#829: Chatting with Talia Lavin
Today, Jordan sits down with Talia Lavin, author of Culture Warlords, to talk about infiltrating extremist spaces and all the things that come along with it.
July 15, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
01:34:52
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
|
unidentified
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Knowledge fight. | |
| And endure knowledge. | ||
| Fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
|
unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| You're on the air. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I am Jordan, without my co-host again. | ||
| However, today I am joined by Talia Lavin. | ||
| Talia, thank you so much for joining me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi! | |
| It's awesome to be on, ready to fight about some knowledge. | ||
| Yeah, that's something like what we do. | ||
| You're the author of Culture Warlords. | ||
| You have a substack called The Sword and the Sandwich. | ||
| Are there any other credits that I could get? | ||
| I believe you're a Fulbright Scholar? | ||
| God, I mean, yeah, if you really want to get fancy with it, I went to Harvard, I was a Fulbright Scholar, I worked with the New Yorker, but now I'm a bum with a newsletter. | ||
|
unidentified
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Gotcha. | |
| I'm working on my second book, but the place that I really put a lot of time and energy is this sub-stack, the sword and the sandwich. | ||
| I sent you like... | ||
| 10 million links before we recorded, so my apologies. | ||
| No, no, no, I like it. | ||
| It's not unlike if Buddy Glass had a food blog, if that makes sense to you. | ||
| That's for very few people. | ||
| I don't know who Buddy Glass is, so I'm assuming he's Ira Glass's younger brother. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Buddy Glass is the Salinger character who writes the Zoe, Franny stories. | ||
| The Glass family stories. | ||
| See? | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| It's not even for you. | ||
| That is for zero people, basically. | ||
| That reference. | ||
| No, I think a lot of people have read Franny and Zoe. | ||
| Unfortunately, my Salinger was limited to Catcher in the Rye. | ||
| Alas. | ||
| Hey, you know, if you don't make it past that, you're fine. | ||
| Yeah, is Buddy Claus notably? | ||
| Anyway, moving on. | ||
| It's, yeah, it's like a food blog, and then I write about the far right, and the Christian right, and then whatever else crosses my path that seems worth writing about. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, today I wanted to get into Culture Warlords. | ||
| I hadn't read it before. | ||
| So I got a copy and I tore through it and I've got plenty of notes for you that we can go over. | ||
| The first thing to start with, though, is fairly simple. | ||
| Could you kind of give an overview of the timeline of Culture Warlords? | ||
| Yeah, so I wrote my first feature about the far right in 2017. | ||
| I wrote about the Daily Stormer's quest for a new... | ||
| Like, domain and how they kept getting kicked off that whole saga. | ||
| And then over the next two years, I kind of kept writing about it intermittently. | ||
| It was something I was really fascinated by. | ||
| Also, if you're a Jewish woman who writes about the far right, they pay attention. | ||
| And then, like, I found their harassment of me kind of got me more enmeshed and whatever. | ||
| And I... | ||
| I wound up selling a book proposal around, I don't know, late 2018. | ||
| And then I spent 2019 writing the book. | ||
| And then in 2020, there was this, I don't know if you know, but there was a sort of world shaking event. | ||
| So I wound up... | ||
| Finishing the book in COVID lockdown, which was just... | ||
| I was going to say, which one in 2020? | ||
| Yeah, all of them, right? | ||
| No, I finished the book in COVID lockdown, and then we published it, and then January 6th happened a couple of months after it was released. | ||
| I think it came out in November 2020. | ||
| So it's a little dated, but not horribly. | ||
| I think what's aged well is like... | ||
| I talked about some of the dynamics of radicalization and the, I don't know what, emotional truth behind it and what these communities are like. | ||
| Like, I tried to give it legs. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Oh, no, absolutely. | ||
| I think you do a great job. | ||
| When you say you were writing the book, that encompasses a whole lot of stuff. | ||
| Like, you were going undercover in all of these far-right spaces. | ||
| Concocting, what, how many false identities over the course of the book? | ||
| I think at least six? | ||
| Yeah, and there were a lot that, like, didn't really pan out, so they didn't make it on the page. | ||
| Like, I had a whole tradwife persona that, like, but, like, the tradwives are just a lot better at info security than their male counterparts, and they're like, who are you? | ||
| Like, no one's seen you before. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, we need someone to vouch for you before you can join our page on Facebook, that kind of thing. | ||
| So I didn't make a ton of headway in the trad wife community. | ||
| But I did have several identities I concocted to try and get in. | ||
| But, you know, and there were a couple of other things that didn't pan out. | ||
| I mean, I was playing like 10 different people over the course of a year and sometimes different people in a day. | ||
| I mean, it was just a real head trip. | ||
| Overall. | ||
| That is the start of the question that I wanted, though, is which and what of those characters did you kind of take with you, I think? | ||
| I don't think you can play a character without bringing something away from it that kind of maybe you don't necessarily even want. | ||
| So did you have a favorite character that you were playing? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I mean, well, I like to think I haven't become like a neo-Nazi in any sense. | ||
| From any of the characters. | ||
| I mean, obviously my favorite and sort of the splashiest and funniest was playing Ashwin, this character who I used to infiltrate. | ||
| I was a little sloppy. | ||
| I reused the identity a couple of different times. | ||
| You know, that's so strange because you've been trained in undercover work so well by the FBI, by Harvard, right? | ||
| It's definitely not something that you just started doing, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, my comparative literature degree also featured heavy undercover infiltration. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| So Ashlyn was this character I created initially. | ||
| And this actually was before I even sold the book. | ||
| I just, like, encountered this site, whitedate.net, which is a still extant dating site for white supremacists. | ||
| And they were so short on women that they had a page called the Mini Flyer, where they had this flyer that they suggested you hand out to women, random white women you meet, even if you don't think they're hot. | ||
| Even if you don't think they're hot? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it might be one of your white brethren might enjoy her. | |
| Literally, it was like, and the text of the flyer was, our existence is as important as the existence of the Siberian tiger, or our survival, as the Siberian tiger join us on whitedate.net, and you were supposed to give her the flyer and then take it back? | ||
| Just very weird. | ||
| And the site is run by a woman or someone I believe to be a woman. | ||
| She's been on podcasts. | ||
| Her name is Liv Haida. | ||
| She's German. | ||
| And she has a lot of content. | ||
| She doesn't show her face, but she has a feminine sounding voice. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But maybe not so familiar with how humans interact. | ||
| Anyway, I saw that they were so short on women. | ||
| Bizarre scheme. | ||
| So I was like, well, this seems like a very ripe catfishing opportunity. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| If they're desperate, you're in. | ||
| Yeah, so I chose the name Ashlyn because it just like sounded really white. | ||
| And I said I was from Iowa because that's the white estate. | ||
| And from like a small rural community. | ||
| And I just started like getting messages from all these. | ||
| I mean, it felt a little like some sort of anti-fi anthropology thing. | ||
| Like, I don't even know. | ||
| I just kind of started doing it on my own and then folded it into the book. | ||
| It was just, I mean, for me, I think what wound up making it into the book was some stuff about basically the banality of evil. | ||
| Like, you see all the time. | ||
| In mainstream coverage, this, like, oh my god, like, a white supremacist said a, you know, complete sentence, or, like, doesn't live in a compound, in an Aryan Nations compound, like, and is able to cook dinner, like... | ||
| Richard Spencer wore a tie! | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And that's all you need for a New Yorker article, apparently. | ||
| Right, I mean, the, I think the Tony Hovater profile in the New York Times is sort of the... | ||
| The, like, archetype of this, or maybe it was the Atlantic. | ||
| It's the one where it's like, oh, like, we went to dinner with him and his girlfriend. | ||
| He has a girlfriend. | ||
| They eat food. | ||
|
unidentified
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And it's like, like, you know... | |
| Nazis, they're just like us! | ||
| I mean, it's A, Nazis, they're just like us. | ||
| And it's like, what were you expecting? | ||
| Of course they're human beings. | ||
| With, like, the same, I don't know what, like, humanity as anyone else. | ||
| They've just, like, made really, really bad choices and... | ||
| Continue to make really, really bad choices. | ||
| And like the fact that, I say this in the introduction, like the people we're talking about are human. | ||
| Obviously, with everything that comes along with that, their humanity does not absolve them. | ||
| And in my mind, it indemnifies them further. | ||
| Because they have chosen out of the beautiful, complex tapestry of human life to spend theirs propagating hate. | ||
| So, you know, how is that in any way an absolution? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| No, there was one thing about white date, not that, that I really, really didn't enjoy. | ||
| Enjoy is the wrong word for it. | ||
| But you had to send a little, like, here's why I should be allowed into... | ||
| Or no, this was with one of your... | ||
| Male characters in a... | ||
| It wasn't a dating website. | ||
| It was an incel community, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it was incels.is. | |
| The sort of... | ||
| The big incel message board that, like, served... | ||
