Rather than trying to beat back the deluge of hate across the internet, a startup called Moonshot CVE is attempting to use social media's reach and analytics to counter the spread of extremism. The company has developed a platform targeting ads at potential ISIS recruits15 by using artificial intelligence analysis of Facebook pages liked and Twitter accounts followed to predict likely targets of ISIS recruitment. It then uses Google's search advertising algorithms and YouTube to send counter-messaging to these same users. Given how powerful a role social media and the internet generally have played in the recent spread of extremism, this sort of technique will have at least some benefits. It may even prove more successful—and certainly less difficult—than continually kicking extremist content off the web.
Another way to combat extremism is both the simplest and most difficult: breaking down our tendency toward divisiveness and dehumanization by showing more love to each other.
Derek Black was born of white nationalist royalty. His godfather was David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. His father, Don Black, had succeeded Duke as grand wizard before starting Stormfront when his son was five years old. Derek Black quickly got involved in the family business. By the age of twelve, he had created KidsStormfront.
But Black has also learned from his father's failures, which included a botched white supremacist coup on the Caribbean island of Dominica and an unsuccessful run for mayor of Birmingham, Alabama. Black claimed that ever since he was a kid he thought white nationalist ideology could win elections “as long as it wasn't called white nationalism.”16 This intuition led the younger Black to play an important role in the alt-right rebranding of white nationalism. Following Barack Obama's election, for example, he convinced his dad to ban the racial slurs, swastikas, and threats of violence on Stormfront that might turn off first-time visitors.17
That same year, Black won an elected position on the West Palm Beach Republican committee, a role he used to push in what would become the main themes of the alt-right's sanitized white nationalism, including the impact of immigration, affirmative action, political correctness and the impending “white genocide.” He also began to co-host a father-son white nationalist radio show on a local AM station. By his late teens, Black, with his thoughtful demeanor and lack of racial slurs, seemed certain to assume his role as a leader in the next generation of white nationalists.
Black's life took an unexpected turn in 2010, however, after he enrolled in Sarasota's New College of Florida, a liberal arts school three hours away. Exclusively homeschooled up to that point, the intellectually inquisitive Black was immersed in a new, diverse world. His father thought he was on a reconnaissance mission to an evil realm of multiculturalism. But Derek Black engaged his new surroundings with confidence and curiosity. He became friends with a Peruvian immigrant named Juan and dated a Jewish woman named Rose.
Black didn't feel he had to abandon his white nationalist beliefs, largely because he thought that segregating people by race wasn't inherently hateful or angry. But he didn't advertise them, either. Before long, though, he felt like he was occupying two different lives. Amazingly, he managed to keep them compartmentalized for a while. He would do his white nationalist radio show in his dorm room before heading off to class in the morning. He'd hang out with the grandson of a concentration camp survivor one day and former skinheads at home that weekend.
Then, inevitably, someone outed Black as a “white supremacist” on a college message board and his world collapsed. The post received hundreds of angry replies. Classmates jeered when Black walked by. A group of students even organized a school shutdown to demonstrate to him how unacceptable his hateful ideology was.
Black, who could have easily dropped out and returned to West Palm Beach, continued to attend classes. Then, an orthodox Jewish friend of Black's named Matthew Stevenson decided that shunning Black wasn't a productive reaction. He began to invite Black to Shabbat dinner every Friday. The dinners, awkward at first, were not intended as debates on white nationalism, but social events that allowed Black, Stevenson, and other students to engage other as people. To both of their surprise, Black and Allison Gornik, another student who sometimes attended Shabbat, eventually became involved romantically.
Over the next year, Black began to trust Gornik and his friends at Shabbat. He began to listen to her counter-arguments about race that he had previously dismissed as empty, left-wing rhetoric. Gornik and Black read academic studies about racial differences in IQ or crime rates together. Black, who considered himself logical and analytical, slowly admitted that some of arguments for white nationalism didn't hold together. He began to back away from the belief system he'd been brought up in. Black began to wonder if, in fact, nonwhite people were being discriminated against—and not the other way around.
