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Oct. 23, 2020 - I Don't Speak German

01:13:17

69: Culture Warlords, with Talia Lavin

This episode, we are joined by special guest Talia Lavin to talk about her excellent new book Culture Warlords. Content Warning. Talia's Twitter: @chick_in_kiev Culture Warlords: https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/talia-lavin/culture-warlords/9780306846434/

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	This is I Don't Speak German.
	I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to each white nationalists, white supremacists, and
	Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
	Content warnings always apply.
	And welcome to episode 69.
	And we are very honoured, once again, the second episode in a row, to have a special guest.
	A journalist.
	I want to stress that she's a journalist because I called in the write-up for the last episode, I referred to poor Hillary Sargent as Cantwell expert, which I think is probably doing her a bit of a disservice, if we're honest.
	Whereas she is in fact a journalist, and so is our wonderful guest this episode as well.
	But I'm going to hand over to Daniel to introduce her.
	Hi Daniel, how are you at the moment?
	I am doing okay.
	I'm actually really happy to have gotten to do this today, because I was planning to do the National Justice Party episode finally, and I completely ran out of time last week to re-dig into that material.
	I read this book and I was like, hey, I was being lazy.
	I'm like, oh, I can spend the weekend diving into the National Justice Party and finding clips of audio of Mike Enoch spreading nonsense, or I could read a very nice book by a lovely journalist who has spent a lot of time covering this kind of material, and I guess which one I decided to do.
	Why wouldn't somebody want to spend their time researching Mike Enoch and the National Justice whatever?
	I don't get this at all.
	Anyway, yes, go on, please.
	Well, we could ask our guest.
	We are joined, I apologize for the slightly overlong, delayed intro here, but we are joined today by Talia Levin, who's just published a book as of a few days ago, Culture Warlords, about her time studying and infiltrating the far right of various kinds.
	Talia, welcome to the show.
	Hello, is it really episode 69?
	I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry, but it is, yes.
	I had a whole bit lined up about this for when I thought it was just going to be me and Daniel and I thought, no, I'm going to skip it.
	No, that's so nice!
	You guys, thank you!
	That's so nice that I am the guest for episode 69.
	I'm really excited.
	This is like, this is like the Real Heads Know, like, podcast of far-right researchers.
	You know?
	It's like, it's like, like, oh, that's, that shit's hardcore.
	This is like 201 level, like, you know who, like, Enoch is and don't have to, you know, have to introduce him.
	Yeah, we're hardcore.
	We don't have to do the appositive phrase, right?
	Mike Enoch, noted far-right personality, founder of The Daily Show, a comma, and then complete the sentence.
	That's always when you know that you're in a land of, you know, we expect the audience to just kind of follow along, is not using the appositive phrase.
	Yeah, it's the Chud Hunters podcast.
	I love it.
	No, I, and I'm super excited.
	I'm a big fan.
	And there was a Daily Shoah episode, like all about me the other day.
	There was, there was.
	I meant to message you, I meant to message you when I heard it.
	And then I just kind of got busy.
	And then I saw you tweeting about it.
	And I was like, Oh, right.
	That was my fault.
	But you know, you know how it goes.
	No, like six different people sent it to me, and I'm like, do I spend the hour listening to what these Nazis have to say about me?
	And a friend was like, ask yourself if this qualifies as self-harm.
	And I'm like, I don't know.
	I guess it could.
	But, you know, it was also kind of funny.
	They just were very obsessed with my fingers.
	Yeah, yeah.
	We should probably not really get into that.
	I mean, that just gets into some pretty nasty places.
	But it was one of those things that I did.
	I was listening to that and just kind of giggling uproariously at the just sheer number of lies.
	And the sheer, just like, either complete misunderstanding or absolute dishonesty that they had to, uh, in order to kind of go there.
	It's like, you know, nobody talks like this on the internet.
	No, this wasn't, this certainly wasn't our forum.
	And it's like, yeah, well, uh, she never named your forum because your forum didn't exist during most of the time she did her research.
	And, uh, you know, uh, so yeah, just a bunch of bullshit artists.
	So, um, you know, we can leave those, we can leave those assholes behind, I think.
	Unless you, unless you have a message, unless you have a message for them, because I know, I think they listen.
	So.
	Oh, well, you know, screw, go screw off, you Nazi chodes.
	Volunteer at a soup kitchen.
	Do something useful with your life.
	God damn it.
	That's that's my take on the Daily Show.
	But yeah, no.
	So Culture Warlords came out this week after like, I don't know, just spending sometimes what feels like the last like three years, just like, Mind melding with the Choads of the worst Choads in the world.
	But really the past kind of year very intensely so and so it's weird that it's out in the world now and some people are reading it and you read it like that's crazy.
	It's like I spent so long like isolated typing into the void and now it's like out in the world for people to read.
	It's very strange.
	Yeah, and it's quite good.
	I will just kind of recommend it now that I do think that it's one of, particularly as a sort of an explainer for normies more so.
	I mean, you know, we do kind of pitch this at a slightly different level, but I think, like, people say, like, I would like to give your podcast to, like, my normie relatives, and they just kind of don't understand it always.
	But I think Culture Warlords would be one of those books that you really could, like, give to your wine mom aunt.
	Yeah, I know.
	I get a lot of comments like, I want to buy your book but I'm too scared.
	Yeah, no, like I get a lot of comments like, I want to buy your book, but I'm too scared.
	I feel like it will depress me.
	And I'm like, well, like, I don't really have a great answer to that because I'm like, yeah, probably will.
	It's not a very uplifting book.
	Although it has its moments of hope and shit.
	It does.
	It does.
	I mean, it has some highly polemical moments, particularly in the first couple of chapters, and then at the very end, it really is.
	Anybody listening to this podcast, I think, will find it both interesting and strangely uplifting in a way.
	Well, I was just like, I came in, I got to be, I mean, I'm grateful to my book editors and to Hachette for letting me be just like very angry and writing it from my own perspective and not having to sort of feign either kind of An overly academic viewpoint or a dispassionate viewpoint that I don't particularly feel.
	This is a book about the far right from someone whose viewpoint is quite unabashedly that they must be defeated.
	Right.
	And so that was really the book I wanted to write and I'm very grateful that I was able to do that.
	And you filter much of the book through your Jewishness, through your Jewish identity, as someone who is targeted by these people, not just for the fact that you're researching them and opposing them actively, but as a member of, like, the group that they most want to see annihilated from the face of the planet.
	And that does give a... I mean, there is a righteous anger underlying so much of the text of the book, again, and particularly in that first couple of chapters.
	I mean, you really frame things In that way, and I think it does sort of, as you get kind of deeper into the book where you're examining these kind of various sub-communities, you're always kind of, reading the book, I was never unclear where your sympathies lie, let's put it that way.
