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The US presidential election result called over the weekend has been met with typical lack of decorum on the incumbents part a spectacle onlookers have grown used to. What could be in prospect going forward? The answer that anything is better anything at all has left some idealists dissatisfied. Quite understandably, such observers have been left underwhelmed, in policy terms, by the allegedly rudimentary package on offer, and equally non-enthused by the failure of the Democratic party to capture the Senate. But, in the immediate aftermath, perhaps it is worth focusing for a moment on the promise of decency. Decency was mentioned in many assessments of Biden's appeal in journalistic coverage in the run-up. For the American electorate (so both opinion pieces and news reports in this country told us), Joe Biden was asking for a return to decency, was emphasising decency in a battle for the national soul, was being perceived personally as fundamentally decent, and would return it to both political and global discourse.

Bidens decency stands at sharp odds with what we might call with a nod to Susan Sontag Donald Trumps alt-Right-influenced inverted camp. In other words, the message by tweet, by announcement, and occasionally by alleged physical act is thoroughly indecent; but surely he cant mean it, can he? The attraction lies in the transgression the permission to act out (in the place of dress-up) with the get-out clause that nobody, not really, is being serious. And yet, all the while, the centre of political gravity moves has moved ever farther away from what is amiable and congenial.

Decency, in attribution to Biden, has another edge, too. Bidens nomination to the Democratic presidential candidacy was acrimonious. He was fought closely by more radical candidates, including Bernie Sanders, who had amassed behind him a vocal and fervent army of supporters. Decency, from this angle, is Bidens offer to the electorate from the centre as opposed to from the putative radical left (slightly histrionic in view of the national political culture): decency as sober; decency as pragmatic; decency that wont have anybody raising up the barricades.

However, the promise of decency on the left is far richer than this simple split suggests. Partly the richness is in the covert history. Partly it is in the words ambiguity.

In the period after the Second World War and with its lessons in mind an influential strand of American political philosophy, following Judith Shklar, proposed that an elemental choice was decent politics versus deadly politics. That is decency in a first sense of the word: in essence, as an indicator of sufficiency (with a hint of the scary bogeyman thrown in). This works in application to Bidens presumed edge over Sanders, i.e. Sanders vision might be more to ones liking because it is more reformist, but Bidens politics will do (meaning: is up to reasonable standards). Some thesaurus synonyms point to this meaning too: adequate, acceptable.

But it could be suggested that there is a second important sense of the word decency for politics. This is where the centre or soft left has something to recommend itself by positively (and not by the default of what is and isnt feasible): it knows, as it were, a secret that the hard or ultra- left doesn't know. But this is the catch. If so, decency in the positive sense is the standard to which Biden in office should now expect to be held, both by his own citizens and the watching world.

Thorough investigation of ideological history would likely show that decencys covert history is on the social democratic left: in the twentieth century, poised between the far left and the Anglo-American liberalism of those resembling Shklar; and passing in notable encomiums through George Orwell, Albert Camus, and Michael Walzer.

But, pushing partisanship aside, the key point is what it might do at the present moment. Decency is not only refraining from the unconscionable (Trump and Trump supporters under the cover of camp). Nor is it just pragmatic sufficiency. Decency can also be compatible with a wide range of positive acts (acts of the kind that ethicists tend to call supererogatory). The most ambitious thought would be that decency is generative: that is, capable of passing from person to person, of being reproduced by example, emulation and reciprocity, in an ever-expanding circle. At this point, the meaning borders on the meanings of kindness and generosity: concern for the well-being of others in senses both material and otherwise.

If we are to move out of an era of bigoted reactionary authoritarianism, then decency is important to re-capture because what, in Britain, seemed like the start of this era was marked by so-called national populists claiming it for their own. Nigel Farage, on the day after the Brexit referendum, made a victory speech celebrating the triumph of real people, ordinary people, decent people. Decency needs claiming back. It relates to what is best in people; it deserves better than misappropriation by who would practice politics without the kind of human warmth that matters. However, where the populists were right was in supposing that political language needs to freshen up its egalitarianism. Decency is readily intelligible. That is why newspapers converged on it as a descriptor of Bidens offer.

Richard Shorten has just finished writing a book on the reactionary right provisionally titled The Ideology of Political Reactionaries. In 2019-20 he was Leverhulme Research Fellow. His latest article on reactionaries is Why bad books matter and his new project investigates aspects of voice partly in relation to decency in the political writings of George Orwell, Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt.