Nonetheless, Black never completely abandoned the belief system he'd grown up with. Finally, during a road trip, Gornik angrily asked him how he thought the idea of a white homeland was going to be achieved nonviolently. When Black later put the question to his dad, he realized—finally—that immigrants, Jews, blacks, and others would be forced to leave, perhaps violently. “This country,” Don Black told his son, “is on the verge of a reckoning.”18
So was Derek Black. In 2012, he declined to attend the Stormfront conference. In January of 2013, he stopped doing his radio show. Later that same year, he finally cut his ties with white nationalism altogether in dramatic fashion: a letter posted on the SPLC website.
Afterward, his mother didn't want to talk to him. His dad—who thought his son had been brainwashed—tried, but there was too much ideological space between them. For his part, Black was disgusted with his previous life. He changed his name to Roland Derek Black and enrolled at a PhD program at the University of Chicago. He wanted to hide, but as Black watched Donald Trump's presidential campaign take off—with the candidate hawking the same sanitized racism he had spread for years—the former golden boy of white nationalism realized he had to speak out. Black denounced white nationalism in a New York Times op-ed and became a “reluctant public face of antiracism.”19
Even as much larger trends—politics, media, economies, technologies, ideologies, conspiracy theories—play huge roles in spreading extremism, each radicalization also happens on a personal level. Black's radicalization process was unique in many ways, but it was still intensely personal.
The same is true of de-radicalization. Certainly, the shunning of Black by his classmates at a small liberal arts college had a personal impact. It may have helped him understand how hurtful white nationalism was to most of the student body. But, much more important—and difficult—was the trust and deep personal connection he had with the classmates who reached out to him. Although most extremists don't have the time and resources to debate white nationalism in a comfortable academic environment over months, factors such as trust, faith, kindness, and love play a role in almost every story of de-radicalization.
Another “former,” as reformed neo-Nazis call themselves, named Tony McAleer was a high profile leader of the White Aryan Resistance. In the 1980s, he attended the first youth congress at the infamous Aryan Nations house in Idaho. Then, in 1991, his daughter was born and his slow exit from right-wing extremism began.
Four years later, McAleer was a single father with a newborn son as well, but the love and approval he received as a dad made the white power side of his life increasingly unattractive. What's more, his association with neo-Nazis was disrupting his life as a parent. His mom had to drop his kids off at preschool so they weren't shunned because of their dad.
McAleer's ongoing involvement with extremism was also limiting his ability to support his kids financially. Just as with Black, a deeply personal wedge developed between his extremist activities and his new life. Eventually, he decided he had to get out. Finally, during a professional self-development course, a Jewish mentor helped him to make his final exit.
Surveying the politically divisive world, McAleer ask
s for a “revolution in compassion.”20 He's worried that in the current political climate, the left will be just as guilty of dehumanization as the right, reducing the space for people to leave hate-based groups and ideologies.
Another ex-neo-Nazi, Frank Meeink, is most famous as the inspiration for the Edward Norton character in the movie American History X. Growing up in Philadelphia, Meeink was a prominent teenage skinhead recruiter and leader. Then, at age seventeen, he was sent to prison for kidnapping and torturing a rival skinhead leader. In jail, Meeink found that he had more in common with some of the African American inmates than the members of the Aryan prison gang he joined. After he got out of prison, Meeink was conflicted. He no longer agreed with neo-Nazi ideologies but was still part of the gang. His daughter had just been born, but her mother wouldn't let him see her. A Jewish man offered him the only decent job he could find, even though Meeink had a swastika tattooed on his neck.
Meeink's final turning point came as a result of the remarkable kindness shown to him by his Jewish employer during a long ride home from work. “[H]e kept telling me to stop calling myself dumb,” something Meeink had not heard before. “After that day, I took my boots off, I was just done.”21
Another former extremist, Maxime Fiset, was a Quebecois white nationalist organizer and leader between 2007 and 2012. He also began to question his extremist life after his daughter was born. Fiset decided he didn't want his daughter being around the sexism and racism pervasive among white nationalists.