	Even when you did like kind of humanize some of these figures, kind of a little bit later on.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that it was two parts of my identity, like definitely being a Jew was sort of the major element and I think part of the reason why I was such a target in the first place, which I feel like backfired on them in that I like chose to be really stubborn and double down and write a whole book about how shitty they are.
	But also being a woman was a major part of it.
	I know you've had some awesome female guests like Becca Lewis.
	And, you know, it's just like the, the toll that it takes to be a female researcher of the far right, you know, particularly one that doesn't like adhere to sort of Aryan beauty standards or whatever.
	Also, forms a major part of it like misogyny is such uh so built into the backbone of the contemporary far right that um that really forms you know another part of why i faced and continue to face like such intense vehemence you know right right
	just because like i've heard from other from male sort of anti-fascists or researchers that that they almost have like a batman versus the joker relationship with some of these guys as if there's like a sense of oh you're a worthy opponent and And like, that really doesn't come into play when you're a woman in these spaces, like, They just see you as another symptom of social degeneracy or whatever.
	Right, I mean, you know, absolutely.
	I mean, you know, one thing that I do try to highlight here is that, like, I get a certain amount of protection, both as a Gentile, you know, but as a man, you know, as a hairy man at that, you know.
	They call me things, they call me trans, they call me fat, they call me, you know, all kinds of things, a loser who doesn't have a job, et cetera.
	But I don't get nearly, like, the amount of harassments that I get, like, everything combined in the, like, years I've been doing this work, you know, absent a few terrorist death threats, you know, doesn't add up to as much as what I think you or some of the other guests on the show have doesn't add up to as much as what I think you or some of the other guests on the show And I think that that's a, I mean, there's a really clear through line there.
	I mean, you know misogyny does really lie at the heart of this movement and one of the things that sorry I was just looking up the list of chapters here in the book So I apologize if I drifted away for a second but in chapter 5 for instance you talk about your time in the incel community and So the structure of the book, I mean, just you spent time sort of infiltrating through sock puppet accounts a number of different kind of online communities in this kind of far-right space.
	And the book kind of is like a little bit of like a, I don't want to say travelogue or like a safari, I mean, but it does have a certain like kind of periodic kind of structural thing where it's, we're examining a community and then looking at the historical roots of that community and then kind of your experience
	Infiltrating it and kind of some of the people that you ran into and I think one thing that gets Under emphasized I think is or some maybe weirdly weirdly and to emphasize in kind of different ways is The is the kind of the role of the incel community and sort of its origins in Gamergate So I guess I guess that would be a since you were kind of talking about the misogyny I wonder if that would might be an interesting place to start.
	Would you like to kind of like summarize that for the audience?
	I Yeah, I mean, it is kind of a travelogue.
	When I was pitching the book, I was like, I will be like your Virgil, taking you through hell.
	You know, like in the Inferno.
	John Steinbeck travels with Chudley.
	I did infiltrate incels.co, the biggest and sort of creepiest incel message board.
	You have to write them a whole letter explaining why you're an incel, and my initial stab was pretty perfunctory and rejected, so I had to come up with a more elaborate backstory of my inceldom.
	You had to give them the dimensions of your tiny wrists.
	I know, so I really had to come up with a whole character and try to get myself into that headspace, which was an interesting exercise, for sure.
	One of the things about the incel community that was fascinating to me was it definitely was super ripe.
	Like, recruitment ground for white supremacists.
	And there were, like, you know, a lot of white supremacist members of that board.
	The chat was full of, like, racist invective.
	You know, there's racism all over the board.
	But, you know, one of the... There was, like, a poll, an internal poll on the site.
	It was, like, are you white?
	And it was, like, 60-40 white, non-white.
	So, you know, community was almost half non-white.
	Just because it sort of is this nuclear, like, you know, hot core of misogyny and anger, like, despite the fact that it's not an all-white community at all, it still forms an effective recruiting ground for white supremacists.
	And I found that really fascinating.
	You know, I think it just really speaks to the ways in which weaponized misogyny Forms both an entree point and a major sort of prop for the movement writ large.
	You know, so many of the people that I call launderers in the book, your Tim Pools and your Andy Neos and your, you know, Stefan Molyneux, the YouTube sort of gurus who make slickly produced videos, use misogyny as a selling point.
	Because it's like, it's more socially acceptable.
	You can like watch it in your living room.
	But then, you know, it greases the slope by giving you a class of people it's acceptable to hate and harass.
	And like, once you've engaged in harassment of one class of people, once you have, you know, a group to wit feminists, and women in general, but feminists in particular, that you've sort of been given license to
	Blame for your current circumstances, a sort of progressive social orthodoxy that you've been encouraged to blame for all the problems in your life, and a class of people that, you know, it's really encouraged to enact your rage on.
	It's very easy to extrapolate from there.
	I mean, you're already in a position where, you know, then what about Black people?
	What about Jews?
	Really coming to a place where your ears and your mind have been open to hate.
	So that's sort of my capsule theory about how misogyny is sort of a driving engine of recruitment for the white supremacist far right.
	Yeah, no, I agree with a lot of that.
	Actually, I was just pulling up, I did check the incel wiki, and I searched it just for a particular term.
	I searched it for the term Talia Levin, and would you like to hear what they have to say about you on the incel wiki?
	Oh my god, I made the incel wiki?
	Your entry is a stub, to be clear.
	But you are, you do have an entry.
	And I'm assuming so it's only it's only it's only like, you know, a few words.
	So I'm just going to read it for you.
	Because I thought it was fairly amusing.
	Talia Levin is a lobbyist for Tone and Reporting within the New York Times.
	She believes that people who can't find sex are horrible people and should be locked up.
	That is your entry on the Enso Wiki.
	I'm a lobbyist for what?
	I'm sorry, what's that?
	I'm a lobbyist for what now?
	A lobbyist for tone and reporting within the New York Times.
	And then it has a link to the New York Times.
	I have never worked for the New York Times.
	That's really funny to me.
	That's like extra funny because I don't think the New York Times would ever hire me.
	But yeah, I mean, yes, I think people who don't have sex should be locked up.
	That's my stance.
	Controversial but brave.
	Thank you for finally going on the record.
	No, I think people who want to murder women and who murder women probably could stand to be removed from society.
	Celibacy is fine.
	I have dry spells.
	It's fine.
	We're in a pandemic.
	I'm not hitting the town.
	I have neither worked for the New York Times, nor do I want to lock up anyone who isn't fucking on the reg.
	Just to clear things up, I'm kind of proud I made the incel wiki.
	That's awesome.
	Yeah, I did not.
	I didn't expect I would, but I did.
	When I found your entry, I did search for myself, and I'm like, no, I didn't make it.
	So I don't talk about incels enough, or I don't have enough of a prominent role anyway.
	They probably have a big entry on David Futrell, who, like, tracks them so minutely.
	Yeah, I mean, you quote David in your book, I notice, and you had a... yeah, he's the blogger, he does the We Hunted the Mammoth blog, formerly Man Boobs.
