Documentary White Noise paints a portrait of alt-right provocateurs

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Journalists, documentarians and certain types of social scientists have for a long time been familiar with the conundrum of researching and reporting on subjects with corrosive ideas. 

Two women pose for a selfie flashing the “OK” sign, now associated with the white nationalist movement. Screenshot from White Noise.

After every hate crime, every instance of hate speech or hate-filled demonstration, it’s always the same question that gets asked in newsrooms, pitch meetings or academic conferences: What’s the worth of giving perpetrators or peddlers of bigotry more attention? Is it better to ignore them and therefore starve them of an audience, or is it better to expose them so that their ideologies may shrivel in the bright light of public scrutiny?

That question runs beneath the surface of the 2020 documentary White Noise: Inside the Racist Right, screening Friday, Jan. 28 at the Panida Theater, though it’s probably not the one director Daniel Lombroso wanted to put in the storefront.

Produced as the first feature documentary from The Atlantic magazine, White Noise is the result of Lombroso’s four-year effort to embed himself in the lives and activities of three prominent voices on the so-called “racist right.” Through them, he accesses a larger world of white supremacist thinking and action, drawing throughlines from online provocation to real-world violence and social disruption.

Picking up just after the election of former-President Donald Trump, which prompted an explosion of white nationalist rhetoric — including from Trump himself — the film focuses on Richard B. Spencer, Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern.

Spencer is a well known leader of the “alt-right,” famous for his agitation at the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., and spreading an apocalyptic vision of white “replacement” by people of color and the subsequent collapse of the social, political, economic and cultural order. 

Cernovich is a “men’s rights” blogger most notable for perpetuating the phony “Pizzagate” scandal, which falsely claimed in 2016 that members of the Democratic Party were connected to a pedophilia ring operating out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.

Southern is a Canadian anti-feminism, anti-immigration and white nationalist activist, best known for participating in efforts to obstruct the search and rescue of refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. Southern has positioned herself as a reporter in the past, even being granted to press briefings at the White House in 2017.

Lombroso gained deep access to these provocateurs, capturing both their private and public lives,including confessional-style one-on-one interviews in which his subjects describe their beliefs, how they see them fitting into the larger socio-political narrative and providing a glimpse of the human being behind the hate monger.

It’s the latter part that some critics have questioned. Writing for rogerebert.com, Nick Allen argued that Lombroso only managed to reveal “some cracks in their performative nature,” mostly succeeding in giving his interviewees additional, emboldening attention. The New York Times wrote that the film “sometimes risks coming across as ‘extremists are just like us.’”

In keeping with the divisive nature of its subject, other reviews have praised White Noise as “the scariest documentary of the year,” and named it among the best documentaries of 2020. Reviews on rottentomatoes.com add up to an 87% critics’ score and 73% score from audiences.

Presented by KRFY 88.5 FM and the Bonner County Human Rights task force, there’s no doubting the timeliness of White Noise, as the country continues to reap the whirlwind fanned by the likes of Spencer, Cernovich and Southern.

White Noise: Inside the Racist Right (NR)

Friday, Jan. 28; 7 p.m.; FREE. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave., 208-263-9191, panida.org. More info at theatlantic.com/white-noise-movie. Theater capacity will be limited to 225 guests per show. The Panida strongly encourages all guests to wear a mask, regardless of vaccine status.