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Joe Biden and the promise of decency - University of Birmingham

WELL, that was a lovely few days at least if youre not an extremist, conspiracy theorist, or any of the other modern varieties of lunatic whove come to populate the planet in recent years.

Donald Trump the alt-right Wotsit in the White House got his comeuppance via the ballot box, and it looks like theres a credible vaccine for the Great Plague of 2020. Hallelujah, let the bells ring out.

Of course, those extremists and conspiracy theorists arent singing hosannahs or getting their campanology on theyre far from happy. Your average white nationalist is deeply upset that their orange avatar on Pennsylvania Avenue turned out to be a massive loser, and the hard left a band so miserable theyd find a downside to the birth of their own child immediately began painting Joe Biden as some democratic version of Ivan the Terrible.

Over in QAnon-land, the vaccine, which offers us a glimmer of hope, is, of course, a high grade plot by the Illuminati to pump microchips into our veins and addict us all to 5G broadband so the Queen, Tom Hanks, and their Satanic minions can continue drinking the blood of children.

Nobody likes to stomp on the chance of a reasonably happy Christmas more than a good old fashioned political zealot or the owner of the latest in tin-foil headwear. In fact, theyre both the same really folk youd jump out of a ten storey window to avoid.

Of course, theres some legitimate shadows hanging over the recent good news. Trump, as expected, isnt just throwing a gigantasaurus-sized tantrum and embarrassing himself and everyone else in the world, hes also trying desperately to ramp up his crazy militia-loving base with nonsensical drivel about rigged elections and dodgy ballots which his supporters want both counted and not counted simultaneously.

Will he trigger civil unrest? Hopefully not, it looks like political power, even after the last four years, really does drain away like dirty water from a bathtub.

It was right to worry and fret over democracy during the Trump presidency he really was, and remains, a threat to the rule of law. But good old democracy has shown itself to be the trusty punchbag we always hoped itd be. You can kick it in the head, it seems, and democracy just keeps getting up again. For my money, thats among the best news of the last few days that our system of government in the Western world really is robust enough to withstand even the predations of the Idiot-in-Chief.

Whats more worrying is the final weeks of the Trump presidency. Hell attempt to smash what remains of the democratic crockery before hes dragged kicking and screaming (I hope) from the Oval Office. Hes currently sacking the hard-working staff needed to keep America running. The Pentagon has suffered near total decapitation of civilian leadership in the last 24 hours.

Instead of leaving a good luck, Joe note in his desk on departure, you can imagine Trump defecating in the drawer, or writing F**k you, Biden on the wall with his favourite sharpie.

Then we come to the virus. The agony of this vaccine turning out to be a false hope isnt something any one of us wishes to contemplate. Unfortunately, we have to trust our incompetent politicians to pull off the roll out of any immunisation programme efficiently. Of course, the incompetency is to varying degrees north and south of the border. Here, its the incompetency of the self-assured middle manager, down south its the incompetency of a drunk baby whos just fallen out of their pram.

But lets be optimistic lets believe Trump will leave office without toppling the Statue of Liberty, and lets believe the vaccine will work and sooner rather than later our political class will manage to get us all a jag.

It really does feel good, doesnt it. That hope. And what makes it even better is that most of the world shares the optimism with us.

The only problem, though, is that this joy unbridled may not last very long for us here at home in our divided islands because, whos that peeping their scary faces in through the window? Why, its Brexit and independence, of course. The ghosts at the feast.

While Biden and the vaccine may have temporarily raised optimism levels here, once Christmas is over weve got our super-free-fall-no-parachute Brexit on December 31 (Happy New Year!), and then Mays Scottish elections which will inevitably trigger a constitutional crisis with demands for a second referendum from a UK government which has all the tact and grace of a two tonne bull in DM boots.

The vaccine and the defeat of Trump may mean that the fever of despair which gripped the world is starting to break, but at home, were still very sick.

Pain will go on here for some time. Sorry to rain or rather monsoon on the parade. In fact, some of the positives of the last few days will be negatives for us. For me, its great that the Democrats won and Biden, rightly, views Brexit as a threat to peace in Ireland. But that could threaten any future trade agreement. Europhiles, like me, may think good, get it right up ye, Boris but in truth bad trade deals mean all of us suffer, businesses go under, families get poorer. Nobody wants that.

