultural orthodoxy. What has the author particularly incensed, though, is that some people inexplicably got the idea that Jews are pushing much of it. How did that ever happen? At long last, the author starts wrapping up with this:

Antitrans rhetoric from politicians and right-wing news outlets — the perennial panic over trans women using women’s bathrooms; baseless fearmongering about gender-affirming care for trans children — is frequently utilized and repurposed by far-right polemicists. It’s yet another example of an all-too-common phenomenon. The open prejudice that has become the driving force of the mainstream Republican party serves to feed the violent, extremist fringe; the more vicious mainline Republican rhetoric becomes, the more the radical right bays for violence, for strife, for war.

Wasn’t she just telling us something to the effect that the radical Right extremist Donald Trump, obviously so far outside of the mainstream that he belongs in the 1930s, was a big letdown for the deplorable horde of Huns in cyberspace? Now she says that the mainstream Republicans are driving the Overton window to the far Right. (Yes, these are the same ones who are so boring and unenlightened that we mock them.) In actual fact, their strategy is “punch right, defend left” — which is why they never get anywhere.

Next up are Nick Fuentes and the Groypers. It’s an odd topic to include in the Boogaloo chapter. Generally they’re about as militant as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, except when they’re sniping at each other. Their specialty is embarrassing politicians with hardball questions. Ooh, scary!

Trump’s own statements, coupled with his policies, form the strongest argument white nationalists can make that their militancy most authentically represents his vision. One wonders what, precisely, someone like Charlie Kirk could have said had an audience member taken up one of Fuentes’s suggestions: asking Kirk “to defend the President’s preference for immigrants from Norway versus Haiti.”

Well, that was mighty snippy. The framing tactics implying that the US is not allowed to select who it wants for citizenship, that Norwegians are no different from Haitians, that they’re equally compatible with Americans once they’ve landed on our magic dirt, and that it’s forbidden to contradict any of the above — all bundled into a single sentence along with a big wad of sheer nerve. Ah, it just warms my heart. Very well, you went there, so two can play that game. So then, Talia, what have you been doing to support open borders for Israel? All those millions of poor African refugees — their tummies are hungry!

Seductive snake

The next interloping act was at WhiteDate.net to go catfishing, and she in fact admits using exactly that word. She earlier covered this at The Nation; cute subtitle there: “An antifa reporter swipes white.”

The website turned out to be problematic from the beginning. Surely the very thought of a matchmaking site for our own people made her Frappuccino curdle:

The landing page, adorned with stylish white couples, coyly advertises its commitment to an anachronistic, ossified view of gender: “We follow classic roles where strong men take the lead and graceful women play the game. Wisely.”

Ah, a feminist. Isn’t that cute? Or maybe not . . .

I found WhiteDate via a blog post on the racist publishing house Counter-Currents’ website, titled “A New White Dating Site.” Ever since the events of August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, my horrified interest in online hate had sharpened. I’d trawled white-supremacist publications, forums, and message boards, learning the jargon of fear and loathing, trawling for answers.

It’s nice to see that she dropped by, but she might could stand to be a bit less melodramatic. Anyway, this gave me an idea: Maybe I can join JDate and sell my services as a gigolo. Would “dumb blond jock with loose morals and a big smile, wants to be $poiled by generou$ lady who likes kielbasa” seem too obvious?

My initial goal was to nudge as many men on WhiteDate as possible to reveal as many personal details as possible, so that I could, ultimately, out them as white supremacists. I’d funnel their information to antifascist groups that sought to let neighbors and coworkers know about the reactionary and violent politics going on in their midst, perhaps unbeknownst to them.

So she confesses not only the intent to deceive them, but to dox them and put their private information on transmission belts for other radicalinskis to tattle on them to their neighbors and workplaces. Ooh, what a way to fight fascism! Your militant pinkette buddy Dolores Ibárruri would be so proud of your bravery; her corpse should rise from the grave to give you a big, slobbery kiss!

More seriously, this is what social justice warriors pretending to be reporters will sink to these days. Journalists in times past would write a hit piece and leave it at that; now they might also unleash an online mob to ruin someone’s community standing and livelihood. She thinks she’s perfectly justified in this. Thus far I’ve been much nicer to the author than she deserves, but my patience for this shameless, self-righteous crybully wears thin:

I closed my eyes and thought about the ideal mate of a male Fox News viewer, then twisted her twenty degrees to the right and plopped her in the Midwest. The result was a crudely drawn caricature, a sort of hideous mash-up of all those parachute-journalism Trump-voter features that had blossomed so absurdly since the election. Blonde, gun-toting, based on a farm-slash-compound just outside Amber, Iowa . . .

