 So good afternoon everyone, we're just gonna get started. Thank you so much for coming to New America and thanks for coming to our session which is Control Alt Delete Hate, a civil society approach to preventing terrorism and targeted violence. My name is Melissa Sallick-Virk and I'm a senior policy analyst here with New America's International Security Program. And for those of you new to New America, we're a think and action tank, a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub, and public forum. The International Security Program aims to provide evidence-based analysis of some of the toughest security challenges facing American policy makers and the public. From homegrown American terrorism to United States drone wars abroad and the proliferation of drones around the world to the profound changes in warfare wrought by new technology and societal changes. I'd like to first begin by introducing Jesse Morton of Parallel Networks who will begin with a presentation on their new initiative before we jump into the panel portion. Jesse was once a jihadist propagandist then known as Eunice Abdullah Muhammad who ran Revolution Muslim, a New York City-based organization active in the 2000s and connected to a number of terrorism cases. He connected Al Qaeda's ideology and transformed it for America, creating English language propaganda. Morton deradicalized in 2011 following his arrest in Casablanca and then incarceration in the U.S. He's now executive director of Parallel Networks. And after Jesse's presentation I'll invite the rest of our speakers to join me on stage and I'll briefly provide an introduction for each of them. We'll discuss Parallel Network's new initiative, the changing threat landscape, future of terrorism prevention practices and the relationship between far right wing and jihadism. We'll say the last 30 minutes or so for audience Q and A and with that I'll hand it over to Jesse. So good afternoon and thank you for attending today's event. We are certainly honored to be here. I'd like to express a special gratitude to New America for hosting today's event, a civil society approach to preventing terrorism and targeted violence. Today's an event that is important for us as it marks the release of our new counter-polarization, hate and extremism initiative called Control Alt Delete Hate. Control Alt Delete Hate is a magazine that will be issued in print and online will be passing around some copies. It is a component of an ecosystemic approach to combating extremism that we've been building out since we got started. You can see the cover of the first edition here which went online this morning but the initiative is more than a mere counter-narrative tool. It is part of our innovative and holistic approach to addressing the threat posed by enhancing and mutually reinforcing extremisms here in the U.S. First, a little bit on the project's background. It's important to realize it's not a standalone initiative. Control Alt Delete Hate is more than just a magazine. For over a year now, Mitch and I, with the assistance of many supporters and in particular the Counter-Extremism Project and their team of researchers have been working on advancing a comprehensive program that can assist in combating the mounting threat posed particularly now by far right-wing extremism. In fact, my partnership with Mitch was announced publicly on June 4th, 2018 with an event right here at New America that documented in the various legacy I once built as a jihadi propagandist and that Mitch combated while he was with the NYPD as Director of Intelligence. Since then, we've learned a great deal. After researching, networking, speaking, publishing reports, designing programs, we launched the online ecosystem. We'll discuss here today in more detail and in which Control Alt Delete Hate will now be incorporated. This project, Control Alt Delete Hate, came about as a result of much in-person effort. Since our inception, we've been putting together a network of former victims of extremism, activists, researchers, supporters, and others that believe in our model. Thinking about Control Alt Delete Hate started a year ago during a week of fluoride activity that made it apparent we needed to get moving and fast. The ad activity included the tragic Tree of Life synagogue attacks, which occurred in the midst of the Magelbomber Scare and an individual white supremacist who tried to get into a barricaded African-American church and proceeded to shoot two elderly African-Americans at a supermarket in Kentucky. Of course, things have gotten a lot worse since then, but we started at that time to select a team of formers and victims of right-wing extremism that can serve alongside our codder that was pre-existent of former jihadists to help us expand into the right-wing space going forward. At the core of our network, late Jeff Scoop, who led the largest neo-Nazi organization in America for over two decades, Frank Mink, whom the movie American History X was based, myself and others like Brad Galilei, who is also here today, and people like Cope Heider, an African-American woman whose father was murdered by a white supremacist, and she actually is in contact with the individual that murdered him and provides sort of support and empathy. These have been our interventionists over the past year, and at the same time, we've supported and informed one another. Control at Elite Hate is a byproduct of these year-long efforts. It's the beginning of our answer, particularly in the right-wing space. So I'd like to talk a little bit about our unique approach to this problem. We believe that formers offer an unrivaled insight, particularly one teamed with an amazing collective of others from different fields and spectrums of activity. Our efforts draw largely from a transdisciplinary model that we call the parallel network philosophy. It's one that takes an ecosystemic approach that expands CVE activities so that what have typically been standalone help lines with no outreach and little publicity and marketing or failed counter-narrative campaigns that cannot reach their targeted audience and are essentially ineffective because they are not connected to a broader network or movement. We think of the need instead of creating an alternative network or movement, you might describe it as, one that first seeks to rival in size and scope and cohesive worldview the network that ties extremists together. Only then we believe, can you map that network's impact, the parallel network's impact, and measure the result of intervention-oriented engagement. So control-alt-delete-hate will serve as a cornerstone of these efforts. A