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Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

by Talia Lavin

Legacy Lit ·2020 ·288 pages
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Near the Top
I Index
72/99
Top of the Pile

77/99

Critics' Rating Index

Maybe Someday

47/99

Readers' Rating Index

Top of the Pile

92/99

Scholars' Citation Index

84/99

Volume of Reviews

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About This Book

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. Culture Warlords explores some of the vilest subcultures on the Web-and shows us how we can fight back.


Reviews

"It's not pretty, but Lavin is an entertaining Virgil for this neo-Nazi hell ..."

Carolyn Kellogg· The New York Times Read review ↗ Near the Top

"There may be deeper, more comprehensive studies of the far right, but the value of Culture Warlords is its anger ..."

Scott W. Stern· The New Republic Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"It's going to take much more than guidance programs for the youth and enhanced surveillance to counter the rising tide of the far right."

Peter Berard· Los Angeles Review of Books Read review ↗ Near the Top

"[An] alarming investigation into online extremism ..."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Lavin is of course not the first to write about the problem, but her book feels particularly insightful, perhaps because she understands so deeply both the modern idiom in which these bigots operate today and their historic roots in race science, eugenics, and anti-Semitism."

Kate Tuttle· The Boston Globe Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Righteous indignation meets techie magic to shine light on one of America's most malignant warts."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"The more traditionally academic sections...are succinct but punchy ..."

Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan· Financial Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Culture Warlords isn't one of those books in which an intrepid author journeys behind enemy lines in order to write plaintively of our shared humanity ..."

Jennifer Szalai· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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