Do I also detect a note of envy here? Freud was a sharp cookie, and I know exactly what he would’ve had to say. So then she steals someone’s picture and creates the ashlyn1488 profile:

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, when Jael the Israelite hammered a tent peg into the sleeping skull of Sisera.

Ooh, classy! Hopefully she’ll keep studying Scripture, because she really needs Heavenly Father’s help to guide her to wisdom.

The fake profile gets inundated with traffic, so much so that she forms a small committee of her Leftoid friends to help with the treacherous correspondence. However, when they started pumping the guys for personal information, they dropped contact. By keeping their bullshit detectors well-tuned, they dodged getting bitten by a snake. Remember, guys: exercise proper discernment and don’t let the little head do the thinking!

Still, a year of trawling on the catfishing operation got lots of initial correspondence, once from as far off as Croatia. This bunny boiler points out their provincial views, often obtained via private emails written in candid confidence to someone who they thought was like-minded and attracted to them. She exhibits these sound bites as if they’re supposed to be shocking, but the effect is underwhelming. Then again, perhaps she’s the type who considers Comrade Leonid Brezhnev a stodgy conservative. Really, these guys were pretty straight-laced, even romantic. She pulls their chains along those lines:

I asked them a simple question, tantalizingly phrased: “If you could write a love letter to your future white wife, what would it be like? I would love to see what you write . . .”

The results were like a car crash between Nicholas Sparks and Mein Kampf.

Then she has the bad taste to print three of these love letters. Playing dick-tease is hardly unusual with high school chicks, but if they don’t grow out of that behavior, it’s called feminist empowerment:

There are more, of course — love letters to the breeding white women of the world, from men who hoped I would be that woman, and who would be filled with rage if they saw my brown curls and big nose, if they found out I was part of the “Jew infestation” plaguing their world.

So she used the fake profile and stolen picture to allure multitudes of men — often strong, prototypically masculine, and Nordic — who she knows would’ve spurned her in real life, hoping to treacherously gain their private information and use it against them. Was this really all about ideology, or at least partly a revenge fantasy fueled by envy and sexual frustration? They were smart enough not to divulge personal details, so she had to settle for merely writing an article making them look bad, but it still smells like sour grapes.

Talia, since you’re a Counter-Currents reader, I’ll give you a tip that you don’t deserve: Your Mediterranean features aren’t such a deal-breaker. Sophia Loren is old enough to be your granny, and she’s still pretty good looking. Develop a sparkling attitude; I bet your results will improve tremendously just from that.

After this there is a long epilogue, beginning basically as heavily feminist-flavored commentary about racial purity. It was as wonderful as one might expect.

Male fraud

Done with pretending to be an ice princess, she starts pretending to be a man. She took on the persona of a young guy who had never been kissed, a classic nebbish who could’ve been lifted from 1960s comedies, but updated to a video game enthusiast. You’d think she should have some understanding of their situation; after all, her last act might well have had at least something to do with getting back at men who are out of her league.

Then a digression about GamerGate appears. It’s a long topic, but as usual, we can count on our intrepid cub journalist to give us half the story:

That “movement” — a loosely organized collective of internet trolls, some anonymous, others emergent ideologues — began as retribution after Eron Gjoni, a then-twenty-four-year-old man, posted a ten-thousand-word diatribe about the alleged infidelities of his ex-girlfriend, a twenty-seven-year-old indie video-game developer named Zoë Quinn. Among his allegations were that she had slept with a video-game journalist, Kotaku’s Nathan Grayson, in exchange for favorable coverage. The screed spread wildly among self-identified gamers. Its immediate repercussion was the vicious harassment of Quinn — who received a cavalcade of death threats; had her accounts hacked; and had her personal information, including her address, posted online, causing her to leave her home in fear for her safety.

I concur that they shouldn’t have gone that far, but riddle me this. Since Talia was planning to dox the men she met at WhiteDate, then why did she disapprove of the GamerGate folks doxing Ms. Quinn? They’re not even journalists, who are supposed to adhere to a code of ethics. Contrary to Leftist notions, the morality of an act does not depend on the ideology of the parties involved. Why all the hypocrisy? Anyway, the digression was pointless. There’s nothing in common between GamerGate and incels other than liking video games. Perhaps the juxtaposition of these subjects is innuendo suggesting a political linkage.

