Meet Talia Lavin, The Author Of "Culture Warlords"
"The zone has been so flooded with shit that flooding with shit is not as effective anymore."
Welcome to Extra Garbage Day! Every other week, I’ll be dropping a bonus Thursday issue just for paying subscribers. To start, these will be Q&As with interesting people I’ve been dying to interview. Let me know what you think.
This week’s interview is with a really exciting writer I’ve been following forever — Talia Lavin. She’s one of the best voices right now writing about extremism, politics, radicalization, and just the general American mess. She also just published her first book, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.
When I realized the somewhat arbitrary schedule I had set up for myself to publish these Extra Garbage Days meant I’d be dropping one the Thursday after the election. I thought Lavin would be a perfect person to interview. When we spoke earlier this month, I assumed that by the time you all read this, we’d have a clear picture of who our next president would, potential coups notwithstanding. And I knew Lavin would be someone who could unflinchingly summarize exactly how we ended up whatever electoral outcome I thought we’d be facing by now.
Except two days after the election, things are still in flux. Pro-Trump protesters are swarming polling centers around the country. The president is on Twitter blatantly threatening to steal the election if it doesn’t go his way. The Trump simulation has finally slammed up against reality and it’s not quite clear who will win.
So while we’re waiting to find out exactly how bad things are, take a second, breathe a little bit, close Twitter, and check out Lavin’s insightful thoughts about the last four years of American lunacy and what all of this means for our next four. The following interview has been edited for clarity and pacing.
My first question for you is, and it's sort of a simple one, but how did you start covering the far right. What was the inciting incident for you?
I think like a lot of people, Unite The Right — Charlottesville — was a sort of a galvanizing moment for me. It was after that. And it wasn't my first brush with the far right, but my first time covering them. It was a couple months after that. It was really the chants of "Jews will not replace us" that, as a Jew, set a lot of my trip wires ringing and made me want to look deeper into this stuff.
For people who may not know the corners of the internet you've been hiding out in and reporting on, what's a typical radicalized space online look like? And were they different in 2016-2017 than they it is now?
The first place I started looking into was a neo-nazi online tabloid that I had already been familiar with that's pretty infamous, it's called the Daily Stormer. Named after Der Stürmer. It's very very very common for neo-nazi sites to name themselves some variant of stormer. So stormer-whatever. If there's storm or stormer in the title, it gives you a pretty good clue as to what you're looking at.
So in doing research for the book and diving into my own experience, I would say this. During the election — the 2016 election — radicalized spaces were super pro-Trump. There was a sense that he was the underdog candidate. And he espoused white nationalism quite openly and endorsed vigilante violence — white power violence — quite openly. One thing that’s been over-looked in some of the retrospectives of the 2016 campaign was one particular incident where two Boston Trump supporters beat up a latino homeless man, breaking his ribs, and urinated on him. Trump was asked to comment on it, with the sort of the naive implicit assumption that he would perhaps condemn it, called them "passionate about their country." And as a result, people who were sympathetic to that sort of hate really adapted to him enthusiastically. And so you might remember 4chan, 8chan, Reddit's r/The_Donald saw themselves as meme factories for Trump's campaign and a lot of their memes wound up being used by Trump folks. And that's still true to some extent. There's still a 4chan-to-Fox News pipeline that's almost been industrialized by this point. And that comes out pretty regularly through media anatomies of the right.
But now I would say there's more of a skepticism about Trump in the white power movement spaces. The thing about the far right, and writing an anatomy of it, is that there are a lot of different sectors of the far right. I look less into the sort of patriot MAGA militia-side of things and more into the nazi sieg heil-specific neo-nazi codes and the swastika and the more esoteric white supremacist symbology. Those kind of groups. But even there — and it's one of the things I discuss in the book — and that's sort of illustrative to my mind, when Trump won, and the atmosphere around the election, was just total glee. And the headline in the Daily Stormer was, "we won." Richard Spencer gives his sieg heil speech. There was a sense of adulation. Like, "finally, we, as a marginalized movement, have finally made it into the mainstream." And then from 2017 on really, there's been a growing disillusionment. Even as the white power movement has gotten closer and closer to the mainline of the Republican party, there's been this increasingly blurred line between extremism and Republicans. Especially when it comes to the younger generation.
Oh yeah, I wanted to ask that. There was this moment where every neo-nazi in America was expecting that the Republicans would transform into the American Nazi Party over night or something. And it seems very much like the Richard Spencer types have reacted against Trump, but that also the alt-lite types who were flirting with that stuff have dropped a lot of it. And I was wondering how you see the interplay between those two groups right now.