	I think that's been around since, like, 2011 in some form or another, and I kind of got into this in a lot of ways through tracking his coverage of Gamergate.
	I was kind of following that at the time, and then you're right, there is a moment in about 2014 when they went from being kind of vicious misogynists, like fantasizing about creating a society in which men are granted access to women by state force, and then they just suddenly turned on a dime and became Nazis.
	Like it really was just like this Moment in the history of the thing and it and it does like I've talked to some other people who were kind of following it at the time and there is some indication that there was like this was a kind of a deliberate goal by certain actors who you know kind of seeded this already kind of existing deep well of misogyny that was Gamergate and then sort of seeded it in with like like it's a deliberate ploy to kind of get people more into this far-right racialized space and
	And I think one of the things that the alt-right, which is a term that you really don't use in the book and one that we don't really use here because it's really a fuzzy phase, but certainly the alt-right of 2014, 2015, 2016, one of the things that they have done and has been kind of an explicit goal was to kind of create this
	Um, online space in which young men are radicalized, not necessarily into becoming Nazis, but into becoming more comfortable with sort of Nazi imagery and Nazi memes.
	And so the Holocaust becomes not like this horrifying thing that happened in our history.
	It becomes sort of, it becomes the butt of a joke, you know, it becomes the, the, um, and so you get, like, you talk to young men, you talk to, you know, 15 year old men, you know, on the internet now.
	Even if they're not Nazis, they all know the Jew jokes.
	They all know.
	And this is this incredible, like, coarsening of culture, and it seems to have been done deliberately.
	And that's why the chapter that you do about the incels, where, you know, you say, as you say here, you know, a large percentage of them are not white, you know, some, you know, maybe half, maybe 40%, you know, the kind of, it's hard to know from, like, internal surveys, right?
	But a large percentage of them are not white, even in this kind of online space, even sort of the big personalities who will go on camera and talk about their inceldom, Or not white.
	And yet they exist awash in this world.
	If you go into these forums, it's not just the vicious misogyny, which you expected, which is normalized, right?
	But like actual overt like Hitler memes are just sitting kind of right there out in the open.
	And it's, it's, it's just kind of, it's a really, it's a really strange thing.
	And I think you document it very well in that chapter, which is why I was trying to highlight it.
	Well, I think just my, I mean, this is all my, my own observation and theory.
	And then of course drawing on Like, the work of prior guest Becca Lewis was a big source for this stuff.
	And, you know, there's been a lot of excellent writing on Gamergate and, you know, a lot of Black women who are from the very first talking about the ways in which, you know, the misogyny was racialized, the ways in which it wasn't just misogyny, it was racism from the start.
	And I think Robin Panacchia, who's a journalist that I spoke to, a feminist journalist who is chronicling Gamergate, had just a great point, that it was this sort of shock jock culture, where first of all, you normalize the concept of targeted harassment.
	Second of all, these are people who have been steeped in a milieu in which the shock jock Racist jokes, jokes about the Holocaust have been sort of normalized.
	And, you know, once like what you're comfortable joking about, what you're comfortable using to fuel targeted harassment, the fact that you're comfortable picking targets and making their lives miserable, you know, that's already an appreciable amount of the journey right there that you've already taken into the far right.
	I mean, it's really not a far journey from there to like, Okay, and now I'm going to harass Jews because they're Jews and black people because they're black.
	Not just feminists because they're feminists, or women because they're women.
	You know, that and like...
	It was sort of premised on these sexual mores, you know, of kind of evil and degenerate sluts that really bear a lot in common with the sexual politics of the far right, which are so restrictive of women and so based in sort of resentment and horror of female sexuality.
	Well, kind of the whole basis of far-right, you know, I mean it's all based on racism and race, that the entire prism of that politics is racism, and so it's all reducing things to this essentialized idea of, you know, biological races and the purity or otherwise thereof.
	So, it's kind of got just that kind of patriarchal, complete appropriation of, or the desire to completely appropriate and tyrannize women's bodies, particularly, you know, reproduction, sort of built into it through that, hasn't it?
	Yeah, I mean, like, the crucible of the continuation of the white race is the womb of the trad wife, right?
	And like, you know, I mean, literally, like, I mean, it never leaves my mind that the first words of the Christchurch Shooters Manifesto were, it's the birth rates.
	You know, this idea of tyrannizing women and demonizing women who are
	Uh, you know, perhaps not giving birth to legions of white children with appropriate submissiveness is really, like, very much at the molten core of all of this, um, and the fact that it really, that it really sort of arose from, uh, whatever you want to call it, like, harassment cult movement thing that was all about terrorizing a woman over her sexuality is perhaps
	Not as out there as you might expect.
	Yeah, I keep meaning to do a Gamergate episode.
	It's just hard to kind of figure out exactly how to tell that story better than it's already been told.
	But I want to put a really strong just pin or just kind of highlight the moment of Talia saying the shock jock culture, which predates the Daily Shoah.
	But the Daily Shoah, if you've listened to any of it, which don't, but if you have, You know, it was explicitly modeled after, like, let's do a more racist Opie and Anthony.
	Like, that's literally what they, that's literally the plan.
	That was the plan all along.
	And so it is, it is, like, modeled after being, you know, like, what if we did Crazy Ira and the Douche, but with, like, a little bit more genocide?
	And that's, that's sort of the plan.
	And so many of these shows that I follow, some I spend so much of my life following, follow this exact format.
	And yeah, I mean, I'm just kind of highlighting, I'm just sort of like agreeing with you there that it is, you know, they use the kind of shock jock tactics in order to normalize certain ideas.
	So that then those become, like, within the realm of, like, accepted conversation, and then you have to go even further to get to, like, an actual shocking thing, and then that becomes normalized, et cetera, et cetera, until, like, now we're literally talking to people who, you know, are doing, like, are talking about, like, terrorist acts, and they're just kind of joking around about it, and it's like, oh no, this is just a joke, man, come on, we're just joking about, you know, Oklahoma City bombing times 100, or whatever, you know, like, it's just a thing.
	I was going to say, you were talking about how they've mainstreamed in certain circles on the internet, just the idea of the Holocaust as like the butt of a joke.
	They've done the same thing with these other atrocities, haven't they?
	Like the Christchurch shooting and the Robert Bowers thing, the synagogue, Pittsburgh.
	Tree of Life Synagogue.
	Tree of Life Synagogue.
	Yeah.
	Pardon my, you know, I didn't intend any disrespect there from misremembering the name, but they've turned these things into like a series of punchlines.
	Yeah, and I mean, I think the idea of this plausible deniability, that it's only a joke, I mean, not to be pretentious or whatever, but I think... Have you ever read that Sartre essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, from like 1948?
	Yes.
	Yeah, with the famous passage, yeah.
