Identity, community, and sense of purpose

Stacey Vanek Smith of NPR did an eight minute interview with Christian Picciolini. He was a lost and lonely teenager and was recruited into a white supremacist group. He soon became a recruiter. He renounced ties at age 22 when his first child was born. He co-founded the group Life After Hate to help people disengage from these extremist groups. He wrote the book “Romantic Violence: Memoirs Of An American Skinhead.” Excerpts of his words:

I think ultimately, people become extremists not necessarily because of the ideology. I think that the ideology is simply a vehicle to be violent. I believe that people become radicalized or extremists because they're searching for three very fundamental human needs - identity, community and a sense of purpose. If underneath that fundamental search is something that's broken - I call them potholes. Is there abuse or trauma or mental illness or addiction? In my case many years ago, it was abandonment. I felt abandoned, and that led me to this community.

But what happens is because there are so many marginalized young people, so many disenfranchised young people today with not a lot to believe in, with not a lot of hope, they tend to search for very simple black and white answers. Because of the Internet, we now have this propaganda machine that is flooding the Internet with conspiracy theory propaganda from the far-right, disinformation. And when a young person who feels disenchanted or disaffected goes online, where most of them live, they're able to find that identity online.

They're able to find that community, and they're able to find that purpose that's being fed to them by savvy recruiters who understand how to target vulnerable young people. And they go for this solution because, frankly, it promises paradise. And it requires very little work except for dedicating your life to that purpose. But I can say that they're all being fooled because the people at the very top have an agenda, and it's a broken ideology that can never work, that, in fact, is destroying people's lives more than the promise that they were given of helping the world or saving the white race.
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What people need to understand is that since 9/11, more Americans have been killed on U.S. soil by white supremacists than by any other foreign or domestic terrorist group combined by a factor of two. Yet we don't really talk about that, nor do we even call these instances of the shooting in Charleston or what happened in Oak Creek, Wis., at the Sikh temple or even what happened in Charlottesville this weekend as terrorism.

When working with people who have been associated with supremacist groups:

I listen more than I speak. And when I listen for is the potholes, the ones that I mentioned before. You know, were they abused? Is there addiction? Is there a mental health issue? Are they just simply disconnected and have never had the time to have a meaningful interaction with somebody they claim to hate? But as I listen, then I start to fill in those potholes with services, whether it's mental health therapy. But to challenge the ideology.

What I do after working on the person, on the human, to make them more resilient and more whole so that they don't have to blame the other, is I'll immerse them in situations that challenge their narrative, so I may introduce a Holocaust denier to a Holocaust survivor or an Islamophobe to an imam or a Muslim family for dinner or somebody who is homophobic to an LGBTQ couple. And oftentimes, what happens is they are able to humanize these people that they once had this idea of them being a monster or a parasite in their head.

And because they've made that humanizing connection, they typically can't justify the prejudice or reconcile the hate any longer. And 9 times out of 10, this is the first time that the hater has had a meaningful interaction with the person they feel they hate. And when they receive compassion from the people they least deserve it from, when they least deserve it, that, to me, is the most transformative process. And I've seen that happen hundreds and hundreds of times, including to myself personally.