Next Question with Katie Curic is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Couric Media. Hi, everyone, welcome to Next Question. I'm Katie Couric. About two and a half years ago, a white nationalist by the name of James Fields Jr. Plowed his car into a crowd protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This rally, close to thirty people were injured. Thirty two year old Heather Higher was killed. What did what did you think of what you saw today here in Charlotte's Ville. I've never seen so much hatred in the eyes of my fellow human beings in my life. We are in very deep trouble. This country is in deep trill. I was there that day and since then, at least seventy three murders can be tied to the radical right wing extremist movement James Fields Jr. Embraced That includes, of course, they hate fuel shootings in Pittsburgh, Poway, California, and El Paso, Texas. In many of these cases, the perpetrators adopted the disturbing views of a broad Internet savvy movement made up of different misogynistic and white nationalist groups. In online forums and on social media. The suspect in today's mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh had an extensive anti Semitic, anti Jewish digital footprint. Law enforcement officials in Texas say they believe he wrote a roughly six hundred word essay on the Internet and posted it an hour or so before the shooting that says the attack was motivated by anti immigrant hatred. Today, that's where hate spreads, not through top secret word of mouth meetings, but out in the open, on places like four chant and Reddit, and even YouTube and Facebook. People who feel lost or left behind, or maybe just looking to rebel are radicalized almost exclusively online, often without ever meeting anyone face to face. The technology itself is a big part of the problem. The algorithms on sites like YouTube encourage users to stick around by serving up ever more extreme examples of whatever topic they're engaged with. To be clear, not everyone who spends time in these virtual spaces will go on to commit horrific acts, but the marching orders for many of these groups are usually pretty explicit. True believers are encouraged to bring people with mainstream views so called norm e s, into the fold. And to ultimately take real world action against the groups they believe are threatening their way of life. That means people of color, women, lgbt Q individuals, and members of other marginalized communities, which brings me to my next question, how can we stop the spread of radical extremism online and keep people from becoming radicalized in the first place. My first guest knows from experience just how easy it can be to get sucked into this world. Three years ago, when he was just thirteen years old, he turned to the Internet as a way to escape a lonely stressful time at school. The community he found there gave him some dangerous ideas about who was actually to blame for his problems. In a jaw dropping anonymous account for Washingtonian Magazine, his mom opened up about forums where her son, who she calls Sam, spent countless hours and the toll his newfound beliefs took on the entire family. Sam, I knew you were having a pretty tough time emotionally when you were thirteen years old. What was going on back then? I had a kind of traumatic experience in eighth grade, and uh, my parents didn't really like how the school handled it, so they ended up pulling me out of the school, um, which just led to a lot of like confusion on my part, and it just made me upset. You know, I had to find new friends. I had to you know, kind of remake my mark on my new school. What happened exactly that made you feel this way? My friend and I were joking around and some people took it out of context and went to the school, and the school handled it really poorly, said you were sexually harassing. Yeah. They said I was sexually harassing these two girls, which wasn't the case, and the girls didn't even think it was the case. Um, and the school kind of they just had their sexual harassment training, so they were really on edge about that kind of stuff, and they handled it pretty poorly. They said that I was bullying the girls. And then eventually it just got to a point where I said, okay, like it's time to go. And so you changed schools and you were feeling pretty isolated, lonely, I guess a little angry. Yeah, I was upset with the school. I was upset that I had to leave. I was, you know, angry that you know, my old friends weren't you know, in I wasn't in as much contact with my old friends as I like as I'd like to be. So you turn to the internet. What was the process that opened this door to the people you got involved with at least online. One of my friends at my at my new school UM decided to show me Reddit, which I had never known, so he was showing me some subredits, like there's one called r slash dank Memes that he was showing me, which was just a subredit for like internet jokes and memes. Um harmless enough, yeah, harmless enough. Seemingly the memes on there, I didn't really understand a lot of them. A lot of them were talking about right wing politics or um, you know, race issues or gender issues, you know, about women lying about rape, or about just in general, like like gender politics, about gay people, and you know, at first, I had come from a friend group that was pretty liberal, so I didn't really understand the memes or get them. But I started to look them up. And the more and more that I started to see the memes and I started to relate to them, the more I wanted to be part of that community since I didn't have friends to fall back on. So did you get involved in these chat rooms. I guess that's a very unequated way of describing it. Well, um, I decided to apply for a moderator position on our slashdanc memes, and a moderator is just someone who controls content that goes on the subredituh, deletes posts, you know, flags them. So I started getting in with the moderator community and a lot of the moderators that were there, there's like a group chat basically something called discord where you can talk to them about everything, talk to them about posts, and a lot of them were, you know, members of the alt right or at least believed in the philosophy. So you know, these people were basically my friends for a little bit, or at least they convinced me that friends. So what kinds of things would they say and what kinds of things would you say? They would say like on our group chat they would say like these liberal snowflakes can't handle the fact that science says they're