Although Im a Yes voter, the thought of replaying that hate-fest from 2014 fills me with dread. Like many, Im weary of division, and angry at a political class which foists conflict upon us a convenient blind for their failures, and a means to extend their lucrative careers in political office.

Most of all, though once these political upheavals and the horror of a global pandemic finally end what will have substantially changed? Weve spent this last dreadful year pondering a better tomorrow, but we all know that once Trump has gone and the virus is beaten nothing will really be different. The political class will ensure we return to the old normal, at home as well as abroad and it was the old normal which brought us to this sorry pass in the first place.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald

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Opinion: Neil Mackay: Trump gone, a vaccine discovered, now we've got to deal with Brexit and independence - HeraldScotland

Caolan Robertson explains how, though Donald Trump lost last weeks presidential race, his brand of nativist populism is still spreading, particularly in the UK

Its a grey and unusually misty day in the tiny rural village of Pentre, nestled in the hills of South Wales. As the most globally important election of a decade unfolds all the way across the Atlantic, this small town couldnt be further from the chaos.

A small takeaway sits on the towns sleepy high street. The owner is a 62-year-old local, Norma Hemming. Shes working the till when a grey-haired man walks into her shop, brazenly refusing to wear a mask. When the delivery driver confronts him, asking him to put on a mask, he pulls a gun and begins ranting to Norma and the delivery driver, spewing all too familiar conspiracies about Bill Gates, microchips and submission. Armed police are called and the man with the gun is arrested.

At the same time in Goodison Park, one hundred miles to the north, Liverpool is hosting Everton versus Manchester United. Suddenly, a huge banner is flown across the sky above reading World knows Trump won, followed by the hashtag #MAGA (Make America Great Again). Even in the UK the COVID-19 conspiracies and Trumps baseless election fraud allegations have taken root.

How on earth did this happen?

Raheem Kassam, a British Alt-right activist who was Nigel Farages aide de camp and ran for the UKIP leadership, has spent the last four years working in the US with as an assistant to Trumps former campaign manager, Steve Bannon. He has been one of the loudest voices suggesting Joe Bidens election win was illegitimate and promoting the idea of resistance against the incoming Marxist administration.

This kind of propaganda, presented as fact, reaches huge audiences not just in the US but also in the UK. Tommy Robinson another British friend and ally of Kassams has been perpetually pushing MAGA content in the run-up to the US elections, content which now includes sharing the Liverpool banner, with his 150,000 Parler followers. Meanwhile, the Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has been appearing alongside Trump at his rallies while broadcasting the same conspiracies about the election to his 1 million Facebook followers.

Its not just intentionally disingenuous activists we ought to consider; Boris Johnsons inept COVID-19 response and lack of clear and reasoned guidance has for months been creating a climate of distrust in government that creates a breeding ground for extreme, toxic ideas to spread.

During my time in the alternative media, I worked with Alex Jones InfoWars, arguably the Mecca for online conspiracy theorists. Increasingly over time, Infowars content, followed by the rest of the alt-right, became obsessed with Britain.

The oppression of Tommy Robinson, grooming gangs, online hate crime hubs and police arresting people for tweets became some of the most popular memes on the right. Oi mate, have you got a licence for that butter knife became the go-to joke whenever the UK was mentioned, a reference to our perceived lack of freedoms and national cuckoldry in the eyes of Trumpian strongmen.

In 2018, I made a feature film for Alex Jones about tech censorship which featured the biggest names in the US online right at the time: people like Gavin McInnes and Laura Loomer. Before I left the right to blow the whistle on many of its practices, the movie had been watched hundreds of thousands of times, and promotional clips had been viewed millions of times, with a fifth of viewers being in the UK.

A recent poll by Hope Not Hate found a staggering one in four British people now believe in the QAnon-linked conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a battle against a deep state run by paedophiles. As the Scamdemic, anti-mask, anti-vaccination movement continues to pick up pace during the Coronavirus crisis in the UK, disinformation remains largely unchallenged by mainstream media in any particularly meaningful way.