bit more on the history and how this template was established, the control-alt-delete-hate easing and the methodology we'll use to disseminate it will be based upon a pilot initiative we launched in June of 2019, six months ago. When I was a jihadist recruiter and propagandist on behalf of Al-Qaeda from 2003 to 2011, I collaborated with several premier jihadists right here in the US to develop the very first English-language jihadist magazines. I designed and wrote the lead article for the first issue, which we called jihad recollections. And after my New York City-based organization threatened the writers of South Park for portraying the Prophet Muhammad, Al-Qaeda launched their own iteration called Inspire. That eventually became ISIS's own debitkin Rumia. So over the years, these magazines weaponized propaganda in ways unseen beforehand. So Mitch and I came up with the idea of taking that template back I once initiated and using it for positive purposes. So we designed a counter-narrative product that outdid jihadists in graphic design and its content and its structure, called an al-Hutakwa for Arabic for people of consciousness. And we included articles that deconstructed the jihadist ideology, included the testimony of formers like myself, and offered a positive alternative worldview that we call our dialogue of civilization's model equally applicable as we address what's perceived threats on the far right for the ethno-state that they categorize as Western civilization. A month before the launch of al-Hutakwa, we inaugurated LightUponLight.online. It's a core hosting hub, we might call it, for control delete hate as well, and we'll embed it there similarly. We launched the first issue of al-Hutakwa in the fifth anniversary of ISIS's pronouncement of its so-called caliphate. And before the launch, even got the counter-terrorism community and jihadist sympathizers to believe that ISIS was about to launch a new English language magazine. That coupled with a media rollout that generated publicity forced extremist recruiters to respond as we invaded their echo chambers. It is essentially the only counter-narrative product that has been utilized over encrypted platforms like Telegram, where extremists, including more recently the far right, are migrating as a result of efforts by mainstream social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to remove extremist content. When we first launched al-Hutakwa, the jihadist recruiters and preachers were angry. We kept popping up in their closed discussion groups with the magazine because we had multiple moles in their network. A method Mitch knows all too well the importance of. That led them to engage me in private discourse where we were screenshotting the refutations we provided. We then bumped evidence of the ignorance of their leadership and their ability to respond to our arguments back into the jihadist networks, spamming them with evidence against those they hold as leaders. At the same time, the magazine connects to interventions. It's not a standalone counter-narrative product. For example, after reading al-Hutakwa on Telegram and coming over to threaten me on Twitter, I've established good relations and am supporting a prominent individual that caused quite a bit of fanfare when he returned back to the West having joined ISIS in Syria but who remains free absent criminal charges. Several similar interventions have arisen as a result of al-Hutakwa's embeddedness in the pro-ISIS English language Telegram network. So now each article in each edition of al-Hutakwa serves as a standalone piece on the website, and it's utilized for linking to engagements, sharing over social media, and putting into extremist conversation threads online. We also use al-Hutakwa for prevention. In 2020, we'll be printing hard copies of both al-Hutakwa and Control-Delete-8 and visiting cities around the United States, speaking publicly with our core team to raise awareness and promote our intervention services. Now that we've launched Control-Delete-8, we can use the same method for domestic extremist collectives while also discussing reciprocal radicalization. So like al-Hutakwa, Control-Delete-8 e-magazine becomes not a standalone counter-narrative product built on the if-you-build-it-they-will-come hypothesis, nor something too insignificant in scope and application to have an actual impact. Next, I'll elaborate a bit on the holistic nature of the project and how it fits into our ecosystem. First, then Control-Delete-8 is more than just the name of a magazine. It's something that we utilize as a clear paradigm in conducting personal and collective transformations. Based on keystrokes and playing off the popularized alt-right brand name, Control-Delete-8 offers a unique framework for storytelling and transformation. The first stage, Control, is to pause and process when confronted with extremist behavior or ideology. As Holocaust survivor Victor Frankel once stated, between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response and in our response lies our growth and our freedom. So our approach is dedicated to imparting this realization. Control transitions to alt, which essentially looks at altering course, to recognize that we need to look not just at the response to extremism and how we react to it, but to create alternative courses that address what are often legitimate grievances by nonviolent mechanisms. The alt phase turns to delete hate, a phase that asks us all to recognize that in such a tumultuous period, only a whole of society approach can address the threat and surrounding issues. When applied, individuals can grasp deradicalization, collectives can contribute, and the message of the magazine has an underlying methodology that can transition into a paradigm and process for individual and collective alteration. Shift hate is the next component of our ecosystem. This is where one-on-one engagements occur, which the authors in the first edition of the magazine and other support staff have facilitated. Shift hate stands for support and help for individuals and families touched by hate. Under that umbrella, we run a 24-7 helpline and aggressively embed access to it via our unrivaled access to online extremist networks. Without any marketing or broad-based support from government or social media companies, we've already conducted nearly 100 interventions, many with key hubs of extremist movements. For example, Jeff and a young female former far-right wing propagandist are here with us today, and they offer a sort of case studies of those that have benefited from the parallel network philosophy. We contact those that