only two genders and just stuff like that. Or they'd say like, you know, gay people, you know, aren't they aren't like genetically okay, Like it's not okay to be gay, It's not right with the Bible. They'd say, you know, immigrants are fighting or fighting to get Donald Trump out of office, and that you know, immigrants are killing people and immigrants are raping people. They would say that black people commit crimes at a higher rate than white people. Do. They bring up black crime statistics, which are obviously skewed and you know, biased, but uh, you know, you want to agree with them, because if someone's your friend, or at least if someone says that they're your friend, you want to be like them and you want to have that friend. You want to keep that friend. You don't want to be isolated. What about women? How did misogyny play into their overall conversation. A lot of the stuff they would say about women was about how women would lie about rape and about how women would lie about sexual harassment, which spoke to me on a personal point because of the thing that happened at my old school in eighth grade. So that was kind of your I don't want to say sweet spot, but their way into you. Yeah, definitely, it was the topic that I had, you know, had to change my whole life because of and because of that, I was kind of like a claim mold. I could easily be manipulated. And did you ever challenge initially some of the things that were being set there, And did you ever say, wait a second, that's not true, or that's racist or anything like that. I would never audibly fight back because I didn't want to lose my position as a moderator and I didn't want to alienate myself from the rest of them. So if they said something, I disagreed, and I just wouldn't say anything back. You have been raised in a progressive Jewish Yeah, so you must have thought, g these views do not swear with the values that have been taught by my parents. I mean, how did you kind of wrap your head around that? For me, I think a lot of it was just resentment from my parents, and resentment that made me leave my old school and they made me leave my friends, and you know, I couldn't see that they were, you know, right in the long run. You know, it was just I'm gonna be different than you guys. I'm gonna be the black sheep of the family, you know that kind of the thing. So you're sort of proud that you were being a nonconformist in a way. Yeah, it became like a part of my identity, that I was different than the rest of my family. Did your parents challenge you when you started sharing these newfound beliefs with them? Definitely, Yeah, there was a lot of um. I'd say it became pretty tense in our household because I would keep learning new stuff and then something on the news would come on that would say it would be Trump saying they were fine people on both sides of the charts to about and he was said, I would say, you know, he's right, you know, not everyone was bad, not everyone was violent, and you know, it was basically defending neo Nazis, or I would say Jews basically run the world, which my parents were horrified by because I was Jewish and I was propagating anti Semitism as a teenager and as a Jew. But to hear this blatant anti semitism as someone who's Jewish himself, was there a disconnect there? I mean at first there was, but then you bought into it, bought into it somehow. Yeah. I became so receptive that kind of talk that I would basically believe anything that they told me. And that was the case with the anti Semitism. Who were these people? Did they reveal, say what they did for a living. A lot of the people were minimum wage workers, people who worked in restaurants, people who worked in you know, hotels, and some people made money off of Reddit. The only time people would talk about their actual jobs is saying like, oh, work, it was so hard today. You know. I think they're upset because they don't have a great job, they don't have a great life in general, and they need to blame it on other people for their downfalls. So these were a lot of aggrieved people. Yeah, definitely. I'd say no one was truly happy within the alright community. I think these people are disgruntled, upset, you know, men who really feel like they have the worst. You know, they feel like they have it the worst. They got the raw end of the stay they got, the yeah they got, the short they got, they pulled a short straw. And then, on top of their preexisting anger, all the new things that they're reading on the internet about immigration, about ethnic people. You know, all of that translates into real anger and they internalize it and you know, their wires get crossed and they're kind of like a powder keg. Yeah, yeah, they're already primed and the alright, hatred is what light suffuse. That's scary, It's terrifying. How much time would you spend online? It depended on the day. I mean I would normally get home from school and then spend about three or four hours online. So you really did get sort of sucked into a vortex. That's a lot of time. Yeah, yeah, I mean it adds up to you know, after a couple of weeks, you've spent days online on those subredit's already, and that amount of time is already detrimental. How did what you heard sam impact your your relationships or how you acted with friends or at school? It alienated me amongst friend groups because again, you know, my school was fairly liberal, you know, my new school at least, and then all my friends shared those viewpoints. So me saying, you know, like immigration is out of control, that would alienate me amongst my friends, amongst my teachers. Even so, it would just drive me deeper and deeper and deeper into isolation, which in turn led to more Internet time because I wanted to talk to people because you you were lonely, yeah, I mean, above everything else, lonely. Did you feel you were targeted in some ways that once you showed up in this place that people were enticing you to kind of get deeper and deeper into it. Do you feel like your groom. Yeah, a little bit, honestly. I mean the people there were really, really, really insist on their strict set of beliefs, which is immigration is bad, women lie about rape. Uh, you know, black people commit more crimes, black people are violent, that kind of stuff. There. They were so insistent on those beliefs that it felt like I was being brainwashed. And I liked it because it meant that people, you know, I was able to talk. I was able to tell them my beliefs and tell them my take on these issues. I would say like, yeah, you know, women do lie about rape