	The anti-Semite has permission to laugh, he has permission to joke, language and truth just don't mean as much to him as they do to his opponent.
	I mean, that really always strikes me, that and the fact that the reason the Klan wore white sheets from the start was because they wanted to be able to say, we were just dressing up like ghosts to scare These, you know, ignorant black people, it's only a joke.
	They call themselves, you know, dragons and wizards and dress as ghosts.
	It's this idea of like, you know, we're both a joke and we're also the terror that comes in the night.
	You know, I think, you know, I used to do stand up comedy.
	I like make jokes a lot.
	It's not that I'm like, Anti-humor, but I think that humor can be like a strong, it's a weapon in the wrong hands, and it's a weapon that has to be carefully aimed.
	And yeah, I was really struck by it.
	It was my first time listening to The Daily Show.
	It was like the episode about me.
	What a way to get into that.
	Well, you know, I'm a narcissist, I guess.
	I wanted to know what they said, and it turned out they spent so long fixating on my fingernails.
	Whatever.
	They're very strange men.
	It really sounded like Morning Zoo shock jocks.
	They sounded like Howard Stern.
	And then they would drop the N-word.
	Or start talking about how my book is full of Jewish lies.
	Because no one ever uses a racial slur in Nazi chat rooms.
	But it really just sounded like the radio show that a big South Park fan would enjoy.
	So it is interesting to me the ways in which Humor can be a tool for desensitization.
	And once you're desensitized to something, as something that causes someone else pain, once you're desensitized to the pain other people feel, I mean, that's kind of where they want you to be.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's, you know, the dehumanization is the point.
	I mean, this is something that I talked about, something that I kind of realized a long time ago, and that we talked about when we first covered the Daily Shoah was, I think, episode 9, was that the name the Daily Shoah is not like saying, oh, let's do a daily holocaust.
	Like, that's not the point of that, right?
	The point is to take the word Shoah, do a pun on the Daily Shoah, and then Turn it into a joke.
	It turns it into something and then it robs it of all of its actual rhetorical power because suddenly it's just, it's just a punchline.
	It's, why did the chicken cross the road?
	But with a noose, with a person hanging from it on the other end or something.
	I mean, it's, it's, I mean, that's, that's the whole point.
	That's the whole thing.
	And like a lot of the humor that you find in sort of the incel forums, you know, that they do kind of talk about like, no, all this, like, you know, like, uh, you know, um, All this maxing talk, all the Elliot Rodger jokes and everything.
	No, this is all just meant to be, you know, this is all just meant to be something that we're, it's just dark humor that we use to comfort ourselves.
	And, you know, people use dark humor to comfort themselves.
	And certainly I have been in situations in which I have not had the kind of intimacy in my relationships that I would like to have had.
	Although I've been very lucky in that regard.
	if you know what i look like then you would be amazed at how lucky i've been in that regard but um stop boasting um but uh you get laid daniel um But yeah, no, it's kind of one of those things of... Sorry, I've completely lost my train of thought.
	You were talking about solace in dark humour.
	Yeah, I mean, certainly, like, you wouldn't begrudge the incels sort of a place to go and feel bad about themselves and to kind of use stark humor around that if it didn't revolve around terrorism and, like, vicious, vicious misogyny, like, 100% of the time.
	You know, and I think that that's kind of the that's kind of the where I draw the line is like, you know, this in this culture is in being like cultivated by literal Nazis and turning them further and further right.
	So I don't know there.
	I get some defenders of incels sometimes in my mentions, and there are some people I respect who study these communities who do like.
	The federal government, like the FBI, is starting to use these incel forums as targets for FBI terrorism investigations, which that's a very complicated topic that we're not going to get into here.
	But when you start to see the incel wiki as an equal thing to ISIS, and you start to use federal funding to track down some 19-year-old, who's posting shit like you know it does get it does get like really complicated because a you do want if there is going to be real violence you want that to be dealt with in some way but maybe uh i don't know sorry i'm kind of off in the weeds a little bit on that one but like i don't know it's complicated i think i mean sorry no no please go ahead
	i think feds aside i mean you know that was one of the things that that sort of you know you might think like it's not inherently 100 germane to a book about like specifically white supremacy online to spend so long talking about the incel community um Part of it was because I wanted to underscore the role of misogyny, but also because it's like,
	I mean, I'll say this, like, I'm a I'm a woman, you know, so I'm inherently part of their hate, you know, hated group.
	Like, they post like crimes by women in the same way like Breitbart will post like black crime, which is sort of my definition of like, how do you tell what's a hate site?
	Well, it's like, does it have a whole segment on crimes of their of the undesirables?
	But that's, um, that's a tangent.
	You know, who hasn't had feelings of like, I hate my body.
	I hate the way I look.
	I am, you know, romantically dissatisfied.
	I'm lonely.
	Like, these are very universal human emotions.
	They're, you know, like, of course, they're the locus of empathy.
	But when you really do do this deep dive into the incel community, as I did, I mean, two things really struck out at me.
	One was just like, First of all, how much despair there really is.
	I mean, and they feed each other's despair.
	There's this sort of universal idea that the only realistic or healthy outlook on the world is utter nihilism.
	Nothing will ever get better.
	The black pill and to the point where they were routinely encouraging each other to commit suicide.
	I mean, yeah, you had like people on you know, I was on the Reddit like, brain cells forum before it got banned.
	And like, There was a post where a guy- I mean, trigger warning, by the way, to listeners.
	A guy said, I'm not going- I've, you know, I've called out of work tomorrow.
	Tonight's the night I'm going to kill myself.
	And like, the comments were all just like, see you in like, Incel Valhalla, you know?
	No one was like, call 911, like...
	Get some help.
	You know, it's really this environment that foments and encourages and sort of marinates in despair.
	And that's one thing.
	I mean, it's terrible and it's it's unhealthy and it's like really, you feel sorry for them.
	But then the flip side of that kind of the power of that nihilistic despair is the rage.
	That's a pretty dangerous and unstable combination.
	reach a stage where suicidal is sort of the default mindset and you accompany that with a boundless well of rage like that's a pretty dangerous and unstable combination um and so i did find that my empathy just for like the natural human feelings that these people are feeling did recede because of just the sheer vitriol of their hatred you know and the ways in which it would be
	so like i mean someone like got in my mentions and was like wouldn't you sleep with an incel to like get them out of the movement right Like, shouldn't you be willing to do that?
	And I'm like... Like, they wouldn't sleep with me!
	Like, these aren't like... You know what I mean?
	Like, they're a cool thing!
	The flip side of like, you know, oh, I can't find a girlfriend, I can't find a woman who wants to fuck me...
	I can't, I'll never have a relationship, is like, have you looked at the actual women in your life?
	Or are you looking at, like, you know, the nines and tens supermodels?
	Like, there's a bit, like, I think it, I think it was in that chapter where it was, you know, how am I ever gonna find a, I'm paraphrasing here, but how am I ever gonna find a woman who isn't, like, super old, like, over 20?
