Talia Lavin > Quotes

“One you start gazing into the abyss of the far right, pretty soon it turns its gaze right back on you. And its gaze is a fearsome thing, a twisted thing, one full of boredom and anger that have calcified into hatred.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“[N]o amount of such rhetoric is acceptable in the country’s discourse, just as there is no acceptable amount of poisonous gas to let seep into a room.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“To make peace with white supremacy, to give it room, to tender it mercy, is to assert that protecting black and brown and Muslim and gay and trans and Jewish people from violence isn’t all that important or necessary.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“Engaging in a debate implies that the opposite side has legitimacy; debating with Richard Spencer implies that his ethnonationalism is a substantive position worth sharing with your audience. It’s a pernicious influence masked in “reasonableness.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“We tend to like our noble lawbreakers to be comfortably in the past, where time and death have sanitized them into heroes, and to suffer those who struggle against injustice in the present only grudgingly, if at all.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“The worst people are still people; their humanity is impossible to disregard, but it does not absolve them. If anything, it makes their choices more abhorrent, surrounded, as they are, by the banality of a life indistinguishable from other lives.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“I asked them a simple question, tantalizingly phrased: “If you could write a love letter to your future white wife, what would it be like? I would love to see what you write . . .” The results were like a car crash between Nicholas Sparks and Mein Kampf.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

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

“Americans have a tendency to believe that authoritarianism will arise here in a swirl of drama, obvious malefactors emerging from the ether to work their evil; even more, we have a sense that our democracy, the most powerful in the world, is immune to becoming a dictatorship, and this form of American exceptionalism has a tendency to blind us to what is directly before our eyes.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Sometimes, as it turned out, antifascists come up just past your shoulder, and like to dress up their dogs in party hats.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“Despite the fact that, as the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has documented, 71 percent of murders related to extremism in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of far-right or white-supremacist movements, federal authorities have maintained a sustained myopia toward white terror.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“It is the nature of reactionary movements to claim that their power is negligible until it is absolute. It is the nature of right-wing American Christianity to nurture a martyrdom that was never theirs, and never will be theirs, and use its sentiments to feed their animus.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“In every era, there are individuals who are prone to question received narratives and ideals, and in every era, such thinkers bifurcate. There are those who use that questioning spirit to seek out truths with integrity and rigor, and others who allow themselves to be snowed by propaganda, to enter harmful, self-serving orbits of errant belief. And, in every era, the latter confuse themselves with the former.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“Within many evangelical homes, violent abuse of children is cast as a direct act of service to God, the showing it a grave, even mortal sin that puts children in peril of losing their eternal souls.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“At the moment, in the national political landscape, there is ample evidence that the Republican Party and its far-right fellow travelers seek absolute power at all costs”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Q-Anoners have long made clear that 'pedophile' is synonymous with their political opposition.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Catholics make up 21 percent of the US population; 59 percent of US Catholics are white, and, according to a Pew Research Center poll, 49 percent of white Catholics in the United States are Republican. The math adds up to a significant addition to the ranks of the Christian Right. While evangelical Protestants were and are the primary constituents of the Christian Right, reactionary Catholics such as [Phyllis] Schlafly have been more than happy to go along for the ride even if some of the theology involved disagrees with their creed.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

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

“This ushered in an era in which anti-Semitism was a transatlantic export, as American racism and anti-Semitism influenced the rise and actions of the Third Reich, and Nazi ideology, in turn, was embraced by a minority of the US population.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 sparked a renewed vigor in the Christian Right. It was the ultimate insult: the integration not just of schools but of the sacred and heretofore pure-white office of the US presidency.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“By the 1970s, the public association of southern white churches with segregationism had damaged the image of the Christian Right. In adopting the antiabortion struggle, evangelicals saw themselves as engaged in a battle for the civil rights of the unborn—a new conflict every bit as morally weighty as the struggle against slavery or Jim Crow. The struggle against abortion was the new abolitionism, and this time, they would be on the right side of history. That the adoption of an identity as abolitionists—explicitly, in some cases—was somewhat grotesque on the part of a group most famous for having stood fairly in the path of integration and civil rights was beside the point; it was a chance to redress a past moral failing by donning the very vestments they had once derided.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

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

“The doctrine of spiritual warfare is widespread among numerous evangelical denominations and has a particular influence on the authoritarian politics of the extreme Right.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“In seeking to hasten the end of the world, evangelicals often make it worse for others who do not anticipate being snatched up into the clouds to sit by Christ's side as the seas boil and Satan takes possession of the earth. For those who are not perennially looking out for signs of Armageddon and awaiting it as a child waits for a father to return, the drama of the Apocalypse looks merely like a collection of people who, in waiting for the world to end, are actively worsening life in the present.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“What does the GOP want? A kingdom of Christ on Earth ruled by his elect. In practice: to impose a nationally unpopular set of principles, many of them theocratic, and seal them into law; to purge the nation of undesirables; and to utterly dominate their inferiors.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Christian nationalism requires imposing a particular view of sex, sexuality, and gender on the public at large regardless of any individual's faith or lack thereof. In the case of gay and transgender people, this mandate is guided by bigotry and Leviticus; in the case of women in particular, it's guided by misogyny and Leviticus again, with its death penalties for various forms of illicit fornication.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“A judiciary branch linked at its core to a religious authoritarian movement cannot be trusted to preserve such a worldly value as a secular democracy. In particular, the multiracial democracy so dearly won by the fighters of the civil rights movement—the only time in the United States’ history that it has been a multiracial democracy is the past half century—that has allowed abortion, gay and interracial marriage, integrated schooling, public education, and social safety net programs. All of these are on the chopping block, and there is a hunger, everywhere, for righteous destruction of it all.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“The amount of violence in Christian homes is perhaps most directly reflected in the violence of the American Christian Right—and a contributing factor to just how violent a place the United States is in general.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“In the slow unraveling of the Jim Crow legal regime in the US South, a new phrase, now an indelible part of the lexicon of American politics, was born (or born again), and achieved ubiquity: religious liberty. It meant: If we nail a cross over the door and say our school is private, we're allowed to exclude Black people. And keep our tax exemption.

It was the latter bit that ultimately woke the sleeping kraken of the Christian right, brought a new political force into its own, and turned churchgoers into politicians and politicians into holy guardians of a segregated Christian order.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“If you are a self-determined member of the elect, schooled to await the Apocalypse from your earliest days with a combination of fear and anticipation, the end of the world coincides with the destruction of your perceived enemies and your elevation to the ranks of the angels. The exultant reaction to the Israel-Hamas war, coupled with demonstrations of public support for Israel, typifies this duality of agony and ecstasy.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America