Daniel Lombroso documents a groundswell of racist populism and tracks the sources of violence

Daniel Lombroso is a director and journalist (http://www.daniellombroso.com/). His debut feature film, White Noise (https://www.theatlantic.com/white-noise-movie/), based on his four years of reporting inside the alt-right, premiered last year and was met with high praise from film critics. The film has also garnered a large academic audience: scholars of communication, sociology and political science especially regard it as a singular first-hand account of the shape and scale of the current networked nature of white nationalism. In this interview we talk about avoiding the simplistic “hot take” so that we can pose more critical questions about how complex our current global society has become, and the challenges we face. Our discussion looks at the ways that White Noise exposes how broken and narcissistic those in the alt-right movement actually are. White Noise is a film that documents the venal desire for influence among many of the movement’s most prominent figures. It also suggests that there is a corruptible drive for community that makes many in the United States and elsewhere vulnerable to narratives of white victimization and displacement. His film studies the ways that white supremacist influencers hack the algorithms that fuel follow culture and seek to, as he puts it, “turbo-charge” their vile racist rhetoric. It also, in subtle ways, unpacks the causal links between racist rhetoric and violence. In light of this fact, we discuss what it would mean, today, to police and regulate online discourse, given the fact that banning Trump and other hateful figures from social media has radically reduced their ability to foment violence. Lombroso's work opens onto an important conversation about how, in the context of a fractured and fractious political moment, we can learn to narrate the possibilities of multiethnic democracy and inject a more ethical radicalism into our political discussions.