| I mean, it sort of was, is the biggest incel hub on the net after Reddit, like, shut down the incel communities. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Well, the reason that I wanted to ask about that specifically is because you had to write a little, here's why you should invite me into the incel community. | ||
| You had to write a cover letter, essentially, explaining why it is that, you know, you hate women. | ||
| And one of the lines that I thought was so fucking funny is, and I feel like you almost could have shortened it down to just, I feel very alone. | ||
| And I read that and I was like, oh, that's speak, friend, and enter. | ||
| That's what that is. | ||
| And then I was going, and then I went right back to white date. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, those communities, how many women could possibly be on white date? | ||
| You know, it's not that there aren't racist women. | ||
| They're just not on that site. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no, no. | |
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Women, well, again, the trad wife community that you had trouble infiltrating, right? | ||
| I can't imagine that any women but undercover Antifa people are on whitedate.net. | ||
| It's just me on feds. | ||
| It's right. | ||
| Doesn't that seem right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it was started by a woman, at least purportedly, I don't know. | ||
| But... | ||
| But yeah, I mean, there's gotta be some, but, like, I think now they charge a subscription fee for joining, but I don't think the gender imbalance has resolved. | ||
| Let's put it that way. | ||
| Like, I think that maybe just, like, the men part of this community are just, like, more open with security risk or whatever, but, like, I don't know. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I think there are a lot of women with a lot of hate in their hearts, or whatever, but also it's such a misogynist community that there are just very few women figureheads because, you know, they hate women, too. | ||
| I mean, if you're a female white nationalist, it doesn't seem like it would be hard to find other white nationalists through, like, OkCupid. | ||
| They're available. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's plenty of them. | ||
| Or like your DMs. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You have an army of the worst simps in the entire world. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| It's also been a while and now I'm trying to access the self that was doing all this shit. | ||
| That was a really crazy year of my life. | ||
| I was just really... | ||
| I was on these chats and forums posing as different people for like 10 plus hours a day, like, you know, and then editing and then rewriting and writing and writing and writing. | ||
| But the insult thing was very funny. | ||
| So you were writing concurrently while you were, so you weren't just like taking notes as this was going on. | ||
| You were trying to come up with complete chapter-based storytelling through this as you're doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God, I don't really remember. | ||
| The writing process was such a blur and lockdown happened. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I had basically nine months to produce a complete manuscript. | ||
| So yeah, I was concurrent research and writing as I'm currently attempting to do. | ||
| And it was just, God, I was either writing about hate. | ||
| In these hate chats or, like, reading, like, surfing Telegram. | ||
| Like, it was so weird and, like, such a dark place. | ||
| But occasionally quite funny. | ||
| The incel thing was funny. | ||
| Just because I had initially written a cover letter that was very bare bones. | ||
| Like, just like, oh, like, I'm interested in connecting with people more like me. | ||
| You know, very boilerplate. | ||
| And they were, like, rejected, not enough information. | ||
| So I literally had to make a persona. | ||
| Like, I literally had to, like, get deep into the mindset of an incel. | ||
| And, like, they write so fucking much about their feelings that it's, like, not hard to copy that. | ||
| But I really was like, okay. | ||
| Okay, Talia. | ||
| Like, you know, now you're a male incel. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, what are you gonna write? | |
| What did you, did you go to a mirror and try and do the Travis Bickle thing? | ||
| No, I looked into a mirror and, like, all of a sudden, you know, I was, I watched my face morph into, like, my bones. | ||
| Are you racist to me? | ||
| Are you racist to me? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I like it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it was more like the Beauty and the Beast mirror scene where, like, You take the magic mirror and it shows you just like a horrifying tragic scene while we're referencing classic mirror scenes in cinema. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, it was just very funny. | ||
| So then the persona had to become more fleshed out. | ||
| I did a fake out chapter where I was like, maybe she interviewed someone else. | ||
| But I'm like, nope, it was me all. | ||
| There is a very good progression of escalation, I feel like, throughout the book. | ||
| You start with a fairly straightforward history of the far right and how those movements go. | ||
| And then it kind of goes from... | ||
| To the social media people who are just talking shit. | ||
| To the infiltrating the dating. | ||
| To the infiltrating the incels. | ||
| And then you finally wind up with, you know, out and out, let's go light stuff on fire people. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| I'm interested to see, do you feel like there were other people who followed along with the same journey? | ||
| If that makes sense? | ||
| Do you think that there was some earnest person who's going on white date, realizes that there aren't any women there, then goes to an incel community? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I mean, I guess I could see someone being like, well, like, I've been radicalized, like, now I'm a white supremacist, looking for my perfect woman, goes on white date. | ||
| No women. | ||
| This must be a problem. | ||
| No women! | ||
| This must be a problem with the women. | ||
| There's something fundamentally wrong with women. | ||
| They're not based enough. | ||
| I'm gonna become an incel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| I mean, a lot of the guys on White Date were older, were, like, divorced. | ||
| There was a lot of divorced men. | ||
| Very divorced. | ||
| Just strong, divorced energy on White Date. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| Like, every night I eat, like, pork and beans from a can. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Kind of vibes. | ||
| Um, can't, like, I would say the most manipulative thing I did, and, like, I mean, there are a lot of things, it's like, I am still proud of Culture of Warlords, and obviously, like, people still want to talk to me about it on a podcast three years later, and that's tight, but, like, some of the things I did were a little outre, like, which is sort of, I mean, I think it makes the book a more propulsive read, but, like, I got the men on White Day to write me love letters to their ideal white wife. | ||
| And then I printed them in an anti-fascist book. | ||
| Which is sort of an objectively funny, if manipulative, thing to do. | ||
| I was going to say, we were going to get there. | ||
| I was going to say, how much of your behavior do you feel like, yeah, I'm going to tell my kids about that. | ||
| I'm real proud. | ||
| I would say I feel ashamed of really anything I did. | ||
| I think it is like, the one thing is there was a lot of push from... | ||
| The, like, publisher to make it more of a memoir-ish feel, include more me, and that wasn't necessarily Hunter S. Thompson going undercover in the right wing kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, that, like, I was a character, and, like, I'm trying not to do that in book two. | ||
| Like, it's something that hopefully as my writing matures, like, it obviates the need to, like, kind of center the self, I think. | ||
| It can be kind of reflexive. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, and every first book is an autobiography, as they say. | |
| But in this case, it was pretty extreme. | ||
| The other undercover bit, and the one that was by far the most emotionally involved. | ||
| I'm sure you were going to get to this, and I'm getting all your questions out of order and ruffling your beautiful hair. | ||
| No, no, no, you're golden. | ||
| No, but... | ||
| I was, like, enmeshed. | ||
| Again, I was sort of Ashlyn, but, like, I think I had a different, I had a different username on Telegram, like, um, hot, like, Aryan Queen. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Oh my god, I swear to you, this is how stupid I am. | ||
| I swear to you, and I wrote it down in my notes. | ||
| I saw Ashlyn 1488, and my first thought was, she's 550 years old? | ||
| And then I was like, right, right, right, right, 1488, the 14 words, and then the high, I got you now. | ||
| Yeah, no, she's also a time traveler from the Carolingian era. | ||
| I know, I'm not very clever. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's like... | |
| As I've moved away, like, the current book is a lot more about mainstream figures, mainstream politics. | ||
| It's still about radicalization and violence, but it's more about, like, the Christian right. | ||
| And, like, it's less... | ||
| I mean, there's still, like, specialized knowledge and shit. | ||
| Like, you just have to read what they write about, like, we want to take over the country. | ||
| We believe there are prophets. | ||
| Like, we are explicitly have this goal of theocracy. | ||
| and like here are like all of our representatives on school boards and state legislators. | ||
| Like it's a little more straightforward. | ||
| You don't have to download any encrypted apps. | ||
| I think 1488 isn't that obscure. | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| But our show is thoroughly familiar with 1488. | ||
| There's no need to go any further into that. | ||
| Everybody here is more than familiar with Hitler. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just to be clear, he's bad. | ||
| I dislike him. | ||
| Bad guy. | ||
| No. | ||
| Have you ever seen the movie Imperium? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, so it's really funny. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Very cringe, and it has a good heart, but it's so weird. | ||
| It's with Daniel Radcliffe, and he plays this real-life guy. | ||
| I think it's Mike German? | ||
| The name might be familiar to you. | ||
| This guy, an actual fed who went undercover with white supremacists and has been kind of warning about them ever since. | ||
| But the movie is Daniel Radcliffe plays him going undercover with a bunch of Nazis. | ||
