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Old October 14th, 2020 #48
Stewart Meadows
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Join Date: May 2018
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Here's a new interview with the crooked jewess from my OP:

Quote:
Anti-Semitism, white supremacy and swords: Talia Lavin dives into the most hateful corners of the internet


BY EMILY BURACK OCTOBER 14, 2020



After over a year of immersing herself into the darkest depths of white supremacy on the internet, Talia Lavin remains hopeful. Lavin, a Jewish reporter, went undercover into some of the most toxic chatrooms the “alt-right” has to offer — and is now telling her story, and the story of the rise of white supremacy in America, in “Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.”

“When I became the target of the far right, I felt my identity sort of burning inside of me,” Lavin explained to me one afternoon in late August. “As a Jewish woman, I was the brunt of all this anti-Semitism and misogyny. The misogyny is very overt — the threats and abuses are incredibly sexualized. It’s very keyed to my appearance. It’s really hard to disentangle these things, but because of my identity, I was targeted with a viciousness. And because of that viciousness, I decided to turn around and dive in. Not to disengage, but rather to turn towards the darkness — and to fight it.”
(...)
Keeping track of the different identities was sometimes a challenge. There are several personas that didn’t make it into the book — entire personas with back stories — just because the research didn’t go far enough. I had a whole “alt-right” woman Facebook profile where I was trying to get into the women of the “alt-right,” and that proved a little more difficult because they are simply less stupid than their compatriots — or have a little less recklessness, typically. At times, I had to consciously remind myself, okay, who am I today? And, what’s my story today? That was definitely interesting. At the same time, so much of my socializing is online, so I was like, Okay, and now I’m Talia again. It was this sort of interestingly fractured consciousness.
(...)
That moment when the culmination of a five-month operation — when I seduced this Ukrainian neo-Nazi — and he gave me a picture of his face with a license plate of his car, where he lived. He was just totally open to me, and my story was ridiculous! I was like, I’m blonde, I’ve learned Russian. We did these voice notes; I would put on this fake voice that was an octave higher and a little more eloquent than mine, and I would record them in Russian and Ukrainian for him. I said that I learned Russian and Ukrainian in order to go to Donbass, Ukraine and meet white supremacists who were fighting on the front lines. It was the most absurd backstory in the world and this guy was just so horny or whatever that he fell for it.

He really bared his soul to me, and then I gave it right to bellingcat. He totally had an implosion. He tried to bribe the journalists. He deleted all his profile pictures. The chat that he had co-moderated, for a time, collapsed and started putting out all these messages like, don’t be dumb, avoid women. That really gave me a sense of satisfaction, because I feel it is a part of anti-fascist work to sow dissension and prevent coherence in these groups that encourage terror.

The man that I spoke to was constantly sending me photos of guns, of violent video game screenshots where he named his AK-47 “Die Muslims,” talking about how to assemble Pythons. It wasn’t an edge case, where I was like, oh, this is just some kid. He had directly organized to the translation and dissemination of [Christchurch mosque shooter Brenton] Tarrant’s manifesto into Russian and Ukrainian, which was being distributed and featured in photos with extremist groups around Eastern Europe. So, I didn’t feel bad. That was a triumph of holy shit, it worked. And that moment where I said to him, “Hey, I have something I need to tell you. I’m an anti-fascist and you’re about to be exposed, you motherfucker”… that was pretty good.
(...)
ISPs [internet service providers] in general — I mean every single hate site that I go to has service providers. To me, if you’re enabling Nazi speech, you are more of an ideological fellow traveler than you might claim to be. Nazis were using the internet very early on. In the ’80s, the Klan had a website. They very quickly realized it was a way to propagandize and to recruit with relative anonymity.
https://www.jta.org/2020/10/14/cultu...f-the-internet