	Right, or like, or like, the poll they ran in their Discord of, like, Do you prefer, like, 3D women or 2D lolis?
	Like, you know, lolita, like, young women, you know, anime characters.
	And, like, way, it was, like, not even close.
	Like, people preferred 2D women.
	And then they still are, like, You know why I can't get laid?
	The Jews.
	Well, and the flip side of that, of course, is... It's impossible to, like, overstate their hatred for ordinary-looking ordinary women.
	Yeah.
	And so, you know, at a certain point, like, I think people have this idea that it's about, like, you know, oh, like some guy who, like, you know, a woman would never speak to him, but it's like they don't They like believe they're entitled to like the most beautiful women in the world in like sexual slavery.
	Like it's a very violent...
	Ideology, if you even scratch the surface and start, like, seeing what they're actually saying.
	Well, right.
	And the other side or the other – kind of the corollary there is that while they would rather masturbate into these like 2D – the 2D waifu than go find a real girl because the real girl is going to have her own needs and her own personality and going to have her own perspective on life.
	And it's going to like want things in return and that a relationship is actual work and it requires more than just sort of like showing – turning on your computer and like pulling up Pornhub or whatever.
	And that like the things kind of feel each other.
	I can't find a woman because my personality is toxic because I spend all my time on this forum.
	And I'd rather masturbate because solving those things that would actually help me to find a relationship and would actually make me more attractive to a partner would then be – it's just too much work at that point.
	And so it is kind of this vicious cycle they go down.
	And I think this might be the way to kind of like – I didn't really want to cover this topic too much because I feel like this is sort of the thing everybody asks you about.
	But you did join an Aryan – you joined a white date briefly and had some interesting interactions there.
	And I'm wondering if we can kind of connect this sort of like the incel philosophy or the kind of the incel community to sort of the people actually trying to date on these – like within this kind of like white supremacist – explicitly white supremacist world.
	And kind of how those personality conflicts or how those things get resolved.
	Like what's the push-pull there between those two different like communities in your field? - Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean so Not to ask you a difficult question or anything.
	Oh no, this is like, it's a spicy part of the book, and I...
	You know, I actually did not join White Date briefly.
	I was actually on it for more than a year, like significantly more than a year.
	Sure, sure.
	So this was a real slow burn, and like, I have been waiting to reveal that I've done this for so long.
	And they finally, you know, they excerpted that chapter, part of that chapter in The New Republic.
	And like, whitestate.net specifically got so fucking angry, like, they put it out on their Twitter and their Telegram, like, an anti-white Jewish woman got a hundred and more messages from innocent men merely looking for a white trad wife.
	I'm like, we've kicked her out, banned her email, we really can't get rid of every committed scammer.
	And I'm like, okay.
	Well, it was hilarious.
	They were so angry and I was like, are you just straight up trying to make an ad for my book?
	Of course I immediately screenshotted it and was like, haha!
	Absolutely.
	Can we use this on the back cover for the paperback?
	Can we blurb this?
	That sounds like a plan.
	Yeah, like, an anti-white Jewish woman.
	WhiteDate.net.
	Yeah, I'll take that as my blurb.
	Yeah, no, I mean, so I spent a lot of time there.
	It is, like, very heavily male.
	This isn't because there aren't white supremacist women.
	I will say, like, one of the weaknesses of the book, like, perhaps, I mean, I'm sure there are myriad weaknesses, but But the sort of frustration that I have is that I really was not able to permeate the world of white supremacist women to my satisfaction, or really much at all, sadly.
	But Sayward Darby recently wrote a book called Sisters in Hate that I can't wait to read, which is like, sort of case studies of white nationalist women that I'm going to devour.
	So that's, you know, her way around this problem, which is that white supremacist women are like a bit cannier than their absolutely, you know, reckless male counterparts and like, will want you to like, be able to have someone who can vouch for you, who's met you in person.
	Like, you know, I did try, I made a whole like white supremacist female persona, To try and penetrate those groups, and I just, like, really ran up against a brick wall, because, like, they are just like, so who's met you in person?
	And I'm like, where?
	I'm like, ehhh.
	Hold on, hold on, hold on.
	Were you Emily Yuccas all along?
	That would explain so much.
	No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
	I'm actually Lauren Northern.
	that's what i was going for um yeah i know um uh lacy flynn um but yeah no i i uh i
	So I joined WhiteDate.net and what really drew me to it was they had this page, when I first saw it, I think I encountered it from a blog post on American Renaissance or something, but they had this page called the mini flyer, which was encouraged to hand out to women.
	You were supposed to Go up to, like, a white lady that you saw in public and hand her this flyer that said, like, you look like one of us.
	Our survival is as important as the survival of the Siberian tiger.
	Join us on white date dot net.
	And then you were supposed to take it back.
	So just very bizarre on every level, but like, Clearly these people were like, there were no fucking women on the site.
	So I was like, sounds like a really ripe opportunity for a catfish.
	And so I joined in this like sort of like white, blonde, Iowa girl persona, which my friend Liz, who is from Iowa, like she was at my like she was my interlocutor for my book launch.
	And like she was like, first of all, how dare you?
	Which is funny.
	And I don't know shit.
	It was like I was so like clumsy about it.
	Like it was my first time really doing any infiltration.
	And like I am like this parochial Brooklyn, New Yorker.
	Like I don't know shit about shit about Iowa, but I like Googled a lot of stuff.
	And I started talking to these dudes who were like trying to meet their beloved trad wife.
	And like, you know, it was very clearly like it wasn't even just like...
	Like, I don't know, I guess you couldn't make a site that was just white people trying to meet white people and not have it be horribly racist.
	But I've had some people try to make that argument, like, Jews have J-Date, why can't we have white date?
	But like, the, the like, politics section was like, pro white, red pill, you know, you could like, choose your, your or your political orientation.
	And so it was like, very geared towards fash.
	And also, you could choose your like, flavor of whiteness with extraordinary precision.
	Like you're like, I'm Anglo-Saxon and Welsh, you know, whatever.
	Lithuanian and Scots.
	The amount of time that these people argue over their fucking 23andMes is astonishing.
	Please continue.
	Yeah, so I write that it's like, it was like choosing, you know, a swatch for like a white bathroom wall, like eggshell, ebony, like eggshell, ebony, porcelain, whatever.
	No, I'm imagining that scene from what's it called, American Psycho, with the bone, or whatever it is, on the business card with the typeface, you know, this is how they treat their ethnicity.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly like that.
	Like, very interested in the flavors of whiteness.
	And so, I was there for about a year, and I eventually, like, at first I was kind of trying to adopt people.
	I got some info on some folks, like, you know, this, like, assistant professor at a Swiss university.
	Like, these different people.
	And then I just started being like, you know, people were cagey, like, you know, they were like wary of honeypots.