Like nazis and the alt-lite? I think the alt-lite tends to be people who are more, how to put it, fair weather extremists. Which is not to say that your Milo's or your Laura Loomer's aren't ravenous racists. They're disgusting people. So figures who might have been "lite" before have radicalized further and their public personae are like extraordinarily racist. One interesting figure in all this is Michelle Malkin. She's always been racist and now she's openly genocidal in her rhetoric.
The Republican party — and I talk about this in the book — there's a really interesting, uncomfortable, and sometimes ludicrous interplay between them and the "we are white nationalists and we're proud" crew. An interesting set of events: Nicholas Fuentes is like this preposterously young influencer who runs the Groyper movement. It's named after one iteration of Pepe the Frog dressed as Rodin's thinker. It's very weird.
But what they did was crash events by Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. and basically heckled them. A lot of what they heckled them about — like "why aren't you more antisemitic" — was with "google dancing Israelis." Which was like a meme that basically says Israel was behind 9/11. They were basically like, "why aren't you more antisemitic?" And this was really interesting to me. One of the questions to ask a Kirk or a Donald Trump Jr. was to ask, "so how would you explain or defend Trump saying 'we want people from Norway, not shit hole countries.’" Like basically saying, "you guys are hypocrites. You're avatars of a white nationalist, but you won't embrace it. You won't own it." And this was quite distressing to a lot of people because even though it's still kind of bad form to be a nazi to degree, even if what the Republican party espouses is very explicitly racist, there was this feeling of "you use white supremacist tropes, you use white nationalist rhetoric, but why aren't you going all the way?"
I kind of went a little ham in the book and compared it to an incident during the Black Death where this town was really strongly hit by the plague over the course of one winter and then the neighboring town mocked them and then found their own town overrun. You can try to dismiss it to a degree, but the Republican party has been feeding off of white nationalism. And utilizing it as its primary method for ginning up the base for so long that, at a certain point, distancing themselves from it, or at least trying to at least do the pro forma "we're not nazis" kind of talk really rings quite hollow and even comical in some instances. When you look at Madison Cawthorn, right? The up-and-coming rising stars who are in their 20s. You look at the Young Republicans in college campuses. Cawthorn is a North Carolina congressional candidate and it's come out that he ran a racist website that slammed one of his opponents' advisors for working for a non-white man. He had worked for Corey Booker. And of course, there were these infamous Instagram photos where he went to the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's vacation home, and was like, "it's really always been my dream to visit the Führer's home."
I think it's indicative of the future of the Republican party and I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say this. There have been numerous incidents where Young Republican clubs have invited white nationalist speakers. You look at who are the young people drawn to Republican party politics in the era of Trump. A lot of the answer to that is people who are animated by the politics of white grievance. People who are jazzed about an embrace of vigilantism. I think if you're running this after the election, regardless of how it goes, I stopped trying to predict the future, but whether we're facing Donald Trump shoring up a security state that's thrilled to prosecute his political enemies, or we're talking about a Republican party refashioning itself in the wake of Trumpism, I think when you think about the next generation of Republican politicians, you're looking at the young people drawn to the Republican party right now, who are the people energized by the party of very fine people. It’s the party of "Mexicans are rapists" and that's the crew that are most politically energized in the GOP at this point. So I think we'll be dealing with this for generations to come — the infiltration of white nationalism into one of our two major parties — and that has an enormous impact on our national politics and will regardless of the election outcome.
I think you're completely right. The idea that Trump could lose and this will all go back to normal is a very cute idea but I don't think that's true.
Yeah, the genie's out of the bottle! And David Roth has written brilliantly about this, of course, because he's just an infuriatingly good writer. But he's written about how presidents set the cultural tone of the country in many ways and like we've all been kind of marinating this racist invective, but also this callous cruelty. And the people energized by that, and the people drawn to that, are the people who are going to have influence over one of the two of our major political parties for decades. So I think that's something not to be discounted regardless of how the election goes.
I feel like you might know this better than anybody. I feel like right now when we're talking about online radicalization, there's the stuff that's happening on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and the mainstream platforms and there's stuff that's happening off of that. So you have The_Donald.win and you have the incel groups who are off-platform doing stuff. And you have stuff happening on Telegram and the more decentralized stuff. I feel like it's never well-articulated to people who aren't covering this world or who aren't staring at these sites all day, how things happening off major platforms influences things on major platforms. How do you see stuff starting in places like 4chan or 8kun or Telegram groups make the jump? It just feels so abstract whenever it's written about.