because this happened to me, and I'm proof that this is the truth. And then they would, you know, they would eat that shipped up completely. They would love it, you know, just to hear that. And so they felt like they had a receptive audience. And you definitely they thought that I was an adult for a while, which I loved. I loved feeling like an adult and feeling like my voice mattered. Was there a turning point did you say these people are assholes. Yeah, I mean it was gradual French Sam, Oh, don't worry about it. You've heard it before, I'm sure, especially on the internet. It was gradual, like I got in gradually and kind of got out gradually as well. In September two thousand seventeen, a little over a month after Charlottesville, Sam convinced his mom to take him to the so called Mother of All rallies in d C, a gathering of right wing groups ranging from arden Trump supporters to far right fascists. You'd think that finally meeting his heroes offline would only reinforce Sam's views, but ironically it was those face to face interactions that made him have second thoughts. So he went and I was like talking to some of the all right people, and a lot of them were insane, like they were crazy people, Like one guy had an iron cross on his lapel and then had a like an anarchist cookbook and was talking about how he was an anarchist but he supported Trump, which it doesn't make sense. It's ridiculous, But he kept trying to justify it with his own you know, with his own reasoning that he made up. And it made no sense. That was the first time I finally saw that the people of the alt right had no idea what the hell they were talking about. And then from there on that kind of planted the seed in my brain that grew, you know, to think like, hey, maybe I should, you know, stop doing this. Maybe I should focus more on school. Maybe I shouldn't try to isolate myself among my friends, you know, maybe I should try to make a name for myself. So I eventually got out just through time. You just stopped going there. I just gradually stopped going on the internet, you know. I went on less and less and less every day until it I was not on the hateful sub credits at all anymore. I wanted to get Sam's mom's take on what it was like watching her son go from a carefree kid to an angering member of the growing far right, so I asked her to join us for the second part of our conversation. When you first realized that saying Am was doing this, what was your reaction, I mean, how did you process it? It was a really scary time. Sam is someone who we had raised from day one to be a very empathetic kid, and everyone had always commented on how he seemed like an old soul. Hey, even his kindergarten teacher couldn't believe how well he related to other people and saw other perspectives. He was the kid that every other kid went to in class when they were hurt or when they needed a friend. He was that person. And so to watch this transformation, I mean, it was as if he had a total personality transplant. How did you realize that this was going on. We have dinner together every night as a family, and do you just have one child. We have a daughter as well, who's younger than Sam, And and that actually is part of the story, because we we had dinner every night as a family, and we always talked through the day and you know, little little things and big things. And I noticed that Sam started to talk about really odd issues, such as there is no wage gap between men and women. So he was thirteen years old. We're at the dinner table talking about our day, and he's talking about how the wage gap is a fallacy his words. And our daughter, who's younger but it is already a very ardent feminist, would argue with him about that. And we'd had such a happy, peaceful family and the two of them are were in our best friends, and so it would they would fight about it, and we were just left scratching our heads thinking where did this issue of the wage gap fallacy even come from? It was never anything we had talked about. So did you ask him where are you getting these ideas? Well? Yeah, and he said, well I read about it online and he wanted to talk about it, and he felt like he was educating us. He was really excited to be discovering all this new information, and I think because we had always been the people to tell him things, he was thrilled now to have new in for nation that we didn't have and to be able to tell it to us. So, I mean, it was the wage gap, it was stuff about the Second Amendment. It was a ton of stuff about you know, women lying about rape, and it was very jarring because it was nothing we had ever been led to expect that our kid would um parent. Do you think that the people online saw an opening in because of Sam's personal experience at his other school. Well, what what I read about when I started finally looking into it and seeing what a problem we really had is that, you know, the people in these white supremacist communities prey on depressed, vulnerable, isolated kids, and they knew what to look for um, and they saw that in him. And we saw he was lonely. He didn't say he was lonely, but we saw he had no friends. We just figured it's going to take time, you know. And when he complained about the kids at his new school, we said, it's going to take time, like over and over, because that's what you say as a parent. It's going to be okay. But that's not what the people online were telling him. What were they say They were reacting in a much more immediate way, saying, the people in your new school don't have your back for whatever reason. That was what they were implying. And they were also implying, we are the ones who have your back, and we're your real friends. And and that resonated with him. And they knew that three or four hours a day he was online. It was actually I heard him say that too. It was more than that. It was more than that because he came home. You were online when you came home, and then you went back online after dinner anything. That's what I remember, because it was do you have an exact time frame? I don't have an exact time frame, but I do remember that when you became a moderator, you had a quota that you had to fill, and that was one of the things that actually added to your stress at that time. Becau as as a moderator, you have to spend a certain amount of time online. It's not about time. It's more like you have a certain amount of posts you have to approve a day. Um so it would be I would have to approve like a hundred posts a day or remove. So there's moderator actions, and an action is removing or approving a