Jewish filmmaker behind ‘White Noise,’ a new documentary on the alt-right

Culture

Jewish filmmaker behind ‘White Noise,’ a new documentary on the alt-right

FILM | BEN SALES | JTA

Soon after Donald Trump’s election win in 2016, raw footage emerged of a rally where white supremacist Richard Spencer called out “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” and was greeted with Nazi salutes.

The filmmaker who caught that scene on tape was Daniel Lombroso, whose Holocaust-survivor grandmother cautioned him, when he started the project, against putting himself in proximity to antisemites.

As far-right activity burgeoned in the Trump era, Lombroso kept his cameras rolling, and he zoomed in on the alt-right movement, white nationalists like Spencer who wanted to remake the right wing and the country.

Lombroso’s resulting documentary, “White Noise,” released earlier this month by the Atlantic (the magazine’s first feature documentary), follows three prominent alt-right

figures through the first three years of the Trump administration, as their careers ascend and then fade: Spencer, a leading ideologue; Mike Cernovich, a vocal misogynist and conspiracy theorist; and Lauren Southern, a far-right antifeminist and anti-immigrant activist.

Lombroso sat down for a long interview with JTA, the full version of which can be read at tinyurl.com/jta-wn1. This has been shortened for space considerations.

JTA: What drew you to this topic?

Daniel Lombroso: I started covering the alt-right as a reporter at the Atlantic in 2016. A week after Trump’s election, I caught a room full of people breaking out into Nazi salutes. It was this really pivotal viral moment … it really solidified that the alt-right is fundamentally a racist movement. It’s fundamentally an antisemitic movement. It wasn’t a cool, conservative rebrand like they claimed.

I think I wanted to understand what made the ideology — which is basically white nationalism, antisemitism — so appealing to so many people. I wanted to get to the core of the ideology and understand at a more psychological level: What do these people believe? How do they work? … You come to see how empty they are, how narcissistic they are, how vacuous the whole ideology is in the end.

You don’t use other voices or provide much historical background. It’s 90 minutes of interviews with them and footage of them. Why?

The best and most effective way to dismantle their ideology is to really expose the contradictions at the core of their worldview. So Mike [Cernovich] tweets things like “diversity is a code word for white genocide,” and then you see he has a Persian spouse and a biracial kid who speaks Farsi.

“The best and most effective way to dismantle their ideology is to expose the contradictions at the core of their worldview.”

Daniel Lombroso

Daniel Lombroso (right), who shot “White Noise,” interviews far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern in France. (Photo/JTA-Michael Miroshnik)

Ultimately that unvarnished approach, it has to be done really responsibly. It shouldn’t glamorize them. It shouldn’t make them look like rock stars. Every single day, I promise you, for four years, that was on my mind — to take them seriously. If done responsibly, that’s the most clarifying approach you can take.

A potential criticism is that we’re helping them recruit, that it’s a platform. I think it’s actually the opposite. No one comes out of the film wanting to join that movement. The three subjects despise the film and want nothing to do with it.

Because some people don’t know that being a white nationalist is bad, did you ever want to give more context to what your subjects were saying?

When someone is saying “lugenpresse” [a Nazi term that means the “lying press”] and talking about extermination, that’s self-evidently bad enough to the 90 percent of us who care that it’s worth raising the awareness. I really strongly doubt, in all of the focus groups, all of the people I’ve spoken to, that anyone comes out of this film feeling empowered or emboldened or wanting to gravitate toward these ideas, because they really expose themselves as being so empty.

How did you deal emotionally with being immersed in these people’s world?

It was very hard. I think I suppressed a lot. I mostly work alone. I would say it’s made me much more proudly Jewish. I’m much more aware and vocal about the level of antisemitism in [the U.S. and Europe]. It’s had an interesting effect on my political views and my psychology and identity after the making of the film, just encountering so much hate. And a lot of it was directed at me … now every day I’m getting really gross antisemitic hate mail and Twitter DMs filled with the most disgusting Nazi cartoons.

How much antisemitism did you face while filming?

All of [the subjects utter] dog whistles like “the Rothschilds” and “global cabal” and “new world order” and “Soros,” and all that stuff is just so part of the vernacular. But there were also some pretty aggressive antisemitic incidents.

I was left on a ranch in Florida in pitch black with a bunch of Richard Spencer’s followers … there’s all these kids dressed in white … and Spencer went out to dinner and left me with all of them, and they had just discovered recently that I was Jewish. It turned south pretty quickly. A lot of “kike” and Hitler salutes and just really gross stuff. [There was also] a lot of really aggressive taunting for being a reporter, that you’re fake news, you’re starting a race war.

Support for Trump is a major throughline in the movie. How much do you connect Trump with what you saw?

There’s no alt-right without Trump and I actually believe that there’s no Trump without the alt-right. The alt-right as it appears in the movie is essentially dead. [But] the far-right antisemitic racist movement, that’s Trump’s most passionate base.

Your grandmother, who is still living, is a Holocaust survivor. What did she think of the movie?

She right away gravitated toward the opportunism: “These guys are just frauds and snake oil salesmen,” she said. At the top of the project, she told me not to do it. She didn’t want me to be subjected to all the abuse that I’ve dealt with. She’s been very supportive and it’s been her view that people need to know what’s going on. n

“White Noise” (94 minutes, not rated) is available for rent or purchase on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon and Vimeo On Demand. For details, visit theatlantic.com/white-noise-movie.