| Goading them into, like, or, like, they have a plot to, like, blow up a dam, and then he, like, sort of both goads them and then interrupts it at the last second. | ||
| And it's, I think it's, like, partially based on a true story. | ||
| It's also just, like, Daniel Radcliffe is a very tiny person, and he's, like, pretending to be this ex-Navy SEAL who, like, is their security expert. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| He was way more believable as a corpse that could talk and be a boat. | ||
| I really believed in that one. | ||
| I was like, that's a Harry Potter performance right there. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, I enjoy that he's spent his post-Harry Potter career just taking on the weirdest roles possible. | ||
| But anyway, at one point, the only point of this anecdote was just like, at one point, like, the dialogue is so bad. | ||
| They're just like, they greet each other. | ||
| White's premise is created to have like 1488, brother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| I mean, the problem is that's not far enough off from reality. | ||
| Like, that's not bad writing. | ||
| That's bad Nazis. | ||
| I know. | ||
| They're just not that creative. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And they do have a blow-up dance. | ||
| They do have a blow-up dance. | ||
| It's just, it was so funny. | ||
| Like, he had this great conversation with a Nazi punk about how, like, um... | ||
| Like, labels on food that say that they're kosher or, like, because Jews are controlling the food supply. | ||
| It was very funny. | ||
| It was interesting to see it in a movie with Daniel Radcliffe in it. | ||
| But, like, occasionally I'll just, like, find myself with an intrusive thought of just, like, wanting to be, like, 1488, brother, to say hello. | ||
| But, like, my brain is poisoned, so don't take anything I say seriously. | ||
| See? | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Now we're talking about the things that you took away. | ||
| It's true! | ||
| Like, yeah, I mean, I was in a really dark place after I wrote the book. | ||
| Like, is all of humanity like this? | ||
| Like, everyone I've talked to for the last year wants to kill everyone like me. | ||
| Like, it really seeps into your bones. | ||
|
unidentified
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It makes you feel scared. | |
| And then I did have, when the book got published, like, the FBI showed up at my door and they're like, um, you know. | ||
| Like, there are rape and death threats against you. | ||
| I'm like, I know. | ||
| From the FBI? | ||
| No, the FBI wasn't threatening to rape and kill me. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But it was like, I got a visit from, like, the, yeah, the counterterrorism squad at the FBI. | ||
| And they were like, people want to rape and kill you. | ||
| I'm like, I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And then a year later. | ||
| I was going to say, yeah. | ||
| They met up with me and were like, one of the people that, like, threatened you the most is now in jail. | ||
| And the other, like, is barred from using the internet in his country. | ||
| I'm like, can you give me more details? | ||
| And they're like, nope. | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Good meeting. | ||
| We're the FBI. | ||
| What do we, help? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I've taken security measures since then. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I mean, I think none of it helped with my anxiety disorder. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's put it that way. | |
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Well, no, I mean... | ||
| There was one question that comes up early on in the book, and it's not quite a question so much as it is. | ||
| You see a tweet or something from somebody that's just, would anyone rape Talia Levin? | ||
| Right? | ||
| I think it was in a Telegram chat. | ||
| It was in a Telegram chat of people affiliated with the Bull Patrol podcast, which was straight up like Ademwaffen. | ||
| It's like terrorists. | ||
| Being like, can anyone rape her? | ||
| Only with a shotgun. | ||
| I mean, fuck with your head! | ||
| That's the thing that I couldn't stop thinking about. | ||
| Besides, you know, the visceral nature of it, I assume must have been just beyond fucked up to not be yourself and to hear people talk about you behind your back. | ||
|
unidentified
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They posted a picture of my feet! | |
| Right. | ||
| In a Nazi chat that I was lurking in. | ||
| It was so weird. | ||
| I think at the time I was like, well, I guess I'm doing something right. | ||
| I will say that as a woman and as a Jew, but as a woman, I think there's an element of covering this stuff that gets very visceral because The misogyny is really at the beating heart of these movements. | ||
| And that includes the Christian right, by the way. | ||
| But when we're talking about these terror movements, when we're talking about white supremacy and white supremacist terror, right? | ||
| And incel them, obviously. | ||
| Misogyny is the beating heart of it. | ||
| And they really hate women. | ||
| They really hate feminism. | ||
| And they are very violent people. | ||
| And so their heads go to gendered violence right away. | ||
| When I talk to men who are in the sort of, like, we're weirdos who research the far right kind of community, most of what they get in terms of opposition, and I wonder if this is your experience, is like, I was like, okay, like, I'm Lex Luthor, you're Batman. | ||
| Like, you know, this sense of we're rivals, but we're equal. | ||
| You know. | ||
| And I'm gonna fuck with you, and I'm gonna say violent things, but it's not like I am going to, like, rape your corpse. | ||
| Like, you are sub, like, you are subhuman. | ||
| You are not worthy of my rivalry because you are a woman. | ||
| Like, the constant talk of rape, the constant discussion of my body, like, you know, um, and my face, and like... | ||
| Like, using a picture of me as evidence that, like, Jews are non-human and are more closely related to, like, Australopithecus because of their giant hips. | ||
| Like, just weird stuff. | ||
| Have you had people analyzing your body and face and feet and threatening rape? | ||
| Physiognomy in 2023 is just great, but no, I mean, for us, no, and we're more than aware that If we were women, it would be completely different for us. | ||
| Because as it stands, we're just ignored. | ||
| Nobody talks about us. | ||
| Nobody really comes after us. | ||
| No, we just sit in our little corner of the internet and are left alone, essentially. | ||
| But if we were not two bearded white dudes, if we were two women... | ||
| Especially women of color. | ||
| We would be exoriated on a fucking daily basis by hundreds of people, if not thousands. | ||
| So, I mean, that's why I asked the question to you, because obviously I can't understand it. | ||
| When I read that somebody would post something like that, my first instinct is like, well, this needs to be against the law or something. | ||
| I don't know what to do with this. | ||
| I don't know what to do with this beyond, say, whatever happened needs to stop, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| But I can't feel the visceral element of it being directed towards me. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was not like a top ten moment of my life, that moment, although it did make for a very dramatic copy. | ||
| I will say that I hired my own fact checker, because that's what you have to do for books. | ||
| Like, they don't provide one. | ||
| That's why I write fiction, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But she reviewed all of the screenshots. | ||
| Like, I took screenshots of every interaction I had, including that one. | ||
| And I traumatized my fact checker. | ||
| She's like, I read through all this stuff and I, like, vomited. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm so sorry. | ||
| And I paid her extra out of my... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, this is hazard pay. | |
| You have the Nazi tip! | ||
| You have the Nazi tip! | ||
| Hey, listen, you need an extra 15%. | ||
| Hazard pay. | ||
| Because, like, you have to read these fucking disgusting chats about, like, this muck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's like, I think the one thing... | |
| And you notice how also, like... | ||
| Many of the people who are reporting on this stuff are white men, right? | ||
| And there's a lot of reason for it. | ||
| First of all, it's not as heavy a lift. | ||
| You're not constantly engaged with people who want to eliminate you off the face of the earth as your job. | ||
| The psychic toll is far less high. | ||
| Uh, I mean, there's still a psychic toll. | ||
| Like, you're looking into the howling void of hell, but, like... | ||
| Oh, yeah, I'm insane. | ||
| We've listened to Alex Jones nigh every day for seven years. | ||
| I've lost my mind completely. | ||
| Yeah, but, like, the howling void isn't, like, looking at you, assessing your looks, and deciding whether you're worthy of raping. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Um, I do think that, like, first of all, there's also a really fucked up, like, sense in journalism that, like, Oh, anyone with a stake in the matter, like, can't be objective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So, like, women can't report about misogyny. | ||
| Only white men can be objective, right? | ||
| And that's an unsubtle factor in why the press corps in the U.S. looks like, such as it is, looks the way it does. | ||
| Well, clearly it's an objective opinion. | ||
| But I think a lot of reporting on extremism. | ||
| Not all of it. | ||
| Not all of it, but... | ||
| But a lot of reporting on extremism is, at the very least, rarely acknowledges how central misogyny is to these movements. | ||
| Because it is not viscerally directed at the reporters themselves. | ||
| Because it is also so ambiently present in the rest of culture that it's easy to ignore. | ||
| And perhaps everyone has internalized bias. | ||
| You know, reporters and non-reporters alike. | ||
| But I think the biggest thing that I would say is, like, living through kind of being an avatar, a recipient of this kind of gendered hate, is, like, recognizing how central misogyny is. | ||
| And anti-Semitism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, I think I knew they hated Jews, right? | |
| Obviously, I'm not stupid, and I've been writing about it, but it's like... | ||
| Then you get into it and you're like, oh my god, no. | ||
| They hate Jews, but it's not just that they hate Jews. | ||
| It's that the hatred of Jews is the scaffolding from which every other hate is hung. | ||
| It's the overarching sort of canon. | ||
| It's the world explanation that provides a support structure for all the other hate. | ||
