Veterans of the posting wars

I’d been meaning to read Talia Lavin’s Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy since the second it came out. I’d also been meaning to organize a book event for its release with the political education working group, maybe at Porter Square Books or Harvard Bookstore, but then the pandemic hit and all my plans for 2020 got dropped in favor of new plans, like “acclimate to new job” and “wrangle Zoom links for thirty hours a week.” I’ve been meaning to do a whole lot of things, and sometimes even books I really, really want to read get shoved down the to-do list by things I need to do right this second--this email to send, that protest to go to, some other piece of reading I have to do by a deadline. So I was pretty excited when one of my book clubs voted to read this, because I figured then I would have a deadline and actually do it.

 

Reader, I whiffed the deadline by about six hours. I was on chapter 8 when we discussed it Sunday afternoon, and then I went out for drinks, and then I went to my mom’s for dinner, and then I finished reading it. But at least I finally read it!

 

I first discovered Talia Lavin’s writing in the wild west of the early 2000’s internet, when she was semi-famous in the worlds of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fanfiction for, among other things, writing an infamous piece of Ent/Orc slashfic that has since been lost to the reading public. She lived about a half hour’s drive from me, which when you are a high schooler with no driver’s license is still pretty far away, and we hung out a few times, then mostly lost touch when we all went off to college and I dropped out of the fanfiction scene. The last time I saw her in person was at Occupy Boston. I’ve followed her career pretty closely, though, because she is and always has been a fantastic writer and delightful online personality. (She was a pretty delightful IRL personality too, if I recall correctly; it is pretty much the same personality in each medium.) 

 

It is curious but perhaps not altogether surprising that these days we are both spending more time dealing with Nazis and less time dealing with Harry Potter fandom, although, as has always been the case, Talia is a million times better and more prolific and funnier than I am at it. I am extremely lazy about monitoring, preferring to spend my precious doomscrolling time merely catching up on the information that the intel and research people have scraped up, mostly using it to inform ground work, with a side of repackaging other people’s discoveries into snack-sized bits of pol ed that I hope will eventually train people to stop being so painfully stupid about said ground actions (thus far with limited success). I’m pretty focused on New England, with a comparatively dim knowledge of the players and personalities in the fash scene in the rest of the country, unless they’ve also shown up in Boston or Providence at some point (which, actually, a lot of them have). Talia, meanwhile, spent upwards of a year dedicating significant time, energy, and writing chops to catfishing the leader of Ukraine’s largest accelerationist Telegram channel, flirting extensively until he gave up enough personal information that she could blow his cover and his credibility. And that’s only one chapter.

 

A lot of the stories she tells in this book are ones I was more or less familiar with; I’ve followed the big antifascist news and general right-wing conspiratorial garbage fairly regularly for the past several years. I remember the discourse around Richard Spencer getting sucker-punched, and the November 2017 “antifa supersoldier” scare--unambiguously the funniest thing that has ever involved Revcom, a group of old cranks with no sense of information security who mostly just glom onto other people’s protests and never help with anything. There were other stories I hadn’t known about, though, either because they were behind-the-scenes, or sometimes just because I was busy with something else at the time--I had somehow missed the whole thing where Talia got chased out of a right-wing YouTube conference at SugarHouse Casino, which you’d think I would have heard of either through antifascist news circles or through casino news circles, given that I was working in casino news at the time, but which had completely passed me by. This might have been because it was literally on the same day as the Straight Pride Parade and I was busy, but you’d think I’d have heard about it sometime the week after.

 

Overall I’d say Culture Warlords is a very good introduction to the strange and emotionally taxing world of spying on Nazis on (and sometimes off) the internet; I’d recommend it very highly to anyone who is curious but unfamiliar. And I’d also recommend it to people who are more familiar with the subject matter, because even if you know a lot of this material it’s still a really engaging book and it’s good go over stuff you might have forgotten or missed once in a while.