	So I kind of lost more than I gained by trying to press for specific details.
	So I wound up treating it almost as an anthropological exercise of just like, what's like going through your head right now?
	Like in this, like, what are the mechanisms of like Aryan courtship association?
	And so I got them to write love letters to their ideal white wife.
	Which is one of the highlights of the book, I'm going to say.
	It's one of the highlights of the book.
	Yeah, I, like, then immediately, like, published the letters in the book, which I think are fun.
	It's like, you know, my dearest Ashlyn.
	That was my name I picked.
	Oh yeah, I wanted to compliment you on that because that is perfect.
	It just felt so right!
	So many consonants, you know?
	It is!
	It's perfect.
	And, like, I want to twirl you about in a field and kiss you and, like, keep you away from the N-words and the Jews.
	Like, it was, like, so... Just, like, bizarre, like... Oh, God, you should laugh.
	Like, trad.
	Trad romance.
	But, like...
	I call it a car crash between Nicholas Sparks and Mein Kampf, and that's sort of how it felt.
	But the long and short of it is they want a submissive female of their dreams that they can isolate and use as a womb.
	And that's the message I came away with.
	And also, I mean, I don't think your viewers, listeners need to be,
	Reminded of this as much but like this is a message that I keep kind of giving out to normies who try and deny it in like every possible way but like Nazis are human being people with like lives and all different kinds of jobs from like that assistant professor to tons of them were in the military to like software engineers there there were people from every state and from all over the world and like you know
	Some of them had very good spelling and like crisp locution and like this idea that everyone is like a toothless idiot Cletus who's like somehow justified in having radicalized beliefs because they are so so very poor and disenfranchised and ignorant you know it's it's really to me it's a it's like a another method of of white self-absolution it's both like
	These people, you know, who are in the white power movement, like, could never look like anyone I know, never be like anyone I've ever met.
	And also, you know, don't they have some sort of unique trauma that almost like justifies their participation?
	And the answer to both of those questions is like, having spent enough time, you know, on these forums and like, Talking to these people about, like, the intimate details of their lives, like, the answer is no.
	They're, like, ordinary people.
	You absolutely could know someone like them, and you probably do.
	Well, the white polos and khakis thing was, like, deliberately meant to be, we're, like, working people, like, we're ordinary working people, and we wear white polos and khakis because that's what ordinary people wear to work.
	Like, that was literally, like, that's the justification for it.
	Like, it's, like, lanyard nationalism is how I like to describe that look, you know?
	Yeah yeah I mean and and like there's this this idea of like oh can't we just like educate our way out of this is like such a persistent theme among like you know journalists who have interviewed me or like you know did you what what common thread did you find weren't these like terribly poor and ignorant people and like no like
	This idea that it's all born of trauma, all born of, like, unique disenfranchisement.
	I mean, I'm not, like, I mean, Stephen Miller went to Duke!
	Like, what are you talking about?
	Stephen Miller, personal friend of Richard Spencer, yes, went to Duke together.
	And, like, you know, the vast majority of people in, like, the lowest income brackets fucking voted for Hillary Clinton.
	Like, You know, the people, and like as Robert Evans just pointed out on Behind the Bastards, the people who went for Hitler in like the biggest numbers were the petite bourgeoisie.
	Those last two episodes as of this recording, the little Nazis, I was really hoping you had heard those because that was really phenomenal work.
	Just for, you know, friend of the pod, Robert Evans there, that was really, I'm glad you referenced that.
	We'll probably put those in the show.
	That's a really important political point.
	Historically, the base of fascism is always in the middle classes, in the petty bourgeoisie, as you say.
	It's absolutely a crucial point, and it gets lost in all the talk about economic anxiety, all that talk, doesn't it?
	Yeah, well, and it's because, like, you know, most journalists are quite wealthy and went to Ivy League schools, you know, because, like, that's the way our press corps is.
	And so there's just this, like, complete unwillingness to... there's this, like, inherent classism in the idea that, like, oh, aren't these people just, like, the brain-diseased poor?
	So it's, like, very...
	Weird.
	People really show their biases when they talk about it.
	No, you can't.
	It's very, very convenient, but you can't spend all your time otherizing people who are in the white power movement as nobody you could know, because that's not the case.
	And it also hobbles your ability to recognize it when you see it and fight it when you do.
	Don't absolve yourself so easily.
	You know, it could be someone from your school, it could be someone in your town, you know?
	So that was exciting.
	I mean, you were talking about the persistent theme from journalists you've been talking to about, you know, educating people out of it.
	And I've noticed your book's been getting very good reviews, deservedly so from most reviewers, but the pushback you've been getting in a couple of places that I've seen in some of, you know, even in good reviews, there's like a paragraph where they say, well, there's a weakness here.
	It's about your, well, It's what they characterize as your non-objectivity, and I think what they're actually talking about is your willingness to be activist about this, and even to defend violence and self-defense against these people.
	If you're up against them in a rally and stuff like that.
	And I think a point you made that's really important is that, and I think Daniel's made this point as well, is that the way that you stop this is to actually get out there and you fight these people, and you make them suffer consequences for being fascists.
	Yeah, I mean, I talk in the book about, you know, like, the book dedicates, you know, two chapters to anti-fascism.
	One kind of about the misconceptions about anti-fascism and one about, like, the real-life anti-fascists they met.
	I went to Charlottesville and, like, talked to some just, like, ordinary heroes for the book.
	I'm, like, literally going to tear up talking with them because they're amazing.
	But yes, there's this like, like pearl clutching about the idea that you should fucking punch a Nazi in the face.
	You know, that like, you must reimpose the social cost of bigotry.
	You know, and it's like, doesn't that just feed their violence?
	And like, no, the Proud Boys ran out of San Francisco this weekend.
	And like, I don't think they're gonna rally in San Francisco again.
	Like, I just don't think they're gonna do that.
	And you know what?
	That's a net positive for San Francisco.
	Yeah, no, yes.
	We need more Proud Boys in San Francisco, clearly.
	No, no, not at all.
	We don't need that.
	I mean, Jack, you know, in Britain, like the 43 group that, you know, were mostly Jewish veterans of World War Two who mobilized against Oswald Mosley, their modus operandi was they saw a fascist speaking in public, they fucking punched his lights out.
	And, you know, and I think that, um, Well, the great iconic moment of anti-fascism in Britain is the Battle of Cable Street, you know?
	And even, like, the Communist Party were saying, no, no, no, don't try to stop them marching, and it was people, you know, it was ordinary people from the ground up, Jewish people, working-class people, that said, no, fuck these people, they're not coming into our streets.
	Yeah, and it wasn't the polite discussion of Cable Street, you know?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And, like, what I say in the book, and what I try to say.
	I have a section, I'd like to, I have, like, the final chapter of the book, if you don't mind, I would like to read it on air.
	Oh, the whole, well, not the whole thing, surely, but the paragraph.