You've had various attempts from the far right, white nationalist groups, and mainline MAGA — which I do consider to be a far-right movement — to go back to the mainstream platforms because that's how you reach an audience. And that's also how to find targets. You're not going to find feminists you want to ruin the day of on Parler or Gab. They're just not there. The far right’s modus operandi is harassment, so they keep being drawn back.
One thing that's a pretty common tactic, that's been around for ages, but reached its current form during Gamergate, and was beta-tested on feminists and gamers of color, is called brigading. It's a pretty simple tactic. It happened to me. Someone posted a photo of me and wrote, "look at this fat Jew who's disgusting, let's bombard this tweet," or whatever. And then you, as the endpoint, the target, end up with one tweet of yours having 10,000 responses that are like utterly deranged. It's unsettling. It fucks with your day. Sometimes it's more or less violent. People have been arrested for SWATing. In the Trump era, it was certainly a very common tactic. You know when the FBI comes to warn you about threats, one of the things they do is they say they'll warn the local precinct in case you get SWATed. So those tactics have been refined. That's one major thing that people do.
The other thing they do is the Hunter Biden/Ukraine stuff. It started on 4chan before it ever got to the New York Post. A lot of the times the seeds of the rumors come from more radicalized spaces. Like I trace something in the book with perhaps excruciating detail. But there was this rumor that antifa was going to incite a civil war in November 2018.
Oh wow, did that that civil war happen? That's crazy lol.
It never happened! But I traced exactly how it originated. The first platform to start talking about it was Info Wars. And then it goes from Info Wars to the Gateway Pundit and various other marginal right-wing blogs. Then it gets picked up by Fox News. Then it gets debunked in mainstream papers. So it gets this attention. There's a pipeline. And so that's an illustration of how things go.
Do you ever have a moment where you stop and think about how so much garbage is just because someone put a thing on a website and then someone else talked about it on a different website? Do you remember the days when websites didn't really matter in real life?
I mean how many stories have you seen that are just roundups of people talking about stuff on Twitter. I think Twitter specifically is a very big locus of this because that's where all the journalists are! And a lot of people in media work in these hideous low-paid serf-like conditions where they pump five posts a day. You just reach for what's low-hanging.
I will say one heartening sign, and I am thinking specifically about the Hunter Biden stuff — and I don't know how the election's gonna turn out!
[Ed. note: we still don't.]
But I will say this. It's sort of interesting. Steve Bannon had this whole thing of like "flooding the zone with shit." And that was in 2016. Where it was the emails, releasing Clinton caches to the New York Times. He had all these email stories. It was such a nothingburger. It was so stupid and it was so effective because at the time, flooding the zone with shit was a fairly novel idea. But because Trump has been at the helm and he has been the primary producer of shit by the gallon. And his whole orbit is so brainpoisoned in this specific way where they'll address like a fourth-tier Breitbart article. The zone has been so flooded with shit that flooding with shit is not as effective anymore. They've been hoisted by their own poo-tard.
lol nice.
They have flooded the zone so effectively with shit that flooding the zone with shit is no longer effective as a tactic and people are maybe, the high-bound gatekeeper institutions, are not as willing to take the bait. So that's interesting. Maybe heartening. We'll see if that changes in a Biden administration or the second era of the Trump regime. I'll say this, the white power guys are still on Team Trump if you had to press them. They're just not as jazzed about electoral politics anymore and way more into just going and killing their racial enemies and causing a race war. That's what I'm seeing in their chats — accelerationism. That's really the ascendent ideology right now and that's worrying for its own reasons and I think in the event of a hotly-contested or drawn-out election, quite serious consequences. And always, I hope the world will prove me wrong by being better than I think it is and that I'm just a false prophet of doom. I would love nothing better.
I also hope that!
Thank you for reading and supporting Garbage Day! If you’ve been forwarded this email, welcome! Definitely make sure you check out previous Extra Garbage Days:
And finally, I want to caution anyone enthusiastically sharing “4chan is having a meltdown right now” tweets. Users on the site had nervous breakdown in 2016 when it briefly seemed like Clinton might win. Defeat and self-hatred is a 4chan user’s natural state. That said. This post is pretty funny.
***Typos in this email aren’t on purpose, but sometimes they happen***