post. You sound like you're an amazing mom. So could you not have said, I'm sorry, you can't be online like this, you can't be talking to these people. I mean, I didn't understand at the time what was going on. I mean when when he told me he was a moderator, he was so excited and proud and proud, and things had been so rocky for such a long time that seeing him happy again made me happy. And I didn't realize what this sub bread it was about. I hadn't gone on it myself. Um, I thought it was just about funny memes. In retrospect, there was so much that I did that was wrong. When did you discover the kind of hateful, horrible things that were being discussed. So it started with the whole wage gap as a fallacy business, and then it moved on to the Second Amendment. And then when he started talking about women lying about rape, obviously that was incredibly alarming. When he started parenting Jews run all the financial networks in the world, that really helped us see how far gone he was. I mean, it's it's one thing to set out on his own like political journey. And we did for a while think, well, maybe he's just maybe he just has a conservative mindset, like that's not a crime. He's not like us. But that's okay. You know, there's merit to both sides. Maybe he's sort of like an Alex P. Keaton conservative. That was like my frame of reference, the Alex P. Keaton of our family. Um. And but when he started, you know, parroting anti Semitic statements, I realized it was it was way more than that. And so that was when we started taking things a lot more seriously and engaging on a more serious level. I can't believe you went to this mother of all rallies. It took a lot of convincing. I mean, what did you think when you I got there and you saw these people, these very fine people. I was there for one reason and one reason alone, and that was to try to show Sam, by actually being there, that I I would be his partner in this um not in in believing these beliefs, but in having these discussions. And he saw for himself. I mean, that was what was so amazing about this whole experience is that he did see, by being there himself, that that these people don't have a leg to stand on. I always tried to get through to him that if you're going to have an opinion, you need to meet the people, You need to talk to the people, you need to see things with your own eyes. And that's what this was. He saw it with his own eyes, and his mind was changed. You're lucky because I imagine that there are a lot of young people who do not have the wherewithal to reject this philosophy and to basically see that it's wrong. I mean, do you ever think about what would have happened if if Sam hadn't had this epiphany. A lot of people wrote in both to the WASHINGTONY and also on Twitter, and a lot of the conversations were from parents whose kids had gone all the way in terms of the white supremacy movement and didn't come back and they were estranged and and I saw that over and over again after my article was published, and I just felt again how lucky we were that it worked out the way it did. And I think some of that has to do with the fact that um Sam was so young when it all happened. He didn't, for example, he couldn't like go out and get his own apartment, you know, he was under our roof, and I think that helped bring him back into the fold. I think that I couldn't go to events myself also right, And also you had a mom who was learning but also presenting a counterpoint. Definitely. I think a lot of the parents that have kids like that, you know, immediately go the your insane route like you did at first, and never change that route. But they don't realize that if you tell a kid no, they're just gonna want something more, I mean, more than anything else. I think that's the case with a lot of things. What do you think should be done about this? If I already given advice to a kid that was going through something like this, I would say that no one ever tells you something to be your friend, and that they only or at least a lot of the times it's not the case, and that when you read something in the news, there's a definitive yes, and you need to source your information. You need to find out where it's coming from. The thing that I do now is I'll read something from a conservative news site, and I'll read something from a very liberal news site, and I'll compare facts and I'll compile the information that has shared in both of those and to me, that is the full story. That's a lot of work, isn't it. I feel like it's worth it in the long run. I mean, even if it takes time, it's a good thing to find out the entire story. How scary is it to think that people are being radicalized online and then they are going out and in some cases, as we've seen, killing scores of people as a result of this indoctrination. It's really scary for me because, you know, over everything else, I could have been one of those people if I had gone down the path, if I had gone down further, you know, anyone has the capability to be radicalized fully, and I'm no exception of that. No one's an exception of that. Sam's story was shocking. After all, If a kid from a stable home and a progressive Jewish family at that could find himself identifying with white nationalists, what exactly does that say about the power of this movement to draw people in. Up next, an expert explains how widespread far right online radicalization has become. I'm here with Keegan Hankus of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. Keegan and his team closely monitor right wing extremists online. Again, I know that you keep a close eye on these communities and what's going on in these circles. So how and where exactly are these people congregating online and what is it about these spaces that makes them so appealing to them? Well, the modern hate movement is really marked by a lot of internet and online activity at this point. So we see a lot of these communities cropping up across all of the same major social media platforms that all of those us in our everyday lives, but we also see them trailing off into more disparate and more underground online spaces as well, especially as more pressure has been put on them in recent years. I know a huge part of the appeal I understand is the use of humor and irony and memes. How does that play into this? That's exactly right. Humor, irony, memes, other forms of visual propaganda, video and audio propaganda tremendously important. There's a whole cottage industry in the racist movement around this. I think a lot of this has to do with this culture that