disengage publicly from extremist movements, and we offer them support as well. We've used Shift to provide some of the only support services to terrorism-related offenders returning to our streets after their incarceration, and we've utilized their case studies to conduct research and recommendations on how to address their concerns in a paper released last year when terrorists come home, again with the support of the counter-extremism project. So the final component of the ecosystem is save hate, society against violent extremism and hate. If Shift hate offers a deficit-based approach, then save hate is our asset-based approach that seeks to build out that network I was referencing that can transform essentially into a movement. Extremists don't simply offer a message. They offer a coherent worldview and counterculture, a community built on axioms and a particular epistemology. They develop ecochambers where opposition is drowned out by noise and confirmation bias. Extremist recruiters think multi-dimensionally and they remain fluid. They're able to adjust nimbly almost instantaneously. Save hate is essentially an effort to match and reverse-engineer the extremist method our team knows all too personally. The save hate component utilizes influencers, whom we call our shapeshifters, and concentrates on formulating that parallel network, that network built on principles antithetical to hate that come together synergistically and offer a complete worldview and alternative to the extremist ecochamber. So the parallel network ecosystemic methodology. You can see on this slide the different intersectional components. First, lightuponlight.online serves as the core hub of our ecosystem. It generates safe spaces free of hate and hosts all of our activity. Each entity of the lightuponlight ecosystem, control, delete hate, shift hate, and save hate is hosted there. Taken together, the system permits extremist energies to be transitioned in a manner that creates opportunities for individuals and groups to experience the same meaning, significance, and sense of belonging extremists offer. Second is research. The understanding today is that evidence-based initiatives with measurable outcomes must precede implementation. We seek instead to learn by doing and then measure outcomes. Extremism is fluid. The lag associated with top-down social science often means the implementation of data-driven interventions that are no longer appropriate in a climate that has already shifted. We first start to grow through the parallel network, then we measure engagements effectively only once the network coalesces and can be juxtaposed and measured against the contraction or expansion of the extremist networks we seek to alter. Partnerships, the third consultancy, is key. There's currently too much competition and not enough collaboration in the PVE, CVE space. Arcata reformers, victims of extremism and shapeshifters, for example, they all do their own things independently, but their engagement with the activity within the lightuponlight ecosystem allows their individual efforts to magnify. Becomes less about the individual, more about the movement. Think of the way charismatic preachers and propagandists operate under the extremist brands, but still can become individual icons, archetypal representatives that embody the mission of their respective causes and organizations. The Control Alt Delete Hate magazine will help us build out effective, alternative and positive messaging. That messaging will lead to broader marketing and raising public awareness about the Shift Hate Intervention Services and Save Hate will now expand the partnerships and shapeshifters or influencers and continue to provide a key means of networking to expand the movement. All of these components feed off of and into each other. So from a social service perspective, they're designed to approach the issue of violent extremism as a public health phenomenon and to demarcate each component of the brand so that it can fulfill engagement at levels of prevention, education, harm reduction, intervention, counter-messaging, restorative justice and rehabilitation, the whole social science or social service spectrum. Finally then, going forward. Now we have to advance and expand the parallel network. We've only been up and running this for publicly, light upon light ecosystem for six months. We'll expand it through activity within each of the ecosystem's essential components. So we'll be building out more research. We have already heavily embedded and are in contact with networks such as Antifa, the in-cell movement, Proud Boys, where Control Alt Delete Hate will be disseminated. We've already contacted several of the hubs of those communities to do so. Our grassroots intervention efforts have already established sufficient sample sizes necessary for empirical qualitative research. We'll also release a report on the Al-Takwa project and we'll pursue other initiatives as well. We'll be looking to form more partnerships. We've been networking with the peace building community and already have put together an impressive team that will organize a center for the study of trauma and radicalization. We've collaborated with ideas beyond borders to translate the Al-Takwa magazine into Arabic and to expand our influence into the Muslim majority world. We'll be taking back ISIS's Anaba newsletter, utilizing the same approach as Al-Takwa in Arabic. We're looking to expand into Australia, into Canada and Western Europe as well. We'll engage social media companies and request their support, promoting the shift tape helpline and making sure that users looking for extremist content are provided access and pathways to the light upon light messaging hub. Light upon light itself will increase its coverage of extremist related activity. We see a communication hub and online portal that can host grassroots research and journalism, that can advance podcasts, online videos and other media, that can arm publics with information and confront polarization with coverage and commentary that enhances resilience and offers a worldview that creates a collective non-polarizing consciousness. As far as shift hate interventions, then we've been advocating for a governmental focus for CVE that focuses specifically on the intervention space. A focus that might reduce public criticism of CVE and government involvement within and provide an alternative to sole reliance on investigation and interdiction. This might add a tool to the counter-terrorism toolbox, mechanisms for civil society organizations like our own to conduct targeted interventions. We put together a proposal for