	Yeah, just the paragraph, not the whole chapter, no, no.
	You'd be cutting into your audio book, you know, much rather, no, just the final, sorry, the final paragraph is what I meant to say, did I say chapter?
	Yeah, please.
	To those who find themselves uncomfortable with the operation of antifascists outside the comfortable bounds of institutions and, at times, the law, I remind you that the French partisans of World War II were acting illegally, while the Einsatzgruppen had the full support of German law.
	We tend to like our noble lawbreakers to be comfortably in the past, where time and death had sanitized them into heroes, and to suffer those who struggle against injustice in the present only grudgingly, if at all.
	Those who oppose a white nationalist president, his allies in law enforcement, and a militarized state might consider moving beyond letter-writing campaigns to their congresspeople and engaging in the life-or-death struggle that motivates antifascists around the country and the world.
	The struggle of communities defending themselves against the nihilistic forces of violence to build a better world by keeping the agents of genocide at bay.
	Yeah, that was my mic drop.
	I mean, I cannot imagine a better summary of why this podcast exists, quite honestly.
	Yeah, like Steve Carell doing the thank you thing gif.
	There you go.
	Yeah, I mean, I feel very strongly about it, and of course, that's not the normative viewpoint of our newspapers, or the polite press corps.
	But what I talk about earlier in the book...
	And somewhat in that chapter as well, this free market of ideas model of defeating Nazism is fundamentally an argument that's very self-congratulatory.
	It's this idea of we are so beautifully, magnificently tolerant that we can even tolerate somehow, despite our great chagrin, the far right.
	Not only does that viewpoint legitimize the far right and place them, by your own admission, within the acceptable marketplace of ideas, it also says that my desire to see myself as noble and magnanimous is more important than the safety of the people who are targeted in very real and very dangerous and material ways.
	By allowing far-right organizing to flourish.
	And so, you know, I think, uh, fuck that.
	That's my take.
	I mean, fuck that!
	Has there ever been a better demonstration of the bankruptcy of that idea?
	You know, the free market of ideas will just cause these bad ideas to perish.
	Has there ever been a better illustration of how that's wrong than the fucking internet?
	About how this stuff has been breeding on the internet this entire, you know, since it began?
	It doesn't work, because it doesn't take place in a vacuum.
	It doesn't start with a level playing field.
	It starts with all these structural oppressions already existing in society, in which these bigotries breed.
	Yeah, and it also ignores the propagandistic faculty of these groups.
	It ignores the grievances they exploit.
	But yeah, I mean, it's like fucking Facebook.
	Sorry.
	They're coming for you.
	They're coming for you.
	Oh, God.
	They heard me saying punch a Nazi.
	No, Brooklyn is a character on this podcast now.
	I'm sorry.
	No, but I think just like, so it's such a self-congratulatory argument and like, you know, as a Jew and like as someone who You know, basically due to, like, my weird life choices, this scene, like, you know, has received so many rape and death threats I, like, can't even count.
	I'm like, you know, this is what you call benign?
	Like, you want to give these people voice and time?
	What they will use it for is violence.
	Very few of the people who actually advocate like, oh, yes, we just need to debate them in the free marketplace of ideas have ever actually dealt with any of these ideas and have ever actually dealt with like trying to challenge them in any like real forum as well.
	Like, let's just keep that like real, you know, the people who write op eds for the Bigger Times are not, you know, who decry the senseless violence of Antifa or Black Lives Matter or whatever, are not actually going to invite, you know, you know, Kyle Slammer 1488 in. you know, you know, Kyle Slammer 1488 in.
	Into like their space and like actually have a real conversation about things that that person actually believes That's just not that's just it's it's it's nonsense It's it's saying it's it's all just a matter of like pearl-clutching and tut-tutting against the people who are actually willing to go and do The real work and you know, it's it's it's just you know, it's I don't know like it's the failures of liberalism People get mad at me when I start talking like that, but you know it is it's true, you know
	No, and I've certainly become, you know, very cynical and particularly cynical against that kind of, you know, tolerance, quote-unquote, tolerance, you know, when it really means I don't give a shit if black or trans or, you know, gay people die as a result of far-right organizing.
	I just want to feel good about myself.
	And, you know, I have so little patience for it at this point.
	And, you know, I hope that my book can, like, If I can convert even like one, you know, nice, like, like, whatever, white mom, like, somehow stumbles into my book into like, someone who's like, huh, maybe it's bad when Nazis speak on campus.
	And we shouldn't allow that and like, Hmm, let me check who's in my local Klan chapter.
	That would be a great coup.
	If we could get the wine ants to do, like, doxing on Facebook, we could have this thing wrapped up in an afternoon, basically, you know?
	I know!
	Like, I mean, and that's what I tell people when they're like, you know, how do I fight?
	Or like, what does your book say about, like, I'm like, start with your town.
	Like, that's what anti-fascists do.
	They protect their communities.
	It is like, you know, like, Antifa gets critiqued from the left sometimes as being fundamentally a reactive movement, and it really is.
	It's precisely what it says it is on the box.
	It is anti-fascism.
	So it's like when far right organizing rears its ugly head, anti-fascists respond to cut it off.
	And so it is a reactive movement.
	But like, you know, everyone should be ready to defend their communities.
	Like, what's your excuse for not being willing to stand up against far right organizing in your town, in your community?
	Why would you be sitting on the sidelines right now, at this moment in history and time?
	And that's fundamentally the argument the book makes, because I was red, nude, and mad from the start.
	Well, you know, that guy over there is, uh, promoting active, like, genocide, but, you know, that guy over there broke a window, and these things are equally bad.
	That's clearly what we're, uh, what we're landing on.
	I did, uh, I know we've, uh, we've been here for a little over an hour, about an hour now, um, and I don't want to take too much of your time, but I did, uh, there was one more chapter I did want to, uh, discuss, if that's okay with you, Talia, if you've got a few more minutes?
	Uh, yeah!
	Um, and then I gotta go.
	Okay, the most interesting chapter, it's sort of the chapter that I had like sort of the least, that we've covered the least on this show, is the is the chapter on the Legion of St.
	Ambrose and the kind of the, what was it, Christ gang versus pig gang battle?
	That was supposed to have happened and you go to some degree about sort of like paganism versus Christianity and the way that these two groups kind of like fight each other but also feed off of each other and the way that these kinds of religious values sort of create, they take our modern sense of whiteness and then like project it backwards into this kind of imagined past and it's a very very good chapter.
	I mean the book is very good but I was really enjoying that chapter and I was hoping you could Just describe that slightly for the audience who may wet the whistle of maybe a future IDSG, if I can ever figure out how to cover that properly.
	Yeah, so the book, the chapter is called That Good Old Time Religion, and I talk about some of the religious traditions that inform white supremacy, either in their iconography or their beliefs or both.