| So it occupies this very unique niche. | ||
| As a Jewish woman reporting on this world, it felt very personal for me. | ||
| And I think that explains why I went so gonzo, why I felt so out for revenge. | ||
| Because I was like, these people want to murder my family. | ||
| They want to rape me to death. | ||
| They obsessively fantasize about subjugating all women and killing all Jews. | ||
| So yeah, it did feel like a personal fight. | ||
| And on the other hand, everything in the book is factual and fact-checked. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| I didn't let my emotions blind me to the truth. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| Let's not, let's not. | ||
| I'm not, I'm more just saying like. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| Oh, oh, calm down. | ||
| No, no, I think. | ||
| Yes, there we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's okay, baby. | |
| Don't worry. | ||
| So it was, it did feel very personal and it's not, maybe like an objective journalistic chronicle in that sense, but like. | ||
| I do feel like there was stuff I learned while I was writing it. | ||
| I really learned more about the history of anti-Semitism in America, the role anti-Semitism plays, and how people get radicalized. | ||
| That's the next step. | ||
| Because that is a really interesting part of this book, from my reading of it, is you were radicalized. | ||
| You know, like, the element of your book is you are going through a journey of somebody's radicalization, you know, through these different groups. | ||
| And then at the end of it, you are thoroughly radicalized. | ||
| Just not in the way that they would have appreciated you be. | ||
| And that leads me to the question of, like, you know, you said I don't necessarily appreciate that I... | ||
| In the face of what you deal with, I don't know what's unjustified and what's justified. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| And I mean that in a very serious way, because when you say radicalized, it's fascinating to me. | ||
| And you say it in the book. | ||
| I'm not putting words into your mouth, correct? | ||
| No, no, yeah. | ||
| I just want to clarify. | ||
| I became radicalized as an anti-fascist. | ||
| Yes, but I mean, yes. | ||
| You were. | ||
| Yeah, oh my god! | ||
| Like, you know, I think so much of radicalization is just, like, being in a bubble where you get exposed to, like, the same self, like, reinforcing material every day, every hour, where you're, you know, in this bubble of like-minded people. | ||
| And I would say that, like, being in those bubbles as someone whose identity is, like, Diametrically opposed to everything they stand for and, like, knowing that they wanted to, they, not only personally, but also just, like, on an identity category basis, like, as a feminist, as a woman, as a Jew, like, they want me dead. | ||
| Was, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you're a triple threat, literally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was a tremendously radicalizing experience. | ||
| It was. | ||
| Like, I was like, fuck you! | ||
| You know, I went from, like, fuck you to fuck you! | ||
| Like, just... | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Spinal tap. | ||
| Deservedly so. | ||
| Deservedly so. | ||
| I don't know how a question like, would anyone rape Talia Laven not radicalize you? | ||
| How? | ||
| How could it not? | ||
| Right. | ||
| For the crime of having written a couple of articles about, I don't know, the far right. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, and it's just a confusing and disgusting question that, like, means so much, you know? | ||
| It is an expression of, again, their, like, loneliness and their hatred for women that is, you know, like, they can't even say, like, oh, does anybody find Talia Lavin attractive? | ||
| They can't do that. | ||
| And that's not the question they're asking. | ||
| But the question they're asking also isn't the question they're asking. | ||
| They're expressing some feeling that is violent and hate-filled and lonely and just horrendously awful. | ||
| Well, it's also what's interesting. | ||
| It is a gendered performance. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| When you're in these all-male, majority-male spaces, especially because I'm honeypotting half the time, you just realize how much of it is like... | ||
| Guys showing off to each other, like, and I think the dynamic of sexually humiliating and degrading women to other men is very much a performance of masculinity. | ||
| Yes, yes, that was the, yes, yes. | ||
| And they're obsessed with hypermasculinity. | ||
| Sorry, I got excited. | ||
| No, they're obsessed with hypermasculinity. | ||
| There was the other, like, episode where I adopted another identity to, like, talk with white supremacists who wanted to do a Christians versus pagans, like, fight in the woods. | ||
| Oh yeah, that one would be fun. | ||
| What was the name of it? | ||
| Oh god, I don't remember. | ||
| It's been a while, but it was like the rumble and whatever. | ||
| They were going to do a fight. | ||
| Good nature, like Christians versus pagans. | ||
| Neo-Nazi. | ||
| We're all white nationalists here, but we have different religious beliefs. | ||
| Let's settle this through violence like we always do. | ||
| Yeah, and it was to raise money for Augustus Invictus' presidential campaign. | ||
| That's a white nationalist, wife-beating piece of shit who started off his career drinking goat blood and challenging Marco Rubio for his Senate seat in Florida. | ||
| I think now he's a tradcast. | ||
| But he just, like, beats women. | ||
| That's his other thing. | ||
| I mean, so misogyny, hyper-masculinity, misogyny as part of hyper-masculinity and performance for other men, this, like, am I tough enough? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough kind of vibe. | |
| I think the degradation, humiliation, and specific targeting of women is part of that performance, which isn't to say it doesn't come from a place of, like, All kinds of fucked up inner rage, but I think part of it is also showing off for other guys. | ||
| Well, that's what I was thinking about. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's what I was thinking about with whitedate.net. | ||
| Sorry for interrupting you. | ||
| But what I was thinking about was how much of the messages that they sent you are them with this mistaken impression, or, you know, in your case, mistaken, but perhaps a reasonable impression that... | ||
| Any woman who would go on white date is looking for the most white nationalist man she can find, right? | ||
| Yeah, and... | ||
| So a lot of those messages to you are tinged with a certain amount of, like, I gotta really up my white nationalism for this lady. | ||
| I gotta really... | ||
| I mean, when I go to the store, I'm like, I don't like black people, but this lady I need to be really white nationalist for. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, I want you... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was so funny. | |
| It was just like the... | ||
| The messages were just like, you seem like the good, submissive mother of my babies. | ||
| Let me prove to you how much I hate minorities and Jews. | ||
| I can't believe there aren't a ton of women on whitedate.net. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| The thing is, like... | ||
| Like, the whole white nationalist terrorist movement, which is like, at this point... | ||
| One of the things that's shifted in my thinking is, like, it is a fascinating and destructive subculture. | ||
| It's also, like... | ||
| Since I wrote that book in 2020, like, the Overton window has shifted so far that, like, to focus on, like... | ||
| Like, the violence is coming from inside the Capital H House. | ||
| Like, there has been a seismic shift in, like, where the centers of violence are. | ||
| Like, you know, who sort of makes sense to study as, like, a... | ||
| Primary target. | ||
| I'm also not really doing undercover work anymore. | ||
| Smart. | ||
| Just because I was like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't do that again. | |
| Like, I'll go crazy. | ||
| Crazier. | ||
| And there's more than enough stuff. | ||
| I mean, I am planning to attend at least one conference either about like prophecy homeschooling ideally both in chronicling the Christian right but like I will not be undercover at that point like I will be a a me um person attending um hopefully I won't get chased out again um Where did you get chased out of? | ||
| A conference organized by Andy Nyo and Tim Pool. | ||
| Two titanic intellectuals. | ||
| I met both at that event. | ||
| Nyo was very awkward and not confrontational. | ||
| I met Tim Pool. | ||
| I asked him if his beanie smelled bad. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| He was like, no, I have a few and I washed them. | ||
| I think one or both of them wanted to take a selfie with me and I was like, no. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| What are they going to do with it? | ||
| They're going to use it to be like, look, this is our enemy and she loves us. | ||
| I'm like, no, I'm just here to cover the fucked up things you say. | ||
| It was very weird. | ||
| It was also in a casino in Philadelphia. | ||
| It was kind of cool because there were, like, some Antifa photos. | ||
| I was, like, I was outside smoking for a lot of it. | ||
| I went to some panels. | ||
| But, like, I also just wanted to talk to people who, like, showed up to, like, see Sargon of Akkad in person in, like, Philadelphia. | ||
| Can't miss it! | ||
| When's Sargon going to be back in Philadelphia? | ||
| Come on! | ||
| I know. | ||
| Like, I'm like, so, you know, what are you up to? | ||
| Like, I wanted to talk to them, and there was this one lady who was like... | ||
| I just think the races should be separate. | ||
| And I was like, cool. | ||
| Can I, like, take your photo? | ||
| Let's talk. | ||
| What's your name? | ||
| She's totally cool with all of it. | ||
| And then she's like, yeah, like, I just don't think people of different races should marry. | ||
| And I posted that to my Twitter. | ||
| I was, like, live tweeting, in retrospect, that was a dumb idea. | ||
| I wasn't really, like, such an expert on reporting from adversarial situations. | ||
| But it was like, she got this other guy to, like, gang up on me. | ||
| Someone else is following me around. | ||
| I had a friend who had driven me there. | ||
| He was playing blackjack because this was all in a casino. | ||
| And at a certain point, I had three different people following me around yelling at me. | ||
| And I was like, it's time to cut bait. | ||
| And so I was like, let's get out of here. | ||
| And so I kind of made a dash for his vehicle. | ||
| And that person is currently my boyfriend. | ||
| I'm not saying this is the test for... | ||