next year that would ultimately lead to uniformity and internal record keeping, advance a Coursera online course that can train and empower our key interventionists with information, instruction in skills and uniform standards and communication. We want to replicate essentially the field of substance abuse treatment, a field that has evolved to rely on former addicts armed with formal training to produce improved outcomes. As for save hate, then we'll be utilizing our partnerships to increase the number of our shapeshifters. In 2020, which will be a volatile and contentious year for certain, we'll be looking to present the magazines to 15 different cities. In the United States particularly, we'll speak there, we'll enhance awareness, we'll educate those on the front lines, we'll impart better understanding of risk indicators and in turn, we'll expand the save hate initiative. After our visit, we'll also retain contact with those communities. So when something comes up, they know we're available to support their own localized efforts. Now in conclusion, we are very honored to be here today. As a society, we need to effectively altogether pause in that space between stimulus and response to alter course and recognize that each of us does in fact have a role to play and ability to address the consequences of polarization, hate and extremism. As Albert Einstein once put it, no problem has ever been solved at the same level of consciousness that created it. We seek nothing less than a paradigm shift in the realm of preventing and countering violent extremism. I look forward to today's discussion. Thank you very much for joining us. I'll give some quick intros. So thank you, Jesse. So first to my immediate left is Mitch Silver. He's the CEO of Parallel Networks and organization he co-founded with Jesse Morton. Mitch is also a founding principal at the Guardian Group and intelligence and security consulting firm. Prior to his work at Guardian Group, Mitch served as Director of Intelligence Analysis at the NYPD, where he was a principal counterterrorism advisor to the Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and was responsible for building out and managing the analytic and cyber units. Then next to have Brad Galloway. Bradley Galloway is a research and intervention specialist with the Organization for Prevention of Violence, which is based in Edmonton, Alberta. Recently, Brad has joined with Parallel Networks and Light Upon Light to work on various initiatives to counter hate and violent extremism in the United States. And then next to Jesse is Jeff Scoop. Until early 2019, Jeff was one of the most prominent figures of the neo-Nazi movement in the United States. He was the national leader commander of the National Socialist Movement for over 25 years. It is now Jeff's mission to help end the violence caused by extremism and radicalization. Today, Jeff is an extremist consultant and works with Parallel Networks as a prevention and intervention specialist. So thank you all for being here today. So let's start with the focus of Parallel Network's recent easing before we zoom in and discuss policy in the United States. So starting with Jesse, can you talk about the existence and similarities of far right, far left, and jihadist tactics and propaganda and how they feed off of each other and for example, the new neo-Nazi social networking platform called the base kind of ties into al-Qaeda because in Arabic al-Qaeda means the base. And then also some far right groups have glorified bin Laden as a symbol according to Vice Reporting. Yeah, so it's a very complicated discussion and one that needs much more research, but I mean, effectively you have three primary principles of the objectives and the narrative that interweave between the far right and jihadism. And then to some degree, the far left as well. So really you have this notion that the community is under threat, that the ummah is attacked or that the white race is attacked. So that is essentially the demarcating characteristic of violent extremists that in order to preserve yourself from the attack violence is justified. And then you have this real issue with the extremist mindset, which is resistant to change and alteration and preserves traditionalism as a way to defend themselves from that. And we see that with regard to this idea of the white ethno-state are returning back to something that is akin to such. And with regard to Islam, it wants to return back to a caliphate, essentially the third demarcating characteristic I think that runs similar is this return to a utopian past. But sometimes we overplay that because it's not a utopian past that wants to return to the seventh century, it wants to return to the 1800s. It's a utopian past that gives the framework upon which modernity or postmodernity can be expanded in line with their preconceptions and interests. So what we see really in my opinion is that's fascinating for me as someone who's acted from 2003 until 2011 is that a lot of what's going on with the far right now that the focus is on them replicates almost to a T the particular approach that we utilize when the jihadists became really the topic of our concern particularly after 7.7 attacks were carried out and we suddenly realized that homegrown violent extremism was a primary import. And so the adjustments that you reference like with organizations like the base are key because if you look at the images and it won't get too far into it but if you look at the images of the people that are pledging allegiance or making veya to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's successor right now it looks almost identical. Seven or eight kids in the woods with guns pledging allegiance to Quran and to their new Khalifa. And if you look at the images of groups like Adam Wafen and now they're fracturing and Fijian Wafen and the base, five or six young white men in the woods armed with AK-47s. And if you watch the propaganda, the videos Adam Wafen just released something of like seven individuals training and shooting framed exactly like an ICS video would have been framed back at the heyday of their onset of their khirafah and you talked about vice identifying the TATP recipe which is disseminated frequently over telegram. This is a jihadi, mast, comes out into a kitchen new kitchen completely remodeled and cheeches one like he's at a cooking show how to produce TATP in their home with basic household items. The group promoted this on the far right and said TATP it's easy to make and then they had some semblance of Osama bin Laden as a resistance figure that they were incorporating into their propaganda. And