She gets back on track by discussing Elliot Rodger, someone who snapped and went postal. What’s left unsaid is that he was plausibly a male feminist. Also, she didn’t mention that he was half-Asian, a detail that wouldn’t fit in a book denigrating white people via associative conditioning. Tellingly, she never mentions the deadliest case by far: Seung-Hui Cho, who shot up Virginia Tech in 2007 and killed 32. Was it because his name was obviously Korean, and discussing non-white bad guys would spoil The Narrative?

Much discussion follows about incels: involuntary celibates. I say they go through too much torment already, and I hate to see them getting kicked when they’re down. The moral panic that talking heads have spread about incels is distasteful; it’s corporate-sponsored bullying beamed to millions of screens. Some guys are just shy or socially inexperienced, which has become quite common lately. Others got hit with the ugly stick through no fault of their own. Young men usually begin on the economic ground floor without money or accomplishments, lacking the bulge in the pants signifying a big wallet. Being inexperienced, guys start out with terrible game and don’t know what to do. Times have changed, and there’s much confusion about how courtship is supposed to work. The list goes on. It doesn’t help that feminists have denigrated men for decades, tried to convince average women that average men aren’t good enough, and otherwise poisoned the well.

Any of these factors can sentence these young guys to years of loneliness before they develop their careers, learn how to flirt correctly, and so on. Until then, having to do without love doesn’t make them bad people as a type; in earlier times, most of them would’ve found fulfilling relationships. Still, popular culture says there must be something wrong with men lacking a social life. Surely it gets soul-crushing, but generally they suffer in silence. When the mainstream media created this narrative that they’re dangerous people, it only stigmatized them further. They didn’t need this; society was already pissing on them too much already.

The author ends up getting in a scrape with some incels. Then it happened: Someone was mean to her online again. This includes sending her pictures of roast beef sandwiches. A few paragraphs follow refuting the “roastie” meme as unscientific. She must have a lot of time on her hands to deconstruct juvenile insults about body parts.

After that, she found the Incel Wiki and some forums. I was shocked at the recap, but for reasons different than she intended. Many were suicidal, and it’s clear that a lot of these downtrodden guys were in a very dark place. So this is what happens to men who get rejected continually for years and are pissed on by society in general. Then our intrepid reporter created a fake message board account, intruding into their space. The brave buttinski has exposed in print their anguish, suicidal ideations, frustration, porn use, and of course politically incorrect sentiments — playing them up as freaks and rubbing salt into their wounds. Way classy!

Christians and pagans, oh my!

Chapter Six begins by describing plans for an upcoming fundraiser, a pugilistic brawl of pagans versus Christians. It later returns to Norse heathenry, leaving an incorrect impression that the scene is much more uniformly Rightist and militant than it actually is. I’ve met a number of Ásatruar who are apolitical, and some who are Leftist pukes.

Sandwiched into that is a sharp change of direction to describe Christian-inspired violence: two instances against Muslims and one against Jews. The first was rather iffy, since one of the “crusaders” was named Patrick Stein, and otherwise it smells like one of those “FBI foils FBI plot” cases.

I’m against mass murder, of course. That said, the narrative is excised from broader context; anti-Muslim violence is pretty much a “Man Bites Dog” headline, though one would never guess it from the book. Surely Ms. Lavin, as in touch with her heritage as she is, has heard about the Intifada, as well as Muslim fundamentalist immigrants perpetrating bombings, mass shootings, “truck of peace” events, and of course the Stupid Plane Trick. (However, let’s not get distracted by all that; white people = bad, mmmmkay?) The only mention of all that is in a long rant beginning thus:

The view that Europe is on the verge of destruction is common on the right of the political spectrum in the United States. Right-wing news outlets, such as Breitbart, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Caller, highlight isolated cases of immigrants committing violence in Europe. The impressionable President Trump, perennially glued to Fox News, has repeated that myth, denigrating Sweden in particular because it “took in large numbers” of immigrants and thus has faced “problems like they never thought possible” in a 2017 speech.

Ah, so the terrorism, street crime, grooming gangs, and so forth weren’t newsworthy by a respectable standard; the real problem with what’s happening to Europe is that we noticed. Behold, this is how Leftist journalists think. Several paragraphs later, the rant concludes: “In reality, European leaders of all political persuasions have sought to limit immigration in recent years, although to a movement that would gladly murder or expel every nonwhite resident of Europe, no restriction could be enough.”

In reality, they’re lying to the voters just like Republicans do. If all those Eurocrats want to close the borders, then why don’t they?

