I'm going to be speaking with Tolia Lavan, who is author of the book Culture War Lords
My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.
Tolia, great to have you on.
I appreciate your time.
Thank you.
I appreciate you having me on.
So you did something very interesting, which is you and Ben potentially harrowing, which
is you jumped into some of the dark recesses of the Internet that I will often mention,
but recommend my audience not dove into.
And this includes white supremacy, anti-Semitism and all sorts of different areas.
Talk a little bit about why you did this and sort of how you dipped your toes into this
pool to begin with.
Yes, so I'm a Jewish woman and I've been writing about the far right for a few years before
the book even came out.
And with that came a response from the white supremacist white power community.
And my reaction to various waves of harassment that were vehemently misogynistic, vehemently
anti-Semitic was essentially to.
Instead of kind of curling up and shrinking back and stop talking was to dove deeper,
I wanted to see who these people were, where they were coming from, how they were getting
to my Twitter feed.
And, you know, it was sort of a situation where the abyss was looking at me and I decided
to gaze back and drag what I saw back out into the light.
So what did you find about the source of many of the the sort of hateful and trolling messages
that you were getting?
So I decided to take a broad view and look at both.
The development of the contemporary white power movement and what it looks like, how
it manifests and where they congregate, so I spent a lot of time looking at particularly
an encrypted chat app called Telegram and which has like very strong free speech protections
and sort of never bandz content, really.
So it's become kind of a thriving ground for white supremacists to particularly in twenty
nineteen, faced some Banning's from mainstream social media like Facebook and Twitter.
And so that's where I spent a lot of my book research looking into.
And I found a lot of different tendencies in communities of interest within the white
power movement that I spend the book, Culture Warlords Exploring.
Did you talk a little bit about how you existed in some of these spaces?
I mean, did you develop a character or a series of characters, alter egos that that you kind
of took on?
Yeah, so I didn't actually set out to write a gonzo journalism book, it's just that when
you're a Jewish woman and when you've been kind of an outspoken antifascist for years,
it's hard to get in the front door.
People who are white supremacists won't get you an interview.
You know, I am.
One of my earlier attempts was to try and get into.
There's a sort of.
Powerlifting based white supremacist pagan cult that that has these solstice celebrations
and I tried to get in just as a reporter and much later one of the guys I was talking to
was like, oh, we would never let a Jew in anyway.
So, you know, it was hard to get in the front door, but and so as a result, I found myself
sort of having to get a little creative and find these back door roots.
And that included making sock puppets, sock puppet accounts to just kind of squat and
listen and in some other cases, having to be a little more proactive and inventing kind
of identities from whole cloth in order to get into more private chats.
And in one case, I infiltrated a white supremacist dating site, white dot net, with the whole
character who didn't look like me or have my background as kind of a course Brooklyn
Jew.
And I got these forlorn white supremacists looking for love to write love letters to
their ideal white wife and send them to me.
And I printed them in the book and it was sort of a car crash between Nicholas Sparks
and Mein Kampf.
Did you make any of what you would consider to be friends during this process?
No, I mean, it's not generally my.
My practice to make friends with people who want me dead, right, but within my character,
I mean, I had.
I was I tried not to be that active and infiltrator, you know what I mean?
You don't want to be the one amping up the stochastic terror.
You want to say just enough to pass and remain in the room.
But in one particular event, there was sort of a.
And may fight being organized between pagan white supremacists and Christian white supremacists
to support the presidential run of a white nationalist Satanist.
And so I got deeply involved in the planning chat's for that group and wound up talking
pretty extensively to one Christian extremist and telling him all about how his fascist
love of Christ had saved my life.
Just funny things to have to do from my apartment in Brooklyn as far as I'm interested in this
religious component.
In your experience kind of weaving your way through these communities, you know, we know
about the Christian roots of the KKK as an example, but at the same time, there are many
people who get pulled into white nationalism and white supremacy who are not particularly
religious.
How relevant was religion, would you say, in these different enclaves?
Well, the group that I was studying primarily were sort of these radicalized white power
guys, right?
We know that within the mainline sort of MAGGA movement, which has its fascistic undertones,
religion plays quite a large role.
This idea that Trump is selected by God and we must fight for him and everyone else is
of Satan.
The group that I was speaking to tended to skew younger.
We're a little more disaffected with religion, but what they really took from religion in
the case of the Christian white supremacists, there was this absolute fixation on the Crusades
as kind of a lost cause, this battle between noble white warriors and swarthy interlopers
that they kind of interposed onto contemporary anti-immigrant anti-Muslim dialog.
So it was kind of like them viewing themselves as crusaders and flying the Templar Crossette
racist realities.
In the case of pagan white supremacists, heathen white supremacists, you have this fixation
on Vikings, this idea of white manliness, and the idea of the Norse pantheon as an indigenous,
white European religion.