even with regard to the reaction of the far right to efforts to take them down off mainstream YouTube platforms, revolution, Muslim radicalized Roshanar Shaldery in her own bedroom on her computer online. It was very much the very first case of isolated radicalization into violence. Immediately the British government called for takedown but immediately what we did as an organization was we adjusted by migrating to other platforms and using YouTube in a way that was consistent and prevented takedown due to their terms of service agreement. So that's the same thing that the far right is in today and it's a topic that you could go on for hours about but it's very important to identify this so that we don't make the same mistakes that we made when confronting the jihadists. Thank you. Does anyone wanna talk about some narratives that have either been used by any of these groups and then kind of changed a bit depending on another ideology? I think what he was saying about the Adam Waffen and things like this with the far right, I mean it's these guys will always fracture each other too. The infighting led me right into thinking about how they're never satisfied with just the one group. It ends up fracturing and these are good intervention points especially for law enforcement and for us as intervention is trying to say okay well this group looks like it's fracturing. Let's go see if we can talk to some of these members whether it be online or if police wanna do typical doorknock scenario is just go and check in on these guys and see what they're up to. I mean that's where a community can sort of mix with I think with the different agencies that are out there that are looking into these groups too. I know in the Canadian perspective some of this has been a bit of a challenge seeing these different types of groups coming up but definitely this infighting thing is definitely leading to these groups falling apart too so we wanna take advantage of those scenarios. And that's something that stems back many, many, many years. In the far right it's constantly a divisive topic between the different groups and the infighting so these are good opportunities to get in there and try to pull people out. Okay, that's very helpful. I think also tying directly into your easing it mentions 954 hate groups that were identified in the US in 2017 so can you give us an idea of what's the nature of these groups? How many of them are violent? How many are still active? So that's a number that was drawn from ADL reporting and it's an important one. I think it's hard to categorize what is a hate group. So this is the question like hate is a lot harder to find than violent extremism because in order to hate you don't have to explicitly call for violence but there's an implicit association with it. One of the key things that ADL points out and particularly is that members of these hate groups oftentimes don't act in the name of the ideology or cause of the movement but because they're associated and affiliated with this network that is promoting hate and extremism they oftentimes go on to commit violence in other realms of their life. Domestic violence is very important. So these could be anywhere, if you look at the list they could be anywhere from five groups of guys pamphleteering on a campus all the way on up to National Socialist Movement which is one of the larger entities. The fact that they're so dispersed is an indication that there is very, far right's harder to understand. There's paper released this morning from ICCT that tried to demarcate between nativism, anti-government and racist violence but there's so many different strands. The phenomenon we're seeing now, post-Turant is the transnationalization of the ideology revolving around the Great Replacement Theory and its adoption by almost every single facet of the far right movement. Thank you. So Jeff, I'm wondering if you can talk to us about what drew you into the neo-Nazi movement in the first place and what made you disengage and de-radicalize after 25 years? And also could you tell us what that process has been like and what your experience has been in combating some of those previous narratives with your former peers? Well, starting out in it, it's something that literally anybody can get involved in. I know a lot of people have a story that they came from a bad home or they had some sort of trauma. I want the public to understand that it's something that literally anyone can be recruited to. I come from a middle-class home, a normal family. My dad and mom were there, excuse me, but literally anybody can be brought into these type of movements. And for some, they're looking for brotherhood, they're looking for a network of people to be part of. For others, it's ideological-based. For me, it was more ideological-based. But once you're in there and the various tactics that can bring you in there, I mean, we utilized our recruitment tactics under many different ways. If someone was religious, we would use Christian identity. If someone was really into music, we'd use music. If someone was into the politics, we'd use the politics. If someone had a bad experience with someone of another race, we'd use that. So there's not one specific tool that's used to bring people in. And that's what we have to look at as far as bringing people out, too. It's almost like you're inside of a bubble and you're part of this bubble and you don't see the outside world when you're in there. So to get people outside of that bubble, I think it's important that we use kindness, compassion, immersion type of activities, get them to understand that there's a world outside of that bubble. Because in a lot of ways, and I'm more referring to it as a cult-like thing now, I know when I was in the movement, I didn't like that designation because a cult is a bad thing, right? When we joined, I didn't join the movement because I hated anybody or because I wanted to oppress anybody. I joined it from the sense of I'm a patriot. I want to protect my country. I want to protect my people. And a lot of people that are joining it are joining for those reasons, not for the reasons that they just systematically hate people. It's, they think they're doing a good thing. So to unwork that and to get that person outside of that bubble is not just a simple process where you say, oh, well, this person is just hateful and that's why they're there. The hate came from me later. It wasn't something that drove me there. I didn't have bad experiences with minorities or other people. It was ideologically based. Okay. And is that what you refer to as the counterculture? So you had an article