| Dating me, but, like, can you safely extract me from a conference full of white nationalists isn't, like, a bad litmus test. | ||
| It's a good quality. | ||
| It's a good quality to have. | ||
| One that most people won't need, but, you know, you never want to be without it. | ||
| So I would say that I was, like, leaving and I was running. | ||
| Like, I wasn't running. | ||
| I was just like, I'm gonna, like, hit the trail, right? | ||
| Like, let's get out of here. | ||
| A couple people were yelling after me. | ||
| Um, we get in the car, we speed away. | ||
| And I was, like, I was just, I, like, tweeted, like, I was just chased out of this conference. | ||
| Especially because they were, like, billing it as, like, we're so reasonable. | ||
| Like, uh, you know, we're, like, we're really open to other perspectives. | ||
| And I was, like, hey, I was just chased out of your conference. | ||
| Like, so, okay. | ||
| Um, and they were, like, they found, the post-millennial was, like, She, like, they claimed that I wasn't chased out. | ||
| I waddled away. | ||
| That I wasn't, like, at a full tilt run. | ||
| And, like, then they were like, we talked to the casino security about, like, whether anyone was chased out. | ||
| And I was like, people running, like, were yelling at me and following me around. | ||
| And I, like, left at reasonable speed. | ||
| Like, you know, maybe casino security wouldn't have noticed. | ||
| And they're like, we're going to produce the security. | ||
| Footage that proves this is a lie. | ||
| And they never did. | ||
| But they were like, oh, she's lying. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| No, it reminds me of, like, 1940s journalism where they'd just go into a paragraph on a woman's appearance on a story about, like, the building was falling down. | ||
| And then they've got her shoes were a little bit too high. | ||
| And you're like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Well, it's just another example of how visceral this stuff is. | ||
| And, like... | ||
| Okay, so, like, I show my face, right? | ||
| The Postmillennial, I swear, published, a woman who looks like a pigeon is actually Antifa, and she's gonna ask you misleading questions and lie about you on her blog. | ||
| The guy who said that at the mic in the session I was in was someone who had told me, like, oh, like, I'm not a white nationalist. | ||
| I'm a civic nationalist. | ||
| I think there's a diversity of opinion here. | ||
| What? | ||
| And I posted a photo of him. | ||
| Anyway, I don't think I look like a pigeon. | ||
| I'm not covered in feathers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| there. | ||
| But it was just... | ||
| I don't even know how to handle the concept of a non-stop barrage of appearance-based insults. | ||
| Like, it never ends. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's the fucked up truth of it is that it never ends. | ||
| No, and for a while they were obsessed with the idea that in, like, a few pictures my fingernails appeared dirty, and, like, someone made a collage of, like, different photos of my fingernails, including several where I was, like, at the beach and just, like, had sand in my nails. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But it was, like, this filthy fingernail Jew, and I, like, started getting really self-conscious and, like, stopped including my hands in photos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, it's like, it gets to you. | |
| Like, you're human. | ||
| That's fucking unbelievable. | ||
| So when I've talked to people who've been brigaded and swarmed by hate, I'm like, like, a lot of times they feel guilty for letting it get to them. | ||
| Like, I've talked through, like, specifically a lot of women through the process of, like, so, like, you wound up being, like, the target of Tucker Carlson's show today, or, like, 4chan found your... | ||
| Blog posts and suddenly gone from being like a random person to like being the target of an avalanche of hate. | ||
| And it's like very weird. | ||
| It feels like the roof has blown off your life. | ||
| And I've talked them through it. | ||
| And like inevitably, it's mostly been women. | ||
| And inevitably, there's this feeling of guilt of like, shouldn't I be stronger? | ||
| Like I'm letting this get to you. | ||
| And I'm like, no, like you're a human being. | ||
| We like evolutionarily respond to criticism because we don't want to be rejected from the tribe and like left alone to starve. | ||
| It hurts to hear people say stuff like, you are too ugly to rape. | ||
| Or like, this disgusting, dirty fingernail Jew is an example of Neanderthalism and not a homo sapiens. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It makes you feel weird when you look in the mirror. | ||
| You're like, God, do I really look like the... | ||
| You know that caricature of a Jew? | ||
| They always have. | ||
| It's like the guy with the hook nose bending over, sort of rubbing his hands. | ||
| I'm like, is that what other people see when they look at me? | ||
| It's just like, you know, and I've had some time and I've had some therapy, but for a little bit it was just like, oh my god. | ||
| You know, when you deal with very direct comments and attacks on your appearance, who you are, your... | ||
| Gender, your ethno-religion, whatever it is. | ||
| Like, and it's all intertwined. | ||
| It does fuck with your head. | ||
| So that wasn't, you know, I think that was part of my process of radicalization. | ||
| Just being like, leave me alone! | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| No, I mean, it makes me blindly filled with rage. | ||
| To hear that, like, I mean, honestly, you can see my body language, I hope, but I'm fucking shivering with how much I can't, I can't even, I can't, I can't conceive of the idea of wanting to say that. | ||
| Not even, not even saying it. | ||
| Saying it is beyond my comprehension entirely. | ||
| I'll say just, like, what female researchers of this stuff endure is staggering. | ||
| And this story is included in the book, but you had Molly Conger on the podcast. | ||
| I love her. | ||
| She's an amazing person. | ||
| She came to Seder with my family one year. | ||
| I adore her. | ||
| She's a delightful human being. | ||
| Friend of the show. | ||
| Oh, we love Socialist Dog Mom. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Do you know what happened to her over the course of, and I included this in the book, I watched this unfold in real time. | ||
| Drew Paul Nealon. | ||
| Does that name sound familiar at all to you? | ||
| He ran against Paul Ryan for the house. | ||
| In, what is it, Wisconsin? | ||
| Anyway, he's fucking nuts. | ||
| And, like, he kind of wound up, like, not winning, obviously, but he became increasingly more and more anti-Semitic over the course of his campaign. | ||
| He also works in water treatment, which is insane, because I'm like, this guy's gonna put cyanide in the water in Wisconsin, but whatever. | ||
| Anyway, he had a specific, um, rage. | ||
| Hard on, against Molly and this other woman who were both, had both done research on anti-fascism. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| This was right around the Unite the Right area. | ||
| This was after, this was during the writing of... | ||
| Charlottesville, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but that's when Molly became more active, but this was a couple of years later. | ||
| Nealon had already lost. | ||
| He had a Telegram channel. | ||
| He, like, went deer hunting. | ||
| He named two deer after these women. | ||
| He shot the deer, labeling them after these women. | ||
| He lynched the deer. | ||
| The dead deer. | ||
| And then he made deer meat sausage and spelled Molly's name out in meat. | ||
| That's psycho. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| I can sense, I can feel why that would be threatening. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But to me, that's more confounding. | ||
| The number of ideas that you have that lead to that point so outweigh any kind of rational behavior. | ||
| The moment you're like, well, I've killed the deer, now I gotta string it up. | ||
| You should have somebody around being like, this is just... | ||
| I mean... | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have a phrase called beating a dead horse! | |
| You shouldn't be allowed to chemically treat water. | ||
| Yeah, that's not complicated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But imagine this happening to you. | |
| Someone named a deer after you, they murder it, and they hang it in effigy. | ||
| That's how visceral the violence against women and the hatred of women is. | ||
| I interviewed Molly about the whole thing. | ||
| I mean, after a certain point, like, we get this sense of mordant humor. | ||
| Like, I would say, I think the women who study this stuff have an even darker sense of humor than the dudes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because we've just, we've been to hell. | |
| Like, you know, but, and it rolls off your back. | ||
| But then also, you know, I don't, Like, I take very serious precautions. | ||
| I don't post photos where I am. | ||
| I, like, still, you know, even though it's been years and no one's coming after me, probably, there is a sense where I'm, like, knowing that, like, enough people have wanted to murder and rape you over the course of your life does sort of put a permanent dent in your feeling of safety. | ||
| I still think it was worth it writing this book. | ||
| I still think it's worth it writing book two. | ||
| Just because whatever, like, my emotional distress, like, this is existential for the country. | ||
| This is existential for so many people. | ||
| It's worth doing the work, but it does take a toll. | ||
| And particularly if you are female, that toll is gendered in very extreme ways. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| And not in ways that are necessarily readily visible to men interfacing with this world. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I talked to Sean Norris, a journalist from Britain, not too long ago. | ||
| And in her book, she wrote, until women have complete reproductive freedoms, they will never be free. | ||
| If that, you know, and it's like, that is, if that is a true statement, then you're also kind of saying that women will never be free. | ||
| Because the vast majority of human beings, regardless of gender or anything, are inherently misogynistic on this fucking planet. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, most religions at their core are misogynistic, or at the very least subjugate women. | ||
| You know, most institutions, most jobs, most businesses, most everything, the fucking government. | ||
| Like, all of these things are arrayed against women. | ||
| And that's just the people who don't send you messages. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think at the same time, fighting for freedom is still worth it. | ||
