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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
Near the Top
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

78/99

Volume of Reader Ratings

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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

"wide-ranging, angry, and sadly relevant ..."

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

"A master of 'social engineering' probes into the deepest recesses of White supremacism ..."

Kirkus 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

"It is a jeremiad, in the very best sense."

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

"But she does more than most anti-extremists to connect the present fascist right to its predecessors as part of long histories of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and fascist organizing in this country ..."

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

"That is not to its detriment."

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

"If there is a weak spot, it's that her reporting only goes so far ..."

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

"Still, this is a bracing and wide-ranging look at the internet as a breeding ground for racism and misogyny."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Near the Top

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