also where you discussed, anyone is susceptible to recruitment and then you referred to the counterculture at the bubble that you're talking about. Yes. And the counterculture is in the movement, you have to understand, to explain it to people, we had an answer for everything. We had the National Socialist Movement was producing video games. We had two different video games that were produced over the years. We had, and I think the group still has at least five radio shows, podcasts that are on every day of the week. People can call in, ask questions. There was online chats. There was a forum. There was music and bands. There was family barbecues, lightings, all kinds of things. So it's an entire culture all wrapped into one. It's, and it goes back to the cult type of scenario where everyone you know is in there. When you leave and when you're in there, almost everyone you know, all of your friends, sometimes your family, some of the people don't have good family networks and support networks. Everyone you know is inside that bubble. So to leave, you're literally turning your backs on everyone that you know, every person that you know, inside your support network. One of the females that I brought out since I left, she said, you know, we were kind of brainstorming about what are the different things we can do. And this is why I'm with Parallel Networks is because they have that counterculture idea and the plan to go forward with it. But one of the females she had said, she said, you know, we need something like Alcoholics Anonymous, but for people in the movement. Because it offers that, from that simplistic outlook, it offers that support. It offers people that have been there, you know, and understanding. And that's why I think it's so important that formers are involved in this process because you can have all the education, all the knowledge in the world. And if you're trying to talk to one of these people that have been there, there's gonna be a disconnect. They're not gonna quite understand. You know, they're gonna say, oh, well, this person maybe seems like they know what they're talking about, but they haven't been there. They don't know what I've been through. They don't know my life. They don't know that. And we're just predetermined almost to fight against that. To fight against anybody coming in and criticizing the movement or our ideology. With confirmation bias. You believe what the answer is that you want to believe. In any type of thing. For example, the Holocaust. You will look at the revisionist literature and say, that's the truth. Even if you have facts from the other side that are there because you wanna believe that what the movement said is the truth. So to break that down is not an instant process. Nobody just says, snap of the fingers, I'm out of the movement. It is a long process. It takes time. And formers are absolutely critical to this process because it's, I mean, simple way to break it down is like street cred. You know, the formers understand that world. They understand how we got there. And we understand now how to get them out. So you said that you have different ways of bringing people in. And it kind of depends on what that person's, I guess what sparks an interest for them. Is that, I guess one thing is, how do you keep the movement together if you have all these different segments? And then how do you also bring people out knowing that you got them in a certain way? Is that a tactic to remove them as well? Yes, with the National Socialist Movement, one of the things that we found, I crossed into a lot of different groups. I would be invited to speak at clan gatherings, skinhead concerts, different things like that. So I wasn't just, you know, at the head of the National Socialist Movement. I knew people from all of the different groups. So taking that into consideration and going, okay, well this group, like League of the South, for example, this is a group that's focused on neoconfederacy and things like that. So they would focus on that and that was sort of their niche. So different groups would have different niches, or niches. The National Socialist Movement and a lot of groups would have religion. For us, in our handbook, it said, religion was for home and family because I found that one of the most divisive things in the movement early on was the religious thing, whether it was between Odinism and Christian identity, regular Christianity, orthodoxy, Catholics, atheists, creators, all these different things and they would all fight against each other. You know, not giant clashes or anything like that, like in medieval times, but ideological clashes within the movement where some of them would say, well, once the Civil War breaks out and we're gonna go take care of these guys because they don't believe in our God. So I saw it as a very divisive thing and for us, we kept it sort of in-house. So we didn't have, in our structure, our structure was set up more like in a rank militaristic type of structure, like the army. So you had different levels in the organization that would answer those type of things. Okay, thank you. So can we talk about spreading of the message? So what's the role of national and local media in disseminating extremist messages from your perspectives? So I'm really interested, Jesse and Jeff, just to start us off, how did you use that to your advantage in the past when you were pushing out message points using the media knowing what they could or couldn't do? How did that frame your approach? Well, I think I'll start because we kind of spearheaded that with jihadism and now the far right is just emulating it. I mean, we could get into the press. Some of the stuff that we espoused publicly was just to get into the press, right? And so they put us on CNN and they would put us on Fox News, but the number one thing that we concentrated on was we knew that if we could get the anti-Islamic bloggers to get more awareness and to arm them with the ammunition they needed to say that the Muslims were coming to implement Sharia law, that we could create a further device of polarization. And then if we created an anti-Muslim center, then we would confirm our narrative that they were waging a war against Islam because we could just point to Pamela Geller as our evidence. And so it wasn't so much the mainstream media. Mainstream media was great because your website will go from getting a couple thousand hits a day to getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day. So we kind of had mastered that art form. And it's very interesting the way that media works because you would think that there would be an overwhelming