| Even if it's really far away. | ||
| Like, even if... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I think it takes a real... | |
| It takes power and courage to imagine utopia. | ||
| It takes courage to resist how shitty things are. | ||
| I recently had a great conversation with a wonderful feminist author, commentator, Moira Donegan, and she said every time a woman summons up the courage to get mad about how unjust things are and speak up about it, it grants Other women the courage to do the same. | ||
| Every single time. | ||
| And there are real stakes that come with that. | ||
| There are real stakes with poking the status quo in the eye. | ||
| And the status quo fucking hates women. | ||
| But, like, yes. | ||
| Attacks on reproductive rights, as we've seen in so many states, it makes women second-class citizens. | ||
| It makes pregnancy very close to a crime. | ||
| You're also surveilled. | ||
| And as I'm writing about extensively in this book, the curtailment of reproductive freedom is fundamentally about a worldview that wants to see all women, every woman, every woman, submissive, subjected, oppressed, and fundamentally dependent. | ||
| Like, this is the dream that they want to achieve, and forcing us to get pregnant when we don't want to be is part of that. | ||
| And some of them are very open about wanting to, about not being sad if someone who tries to get an abortion illegally dies. | ||
| Like, that the deaths of women are just collateral damage that they're not even particularly sad about. | ||
| All the shit about babies is a smokescreen. | ||
| It's all about controlling women. | ||
| It's all about making sure that... | ||
| I've chosen not to have kids for a variety of reasons. | ||
| That choice is one that is no longer available to a lot of women. | ||
| That's really scary. | ||
| And it's life-altering. | ||
| And... | ||
| It's tragic. | ||
| And so the stakes are very existential. | ||
| So as I'm writing book two, it's like, you know, these aren't people that are going to say, I'm going to comb over to your house and rape you. | ||
| They're in state legislature saying, I am going to curtail your rights. | ||
| That's why, yeah, I go back to the white date, you know? | ||
| When you enter in a space for these men where they feel like they're okay to say whatever it is they want, right? | ||
| They wind up saying shit that they would never say out in the real world. | ||
| There are millions upon millions of those guys who would say the same stuff, who think the same stuff as like, I'm looking for my perfect white submissive wife, but they're not on white dates, so you don't hear them say it. | ||
| They just look for their perfect white submissive wife. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Or try to beat down anyone that they date into that mold that they have in mind. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, the other thing is that... | ||
| How do I put this? | ||
| I mean, there's a lot to say. | ||
| I personally also left a religion. | ||
| Like, I grew up Orthodox Jewish. | ||
| I left not ultra, like, Orthodox, but... | ||
| Modern Orthodox is a subset of Orthodox Judaism that let me go to college. | ||
| But I was like... | ||
| You idiots! | ||
| You fools! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| You've only educated me to defeat you! | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, I'm not in the business of defeating my past. | ||
| But I will say, it was like, I was a smart kid in high school. | ||
| I peaked in high school. | ||
| I was a... | ||
| But I was the captain of the debate team, and I wasn't allowed to lead, like, prayers because of my gender. | ||
| You know, like, there's all this stuff that's very misogynistic that's baked into the religion, like, you know. | ||
| Baked into every religion. | ||
| Yeah, but, like, it manifested very physically in Orthodox Jews, and, like, we were required to pray in school, and there was, like, a division, literally, like, a... | ||
| Partition between the sexes. | ||
| And in many synagogues, the women's section is much smaller and more uncomfortable because women not only can't make up a prayer quorum, they can't lead prayers, they're not obligated to be present, they're expected to be home taking care of the kids. | ||
| So it was just very, very physical. | ||
| And I, at a very early age, I think I was 19, I was just like, I don't want to be part of a faith that says that I am... | ||
| Inherently inferior because of my religion. | ||
| And just one funny moment from that. | ||
| I married very young. | ||
| We got divorced. | ||
| And we went through a religious wedding and a religious divorce ceremony. | ||
| The Orthodox Jewish divorce ceremony is that you... | ||
| You're in front of a panel of three rabbis, a religious court. | ||
| The man hands over the divorce decree. | ||
| Only the man can initiate it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Men who don't, who refuse, are socially ostracized, but can keep their wives in this state of limbo where they can't remarry. | ||
| Great. | ||
| But what was supposed to happen... | ||
| He handed me the divorce decree and there's this doctrine of silence as acceptance. | ||
| I was supposed to take it quietly and back out of the room. | ||
| And I didn't even remember this, but I was recently reminded that apparently during that moment I was so pissed off at the whole thing that I moonwalked out. | ||
| Nice! | ||
| Nice! | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I moonwalked out. | ||
| I moonwalked backwards. | ||
| I was like, take this silence as acceptance, my bitches. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I find it hard not to, like, shit in my hand and throw it on the walls and say, this is all arbitrary. | ||
| All of this is pretend! | ||
| You're all making it up as you go along! | ||
| This is stupid! | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| You also left astringent faith. | ||
| Am I wrong? | ||
| Is that not something you want to discuss? | ||
| Oh, I left the shit out of astringent faith. | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| The difference between leaving a form of Christianity that's oppressive and leaving a form of a minority faith in this country that's oppressive is that I'm not, like, gonna tire and feather, like, I'm not comfortable being, like, I think that, how do I put this? | ||
| Sometimes people who have experienced religious trauma and spiritual abuse in Christian contexts are very eager to say, like, All religion is shit. | ||
| All religion is oppressive. | ||
| All religion is arbitrary. | ||
| I don't disagree. | ||
| But, like, some of that anger is more appropriately directed at a hegemonic faith that's trying to proselytize and oppress. | ||
| And, like, not all religions are equally harmful to society. | ||
| And I get a little touchy when, like, ex-Christian Atheists who don't really realize that they're still Christian influence. | ||
| Just saying stuff like, kosher laws are stupid. | ||
| Like, oh, God doesn't want you to use a magic microwave. | ||
| And they're older than fucking time. | ||
| If people want to keep kosher in their own kitchens, whatever. | ||
| That's the least of our problems with religion at this moment in time. | ||
| And you're not proving how equal you are. | ||
| By, like, shitting all over Judaism or whatever. | ||
| So I get protective also because I've, like, dealt with a lot of anti-Semitism. | ||
| Anyway, I'm not trying to... | ||
| No, no, no, you're fine. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| I just think sometimes... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not you. | |
| I'm just, like, experiencing something... | ||
| Talking about something I've experienced, which is that... | ||
| Sometimes people who grow up Christian, especially evangelical... | ||
| And then become atheists. | ||
| Have not necessarily unlearned evangelical Christianity. | ||
| They just, like, reversed it. | ||
| They flipped it and reversed it. | ||
| Like, you have to believe what I believe. | ||
| Everything else is stupid. | ||
| It's just now it's about atheism. | ||
| And I'm like, you have a lot of shit to unpack. | ||
| Not you. | ||
| Like, people. | ||
| Anyway, that's a very big candidate. | ||
| I did have a lot of shit to unpack, and I unpacked it. | ||
| It was very nice. | ||
| It was a pleasant experience to unpack my shit. | ||
| Like, God. | ||
| I mean, but now I'm writing about evangelical Christianity, and I sent you a series I wrote about child abuse in the evangelical context. | ||
| It's more in line with, like, what the current book and current work is. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| What are these parents doing to their kids? | ||
| It's really fucked up. | ||
| What's fun about it is a lot of what's fun. | ||
| What's hilarious about child abuse. | ||
| The top funny things about child abuse. | ||
| It is like all of the stories of abuse that you are describing and telling and retelling from other people are ones that I experienced. | ||
| And so what's funny about that to me is that it is treated with such emotional reverence. | ||
| And for people for whom it is, it should be. | ||
| The problem is my reaction to that was becoming a comedian. | ||
| So it's hard for me to read my story reflected as this tragedy. | ||
| Whenever I'm walking around being like, alright, so when my parents beat me to shit when I was five, you know, like, it's a joke to me to have lived through this, and that's because it's how I'm dealing with it, not because I believe it to be a joke. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| Like, let's just say that there's a reason I was drawn to the topic and I'm not without a stake in the matter, and that's as far as I'll elaborate in public. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| We all cope in different ways. | ||
| I think for me, like, a radical empathy is, like, part of it. | ||
| Or just, like, being, like, how can the experiences I had enrich me as a writer and reporter and, like, someone who can hear and hold pain. | ||
| But, like, at the same time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And also, just someone who can be like, this is wrong. | |
| It's fucked up. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But also, some of it is objectively, like, a little bit funny. | ||
| In horrifying ways. | ||
| Not people's stories, but, like, if you read James Dobson's books, The Focus on the Family Guy, he opens up being like, I remember the day my mom beat me with her girdle and, like, I felt every strap. | ||
| And, like, that was the day I knew I would be saved or whatever. | ||
| And, like, that was the day you developed this... | ||
| Fetish. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| No, the difference between fetish and the things that all of these books start with as far as their origin story are the same as somebody being like, and that's why I go to a dominatrix every week. | ||
