One among a sea of unfortunate consequences of the last four years is that ordinary people have heard of many political figures who once would have been relegated to the fringe. There’s Mike Cernovich, a self-styled provocateur and meme creator who is an InfoWars regular. There’s Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who became especially notorious during the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And there’s Lauren Southern, a YouTube personality and anti-immigrant activist who famously supported the “Defend Europe” group, which opposes search-and-rescue operations for refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.
These three individuals are the focus of White Noise, an excellent new documentary from Daniel Lombroso, a journalist at the Atlantic. The film paints a portrait of the past few years of their lives, but more than that, it subtly exposes how much of the internet-fueled alt-right is driven by a desire to get rich, become well-known, and draw acolytes.
In the way we talked about radical Islam, for better or for worse, as being a defining issue of the late ’90s and early ’00s, I think white domestic terrorism and white nationalism are issues we’re going to be dealing with for a long time. Daniel Lombroso