interest in promoting some positive work, like the work that we're doing. If we were out there promoting a rally against for white civil rights or something, we'd have massive media lined up today. Nobody wants to cover the positive stories because that's not what sells and gets ratings. And so it's the sensationalism that drives the media and the symbiotic relationship between extremist movements, terrorist movements and the media, it's so easy for us to exploit that. And we used to always do that. And immediately what you do then too is what people don't realize is if you can draw media to your website or to your social media account, your number of followers go up, but you also get up higher in the rankings of Google search engines. So you start to appear not anymore. They sort of come around that and now they've actually made it even worse without realizing it. But yeah, I mean, there's a really important, it's the importance of getting into the mainstream media by with the activity that you do is key to the work of a recruiter and a radicalizer. And for us in the National Socialist Movement, we had a press release department. We actually had a guy that was a journalist before that would write it in the way that you would submit it to the press and would send out mass emails to all the press in the area at the time. And we'd send it, you know, I'd tell them like in the subject line, put Nazi, put something that's gonna jump out. You know, because if you just put the National Socialist Movement press release, a lot of the press wasn't gonna look. So we became sort of experts in a sense on how to manipulate that. We knew it wasn't gonna be good press no matter what, but that didn't matter. As long as they weren't saying really, really bad things, we knew that we could reach the public through the press like nothing we ever did before. So we would do public rallies and we'd announce we were gonna be here. We'd sometimes challenge people to debates and things like that. Anything to generate press and activity, it would focus traffic to our websites, to our shows and things like that. And it would, you're gonna break through and get to some people no matter what. And for us, it was even if we spend the time and energy going to a city and say we only have 20 guys out there, which is a small number by comparison. If those guys are flying NSN flags, the press is gonna come out. If the antifa comes out and attacks us even better because now there's violence and the press has to report on it, even if there's a media blackout because that's been a tactic. We started wondering why in some areas the press wasn't covering us because they were not eventful events. If we clashed with the other side, guaranteed press. So that takes away, I think, you're looking at it from the side of the left as well. They think they're going to stop the movements by initiating violence and attacking people that are in the movement. It does just the opposite. The guys would thrive on that sort of thing. They would say we did an event in Mississippi one time in Tupelo and the police sort of cordoned off the area. So really there was like a handful of people from the downtown area. There was police and press. And the guys that were there with us was National Socialist Movement and Klan that time. And they said this was the most boring rally, uneventful rally they had ever done. It was demoralizing from the standpoint of the movement. Now, other times, like we had a big street fight in New Jersey, they said, why can't we have that again? They knew in the National Socialist Movement you couldn't attack somebody. It was against our rules. I had done this for 27 years total. Never had not one person from the National Socialist Movement arrested for violence at a rally because we knew it was our rules and our guidelines that you did not hit somebody first. If you were hit, you defended yourself. But to say that people weren't hoping or wishing for that violence would be incorrect because that would turn that into something that they thrived on. So the far left thinking they're gonna shut down these groups by punching a Nazi in the face or something like that absolutely doesn't work. It's what they want. Okay, so to combat that then what's the strategy? Knowing that you know that inciting violence is the number one way to push out messages in a lot of ways, get that press. What's the alternative then? If you know that the other side is trying to quell this. I mean, there's a few different ways of looking at it. I feel like in this country, everybody has the right to protest. Whether you're on the right, the left, the center, or wherever in between, you should have the right to do that. And it's kind of a complicated thing because in some ways, like in the example of Mississippi, there was hardly anybody there. So it was demoralizing to the people that were coming. But the counter argument from the other side is if you just allow it, then these guys are gonna grow because more people are gonna come out and hear it. So I think it really depends on the way one looks at it. One could, peaceful protesting is fine. And peaceful counter protesting is fine. But the moment it crosses that line into violence, whatever side it's coming from is wrong. And I think that that's where law enforcement needs to come in and typically they do. Typically they do. They'll separate it. They'll take in people that have committed criminal acts. And that's good. But I think either ignoring completely from, we're talking from the street level counter protesters. Is that what you're asking? From the street level counter protester, either be 100% peaceful or stay home. Okay, thank you. So something, a slight pivot. I'm thinking that maybe we could talk a little bit about like Gab and Telegram, this is examples. So it seems like violent extremist groups are always one step ahead. And everyone who's trying to counter that is behind because we're trying to also change course as we go along. If they're actively pursuing ways to engage on different platforms that mainstream or people are trying to counter the narratives or counter the work are doing, what are we missing? What's the next thing after Gab and Telegram? Good, I think that no matter what we do there's going to be an echo chamber that they're gonna create for themselves in some area of the internet. They'll find some place to do it whether it be online or offline. But in the online space, I think that recently somebody sent me this thing where it was like 100,000 different videos on Telegram of music, hate music, right? So what is that about? Well, that's just about them