The US might have just voted for Biden in a historic election, but a margin of 5 million votes out of 148 million is hardly a landslide. The truth is that even when Trump is no longer in office the political movement he gave birth to is going to prove much harder to defeat than the man himself. More people voted for Trump than in 2016 and according to exit polls, he actually increased his margins with all non-white demographics. While we should all be sure to celebrate his defeat as a moment of light against a backdrop of four years of darkness, we would do well to remember that near enough 50% of voting Americans will be thinking the same way today as they did three days ago.

Bidens win, while a victory, is not a solution.

Norma the shopkeeper in South Wales, is still shaken. You hear about this stuff on the news but you never expect it to happen to you. You dont expect anything like this, she told reporters. But the sad reality is that even with Trump finally ousted from office, we should all expect a lot more of this in the future.

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US Election 2020: Trumpism Is Here To Stay and Nowhere Is Sacred - Byline Times

A disinformation push to subvert the election is well underway, and it is coming straight from President Trump and his allies. The goal: to somehow stop a victory by former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., or, failing that, undermine his legitimacy before he can take office.

Mr. Trumps false declaration of victory in the small hours of Wednesday morning quickly united hyperpartisan conservative activists and the standard-bearers of the right-wing media, such as Breitbart, with internet trolls and QAnon supporters behind a singular viral message: #StopTheSteal.

But its impact has become apparent far beyond the internet, with the theme dominating conservative talk radio and the prime-time lineup on Fox News. There, Trump-aligned hosts pressed the false notion that the vote counting in the crucial, still-undecided states was illegitimate the sort of message that was drawing flags on Twitter and Facebook but flourishing elsewhere.

How big of a mistake is it for the Democrats to have kind of a burn-it-all-down approach, Laura Ingraham asked on her program Wednesday night, to destroy the integrity of our election process with this mail-in, day-of-registration efforts, counting after the elections over dumping batches of votes a day, two days, maybe even three days after the election?

The messaging was far blunter from the president himself, who used a Thursday evening briefing at the White House to reel off a series of baseless attacks on an election system he described as rigged by Democrats trying to steal an election. It was the continuation of a diatribe he had started earlier in the day with a tweet reading STOP THE FRAUD! that Twitter quickly flagged as containing information that might be misleading.

Mr. Trump and his campaign aides had long indicated that they would challenge any unwelcome result with charges that the election was being stolen through voter fraud, which is in fact exceedingly rare.

On Thursday, senior aides to Mr. Biden portrayed the disinformation push as part of a desperate, coordinated campaign that, in tandem with the presidents legal strategy to press lawsuits against election officials across the country, was intended to halt a count that seemed likely to end Mr. Trumps presidency.

This is part of a broader misinformation campaign that involves some political theater, Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden, told reporters. All of this is intended to create a large cloud that it is the hope of the Trump campaign that nobody can see through. But it is not a very thick cloud, its not hard to see what theyre doing we see through it; so will the courts, and so will election officials.

If there was little indication that the disinformation push was helping the Trump campaign in court, where it was seeking to use small instances of worker error or technical fouls to challenge Democratic ballots, it nonetheless seemed likely to do one thing: persuade a large swath of American voters that any Biden presidency was being stolen through illegal and unconstitutional means.

This country is too corrupt, Im so angry, said Min Liu, who drove down from New York City to join protests in Philadelphia supporting Mr. Trump. The Democrats are cheating right now, and the people need to wake up.

She was not alone. On Wednesday and well into Thursday, the media campaign was spilling into the real world with similar protests in Detroit, Phoenix and elsewhere. Some were led by notorious alt-right trolls, like Mike Cernovich, who rose to national prominence in 2016 pushing the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a precursor to the QAnon movement that falsely claimed that powerful Democrats were running a child-trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant that, in reality, has no basement.

Now, Mr. Cernovich is pushing a message of widespread election fraud in lock step with the president, his children and well-established members of his inner circle, like his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Taken together, the media activity and the protests were emerging as a national and online version of the Brooks Brothers riot in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, when preppy Republican operatives, claiming fraud, stormed the Miami-Dade County canvassing board in Florida and effectively halted recount efforts that were expected to benefit the Democratic candidate, Al Gore.

A Stop the Steal Facebook page, created on Wednesday to help organize groups to flood ballot-counting centers with observers, quickly amassed nearly 300,000 members before the social network stepped in and shut it down on Thursday afternoon. Facebook said it saw worrying calls for violence in the group, which was organizing around the delegitimization of the election process.