| It's the same exact story. | ||
| And that's how I knew I was really into feet. | ||
| But in this case, it's like, that's how I knew Christ wants you to beat your children. | ||
| That's how I knew I needed to annoy women on white... | ||
| MenDate.com about their feet. | ||
| That's what I knew. | ||
| By the way, there is a WikiFeet, men. | ||
| But it's for gay men. | ||
| Why are men so much more prone to foot fetishism than women? | ||
| It's a mystery. | ||
| Anyway, that's a tangent. | ||
| Dobson also opens one of his books with an epic description of how he spent a weekend beating the shit out of a dachshund. | ||
| For sleeping on a fuzzy toilet seat. | ||
| He's a fucked up man. | ||
| And like so many people, millions of people took him as gospel for how to raise their kids. | ||
| And he's the reasonable one compared to other folks. | ||
| Because he's like, wait till they're like a toddler to start beating them. | ||
| Yeah, I mean when Ted Bundy... | ||
| Tortures animals as a child, we correctly go, oh, that's disqualifying. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Whereas, like, Dobson's like, my, like, you know, I am America's reverend. | ||
| Like, it's just really, like, and this idea, and I think it is tied up in some of the current political struggles in school boards and... | ||
| Libraries, you know, this idea of absolute parental rights over what your child consumes, over the ideologies your child is allowed to encounter. | ||
| I think it comes from this attitude of my child is my property. | ||
| And I think that mindset is very intimately related to I can abuse the shit out of my kid. | ||
| It's my kid, so it's their arm. | ||
| And if I break it, it's nobody's business but mine. | ||
| Kind of a deal. | ||
| I think these mindsets are very interrelated. | ||
| I know it's hard to be a parent, but it's not that hard to not break your kid's arm. | ||
| It's really not. | ||
| And then believe that it's okay because of a verse in Proverbs. | ||
| Anyway, you wanted to talk about my book. | ||
| I wanted to talk about something else, and I totally derailed the conversation. | ||
| No, I'm down. | ||
| We can keep going. | ||
| I'm happy with this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I understand completely where you're coming from. | ||
| It is tragic, not those. | ||
| The ones where it's abuse from abuse's sake. | ||
| It's tragic, the believers. | ||
| The ones who are weeping as they hit their kid. | ||
| You know, the ones who are going, if it weren't for God telling me to do this in the form of Dr. James Dobson, if it weren't for that... | ||
| Then I really, I don't want to hit my kid. | ||
| This is a small human being that can't fight back, you know? | ||
| Which was very interesting to me. | ||
| Reading those stories is also one of the biggest differences in misogyny versus, you know, anything really is just, there was a moment, you know, I got the shit kicked out of me, but there was a moment everybody knew was coming where I would be big enough. | ||
| That you couldn't do that shit anymore. | ||
| And everybody kind of, because it happened to my older brothers, you know? | ||
| My older brothers got the shit kicked out of them, but then there was a time when it's like, if you want to start shit, I will fight back. | ||
| And that was almost like a rite of passage moment in a way. | ||
| You know, the first day that he comes over to hit you with the belt, and you say, fucking hit me. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That was a moment. | ||
| And that's not a moment that my little sister had. | ||
| That's not a moment that women have had. | ||
| I mean, most women, I'm assuming, haven't had that. | ||
| But that is a moment. | ||
| Well, it's a moment where you get to say, like, I am now sufficiently masculine that you can no longer abuse me in this way. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's a moment that I am afforded that is taken. | ||
| Yeah, or that, like, because of also, like, specific evangelical social conditioning of women to be submissive, submissive, submissive, submissive, never fight back, never complain. | ||
| There isn't that moment. | ||
| You don't prove your femininity by beating the shit out of someone. | ||
| Much as I would love that to be the case. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| On occasion. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I think I'm interested in that question. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I mean, you've been radicalized. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Whenever we start saying the word radicalized, I say, based on the amount of shit that they put you through, it is entirely fine with me for you to go throw a punch. | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| No, and also, I would say that part of it is growing older. | ||
| The amount of shit I went through in my 20s, just in terms of... | ||
| Dating, but in terms of the way, like, men would just, like, interact with me, like, now I'm just like, like, the reason why men talk about sell-by dates and, like, women being too old is because, like, I'm 33 and I'm just like, don't talk to me that way. | ||
| Like, sorry. | ||
| Like, don't fucking talk to me that way. | ||
| I'm not gonna put up with your shit. | ||
| And, like... | ||
| The younger a woman is, the more pliable, the closer she is to a socialization of, like, be nice, be nice, be nice, be nice, be nice. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| That's why the Quiver kids get them started at zero, you know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, like, the... | |
| And again, it comes back to reproductive freedom, right? | ||
| You entrap a woman into child-rearing at 18. She never has this process of maturation. | ||
| Or she can say, this isn't for me. | ||
| Or I can make independent choices. | ||
| It's this very gross property transfer from father to husband. | ||
| No, my little sister was married. | ||
| She was married in a church. | ||
| You know, the whole thing. | ||
| Childhood pastor there. | ||
| And he read 1 Timothy 2.11, which is, let a woman learn in all submissiveness. | ||
| I permit no woman to hold authority over man because Adam was created before Eve, right? | ||
| He read that out loud in a church. | ||
| And my little sister and her husband just got married to it. | ||
| You know, like, that is a totally acceptable thing to hear and not be like, hey, by the way, fuck you, I'm just not gonna do that one. | ||
| I would be fine if she had just been like, yeah, but we're not gonna do that one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but like, you can't... | |
| This is why I'm a little bit skeptical of all the people who are like, we just do radicalize all the Nazis. | ||
| That's a very emotional experience. | ||
| You'll probably get radicalized in the bargain. | ||
| How emotionally close do you want to get to some rando who wants to beat up Jews? | ||
| I'm more of the make them social pariahs route and protest every time they show up. | ||
| You cannot pull someone out of an oppressive Or hateful belief system, like, externally. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| There has to be a breaking point from within. | ||
| And in your case, that was the moment, you know, you walked away, right? | ||
| In my case, I walked away from a faith. | ||
| In my case, I also experienced, like, the very extremities of misogyny, and it strengthened my identity as a feminist. | ||
| Whatever process we go through to attain the beliefs we do or that shape our beliefs, the experience of getting extracted from an oppressive belief system via someone sort of explaining to you how your beliefs are wrong, I think is very vanishingly small. | ||
| Which is not to say that these beliefs shouldn't be opposed. | ||
| It's just that you can't rescue people unless they're willing to be rescued. | ||
| Um, and I've learned that in a variety of different contexts, you know, whether it's abusive relationships, spiritually abusive faiths, um, all sorts of things. | ||
| Um, and, and I had like a disastrous, the reason when you were like, I'm kind of intense. | ||
| I'm like, is this a debate podcast? | ||
| Just because I had a fucking disastrous podcast appearance with Brianna Joy Gray. | ||
| Where she was like, shouldn't we just gently talk to Nazis and de-radicalize them? | ||
| And I was like, no! | ||
| That's not ever gonna work. | ||
| See, this is why you gotta... | ||
| I am a person who... | ||
| Is a soft yes on white genocide, famously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| I'm fine. | ||
| People don't give a shit what I have to say anymore. | ||
| Because I'm a little bit too far to the left. | ||
| Which is why my question to you then becomes the word radicalized. | ||
| I know I keep coming back to it, but I'm interested in the definition of it because I don't think anybody agrees on it quite specifically beyond to say... | ||
| That it is the transformative process, you know, from I was here, and now I'm here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think it contains multitudes, right? | ||
| It's not a simple word. | ||
| It doesn't mean the same thing for every person. | ||
| So when you use it in the book... | ||
| When I use it in the book. | ||
| God. | ||
| Or when you use it now. | ||
| Whichever it is that's more visceral for you to answer, I suppose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think that I wouldn't necessarily use that phrase to describe myself now. | ||
| Like, I would say my politics are radical. | ||
| I am also disabled. | ||
| I have a condition that makes it hard for me to leave my house. | ||
| So I'm not on the street. | ||
| I'm not throwing Molotov cocktails. | ||
| I'm not doing... | ||
| I often feel very, like, horrible that I can't show up for the movements I care about. | ||
| And so to use that phrase, like, I'm some radical, like, I try to be radical in my writing. | ||
| I try to, you know, I think that, like, maybe exercising radical empathy or using a radically outsider framework or whatever, just, like, not giving, like, evangelical Christianity a lot of court or credence in and of itself as a radical act in a, Hegemonic Christian society, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I would say that I was more comfortable using that term in 2020 because I was just so reeling from the experience. | ||
| Well, that's why my interest in it, especially in regards to this, is I feel like what you've danced around in that answer is that the immediate assumption that everyone has now is that it's violence. | ||
| Which, in my case, literally, I'm just like... | ||
| No, it's okay to punch a Nazi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, do it. | |
| And you'd be amazed how much it pisses off liberals. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| To say this. | ||
