Culture Warlords

Summary, part 1

White supremacy is an antisemitic, racist, and misogynistic framework that values white bodies and a so-called white tradition over others. It is the belief that white people are superior, and that white people are under attack by racial minorities and Jewish people in particular. More on white supremacy will be unraveled in this section.

Intro

To write this book, Lavin infiltrated white supremacist forums online to discover who they are, how they operate, and what can be done to stop them. In doing so, she uncovered something that bothered her: their humanity.

“It’s not that I discovered that members of the racist far right are inhuman, or monsters beyond comprehension … They are just people, people with an entire alternate curriculum of history, who operate within an insular world of propaganda, built to stoke rage and incite killings and for no other purpose at all.” (p. 8-9)

Disturbed by their humanity, Lavin became filled with rage. Rage for the neo-nazis that walk the streets, as well as for the white moderates who want to ‘let them march’ and voice their white supremacist ideology. An ideology that leads people to violence:

“‘The violent far right has the sole goal of destruction, and allowing them to amass any power at all is to accede to that goal. To make peace with white supremacy, to give it room, to tender its mercy, is to assert that protecting black and brown and Muslim and gay and trans and Jewish people from violence isn’t all that important or necessary.” (p. 11)

Chapter 1: On Hating

Hate on the Internet

Lavin begins by painting a depressing picture. In a chat room called The Bunkhouse on an encrypted messaging app called Telegram, white supremacists were debating whether or not Lavin herself was “too ugly to rape” (p. 13). They were unaware, of course, that she was there, but this allowed her to get an unfiltered picture of these “Siegeheads” (fans of neo-Nazi James Mason, who advocated the use of terrorism to topple American social order). These Siegeheads were also fans of Dylann Roof and Timothy McVeigh––both white supremacists who had committed mass violence. 

In The Bunkhouse, Lavin saw the following:

• Deep hatred of Jews and women,

• Casual disregard for human life,

• Incitements of violence;

• Gun lust, and;

• The humiliation of their enemies (like Lavin herself).

In chat rooms like these, “there [is] no one to de-escalate these men” (p. 14).

Hatred towards Jews

Lavin is Jewish, and every element of her upbringing was steeped in lessons of Jewish history. She would hear stories of her family running away to protect themselves during the Holocaust. She learned her family was always ready to run, since “the fear of slaughter because they were Jews never left them” (p. 17).

It was only when Lavin interned for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency did she get her first glimpse of antisemitism on the Internet. The largest source of website traffic for the Jewish newspaper was users coming from Stormfront.org, a website home to neo-Nazis. From there, she discovered 8chan, a message board like 4chan, where users post pseudoscience about Jewish people, and that Jews are not homo sapiens, rather that they are Neanderthals. This is, of course, not true.

Antisemitism and white supremacy on the Internet can and often does lead to violence in real life. The shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, or the murder of a woman at a Chabad synagogue in Poway, CA are all examples of violence that started as white supremacist ideology on the internet. White supremacists see Jews as an all-knowing enemy, as the source of all evil in the world. This process begins with people spewing similar ideologies for shock value, but they are then fed narratives, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that trap them in a white supremacist bubble.

Chapter 2: The Jews

“The intellectual framework of the modern white-supremacist movement is built on a central principle of racist negation: Unwilling to believe that black people and other racial minorities are intellectually capable of organizing for their own betterment and producing positive social change, white supremacists pin any advance in racial equality on a cunning plot engendered by Jews. To the white supremacist, the Jew is most dangerous because of his adjacency to whiteness, and a desire to destroy it, with crafty malice, from within.” p. 25-26

White supremacy and antisemitism are not new ideologies. They have a long history.

In Medieval Europe, Jews were accused of causing the Black Death (also known as the Black Plague) and were slaughtered en mass in what were called pogroms.

When Russian Tsar Aleksandr II died, Jews were blamed for his death and targeted through more pogroms. Because of this, many fled to countries in Europe and the United States.

In 1919, Henry Ford of Ford Motors fame launched The Dearborn Independent––a newspaper where he published an article titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” In subsequent editions, the paper would not only publish more conspiracy theories about the Jews but also be translated to German and influence Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic propaganda campaign.

In the 1930s, Hitler’s rise encouraged more antisemitism, which saw…

• People believe that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was originally named Rosenfield–a Jewish last name;

• Chapters of Silver Shirts––a group that believed Jews should be excluded from America––sprang up and gained 15,000+ members;

• People combining Jews and communism, saying Jews spread communism;

• In the mid-20th century, white supremacy manifested with antiblack racism;

• This was most evident with white supremacist hatred towards the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that desegregated schools. The fact that the legal charge of Brown was a Jewish man who worked for the NAACP furthered white supremacists’ belief that Jews or “the elite” run the world;

• Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, rose to fame and revolutionized antisemitism with his use of the press;

• The Turner Diaries were published––a book so infamous the Federal Bureau of Investigation dubbed it the Bible of the racist right––and inspired Timothy McVeigh, Alan Berg, and the right-wing phrase “14 words,” which refers to these 14 words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

On the internet, white supremacy manifests by…

• Targeting random Jews because all Jews are in on the greater plot,

• Adopt the vernacular and writings of Jewish culture, such as taking excerpts of the Talmud to turn a 6,000-page religious document into something exclusively about child abuse and degeneracy,

• Believing that “Jews … must be punished the most” (p. 38)

White supremacy is not a belief, but a framework.

The far-right’s obsession with the Jews is more than blind accumulations of hatred. Instead, it is an intellectual framework where Jews create systems of depravity against white people. It is a worldview where Jews are at the center of everything, plotting things like gay marriage and legal immigration to weaken white people. 

“To the white supremacist, every evil looks like a Jew” (p. 40).

Chapter 3: Boots on for the Boogaloo

In the summer of 2018, a decentralized, nonprofit left-wing media collective called Unicorn Riot released Discord chats between far right members in a publicly searchable database, which “led to the identification and outing of dozens of white supremacists around the country” (p. 41). Many of them moved from Discord to encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, which Lavin joined. There, she saw people post propaganda, organize privately, and, more often than anything else, share memes and dossiers of their enemies. Between the chat and the other 150+ rooms she was in,  there were about 32,380 members total. In these chat rooms, people would also share information material like The Turner Diaries and use the word ‘boogaloo.’

The word Boogaloo is a term for a Race War––a societal breakdown that will allow white supremacists to carry out their most violent fantasies against minorities. It is rooted in accelerationism, which is the notion that things must get much worse as before anything good can happen. A race war would be just that thing. Believing in the boogaloo and accelerationism is to also believe in the globohomo, which is a vague yet galvanizing force and ideology that refers to the homogenization of economic life (e.g., globohomo megacorps). 

But how did white supremacists come to this?

In part, the rise of this fantasy was aided by President Donald Trump:

“Trump’s extremist rhetoric, embrace of violence, and propensity to engage in public racism—and succeed precisely because of his willingness to do these things—led white supremacists to hope for the first time, in most of their lifetimes, that they might see a government ready to purge the country of nonwhite people and create the white ethnostate they dreamed of. Trump’s policies have trended strongly in that direction.” (p. 50)

The policies Lavin refers to include, but are not limited to, family separation, curbing legal immigration, and advocating for police brutality against protestors.