As the member of a Montreal-based group that helps prevent radicalization, he advises against aggressive confrontation. Faced with staunch opposition, most people in the process of becoming radicalized, Fiset says, will just “harden their beliefs.”22 Instead, he recommends listening and asking questions. The goal is not to win arguments, but to instill doubt about the extremist ideas that are radicalizing them.
The same personal nature of de-radicalization is broadly true on the left as well. Ex-Weatherman Mark Rudd eventually turned himself in after years on the FBI most wanted list because he was tired of forcing his wife to move every year or two. No matter how deluded an extremist may be, their first step away from hate is almost always the result of trust, love and respect shown for them by others.
When discussing de-radicalization, some experts make the process sound like a 12-step program for alcoholics—a system in which success is dependent on the community support an addict perceives. Similar tactics—emotional connection and empathy—are also critical in treating suicidal people.23
In a completely different field, researchers are studying the possibilities of what amounts to a compassion drug. A so-far promising, but experimental, treatment for extreme cases of PTSD is the party drug MDMA, the psycho-active ingredient in ecstasy. The study followed the treatment of military veterans and first-responders who were too emotionally walled off to respond to traditional psychotherapy. During the test, one veteran said that he finally felt “the person inside the patient.” MDMA, which is thought to create feelings of trust and openness, provided a chemically enhanced opening for traditional therapy sessions to begin.24 But MDMA isn't so much a chemical solution to hate as an entry point for other forms of therapy.
On a local level, everyone can play a role in lowering the heated rhetoric and divisiveness that opens up space for extremism. A November 2018 Washington Post article details a liberal blogger named Christopher Blair who began creating fake conspiratorial right-wing stories during the 2016 election cycle as a kind of political satire.25 He was shocked to find that, no matter how outrageous and implausible he made his articles, Trump supporters continued to read, like, and share them.
Before too long, Blair was making as much as $15,000 a month creating tall tales about California instituting Sharia law, Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, and Barack Obama dodging the draft when he was nine. Typically, Blair allowed the stories to go viral before lowering the boom on the people who believed it, ending his posts with “congratulations, stupid.”
But, after two years of letting people know they'd been had, Blair wasn't sure he'd changed a single person's mind. In fact, it would be shocking if he had. In today's media ecosystem, “truth” is a seriously devalued currency—part of the reason why the Post itself stopped publishing its “What was fake on the internet this week” column back in 2014.26 Many people select what they want to believe based on emotional need, and those are same people who are inherently suspicious of fact checkers like the Washington Post and snopes.com. Most importantly, Blair didn't have anyone's trust when he told them they were wrong. In fact, he insulted them, making himself one more troll on the coarsened internet.
For all his desire to deflate conspiracism, Blair seems unlikely to do much but perpetuate the walling off of America. In fact, there is no fixed barrier between “extremists” and “normal people”—much less Democrats and Republicans. Likewise, extremists don't become so because they are lesser or worse people, but because of some unlucky combination of personality and experience. This doesn't mean they aren't responsible for their actions, but that they—like everyone—are capable of change. Not everyone could treat Frank Meeink with the compassion he needed to leave his neo-Nazi past behind, but everyone should accept that it can happen.
Likewise, extremists’ often-hateful rhetoric doesn't arise unbidden. Today, what used to be called extremist ideology courses through mainstream websites, friends’ Facebook feeds, and celebrity Twitter posts. The entire media ecosystem is even designed to create self-verifying tribal loops, essentially discouraging future extremists from confronting ideas that contradict their emerging belief system.
In this sense, the enemy is not them, but us: America's addictive social media, irresponsible cable news pundits, divisive political parties, unforgiving paramilitary culture, and an unbalanced economy with shortcomings that are easily exploited by extremists.
This is also how Micah Johnson, Muhammad Abdulazeez, and Dylann Roof came to be mass murderers. They were not double agents dedicated to an alien form of extremism. They were young men weaponized by contemporary America itself. Each was a neighbor looking for a place to pour their pain and frustration; their violent direction was not predetermined. With love and understanding, we can help to stop such violence from being repeated.
