Catfishing for fascists

Illustration by Cathryn Virginia

The global alt-right feeds on a vast range of counter-empirical resentments, grievances, conspiracy theories, and race hatreds, but there’s one quite banal way to gain access to its inner circle: via the well-worn tropes of online dating. That’s the key finding of New Republic contributor Talia Lavin, in an adaptation from her new book, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. Using a fabricated identity as a neofascist fellow traveler named Ashlynn (screen name “AryanQueen”), Lavin managed to win the ardent attention of a Ukrainian-based habitué of online hate groups named David (screen name “Der Stürmer”). Before long, the two young race-war apostles strike up a flirtation, with Levin’s Ukrainian swain confessing his eagerness to court her in person, in an all-white United States. (Both the fascination with all things American and the urge to transform the country into a showcase of Aryan power are abiding themes on the discussion boards of the far right, Lavin reports.) On her side of the exchange, Lavin tries to tick all the boxes of die-hard white extremism, creating a Twitter persona for Ashlynn and a backstory for her as a waitress in Iowa. And as things get more intimate, the overall tenor of the growing exchange of intimacies remains ideologically charged, to an absurdist degree, Lavin writes: “In order to get him to reveal his face, I ask him to ‘prove he’s not a Jew,’ and he offers to send me a photo of his foreskin. I decline and ask to see his nose instead.”

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Lavin has embarked on this catfishing scheme in the hopes of outing and reporting the purveyors of online race hate, and she soon discovers that David is an influential player in that world. Seeking to impress her with his credentials as a dedicated white nationalist, he boasts of his ties to armed Ukrainian guerilla groups, and via some online sleuthing, Lavin learns that he’s one of the administrators of a Ukrainian-language channel called “Brenton Tarrant’s Lads”—named for the mass shooter who killed 51 worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, last year. What’s more, David is spreading Tarrant’s deranged gospel of hate in the offline world as well, Lavin discovers:

He shows me photos of a Ukrainian translation he’s made of Tarrant’s manifesto, “The Great Replacement,” and tells me he’s printed and distributed hundreds of copies. The open-source intelligence website Bellingcat, which closely tracks the far right in Eastern Europe, had published, a few months before, an investigation of the translated booklet, documenting numerous selfies of men in Ukraine and Russia holding copies of the pamphlet—some reading it by the sea; a group of men holding it up while giving Hitler salutes; and an extremist anti-gay group that attacked marchers in Kiev’s Pride Parade in 2019—encouraging its members to buy copies. The fish that had landed in my net unwittingly was surprisingly big: He was single-handedly aiding in the radicalization of potentially thousands of men, disseminating a document that had already inspired copycat terror attacks. And he was proud of it.

As the flirtation continues, Lavin homes in on her main objective: discovering revealing details of David’s identity so as to put him in the path of groups monitoring the online recruitment efforts of the fascist alt-right. After he sends her a photo that obscures part of his face to conceal a scar on his mouth, she coaxes him into sending a full image of his face. And without her prompting, he also forwards a shot of his car, with his full license plate in view—a critical detail that unlocks a trove of other identifying data. Before long, she’s able to go to the administrators at Bellingcat with David’s real-life identity and online profile—and then resumes the chilling routine of persuading the online right to give itself up, one catfish at a time.

—Chris Lehmann, editor