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Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
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77/99
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47/99
Readers' Rating Index
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
"All too often, analyses of white nationalism and the far-right have devolved into anodyne stories of 'Nazis buy milk too', or else created false equivalence with counter-protesters."
"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 ..."
"At least as far as what's presented in Culture Warlords, Lavin doesn't get especially far in her efforts to dox fascists."
"Righteous indignation meets techie magic to shine light on one of America's most malignant warts."
"Still, this is a bracing and wide-ranging look at the internet as a breeding ground for racism and misogyny."
"wide-ranging, angry, and sadly relevant ..."
"There may be deeper, more comprehensive studies of the far right, but the value of Culture Warlords is its anger ..."
"It's a kind of gonzo journalism by proxy, and her most successful effort as a modern-day Nazi hunter ..."
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