YouTube isn’t censored enough

The next chapter begins much differently from the book’s usual fare. First, the scene she describes took place in real life. Also, a few moderates are described with more than a mention in passing, which is a break from the endless parade of hyper-carnivorous skinheads and the like. Lastly, for once she’s not pretending to be someone else. It opens by describing a conference featuring Alt Lite content creators: “Figures like Carl Benjamin, aka “Sargon of Akkad,” a massively popular right-wing YouTuber; Blaire White, an antifeminist trans YouTuber with close to a million subscribers; right-wing gadfly Tim Pool; and fascism-adjacent dickwad Andy Ngo.”

My take is that Sargon has his moments sometimes, but is too purple-pilled. Meanwhile, Tim Pool is basically a high-functioning liberal. Although it’s not a very hardcore lineup, Talia makes herself unwelcome by buttonholing participants and posting unfavorable tweets. (At least she doesn’t poop in the punch bowl.) Then she runs away — or is run off, depending on whose story one believes.

A sermon follows stating that the more moderate Dissident Rightists (who she terms “launderers”) essentially act as a gateway drug to the hardcore stuff:

The process of far-right radicalization is real, and widespread, and it rarely starts with overt Nazism. Average Americans tend to shun swastikas, if only due to their historical associations. It takes a process of being exposed to and absorbing far-right ideas — and then more and more of them — to break down a person’s inherent opposition to racism, or misogyny, or anti-Semitism. Critical to this process are people like those at the Minds IRL Conference: ideologues whose personas are groomed to seem reasonable, who introduce far-right ideas more subtly than a Sieg Heil, who you can watch in the living room without setting off alarm bells to all and sundry around you.

I totally get how slow radicalization works. Our culture is light-years to the left of what it was when I was young, thanks to the mainstream media incessantly bombarding the public with sneaky propaganda. Since Ms. Lavin is on the same side as the multibillion dollar mainstream media megaconglomerates, the Tech Tyrants, Woke Capital, the big globalist foundations with their think tanks and NGOs, and the Washington establishment, then why does our brave little rebel complain so much about a few YouTubers?

Then she discusses a couple of individual cases. Some guy got radicalized while watching over 12,000 YouTube videos and then turned coat and made a confession to the media. (Dude, really?) Next up was Soph, a razor-tongued waif formerly at YouTube. Talia emailed her, but Soph knew exactly what she was up to and let her have it with one of the most epic tirades I’ve seen in a long time. Ever the buttinski, she tried to contact Soph’s parents, but they blew her off. The rest of the chapter is moaning about how there isn’t enough online censorship.

Into the home stretch

The eighth chapter is about “accelerationism and violence.” It opens by describing a lone nut attack on a synagogue. In another abrupt change of direction, she uses the Ashlynn catfishing persona to entice a Donbass fighter from Ukraine to fall in love with her:

It’s a fucked-up act. But it works. He spontaneously sends me a picture of his car, its license plate plainly visible. I discover that you can get an awful lot of information by Googling someone’s license plate. He tells me his real first and last names . . .

Yep, he let his guard down and soon got bitten by the snake. Then she turns her perfidy into a journalism project, selling the story to someone at Bellingcat who had a mutual grudge with her target. She gloats:

How could they rebuild the white race, and preserve a future for the white children they claimed to want, if any woman could be a trap? The less they trusted each other, the less cohesive their movement would be.

This is your brain on feminism — any questions? The rest of the chapter discusses violent Rightist literature, lone nut attacks, and “the documented propensity of law enforcement to be sympathetic to white-nationalist groups . . .”

Up next is a discussion about Antifa. After portraying the Dissident Right as being full of wild-eyed fanatics and thugs with few exceptions, it’s comical how she soft-pedals her favorite pinko paramilitary gang. For one thing, to say that these brave protectors of The People might be planning their own kind of Boogaloo is, of course, a big conspiracy theory. Ooh, check it out: A journalist called something a conspiracy theory! Very well, then: There’s nothing to see here; move along. It does go into some of the history of militant anti-fascism, which might be informative for those who are into that stuff.

The final chapter begins with a pilgrimage to Charlottesville. Ah, what a sweet mixture of treacle and bovine organic fertilizer. Then in the Epilogue, the author takes up traditional Jewish cooking — which seriously sounds like a great idea for keeping it real.

Summary

As a book, this new take on the Dissident Right is hardly groundbreaking. Hit pieces about “Right-wing extremists” are a dime a dozen, and typically have somewhat higher quality. Surely there’s some entertainment value in it for those of a certain political persuasion. However, those desiring an objective take will have to keep looking. In my humble opinion, Culture Warlords stretches the truth like taffy. She’s not as far out in left field as Robin DiAngelo, but that’s really not saying much. All the disingenuousness right out in the open is a little much. I’m just old school that way. Back in the 1980s, reporters at least made a token attempt to hide their biases.