INTRODUCTION: THE SECRET EXTREMISTS
1. Jennifer Emily, “Who Was Micah Johnson? A More Complex Picture Emerges,” Dallas Morning News, July 2016, https://www.dallasnews.com/news/dallas-ambush/2016/07/10/shooters-journal-portal-madmans-mind.
2. “When Army Career Ended in Disgrace, Dallas Gunman Was Ostracized,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 2016, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-dallas-gunman-micah-johnson-army-discharge-20160715-story.html.
3. Snejana Farberov, “FBI Recovers Chattanooga Gunman's ‘Anti-American Diary’ Which Reveals His Anger at the War on Terror, a Growing Dependence on Drugs and His Desire to Commit Suicide to Become a ‘Martyr,’” Daily Mail, July 20, 2015, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3168189/FBI-recovers-Chattanooga-gunman-s-disturbing-diary-talked-committing-suicide-martyr-struggled-addiction-debt.html.
4. Avery Wilks, John Monk, and Harrison Cahill, “Exclusive: Sharper Picture Emerges of Suspected Charleston Shooter Dylann Roof,” State, September 19, 2015, https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article35836482.html.
5. Richard Fausset, “Chattanooga Gunman Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez: ‘Life Is Short and Bitter’” New York Times, July 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/us/chattanooga-shooting-suspect-was-ordinary-boy-neighbors-recall.html.
6. Ibid.
7. Emily, “Who Was Micah Johnson?”
8. Dylann Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto,” New York Times, December 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/13/universal/document-Dylann-Roof-manifesto.html.
9. “Dylann Roof's Friend: ‘He Never Said Anything Racist,’” BBC, June 20, 2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-33209654/Dylann-ro
of-s-friend-he-never-said-anything-racist.
CHAPTER ONE: WE WANT THE BROKEN TOYS
1. “Skinheads USA Soldiers of the Race War Full Documentary,” posted by Pawel Merlin, January 16, 2016, YouTube video, 10:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSXYUoBxH-c&list=PL31YglUmKqu6g7fKT2ECsTtdH-ABaRtJh&bpctr=1542768361.
2. Ibid.
3. Brentin Mock, “Former Followers Expose Neo-Nazi Skinhead, Former Klan Leader Bill Riccio for Sexual Harassment, Abuse,” SPLC Intelligence Report, October 1, 2007, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2007/former-followers-expose-neo-nazi-skinhead-former-klan-leader-bill-riccio-sexual-harassment.
4. Ibid.
5. “Skinheads USA Soldiers of the Race War.”
6. Dylann Roof, “Dylann Roof's Manifesto,” New York Times, December 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/13/universal/document-Dylann-Roof-manifesto.html.
7. Ibid.
8. “Online Preachers of Hate: Anwar al-Awlaki, ‘bin Laden of the Internet,’” Telegraph, June 7, 2011, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8560438/Online-preachers-of-hate-Anwar-al-Awlaki-bin-Laden-of-the-internet.html.
9. Kathy Sawyer, “Turning from ‘Weapon of the Spirit’ to Shotgun,” Washington Post, August 7, 1994, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/08/07/turning-from-weapon-of-the-spirit-to-the-shotgun/d5ba8384-de0a-4ee9-84ad-dd9983925a67/.
10. Frances Robles and Nikita Stewart, “Dylann Roof's Past Reveals Trouble at Home and School,” New York Times, July 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/us/charleston-shooting-dylann-roof-troubled-past.html.
11. Matt Apuzzo, “Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues,” New York Times, March 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/world/europe/mystery-about-who-will-become-a-terrorist-defies-clear-answers.html.
12. Chip Berlet, “The Good, Bad and Ugly in Oregon Standoff Coverage,” FAIR, January 15, 2016, http://fair.org/home/the-good-bad-and-ugly-in-oregon-standoff-coverage/.
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