Talia Lavin

Talia Lavin (born 1989) is an American journalist. She is the author of Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, published in 2020, and the forthcoming October 2024 book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America.

Life
Lavin grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey and was raised Modern Orthodox. She attended SAR High School and graduated from Harvard University in 2012 with a degree in comparative literature. She was a Fulbright scholar and spent a year in Ukraine from 2012 to 2013.

Career
Lavin was a fact-checker at The New Yorker. She resigned from her position in 2018 after mistakenly comparing a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer's tattoo to an Iron Cross. ICE released a statement via Twitter that the officer's tattoo is a Titan 2 platoon symbol, accompanied by the Spartan Creed. Lavin had deleted the original tweet before the agency's statement. In 2018, she was hired as researcher on far-right extremism by Media Matters for America. Within "several months", she was no longer with Media Matters for America, and was hired at New York University where she was scheduled to teach an undergraduate course in the Fall semester called "Reporting on the Far Right". The course was canceled by May 30, 2019 when only two people signed up for the course. The Wrap reported her faculty bio had been deleted "around April 20, 2019".

Until January 2019 Lavin wrote a weekly political column in HuffPost, and she also worked as a columnist for MSNBC Daily. Her work appeared in GQ, Jewcy, HuffPost, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The New Yorker, New York magazine, The Nation, and The Washington Post.

Books

 * ISBN 9780306846434
 * ISBN 9780306829192

Critical studies and reviews of Lavin's work

 * Culture warlords