	Um, and so I talk about Christianity versus Paganism, and the sort of like, framing event I use is like, I got into the planning chats for, yes, this event, Christ Gang versus Pagan, or as I like to call it, Rumble in the Bumblefuck.
	It was supposed to be like an MMA fight in like, Kentucky, to support Augustus Sol Invictus, who is a Satanist, by the way, his campaign for president.
	But then he got nabbed on domestic violence.
	The whole thing got, you know, like fell apart.
	Because these guys just love infighting so much.
	So very much.
	He was running for president on an explicit colonize Central America, like colonize Mexico to defend against Central immigration, Central American immigration.
	That was his platform.
	Yeah.
	And among other shitty and hideous things.
	And it was actually in the planning chapter that I developed yet another persona, where I was a down-and-out guy from West Virginia who joined the white nationalist movement because I was sad my wife left me.
	I was a mover and whatever.
	One of the guys in the Christ gang planning chat was like, I really find that tradesmen often sympathize with their ideas.
	And it just was like the encapsulation of the idea.
	And the inclination to really get deep into white supremacy are the petite bourgeoisie.
	And that he would literally call me a tradesman was so funny to me.
	But yeah, anyway, back to the subject of religion, there's this idea.
	So like Christianity, extremist Christianity, like the group the Legion of St.
	Ambrose, which is led by Colton Williams in, I think, Tennessee is where they're based.
	Yeah, I believe so.
	It's an extremist Christian group.
	They claim to be followers of Christ who believe in the heritage of European Christianity.
	And as we know well on this podcast, European is very often a dog whistle that has nothing to do with a continent and everything to do with the skin color.
	And then there are pagans who follow us through who are worshipers of the Norse pantheon.
	Both of them kind of use this mythos of an imagined white past, which is, of course, inherently anachronistic, because the idea of whiteness as a racial construct was, you know, maybe an 18th century invention when people started talking about Caucasoids and whatnot.
	But both draw in different ways, whether it's like the noble crusaders who wet their Manly swords with the blood of the swarthy infidel.
	Or, you know, in the case of the pagans, it's like the manly Vikings who went out and fought in the name of Odin.
	And this is an indigenous white religion without like the Jewish taint of Jesus, who's a Jew.
	They were literally like too anti-semitic for Jesus, which is amazing considering how many Jews have been murdered in the name of Jesus.
	I mean, it's a very good line in the book when it's like you when you're so anti-semitic that Jesus Christ himself is not Christian enough for you.
	I know.
	And I'm like, so many Jews have died in the name of Jesus that that's just extra astounding.
	But yeah, I mean, so both of these groups, they do for a pan-global white nationalism what all nationalisms do to a greater or lesser extent, which is bolster their claims at righteousness and justice by drawing on a myth of the past.
	That they wish to restore to its full glory.
	So whether that's using Pope Urban II and the Crusades as the Christchurch shooter did in his manifesto, as many Crusades-loving white supremacists do, or using the idea of
	The Noble Warriors of Odin, you know, such as like racist groups like the Soldiers of Odin, which is an anti-immigrant group in Finland and Canada and the US, and like many other sort of pagan-influenced, heathen-influenced white supremacists, also the Wolves of Vinland, you know, what they do is like imbue their white nationalism with sort of this
	Often aesthetic, often superficial, but sort of, in some way, fundamentally animating sense of a glorious past that they're fighting for and, you know, a future that will look like it.
	You know, a sense that they are reclaiming something.
	So that's kind of the gist of the chapter.
	Yeah, no, definitely.
	I mean, a lot of these guys will talk about, you know, reconquering Constantinople being, like, sort of the The animating goal of the movement or they talk about like the conqueror gene.
	They look back at our colonial history, not as exploitation and torture, but as you know, well, this is just sort of the victory of the white man over.
	Nature and over the other races etc.
	And it's it's it's a really kind of fascinating element and I know you you mentioned it a bit that Medievalists have been fighting against this for quite some time and trying to get You know trying to get this kind of out of out of public consciousness But it is one of those things that I am NOT like qualified to talk on these issues so I would highly recommend people people read that section of your book and hopefully we can Figure out a way to cover this in a little more detail in a future episode.
	I know our time is getting short here, Talia.
	I would like to thank you again for coming on the show.
	I really appreciate it.
	I love the book.
	I'm going to recommend everybody buy the book.
	I'm going to put links in the show notes to where you can buy the book, to the publisher page, and to whatever major bookstore.
	Talia, please tell us where we can find you on the internet.
	You can find me on Twitter, at ChickInKiev.
	To the Nazis who are listening, I have infiltrated all your chat rooms and nothing is secret.
	And fuck you, and I hope you die in a hole.
	Seconded.
	To the non-Nazis who are listening, I love you, you're amazing, you're great.
	You can find me on Twitter, you can find Culture Warlords.
	All over independent bookstores are really having a rough go of it right now in the pandemic.
	So if you can order from your local bookstore or through bookshop.org, or indiebound.org, both of them, you know, allow you to select a bookstore in your area that you can buy the book from, that would be tight.
	I'd like to be able to write another book someday, hopefully about like soup or beehives and not fucking Nazis, because I am tired.
	But like, um, Yeah, it's definitely been a long, crazy trip of fearing for my life on a regular basis and also just waking up in the middle of the night thinking about Hitler, but not in a positive light.
	I really hate the guy still.
	Well, that's good.
	Didn't get you that far.
	That's good.
	Yeah I mean like I will say one of the advantages is like my fucking my family like really directly went through the holocaust like my grandparents you know their whole families died and like my mother lost her sister like you know this is very close to my family history and I think that that element uh you know the way that like the dangers and wages of fascism anchored in my identity from a very early age
	Never let me see this as like a series of shiny objects or get lost in fascination.
	Like I think it's part of the sort of moral clarity that I was able to retain even while getting like, as deep as I did and like assuming different identities and shit.
	Um, you know, so I always came at this with a sense, you know, Of both moral clarity and, to be honest, vengeance.
	Fuck Hitler and fuck anyone who glorifies him.
	Hitler did many things wrong.
	That's the official position of this podcast.
	Controversially, I think.
	Everything wrong and... More controversial than it should be.
	Yeah, and everyone who thinks he's awesome is a sack of shit.
	So that's my official salty take on the world.
	Thank you so much for having me on!
	Oh yeah, please, you're welcome back anytime, even if you just want to talk about soup or beehives.
	I don't know anything about beehives, but I can talk soup.
	We can talk soup if you want to, it's fine.
	Yeah, soup's nice.
	I love soup.
	Yeah, I'll go Limonio, Borscht, it's like soup season, I'm excited.
	Yeah, I make my own chicken stock, so, you know, it's always a good time.
	But yeah.
	Thank you once again.
	All right.
	Thank you once again for coming on, and until next time.
	Thank you so much.
	Episode 69, in the can, as it goes.
	Nice!
	That was I Don't Speak German.
	Thanks for listening.
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