they're building for themselves. There's a very intentional project going on across these movements to build content that's going to keep people engaged, is going to keep pushing people towards more extreme beliefs. And they also then claim, you know, plausible deniability and say, oh, we were just kidding around, we thought this was funny. If they get busted, yeah, you frequently see people say, oh, I was just being quote edgy, or this was just humor that was taken out of context. I think what's notable is that a lot of these communities are built around these uh this activity. So if you think about a platform like h Chan, which we've seen a number of manifesto show up on in the last year or so. Um these communities, it's more common to see death threats and in a joking and almost presented as an ironic manner, than it is to not see them. I spoke with Keegan in September, about six weeks after the El Paso shooting. Following El Paso and christ Church and pow Way, there was talk of shutting down eight chan, the site where all three shooters posted violently racist manifestos. Ah Chan went dark for several months as it struggled to find a company willing to host it, but re emerged on the so called clearnet in November as the rebranded eight coon. Keegan told me more about how the site works h chan. I would first describe it as probably one of the darkest and grimmest places on the Internet, particularly some of the boards that are dedicated to politics and more specifically to extremism. It's an image board that has some text in it, and this is content that's basically organized in threads and is almost always dedicated to some form of extremism. There are participants from all across the world, especially in the last year, so what we've seen is basically cheerleading on this site around massive violence. What's the difference between eight chan and four chan? They're very very similar. H chan it was designed to be an even more extreme version of four chan. It's four Chan with even fewer rules around moderation. Almost no content at its inception was taken off of h N. We've seen that change a little bit, especially as there's been a lot of attention put on the site for the number of manifestoes that have been posted there. But it is very uncommon for content to be taken down no matter how extreme. Do you worry about shutting down these sites that they'll go further underground and be harder to monitor by law enforcement and other authorities. Well, the first thing I would point out is that sites like h N are already incredibly difficult for law enforcement to monitor. The posters are almost always anonymous. It requires a heavy investigative lift to go and unravel some of these threads as they're happening. Um, so it's already a really big problem. The bigger issue with the site like HN being online is that it's well known and it's very notorious, and that people know to go there to look for this type of content. It has a wide audience, so whenever I get asked about, you know, the danger of driving this content further underground, I actually propose an idea more akin to containment. Right, we should be striving to make this content as hard to find as possible, because you are then limiting the potential pool of people who may be susceptible to its messaging. So you'd be okay to have it go into sort of the darkest corner of the dark web. Absolutely. It also makes it easier for researchers like myself and my colleagues of the SPLC to track these communities. We follow these extremes wherever they go, and there's this interesting tension in the hate movement where they can never go entirely underground. So if your entire project is based around the idea that doing nothing or not bringing more followers into your movement means extinction for white people, which is what many of these individuals believe, then you necessarily have to have some entry points into it. Well, that brings me to the next question, how do they convert people and how easy is it for them to have access to vulnerable targets. Well, it has become disturbingly more easy to find vulnerable targets. With the rise of social media, in particular in the last decade or so, as we've seen a lot of these tech companies really drag their feet, uh to enact meaningful policies and to enforce them against hate and extremism. One of the things that they commonly do is go to online spaces, whether it be on social media or certain you know, right leaning news sites, where they know that there are people who are near their ideological beliefs but still part of the mainstream, and they will start using very targeted propaganda to try to push them further and further to the right. They call this red Heilene. Is that right? Yeah, So that's common vernacular on a lot of these sites and in a lot of these communities for uh, you know, bringing someone into this set of extremist beliefs. You know, it's it's reminiscent of the matrix of course, right where you take this red pill and suddenly you see reality for what it is. Do potential recruits share anything in terms of demographics, geographics, socio economic backgrounds. It's a really difficult question, and the reason for that is it's really difficult to know just how many people have been exposed to these beliefs. What we see, at least from monitoring the extremist groups themselves and their leaders, is a really concerted effort to recruit young white men into these movements. Uh. And there's a couple of mechanisms that they used to do that. So one of those is that they play up this narrative of basically declining prospects for young white men. You know, they make a narrative about you know, what's being taken from them, are deprived for them, and they ascribe that to you know, a target community, say it's this group's fault that you did not get what you were expected, or this is the group that took what you thought you were owned, and sort of grievance politics. Right, that's absolutely right. Do you think the number of people who are gravitating towards these groups has exploded? What role do you think external factors are playing into this? I e. Political rhetoric that we hear, the immigration debate, the whole focus on diversity and inclusion in kind of all aspects of society, and by the way, changing demographics. So it's interesting you actually just named the three largest drivers that we point to when we explain that we listed the largest number of hate groups that we've ever counted last year. You know, there were a thousand and twenty of them in the country. And in that number, we saw fifty