The Facebook page was started by a Republican activist named Kylie Jane Kremer. It followed on a Stop the Steal group, with a similar playbook, created in 2016 by Roger J. Stone Jr., the self-described Republican dirty trickster and Trump confidant. (Mr. Stone was convicted on charges stemming from the Russia investigation but had his sentence commuted by Mr. Trump.)

Mr. Bidens aides said later in interviews that they did not believe that anyone beyond Mr. Trumps most die-hard supporters would question the legitimacy of a Biden victory. They pointed to statements from prominent Republicans dismissing Mr. Trumps unsubstantiated attacks on the voting system. And they said they were heartened by a striking split at Fox News: While its prime-time hosts have parroted elements of Mr. Trumps unfounded missives, its decision desk has not been shy in calling states for Mr. Biden, and several of its journalists have challenged dubious claims by Mr. Trump and his supporters.

The president and his allies have nonetheless relied heavily on the broader conservative media ecosystem to lob accusations against election officials, and then quickly moved to amplify them.

On Wednesday, the president shared two articles from Breitbart on Twitter. One falsely claimed that officials in Detroit had barred ballot-counting observers, even though both campaigns had the maximum number of observers allowed inside the building. Another Breitbart post shared by the president rounded up criticism from conservative influencers on social media of Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general of the still-contested state of Pennsylvania, as evidence of calls for him to step aside.

Nov. 11, 2020, 11:06 p.m. ET

Searches related to the keywords steal or stealing in the context of the election had more than 1.2 million mentions across social media platforms from 11 a.m. Tuesday to 11 a.m. Thursday, according to Zignal Labs, a firm that monitors disinformation. Michigan was leading the way with more than 96,000 mentions, followed by Pennsylvania at roughly 80,000 mentions and Arizona at just over 46,000.

Followers of QAnon, the convoluted pro-Trump conspiracy theory that falsely claims that the president is fighting a deep-state cabal of Democratic Satanist pedophiles, were eagerly joining in with claims of election fraud. It fit their imagined narrative perfectly only widespread fraud by the deep state could defeat Mr. Trump, a man whom many QAnon followers venerate as something akin to divine.

There were indications that at least some parts of the campaign were planned in advance of Election Day.

A young conservative activist, John Doyle, who runs a YouTube channel called Heck Off, Commie!, was circulating a Google doc that encouraged people to head off the purported fraud in Pennsylvania and lobby state legislators to cast their electoral votes as Republican! The document, which listed the names and numbers of all the states legislators, was created on Tuesday that is, before the president or his allies were claiming the election was being stolen in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Doyle did not respond to a request for comment, and his Twitter account, @ComradeDoyIe, was suspended on Thursday for violating the platforms terms of service. Mark Levin, a popular conservative radio host and ardent Trump supporter, echoed Mr. Doyles call for Republican state legislators to disregard the outcome of the voting. In a tweet on Thursday, he wrote: REMINDER TO THE REPUBLICAN STATE LEGISLATURES, YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY OVER THE CHOOSING OF ELECTORS, NOT ANY BOARD OF ELECTIONS, SECRETARY OF STATE, GOVERNOR, OR EVEN COURT. YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY.

Dozens of other Twitter accounts pushing the hashtag #StopTheSteal were created in October and the first few days of November. The use of freshly created social media accounts to amplify a message is a common feature of disinformation campaigns.

By Wednesday, the hashtag had quickly jumped from the hard-right of the internet to mainstream Republicans. The Philadelphia Republican Party picked up the hashtag in a tweet, tagging Eric Trump, the presidents son, and Mr. Giuliani, and urging them to get ready to #StopTheSteal and deliver Pennsylvania to the president.

Eric Trump went even further. He posted and then quickly deleted a tweet using the hashtag on Thursday and asking, without evidence, why the F.B.I. and the Justice Department were not stepping to stop election fraud. Jeanine F. Pirro, the popular Fox News personality, tweeted a similar thought.

A day earlier, Eric Trump had posted a video purporting to show ballots that had been cast for his father in Virginia Beach, Va., being burned. City officials later said that the ballots were clearly samples and not real. But even before that, the videos questionable provenance probably should have been a tipoff that it was fake: It came from a Twitter user who goes by the handle @Ninja_StuntZ and is connected to the troll-infested message board 8kun.

