Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

One you start gazing into the abyss of the far right, pretty soon it turns its gaze right back on you. And its gaze is a fearsome thing, a twisted thing, one full of boredom and anger that have calcified into hatred.

[N]o amount of such rhetoric is acceptable in the country’s discourse, just as there is no acceptable amount of poisonous gas to let seep into a room.

To make peace with white supremacy, to give it room, to tender it 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.

We tend to like our noble lawbreakers to be comfortably in the past, where time and death have sanitized them into heroes, and to suffer those who struggle against injustice in the present only grudgingly, if at all.

The worst people are still people; their humanity is impossible to disregard, but it does not absolve them. If anything, it makes their choices more abhorrent, surrounded, as they are, by the banality of a life indistinguishable from other lives.

Engaging in a debate implies that the opposite side has legitimacy; debating with Richard Spencer implies that his ethnonationalism is a substantive position worth sharing with your audience. It’s a pernicious influence masked in “reasonableness.

I asked them a simple question, tantalizingly phrased: “If you could write a love letter to your future white wife, what would it be like? I would love to see what you write . . .” The results were like a car crash between Nicholas Sparks and Mein Kampf.

In The Ethics of Our Fathers, a book of the Talmud, Rabbi Tarfon says: "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." By the end, this is how I came to feel about my work. Dismantling the rise of fascism is best not left to lone vigilantes, nor to the punitive mechanisms of the state, but to people working together to stamp out hate wherever it arises. In the meantime, I cook like a Jew: paprika, dill, onions, garlic, warm broth, and company. The herring is optional, but love is not optional. It is what we must marshal to break the back of the beast. To do so, we must break bread together: a prickle of salt, a pat of melting butter, a bite, a kiss, a homily in the mouth about what's worth fighting for.

Despite the fact that, as the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has documented, 71 percent of murders related to extremism in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of far-right or white-supremacist movements, federal authorities have maintained a sustained myopia toward white terror.

In every era, there are individuals who are prone to question received narratives and ideals, and in every era, such thinkers bifurcate. There are those who use that questioning spirit to seek out truths with integrity and rigor, and others who allow themselves to be snowed by propaganda, to enter harmful, self-serving orbits of errant belief. And, in every era, the latter confuse themselves with the former.

Sometimes, as it turned out, antifascists come up just past your shoulder, and like to dress up their dogs in party hats.

led to a campaign of attempted and actualized white-supremacist bombings of Southern Jewish properties in 1957 and 1958, with synagogue-bombing attempts taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina; Gastonia, North Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; and Jacksonville, Florida.

This ushered in an era in which anti-Semitism was a transatlantic export, as American racism and anti-Semitism influenced the rise and actions of the Third Reich, and Nazi ideology, in turn, was embraced by a minority of the US population.

No hate is an island.

And in a country as saturated with violence as the United States, the free-floating stochastic violence of the far right inevitably results in atrocity: it only takes one person, made part of a movement by the inflamed rhetoric of hate and threat, to pick up a gun, and in minutes or seconds leave a trail of grief that never fully dissipates.

Despite the fact that [...] 71% of murders related to extremism in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of far-right or white-supremacist movements, federal authorities have maintained a sustained myopia toward white terror.

Extraordinary anti-Semitism proved a useful tool for a country steeped in antiblackness from its inception: The two ideologies work in tandem, providing intellectual nourishment and moral justification each to the other, a poisonous wellspring that never runs dry.

There is racism bound up in religious ideas, racism bound up in pseudoscience. And all of it is poison; and to allow any of it to be aired, particularly under the mealy-mouthed argument for “tolerance,” is to give way to a movement that seeks absolute power and the total destruction of its enemies, who are its enemies by virtue of the immutable characteristics of their birth.

Men are vanguards and it is reflected in the ratio between men and women on WhiteDate,” the page begins. “So gentlemen, don’t be shy and invite white ladies in real life who display trad potential.” Trad is short for “traditional”—meaning someone willing to hew to the antiquated gender roles beloved of white supremacists. Users of the site are encouraged to print out a mini-flyer that says: You look like one of us. Join us on WHITEDATE.NET. Our survival is as important as the survival of the Siberian Tiger. “We have started to present this mini-flyer with a ‘Hi!’ and a smile, letting the ladies read and memorize it, then taking it back,” write the anonymous founders of the site. “Walk away and present the same flyer to the next one that crosses our way. Even if she is not the ideal woman for you, she might be for one of your white brethren.

antifascism is a responsive ideology—a way to counter the rise of fascist movements. It is an ethos—and a set of tactics—that are more complex and deeply rooted than media portrayals would have you believe.

The fact that no deaths in the history of the United States have been attributed to antifascist activism is almost beside the point. They look scary.

Debate over leftist tactics, after all, fits very smoothly into the bellowing, gladiatorial panels that make up most news shows. Such prevaricating also allows mainstream media, which is perennially critiqued as overly liberal, to punch leftward, maintaining a veneer of objectivity.

Critical to this process are people like those at the Minds IRL Conference: ideologues whose personas are groomed to seem reasonable, who introduce far-right ideas more subtly than a Sieg Heil, who you can watch in the living room without setting off alarm bells to all and sundry around you. I call these figures launderers: They are in the business of repackaging the same ideas zipping around Telegram and neo-Nazi news sites, but in a way that’s palatable to the clicking masses. They make money by beckoning viewers onto a journey that ends somewhere sticky, dark, and difficult to extricate oneself from—an ooze-pit redolent with the stench of hate.

And the hate was violent; casual posts about mass murder and suicide abounded. Just as white supremacy leads to misogyny, the causal relationship could be reversed. No hate is an island. Here, these angry young men were telling each other what they considered to be truths—the truth about the evils of women, the truth about the Jews, the truth about the ultimate desirability of whiteness. There was no one to stop them, and the steam was building, until the next murder occurred. Reading the posts, I wondered who among those who idolized incel shooters would be the next. I wondered how many women would die, and if, in the age of ubiquitous gun violence, I would even hear the news.

Could a religion started by a Jew ever be free of the Jewish taint? This is perhaps the ultimate example of how difficult it is to transcend anti-Semitism; you can literally be Jesus Christ and it won’t be enough for some people.

Having enabled Trumpism and thoroughly condoned—or joined in on—white-nationalist campaign rhetoric, the GOP finds itself uniquely unable to fend off the incursion; it is akin to someone who starves a hound, lets it loose to savage the neighbors, then finds himself surprised when the red-jawed hound turns at last on its owner.

The TWP fell apart in spectacular fashion in 2018 after its leader caught the group's chief spokesman having sex with his wife - an event archly dubbed by antifascists 'The Night of the Wrong Wives,' in reference to the infamous intra-Nazi Party purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.