rise in the number of white nationalist groups. And when you're explaining or when we are explaining how that happened, those are a lot of the factors we point to. Demographic change is absolutely the biggest driver of these groups and what is giving them so much energy this tremendous anxiety about the idea that you know, whites will no longer be an absolute majority in this country. This rhetoric has been very effective in driving people these movements, and it has coupled really dangerously with a lot of the toxic political rhetoric that we've seen from the halls of power, particularly the White House in recent years. A lot of this anxiety about immigration, for instances showing up in the manifestos of mass shooters. Uh. And it is almost indistinguishable from some of the statements we see from politicians when it comes to the pres it in do you think that he has made or sent implicit or explicit messages to these very groups by saying things like they're very fine people on both sides, or just failing to criticize and come out and say this is wrong. Well, he's done both. I mean it's been explicit and implicit, and this is obviously not lost on these communities. I mean they see the president's language, whether they agree with him on every issue or not, as the ultimate validation of their worldview. What can be done about this, Well, there's a number of things. I mean the first, at a high level, especially when we're talking about this issue of radicalization and online spaces, you know, we need to demand more of the technology companies that play such a large role in our lives. For instance, we should have meaningful policies banning all of this content on every major social media platform, and not only that, we expect them to enforce this stuff. That is an easy first step, you know. One of the other things that speaks to the drivers that you brought up earlier, because you know, we as citizens and voters need to be making forceful demands that politicians speak out against hate and extremism, and also candidates should be including these planks in their platforms. And the other piece of this is, you know, we need to find ways of a civil society level to break down these feelings of social isolation and really do more to counter what the racist hate groups have been so good at perpetuating, which is this narrative that you know, demographic change and diversity in this country and multiculturalism is somehow a threat to white people. What about the free speech argument? I know you mentioned social media and basically stopping this on all platforms. You often hear the free speech argument and this being a slippery slope, and I'm curious what your reaction would be to that. Well, whenever I have the free speech argument presented to me, I bring up a couple of different points. You know, there's no one stopping these individuals from going out on a street corner and yelling racist slogans or trying to convince random passer bys of their racism and you know, the truth in their worldview as they would see it. However, the difference when it comes to the social media companies, as these are megaphones that are directed in every direction. Right, this is just tremendous amplification for these ideas, and members of hate groups and their leaders have proven that they're very good at manipulating them. These companies have every right as private institutions to set codes of conduct and acceptable use policies against these ideas, and I would argue that many of them, if not all of them, have a moral responsibility to do so, given the consequences that we've watched play out so many times. I would remind all of your listeners that you know, what happened in christ Church, New Zealand earlier this year is an absolute atrocity, and it's incredibly disheartening and was powered by Facebook's live broadcasting mechanisms. The fact that that was even allowed to happen and the devastating impact that we watched it have across the world, UH is a problem in and of itself. So there's a lot of work to be done. You know. One of the things that we would expect from these companies, and these are two concrete suggestions, is you know, we want them to be much more transparent about the activity of extremists on their platforms, and especially making that data available to outside academics and researchers who study this so that they can try to find new ways to combat it. The other is, and this especially speaks to for instance, Facebook Live and the role it played in New Zealand. Um, whenever they're rolling out products, we should be testing them against civil rights concerns as opposed to just solely looking at how much money we can make from them in the consequences of not rolling them out quickly. You are offering some great suggestions, But when you really think about it, do you think, Hgan, that this can be controlled or is it just too hard to get a handle on this. I think it's too important and the consequences are too devastating not to try. And I think there's some obvious in easy steps for us to begin taking to go down this path. Um. Whether we ultimately succeed, we'll have to see. Um. But I just can't accept that the normal and regular pace of life is now going to be that we're going to see these violent actions taking place over and over again in our society. It's I mean, it's just devastating to watch and for you, just unacceptable, absolutely unacceptable, well should be for everyone. Up next, we'll hear from someone who understands exactly what it takes to leave extremism behind, an ex neo Nazi who was able to turn her life around Angela Hi. It's Katie Curic. How are you, I'm well, thank you? How are you today? I'm good. Thing. We've talked a lot about how online radicalization works, but experts in this field also talk a lot about what it takes to do you radicalize someone. Angela King, a former neo Nazi, has devoted her life to doing just that. Her organization Life After Hate, helps people disavow far right extremism. Do you believe the radicalization process today is fundamentally different than it was when you were younger? Fundamentally no, just more streamlined, and individuals have the ability to now become radicalized completely online rather than in face to face meetings. How did your radicalization happen? Well? I was raised in South Florida in a household that there's no easy way to say it. I was taught racism and homophobia from as early as I can remember, from my parents and my family, and by the time I was an adolescent, I was angry. I had been bullied. I was very vulnerable, and when I ran