Mr. Ninja or is it Mr. StuntZ? appears to spend his days selling 8kun-branded coffee. By Thursday morning, his Twitter account had been suspended and the video was no longer available.

The relentless messaging and noise appeared to drive the campaigns legal strategy. On Thursday morning, with the presidents slim lead in the key state of Pennsylvania growing slimmer, Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, and Corey Lewandowski, a close political adviser, held a news conference amid dueling protests outside the Philadelphia convention center, the citys main ballot-processing site.

Lining 12th Street and protected by police barricades were dozens of protesters supporting Black Lives Matter and Democrats call to count every vote. On the opposite corner along Arch Street were roughly two dozen Trump supporters, chanting back to count every legal vote.

Ms. Bondi entered through the back of a barricade and stood in the middle of the Trump supporters, holding up a printed-out court order permitting the Trump campaign poll watchers to get closer to observe the ballot counting.

But her speech was drowned out by protesters across the street, who were armed with a D.J. and a full P.A. system blasting Party by Beyonc. The D.J., counting to 10 repeatedly, in rhythm, was the only audible voice during Ms. Bondis remarks. As she continued, he broke into a chant: Count, Philly, Count.

Ben Decker contributed reporting.

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The Disinformation Is Coming From Inside the White House - The New York Times

Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, by Talia Lavin, Hatchett Books, 2020, 288 pages.

Its uncommon for an author to get a visit from the FBI in the middle of promoting her book. In the few weeks since Talia Lavins Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy was released, to almost universal acclaim, the torrent of hate regularly directed at her kicked into overdrive.

This escalation could be because we are moving past a nightmare of an election season in which the Proud Boys, a fascist street gang, were standing by on the presidents orders, and Donald Trump is pushing his followers to violence by refusing to concede. Or it could simply be that Lavin is refusing to hold back. The book has brought the ire of white supremacists around the world, who are enraged that a Jewish queer woman had not only the intention, but also the ability to expose and ridicule them on a scale measurable in bestseller lists.

The book is the result of the same targeted hate that Lavin has received over the past several years, which brought with it doxxing, threats of sexual violence, and even a frightening postcard to her family bearing the Nazi slogan Blood and Soil. Inside the often white and male-dominated world of far-right journalism and research, there can be a certain cavalier (or worse, celebratory) attitude about the threatening response reporters get from fascists. For example, after I published an article on Augustus Sol Invictus, a fascist demagogue famous for pagan theatrics and eventually for assaulting his intimate partners, he declared me his worthy adversary and demanded we share breakfast at a Panera Bread. And despite the extensive personal safety measures I have had to take in response to threats, I still often get framed by neo-Nazis as their opponent rather than their scourge. That is not the response Lavin gets.

I had a friend who engages in actifascist activism say that he felt that white supremacists treated him with a sort of Batman vs. the Joker kind of attitude, Lavin has reflected. I dont even get to be Poison Ivy. Im just literally the plant poison ivy. A rash that they want to eliminate. Theres no sense of being a worthy opponent, theres just someone to destroy.

Lavins experience of the most vitriolic misogyny is at the core of Culture Warlords, and, to a degree, one of the catalysts of this latest generation of fascism, birthed in the reactionary world of internet memes and anonymous rage.

Culture Warlords is a book about the internet from someone who is steeped in online culture. Lavin focused her research on the type of white nationalist social networking that was only possible in the era of decentralized, web 2.0 platforms such as Telegram, or whites only dating sites. She jumped into the center of this ecosystem, posing as the perfect trad wife, a white nationalist term for a traditional housewife, to string along a Ukrainian white nationalist and pass his information over to Bellingcat, an outlet known for crowd-funding research.

Adopting this approach enabled Lavin not only to collect white nationalist publications and research organizational intersections and ideological convergences, but also to talk to actual people. And it was this process that led her to reject dispassionate analysis of white nationalism, since faux neutrality underplays its threat and impact.

Beyond a captivating narrative, Culture Warlords also contains a piercing analysis of what insurgent fascism looks like and where it comes from. Its politics are centered on an explosive anti-Blackness built into the foundations of Western colonialism, which motivates the revolutionary energy of those who cannot wait to eradicate non-whiteness.