And one of the things that sort of.
Surprised and tickled me was that many heathen white supremacists are drawn to the worship
of the Norse pantheon by the idea that Christianity was started by a Jew and is thus tainted by
the Jewish taint forever.
And so you can literally be Jesus Christ.
And that's not enough for some anti-Semite, which was sort of a funny discovery to make
via the people you came across.
What portion did you get this?
I mean, this is it could be just difficult to tell.
But did you get a sense of what portion would be willing to sort of go and actually take
violence into their own hands in the real world versus how many of them are sort of
existing in these online spaces?
And that's as far as they're willing to go.
So when I tallied up the telegram groups I was involved in and of course that's not the
most scientific measure, but I joined between ninety and a hundred of these chats and collectively
they had tens of thousands of members.
Sure.
And one of the big problems facing researchers and journalists in this area is that it's
quite simply very hard to tell which young man spewing violent and genocidal rhetoric
is going to be the one that snaps.
So, you know, I have a close friend who is an anti fascist and who was several times
threatened directly by Robert Bowers, who went on to allegedly shoot 11 Jews in the
Tree of Life synagogue.
And it's just very hard to tell.
It's hard to tell when you're looking at the sea of essentially stochastic terror, this
sort of perpetual motion machine towards radicalization and violence.
Who is going to be the one to snap?
And that's why I talk about how the importance isn't necessarily the raw numbers.
Yeah, but about the tenor of the conversation.
And when you are marinating in stochastic terror, marinating in racial violence, marinating
in the dehumanization of your supposed racial enemies, you know, this is an environment
that's specifically queued to get people to snap, to radicalize, to engage in violence,
to stockpile guns.
When I have interviewed former white nationalist and white supremacists, including folk, folks
like Frank Menck and many others of these folks who have now become anti-racist advocates,
they almost UNILAG almost unanimously tell the same story about how they were pulled
in, which is that they sort of found either an attention or what they felt as support
or a community where they had an absence of it.
Typically in their family life growing up like that's it's almost cliche, but it's the
story they almost all tell.
Did you get any sense of at the individual level how the folks you came across ended
up in these movements?
Yeah, I mean, particularly on the white supremacist dating site, there was often kind of a there
was a segment, you know, in the BIOS where people describe their politics and how they
came to be on a white supremacist dating site.
And a lot of the story started with YouTube.
There were a lot of divorces in their back stories.
You know, there were a lot of people in the military, you know.
I would say that the most.
Consistent theme was a sense of alienation.
Right, and I think, as we all know, that that sense of alienation, lack of community, desire
for purpose, it crosses socioeconomic lines, it crosses geographical divides.
You know, it's really a question of sort of how deep is your feeling of alienation and
displacement?
And that can have a lot of different causes.
I think it's a mistake when people say, oh, it's just toothless.
Cleatus in his mother's basement, when what I saw was really a movement that spanned geographical
lines, socioeconomic lines is where people with lives and sometimes spouses, sometimes
people who are in college.
You know, the myth that everyone is sort of southern and uneducated is really a self absorbing
myth that white liberals used to say it couldn't be anyone in my neighborhood, couldn't be
anyone in my school or my acoa, when in fact it could.
It's just a matter of people feeling lost.
And the white supremacist white power movement really offering you this mythos of you can
become involved, you can save the white race.
We will give you a sense of purpose in your life.
And I think a lot of us are looking for a sense of purpose.
A lot of us are feeling lost and alienated and we all find that in different ways.
But that's the sort of compelling argument they make, as is here's a chance to be part
of a community of people saving the white race.
Yeah, what's interesting about that is, you know, there's a similar pattern to a lot of
the people that get sucked into the cult of Trump ism, which is believing that it will
provide solutions to problems that may well be real, but but they get tricked about where
the solutions are.
And that seems to be kind of interesting overlap in hearing hearing you describe it.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's true of any sort of radicalizing movement, right?
Yeah.
Is that they look at you, look at your vulnerabilities, look at what you're seeking and then become
that, you know, love bomb you.
Although, frankly, the tenor of conversation is quite puerile and often very cruel.
There's not a lot of love bombing going on, but there is a sense of like you are a warrior,
you know, there's really a regression and to very toxic and narrow gender roles.
This this idea of kind of you will be a manly man, a warrior for the white race and encouragement
towards survivalism, towards stocking up guns.
But really the sense of kind of propping up embattled masculinity and making that be part
of a community that has this sort of overall, quote unquote, noble purpose.
The book is fascinating, its culture war Lords, My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.
We've been speaking with the book's author, Tolia Laventhol.
I so appreciate your time today.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, and the book is available on Amazon at your local indie store, which you should
please support during the pandemic and everywhere books are sold and it goes into great detail
about not just contemporary privacy, but The David Pakman Show at David Pakman Dotcom.