into other UH kids my age who were already involved in the violence far right, it wasn't a great weak for me to become involved. I happen to have ingredients in my life and experiences that led to a very negative recipe. Let's call it so. You know, I had familial racism and homophobia that certainly socialized me in a way to think that I was better than others and that that kind of behavior and thinking was acceptable. But I was also vulnerable. I went through um in acute identity crisis at a very young age because of what I was exposed to at home and some experiences. I was bullied both verbally and physically, and I buckled under that pressure. You know, I I honestly felt that my pain emotionally and mentally was so intense I could not hold it on my own. And it's only in retrospect that I'm able to see that as this vulnerable young person that was struggling and in so much pain, I tried to literally beat my pain into other people. That's really difficult to come to terms with. But it's even more difficult to see the very same things happening to an even larger scale to our young people today. There's a lot of fear, and I feel like anger has its roots and fear one of the big factors that I think is contributing to an increase in and extremism and far right extremism in particular, is changing demographics. It will be a majority minority population. Absolutely. Communities or groups who are used to being in positions of power and affluence are losing those positions or feeling like they're about to lose them. What is terrible is that we are a society that is so quick to say this is mine, I'm not sharing, you're not taking this from me, instead of sitting down and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and allowing ourselves to say, hey, I'm worried about this. There's nothing wrong with being worried about the future, but when we allow that to translate into violence or into dehumanization. We always talk about learning from the past and learning from history. It is becoming clear on a daily basis to me that those lessons are almost blocked. You know, I don't know if you have seen or heard about any of the polls asking something as simple as or measuring, you know, people's knowledge about something like the Holocaust. That history is slipping away. And that's terrifying. When you look back at your own journey, was there a turning point when did you say this is wrong, I can't do this anymore. This isn't me. It took me almost a decade before I had that epiphany. I was nineteen. Oh gosh, I just gave my age away. I was nineteen when the Oklahoma City bombing happened. I had already been involved in the violent far right for years, and that was the first thing that I really remember kind of shaking me a little bit and even um inspiring me to consider my beliefs or my actions. It that wasn't even enough. What I was involved with isn't something that you know, you just wake up from one day and say, hey, you know, nice knowing you have a nice life. I'm growing up now or moving on. So it was another few years when I was twenty three and I found myself sitting in a federal detention center because I took part in a hate crime. You were arrested for taking part in an armed robbery of the Jewish owce store, and you were sent to prison for that. Yes, I was. And it was sitting in this federal detention center as a result of that that I really started to reconsider my life. There was a woman, um, a woman of color, who kept looking at me this one day and in my mind. I thought, she's going to do something to me, she's planning something, she's going to try to beat me up, or And she asked me if I knew how to play a game, and I didn't, So she picked this game up and came over and sat down next to me and taught me how to play. And she did that knowing why I was sitting in that detention center. She did that, knowing that I was there for a hate crime. She did that having to look at the racist tattoos I had on my body because I couldn't cover them all. And over the course of the time I spent in prison, I was treated with kindness and compassion by women who I never would have had the same respect for had I met them prior to entering prison. And it changed me. I mean I was changed at the core of who I was as a human being. Because I was expecting anger, aggression, hatred, potentially violence, I wasn't expecting kindness. That just absolutely disarmed me. And it inspired me not only to change who I was and to take responsibility, but to come out and do something meaningful with my life and to make a difference with the unique knowledge and experiences that I had. How long did you spend in prison? Almost three years? When you got out, I know you started an organization, Life After Hate. What inspired you to do that? Well, I did not start it by myself. I am one of six co founders of Life After Hate UM, and essentially I did outreach and some consulting for about a decade before I met my fellow co founders. In two thousand eleven, I was invited to attend a summit in Dublin. It was at this conference that I first UM met face to face with others who were similar to me, and by that I mean other former violent far right extremists. On the last day, we talked about how inspired we were by you know, the individuals that we met and the things that we learned, the feelings, you know, the emotions that we had, and we all remembered what it was like to go through this disengagement from the violent far right on our own. And we also talked about UM coming back to the US and moving forward together as a group. And one of the men had an online journal called Life After Hate, and he said, I have the perfect name. Let's take the name of my journal and we'll go home and turn it into a nonprofit organization, and that's exactly what we did. What is the group's primary focus. Our primary program is called Exit USA, and Exit USA is a program that helps individuals to disengage from the violent far right. So there is UM an element of intervention that is involved. There is after care and support networks in place. UM. This is not a linear process. It is different for every individual and it can depend on so many different things. You know, why someone got involved, how long they were involved, what kind of violent far right group they were involved with them. We do not go out seeking UM. Individuals come to us concerned family loved ones. We get UM referrals, so it can be anyone from you know, a teacher, to a parent, to a sibling, to a spouse, to UM law enforcement to somebody from you know, a human rights group. We also get individuals