The cover of Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, a non-fiction book by Talia Lavin published in 2020 by Hachette Books.

Antisemitism, too, is an ideological linchpin that lends a kind of coherence no matter how delusional to white nationalist ideology, writes Lavin. In this worldview, Jews are proposed as the masterminds of a plan to erase whiteness from the earth, given that white supremacists believe people of color to be incapable of doing so for themselves. White nationalists claim Jews are responsible for Globohomo, all things wrought by degenerate liberalism, from queerness to feminism to individuality. This story is matched by Lavins own experience of Jewishness as conditional white privilege, a status made uneasy by the specter of antisemitism.

The white nationalist hatred for women and gender non-conforming people, which is particularly aggressive online, is a seething rage that Lavin links to the inverse treatment of white womanhood in fascist narratives: as pure, untainted progenitors of the race.

This was a culture born from the sticky, tarry, concentrated misogyny of the internet, the hatred of women expanded into all the hatreds white supremacy claims as its own, writes Lavin. Misogyny was a natural outcome of indoctrination into white supremacy, which sees women purely as vessels for breeding.

The violation of that role, when women refuse to be submissive vessels of social reproduction, is where the white nationalist system starts to break down. Controlling women is an essential piece that their entire image of white empire is founded on meaning women who challenge that model are dangerous subversives. And since, according to white nationalists, one of the greatest dangers posed by Jews is that they appear to be white but are, in fact, not, a Jewish woman spreading ideas about liberation is a particularly pernicious treason.

Alt-right members preparing to enter Emancipation Park holding Nazi and Confederate flags before the Unite the Right rally, Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017. (Anthony Crider/CC BY 2.0)

Another thing that sets Culture Warlords apart is the fact that its author is an unapologetic partisan. As right-wing media performers increasingly goad mainstream news outlets into a bastardized doctrine of fairness that normalizes white nationalism and authoritarianism, it is notable to see a book that avoids contrived neutrality over issues that do not merit it. It is correct, for example, to universally oppose the imprisonment of children in concentration camps, or to see attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters as wrong, or to denounce police murder.

Lavin takes this one step further, past condemnation and argumentation and into disruption. When Lavin joined the white nationalist dating site, where she got men to write her letters to their future wives, she was not engaging in analysis, biting reporting, or witty insult. She was embarking on a larger project of dismantlement and confrontation in order to close up shop on white supremacists.

Lavin has made this distinction clearly, and says that she and her fellow travelers make each other safe, rather than rely on the carceral state or the FBI to protect them. What makes the book that much more impactful is that the surrounding threat of violence that Lavin experienced never stopped her from continuing the work, because losing the fight against white nationalism would have such an astronomical cost.

Thus, even as the threats continued through Lavins book promotion, and as she faced antisemitic harassment on Instagram, she turned the tables. Joe Mercurio, an active duty marine, trolled Lavin with well-worn blood libels and Lavin struck back immediately, outing his military status and his clear neo-Nazi ideological ties. He is now under investigation a clear win in Lavins approach of pushing back on far-right trolls reliance on their anonymity in order to single out, harass, and victimize people.

Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, October 16, 2016 (Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0)

There is a reason, beyond its brilliant prose and modeling of antifascist activism, that Culture Warlords should be a cultural touchstone: it embodies, and reflects, the heat of the anger so many of us are living with in this political moment. We move around in an online world, even more so due to the pandemic, which is increasingly defined by a rising tide of radicalizing white supremacy.

Its an old cliche that lovers shouldnt go to bed angry; well, for the past year I have gone to bed with my anger and woken up with my anger and gone about my day with my anger hot and wet like blood in my mouth, writes Lavin. We are all living in some experience of shared trauma, a constant deluge of anger mixed with fear as we make sense of the threatening present we are living through.

There is no reason to think that the threat of insurgent white nationalism will shrink in the weeks past this crisis of an election season, and so the book is going to stay just as relevant as it is right at this moment. What makes Culture Warlords the best book of the year is that it moves the experience of the violence inflicted on Lavin and others in her position beyond simple tragedy and reframes it through the eyes of resistance. This is not just the resistance of antifascists in chat rooms and on the streets (though it is unapologetically that as well), but in the refusal to give up the things we think the world is trying to take from us.

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Disrupting the dark web of white supremacy - +972 Magazine