| And that I'm, like, team Antifa all the way. | ||
| Like, fuck Moms for Liberty. | ||
| That they're whining. | ||
| Like, you know, people, like, protested. | ||
| Fuck Andy Nail. | ||
| Like, fuck, uh, like, the gender crits who are, like, gender critical turfs who are, like, someone threw soup on me. | ||
| Go throw soup. | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| I think radicalism can mean you just have achieved a certain... | ||
| I think when I wrote it in the book, I meant I hate these people. | ||
| And it is a visceral, bone-deep hate that is almost equal to the hate they feel for me. | ||
| And that was an emotional process. | ||
| For me. | ||
| That's what interests me about the journey of the book as far as the radicalization goes, is that I don't know quite... | ||
| I mean, I think the way that the term is used is fairly interchangeable with I wasn't and now I am ready to kill somebody. | ||
| I mean, isn't that generally how we use it? | ||
| Explain to me how it's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| I think you're right. | ||
| I just don't... | ||
| Like, I have agoraphobia and panic disorder and I don't leave my house a lot and, like, am I ready to kill someone? | ||
| I will say this. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| Like, during this radicalization process, I started collecting swords. | ||
| I have, like, 12 swords in my house. | ||
| Was it because, like, when I hold a blade, I feel safer? | ||
| Yeah, if someone came into my house to kill me, I'd probably grab one off the wall. | ||
| Probably I'd get murdered in the process. | ||
| But yeah, I need to be safe. | ||
| As you are not a great swordsman yet. | ||
| No. | ||
| You must train with Miramasa, obviously, before you can defeat... | ||
| Yeah, I need to go to some sort of mountain fastness and learn wuxia moves. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That would be cool. | ||
| Like, ideally, Michelle Yeoh would, like, teach me how to sword dance in, like, some sort of isolated, um, buttressed place. | ||
| But, uh, no, I, yeah, so what can I say? | ||
| Yeah, I started thinking a lot about, like, is someone gonna come murder me, and, like, what am I gonna do about it? | ||
| And, um, the answer was, like, to collect an increasing number of medieval swords. | ||
| All right! | ||
| So, is that radicalized? | ||
| I don't have a problem with that. | ||
| Does that answer your question? | ||
| Maybe it does. | ||
| Listen, I don't go around fantasizing about murder, but I did say... | ||
| I think that maybe the radicalization point was me saying, am I willing to die for this work? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| That's a good definition. | ||
| I appreciate that much better. | ||
| Because I'm finding it through my conversations with so many people who profess a lot of the words associated with all of this stuff generally have a definition of their own that they are not sharing and are instead kind of allowing the parlance of the day to carry a lot more weight. | ||
| And to me, I don't necessarily think that radicalization means Now it's time to fucking kill people. | ||
| I think that your definition is far better as a way of describing something that does radicalize you. | ||
| And that's what I find so interesting about that is that in this case, I don't think that the white nationalists on incel places or white date or whatever are radicalized. | ||
| I don't think these people are willing to die for whiteness. | ||
| I think they are willing to talk a lot of shit about it. | ||
| And about how they're the heroes of the day. | ||
| I think some of them are willing to kill. | ||
| And that's the roulette you play with stochastic terror, right? | ||
| Is that you're hoping, as you produce this propaganda and this perpetual motion propaganda machine, is that you are hoping. | ||
| To instill in someone the willingness to kill. | ||
| And, like, in America, the way massacres work is you usually die. | ||
| Or go to jail for life. | ||
| So, am I willing to die? | ||
| Am I willing to kill? | ||
| Like, these are the central questions of radicalization. | ||
| For me, I'm not, like, particularly a violent person. | ||
| In the times in my life I've been in extreme physical danger, I have wound up reacting by screaming extremely loudly, which weirdly works. | ||
| I have a pretty eardrum-piercing scream, and that's just my go-to. | ||
| Use what weapons you got. | ||
| Very sticky situations. | ||
| I kind of freeze up, but I am very strong. | ||
| I probably could punch someone out. | ||
| I don't fantasize about it. | ||
| I don't want to kill someone. | ||
| I am willing to die. | ||
| If someone kills me because I spent my life writing about people who want to subjugate, murder, and destroy the lives of others, that will, to me, have meant I died a good death. | ||
| That wasn't more salient when I was writing about terrorists who were personally threatening to murder me, but at the time... | ||
| That was what I felt. | ||
| I still feel that way. | ||
| I am writing right now about people who murdered George Tiller, who bomb abortion clinics. | ||
| I'm always skating close to the edge when you write about people who are willing to move heaven and earth, who want to move earth closer to heaven and are willing to bulldoze a lot of people to get out of the way. | ||
| I mean, you're talking to people who've already committed violence. | ||
| It doesn't seem like a big stretch for them to take another swing at it. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That being said, after this book, I am going to write a book about sandwiches. | ||
| I already have that planned. | ||
| I think it might be time for me to move on from staring into the void. | ||
| It would be nice to do work, at least for a while. | ||
| Maybe not forever. | ||
| That doesn't make me want to jump in a volcano. | ||
| But anyway, yes, I think my definition of am I radicalized is like, I have internalized the idea that this work is so existentially necessary that I'm willing to give my life for it. | ||
| That's where we settle after I've been dancing around the answer for a while. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| I love that answer. | ||
| I like it a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you willing to die to talk shit about Alex Jones? | |
| Me? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I'm bipolar type 1. I spend every day waiting to die. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Dying is the least of my concerns. | ||
| I'm dreaming of the day where it's not my fault because then I won't have to worry about it. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| I mean, this is like mental illness, like 101, but it's like, yeah, you have days where you're just like, give me a reason not to die today. | ||
| And so I'm like, yeah, some Nazi shoots me in the head because he didn't like my book. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| I get to be a martyr. | ||
| Oh, hell yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's great. | ||
| I didn't really... | ||
| I mean, first off, I didn't particularly ask to be here. | ||
| I don't particularly like being here. | ||
| The people around me are all fucking Nazis. | ||
| What am I doing? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, why bother with this? | ||
| Why? | ||
| I'm not sure it's an emotionally healthy perspective, but at the same time, you can't really be emotionally healthy while doing this work, which is another reason why I would like to write book three about sandwiches. | ||
| If you read my newsletter, I have 67 essays following Wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches in alphabetical order, and a lot of them go into history and culture, and generally it's been like a breath of... | ||
| Non-fetid air in, like, my life. | ||
| Wow, the one about the Belgian sandwich, the deep dive into who invented the sandwich. | ||
| Was it this guy in 1946? | ||
| Or was it some other asshole across the street? | ||
| I know! | ||
| I sent this sandwich called the Bosna, and I went on, like, a sandwich investigation and was, like, reading, like, very, like, long... | ||
| Excerpts from media in Salzburg. | ||
| I mean, I do address some heavy shit, like the history of barbecue. | ||
| The barbecue sandwich one was all about slavery. | ||
| Yeah, that's usually how it goes. | ||
| So the Dutch one was all about Dutch colonialism of Indonesia. | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| You can tackle heavy topics through a little scrim. | ||
| You're not like... | ||
| I'm writing about people that personally want to... | ||
| Subjugate slash murder slash destroy, like, me and my family. | ||
| Like, that's very immediate. | ||
| And, like, that's where I've been for the last, like, five years. | ||
| And I'm just like, um, after this, like, this is my last adventure. | ||
| This is my last heist. | ||
| We're doing one last job? | ||
| You're fucked! | ||
| You're hosed! | ||
| You don't say that out loud! | ||
| I'm going to show you a picture of my beautiful family. | ||
| No! | ||
| Oh, McBain! | ||
|
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Here's my beautiful family. | |
| I can't wait to get on a speedboat and retire. | ||
| You're about to become Ashlyn 1488. | ||
| Well, I think that's an excellent spot to end. | ||
| I appreciate the interview. | ||
| This was absolutely fantastic to do and a delight. | ||
| Could you please go ahead? | ||
| It's Culture Warlords, of course. | ||
| Yeah, Culture Warlords, my journey into the dark web of white supremacy. | ||
| If you like the silky, smooth tones of my voice, it's also available on audiobook and ebook. | ||
| I do accents in the audiobook. | ||
| Oh no! | ||
| Oh no! | ||
| Like, you know, which is not like cringy southern ones, but whatever. | ||
| I do accents. | ||
| If you like that sort of thing, please, please, please subscribe to my sub stack, The Sword and the Sandwich. | ||
|
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It's... | |
| I guarantee there are not a lot of newsletters that are similar. | ||
| Like, every... | ||
| I'm taking a break this month because I have a big book deadline, but every week you will get an essay about some aspect of American politics and a very bizarre essay about food that will probably make you hungry or angry or both. | ||
| So that would be fun. | ||
| And what a joy, what a pleasure to talk to you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yeah, of absolute delight. | ||
| And I hope people pick up your book. | ||
| Thank you, and I suppose we'll be back for another episode of Knowledge Fight. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Alright, take care, everybody. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
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Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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