As per the usual script, Culture Warriors looks at the scene through a fish-eye lens. It plays the bad optics buffet for shock value and as a misdirection tactic to cover over the book’s underlying assumptions. Even when it’s technically correct, the narrative is profoundly warped by way of half-truths bordering on lying by omission. Among all the staggering spin-doctoring and clever word games, what’s more telling is what isn’t said. For example, she never declares outright that whites are collectively always wrong, have no legitimate interests or concerns, have no respectable spokesmen, have no right to organize, and should accept whatever happens to them without uttering a peep. However, one needn’t read too far between the lines to notice these unspoken axioms.

One question remains: How does she do it? I’ve reviewed plenty of enemy literature, from radicalinskis, skintellectuals, globalists, culture distorters, renegades, and diversity dervishes. Still, it’s always a delight to come up for air at the end, including with this book. I can’t imagine myself monitoring Leftist social media for months at a time. Once I came across some pinko bulletin boards, but that stuff was so boring that I left after about half an hour and never looked back. They just don’t make commies like they used to.

I just couldn’t do it, so I have to hand it to the author for hanging in there. I am in awe of Talia Lavin’s persistence in keeping up with dozens of chatrooms full of skinheads who eat raw meat for breakfast and think she’s a big dweeb. Perhaps some of this is masochism. Actually, I hope it is, for her sake, because this odd hobby would be a big waste of time if she wasn’t getting her kicks out of it.

How about the catfishing? Could I falsely romance a bunch of blue-haired feminists and face-pierced radicalinskis, leading them on and trying to pump them for personal information to use against them? No, I’d never behave that unethically. They’re people, too, no matter how much I dislike their nasty ideology.

Despite her tireless efforts and feverish prose, Culture Warriors was about as monumental as a squeak during a tornado. Former Rightist turncoats have already given too many pestilential tell-all accounts, which are more damaging because they know more gossip than interlopers sneaking into chatrooms. For that matter, the Leftist cause certainly doesn’t need her; social justice warriors are a dime a dozen and expendable as needed. Does she think this hobby is helping her people? One thing it isn’t doing is winning hearts and minds. Be that as it may, I’ve criticized her here, though falling far short of the lambasting I’ve given some other individuals — but I’ll end it on a high note.

A brief open letter

Dear Talia,

Although we have some obvious differences of opinion, I’m not out to get you. (Surprised?) Neither am I out to get — to paraphrase from your introduction — your nieces and nephews, your cousins and aunts, your lovers, your friends, or those who look like them. I’ve never even met those people, so I have no reason to be upset with them.

I don’t hate you for your weight. I understand that staying in shape is a real struggle, and not everyone is in the same place. I don’t hate you for your hair. Although I’m a natural blond, I say there’s nothing wrong at all with being a brunette. I don’t hate you for your nose. That’s just how nature made you. Neither do I hate you for your orientation. Most of my girlfriends are switch hitters, and that’s certainly not a problem for me. I don’t hate you for your background. Nobody chooses the circumstances of their birth, so why would I fault you for that?

I see that you’ve said lots of perfectly silly things. We disagree about politics, but that’s not the end of the world. Your behavior has been atrocious, but you’re not irredeemable. I’ll only suggest that you back away from the ledge. Serving Leftist ideology is a real drag, and it’s clear how much stress this caused. You’re not doing anything tangible for your movement; the ideological machine you’ve been part of has more than enough cogs to grind down. Neither are you helping your people; your behavior is bad ambassadorship and only serves to make your critics think they were right about your people all along. Moreover, your hobby isn’t contributing anything positive to the world, so stop kidding yourself. Social justice warriors are losers — and you don’t have to be an indoctrinated pawn. Why not simply be the change you want to see in the world and leave it at that?

Talia, I challenge you to do better things. You should find a more rewarding hobby. This can be gardening, scrapbooking, photography, classical music, water skiing, VLSI circuit design, diesel engine maintenance, flower arrangement — whatever. Just do this for yourself, okay? Whatever this better pursuit is, may it put a spring in your step and a sparkle in your eyes. Peace and blessings to you, and may your future be filled with joy!

*  *  *

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Note

[1] Dolores Ibárruri, also known as La Pasionara, was one of the iconic figures of the Spanish Civil War, fighting on the Communist side. Posthumously she has been regarded as a freedom fighter and a minor feminist celebrity.