Culture Warlords

Summary, part 3

Chapter 7: Tween Racists, Bad Beanies, and the Great Casino Chase

Lavin had attended the Minds IRL Conference, which was a conference held in a casino for members of the far-right to come to see their favorite YouTubers (e.g., Blair White, Carl Benjamin). The conference was allegedly about open dialogue and invited leftist speakers, but no one Lavin met in attendance identified as a leftist. Instead, there were white supremacists. She would meet people as Talia Lavin, introduce herself as a journalist, and live tweet the things people told her. Eventually, people she interviewed began to target her and she was literally chased out of the casino the event was held in. Her life had been in danger.

Radicalization and Social Media

YouTube’s algorithm is perfect for taking someone from a video about conservative news to a video about how Jews are secretly communists trying to take over the world. From this, one can see that radicalization doesn’t start with overt Nazism. Radicalization to the right is “a process of being exposed to and absorbing far-right ideas,” which then brings out racism, misogyny, and antisemitism (p. 127). These ideas can come from YouTube, but it can also come from plays on traditional social media, such as the Alternative Influence Network and Hatreon (a play on Patreon). 

Despite YouTube’s influence, Lavin states that the process of radicalization is more than YouTube, “It is a social and media process where influential broadcasters build trust with their audiences and introduce them to more extremist content over time” (p. 130).

Soph, the teenager

To show how social media as a whole can radicalize someone, Lavin points to Soph––a right-wing social media influencer who rose to fame at the age of 11. She began as a video game streamer whose small frame and foul mouth drew the attention of many gamers. Lavin acknowledges that video games have a broad cultural appeal, but also states that “self-identified gamers make a fertile recruiting ground for right-wing ideologues” (p. 131). This is because video games make a point of sexualizing women, which can lead to misogyny, which can lead to white supremacy. 

Soph reached new heights when she made a response video to a Buzzfeed job posting which said they were not looking to hire white men. She began making fewer videos about video games, and more videos about anti-social justice warrior rants. She went so far as to make a video saying she had converted to Islam and wanted to stone gay people, which was in response to her being outed for saying she wanted there to be a Hitler for Muslims on a Discord server. 

Her content is now no longer on YouTube, but is instead hosted on Censored.tv, a far-right site created by Gavin McInnes, the founder of Proud Boys. 

Radicalization through the Internet

Members of the far-right use the Internet innovatively. They were one of the earlier adopters of the Internet, with the Texas Ku Klux Klan having a website as early as 1984. The Internet has remained a communication tool used to do three things: “radicalize dormant populations, to link white supremacy around the world, and retain some level of anonymity while incident violence” (p. 137). 

On the Internet, with apps like Telegram and Discord, white supremacists are able to coordinate and train with militia groups abroad and share resources. More than that, though, they use the Internet to engage with outsiders and send hateful comments and harassment their way.

Social media companies are not good at and far too lax at addressing the spread of white supremacy on their platforms. Even social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are guilty of this. There is little to no regulation around the dangerous speech that can be spewed on social media, allowing right-wing radicalization to occur on such platforms. 

“The idea of relying on corporate generosity to combat hate is naïve at best; hate generates a profit. It is on us to demand more, and better—and to fight back.” (p. 142)

Chapter 8: On Accelerationism and Violence

Lavin begins this chapter by outlining four examples of violent accelerationism. 

First, she talks about Stephan Ballet, who wanted to kill Jewish people in the German town Halle––a town many Jews fled to after the collapse of the USSR––on Yom Kippur in 2019. While there were two casualties, the Jewish congregation he targeted was unharmed. His violence, however, is a testament to how white supremacists are teaching themselves how to make weapons (his gun was made out of pipes), and that white supremacy is rampant around the world. 

Second, she talks about a man from Ukraine named David, whom she met on a dating website under the guise of Ashlynn. She learned that he wants to see an all-white United States and was preoccupied with all things American. She learned he (a) left a guerrilla military group to spread far-right ideology, (b) ran a far-right messaging board, and through a series of ‘prove you’re not a Jew’-type messages, she (c) learned his name and face. She shared this information with a journalist colleague, Michael Colborne, who wrote an article outing him. After the story dropped, David bribed Colborne to drop the story and David eventually vanished.

Lavin has no reservations about outing Nazis and white supremacists:

“The less they trusted each other, the less cohesive their movement would be” (p. 151).

Third, she mentions a fiction book called White Power by George Lincoln Rockwell, where he urges his readers to fight back against the “impending menace of black socialist revolt” (p. 152). His book tapped into the heritage of violent white supremacists beliefs, as well as their need to be prepared for apocalyptic warfare––both of which are core principles to white supremacist groups. 

The fourth example is less one specific example, but more a collection of military-type examples. As proof of white supremacist accelerationism and violence, Lavin points to the following:

• Timothy Wilson planned to bomb Kansas City building (car bomb at a hospital);

• Patrick Crusius Walmart in Texas Aug 2019;

• Kaleb Cole had a cache of military-style weapons, possessed propaganda calling for a race war.

Between August 3 and August 22, 2019 alone, the federal government stopped seven white nationalist mass shootings from happening. White supremacist violence is so common, that 71% of murders related to extremism in the US between 2008-2017 are done by members of white supremacist groups. Unfortunately, there is a “documented propensity of law enforcement to be sympathetic to white-nationalist groups,” which begs the question, who can we trust (p. 157)? 

Lavin’s answer? Each other.