who contact us directly and say, hey, I have been involved in this for this long, you know, and for whatever reason, I don't want to be involved, but I don't know exactly how to get out. What is the success rate? I mean, are you more often than not able to extricate people from this world? You know? It all depends, UM. There are so many factors involved. Part of it depends on the individual. It is not at all uncommon to see a certain level of recidivism with this when individuals get involved in these types of groups. It's not necessarily because someone wakes up one day and says, I decided I hate everyone who doesn't look like me today. A lot of times there are so many other mitigating factors. So maybe somebody has grievances, maybe somebody's looking for protection, maybe somebody's looking for acceptance, are belonging somewhere, so when they find these things, they gravitate to the group, and they're so grateful for having found or filled whatever was missing for them that they take on the entire identity of the group. This affects every aspect of life, the kind of clothes they wear, the kind of music they listen to, the kind of food they eat, the people that they associate with. So imagine having all of that and then disengaging. You lose all of that, So you lose your entire identity and need to reshape a completely new one. So a lot of times we see individuals who we call it, you know the difference between disengagement and de radicalization. So for someone to disengage. They can disengage from you know, physically being in proximity to the individuals. They're not going to events any longer. They're not you know, going to meetings or out you know, physically recruiting people. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they've left behind the ideology. De radicalization, on the other hand, that's at the cognitive level. So that's deconstructing the beliefs and the ideology and leaving that behind. Um So it's a very very complicated process. Like I said, it's not linear, and it's really hard to go into success and failure because then we have to stop and ask, how are we measuring success? How do we measure what was prevented? So, for instance, look at you know, we can look at things like the cost to society. What if we prevent people from committing mass violence, you know, like a mass shooting. Is it successful if we prevent someone from picking up a gun and going out and doing something like that, but they maybe still have the belief. It's very complicated and it's something that I think is going to remain complicated probably forever. Is there anything you would say to someone listening today who might be worried about a loved one who might be attracted. I can't imagine people attracted to these beliefs necessarily be listening to my podcast, honestly, but you never know. What would you say to those people if they're in fact out there listening right now. I would tell them that their novelone that you know, things don't have to be that difficult. We have a community of individuals who understand from having the experience there, and you know, we are individuals who have gone on and worked hard to be so much more than just former extreme you know, we're educated, we've worked on, you know, making amends, and you know, really going for personal and professional growth. So I would say, you know, to everyone, whether it's an individual who wants to come out or a concerned loved one or family member, change is possible. Transformation is possible. One of the hardest things that we have to do is to listen to each other and to try to understand one another's grievances, not to concede our own position that these beliefs are heinous and they're wrong, But we are not going to just right off the individual human being because their beliefs are ugly. People can come back from this. I know this is true. Um, probably you know more than I know anything else in this life, because I've I've gone through it myself. So I would just say, you know, there is help out there. We're here to listen. We're not, you know, going to judge, and it's possible we we can find a way to get through it. We've talked about earlier, you know, the Holocaust and the lessons of the past. I have in the past two years had experiences with survivors who have said things like, it was never supposed to happen again, and it's happening again. Why Why are we letting this happen. Why isn't anyone doing anything? Why don't people care? It's horrifying to me that we have individuals, an entire generation that they're almost gone, their voices are almost gone from this world. What they survived and what they went through no human beings should have to go through. And we are on the same path again. It sure is enough to motivate someone to keep going. Well, thank you for the work that you're doing, Angela, and thank you for having such a profoundly open and honest conversation with us about your own story and about the larger story that unfortunately is unfolding in this country. Thank you. I am one of the lucky ones. Angela is in fact one of the lucky ones. Clearly she had the strength, support and newfound empathy that opened her heart to understand others and ultimately herself. It seems to me people are attracted to these groups because they're lonely, isolated and want a sense of belonging. If you need help or know someone who does, you can go to Life After Hate dot org, or you can text or call six one two eight exit. Thank you so much for listening everyone. I hope you learned something from this episode. I certainly did. By the way, if you're feeling overwhelmed by news and ormation these days, and let's face it, who isn't, you can sign up for my daily newsletter, wake Up Call by going to Katie correct dot com. And of course I'm a social animal, so you can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Until next time and my next question, Thanks again for listening. Next Question with Katie Curic is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Curic Media. The executive producers are Katie Curic Lauren Bright Pacheco, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang. Our show producers are Bethan Macaluso and Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. Associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clemens. Editing is by Dylan Fagan, Derek Clements, and Lowell Berlante. Our researcher is Barbara Keene. For more information on today's episode, go to Katie Currek dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie currec For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.