saying, well, you know what, screw it, YouTube's taking all of our stuff down. We're just gonna go here and we can share away as we want. And that's, I mean, that's just gonna be the way that it's gonna go. Now, which company is going to do, what are they gonna do to moderate it? How are they gonna do to remove it? Like what is, each company has their different way of looking at it. But yeah, I guess in the sense of Gab, obviously these guys wanna, it is a social in group. So these guys want to socialize. They want to hear from each other about what it is that they're, what the next steps are for their movement, what the next steps are for, what should they be doing? Or what things did they do bad in the past where they can work on those things? I mean, there's a lot of that talk used to happen on Stormfront. And it would be like regional, but now it's, they've said, well, Stormfront is a lot of anti-farer on there and a lot of law enforcement are on there. So why don't we just make a platform for ourselves? So I mean, I think that's gonna continue. And I think we need to be up on it. And the point of having former's involved in this type of work is we understand what these guys are gonna, what they're gonna do. I mean, myself, that's what I used to do. I used to recruit online for years on Stormfront and these different types of platforms and social media when it came out, Facebook, all of these different things. Like, I mean, I think it's really important that we keep up to date on these things as former's working in the intervention space and especially trying to create some sort of standardization platform that how we work online and the ethics, I've written a bunch on the ethics of trying to engage people online. And I think those are important things for us to try to keep up with. I know it's hard because these guys are forever trying to stay ahead of the game. So I think having former's involved is definitely a, you know, it's a positive forward thinking motion for us to be working alongside of all the different agencies that are doing this work. The future very quickly. We're going to go to the decentralized web and we need to understand what that's gonna look like. That's five years down the road. More mainstream, 10 years down the road. Telegram will continue to be the hub because the way it's designed and the one that designed it. But interestingly enough, we should be very weary of what is forcing that conversation in public around Facebook's revelations of privacy because what's happening is the migration is true. It's on Telegram. But because people are migrating and Facebook is losing followers of those that actually shop and spend money, they are adapting, due to public's privacy concerns, things like self-demolishing storyboards, which ICS now utilizes that only your friends can watch and they expire like secret chats in Telegram after 24 hours. So they're basically creating Telegram on Facebook with a cryptocurrency, but they don't wanna talk about it even though they consciously do and are aware that that's what they will create a safe space for terrorists. When we were disseminating Alcatacla to people here that were conducting the research literally had to watch a beheading video for the first time in their life because they stumbled across it haphazardly. So we'll be talking about that two, three years down the road when someone actually notices it. We're actually in there with counter narrative work. So take down is never gonna work in and of itself. Counter narrative work has to follow and counter narrative work has to be informed by redirect method made a video that took two years to launch and they proclaimed success. DARPA came in, studied the results, found out it was actually counterproductive for those that were already affirmed and committed to the ideology. Same thing we're seeing now. Cognitive radicalization taking down the incubators and the conveyor belts is only amplifying the message of those that are more prone to actually progress to violent extremism. So they're migrating to Telegram where they have lower numbers of followers, but the grievance that look they don't allow us to speak is arming the narrative that says, you know what, if you can't speak might as well act violently in the street. And that's a really good point. I'd like to expand upon that a little bit. That was one of the things that we used as recruiters in the movement too, is to say, and I tested this theory myself, on Facebook I was banned from Facebook just because of my name alone. So we had set up accounts and posted just like vacation pictures, nothing with anything pro-wide or anything like that. And then had somebody anonymously and we were doing counter intelligence type work like this all the time on all different levels. I could go on for five hours about some of that, but there's just one little example. On Facebook, we'd set that profile up and we just have pictures of me and my girl at the beach or family, just do that. And then send an anonymous message from a different email address to Facebook and say, hey, the head of the Nazi party's on here, why are you guys allowing this? And this was years ago, this was before all the big deal about Facebook and Twitter and all that kind of stuff. And the count was banned instantly. Now, in another sense of that, like on Twitter, you had, we would point out like extreme black movements. For example, like New Black Panther Party, they would say, they'd have certain people saying things like kill every white man, kill every white woman, kill every white child. We'd show that and that wouldn't be deleted, but if you posted a white pride worldwide symbol, boom, that account was deleted. So the reason I'm mentioning these things is because a lot of people think, and they've got good intentions, I get it. They want to censor these things and to stop, get all the white nationalists off Facebook, off of Twitter, off of these things. But as recruiters in the movement, it did not discourage us. All it did was say, look, you're being treated unfairly. Other groups are allowed to promote violence against you guys in the movement. So it was like self, it further radicalized them because it gave them that proof. We could say, look, here's the proof. You can't say this, but everybody else can. And I'm not saying this to defend them. I'm not making an excuse. I'm just simply explaining, this is how they're going to get further radicalized. And if they're pushed off to somewhere else, they just, there was ways around it. VK was another one, it was like Russian Facebook. That's where everybody from the NSM was on there that was off of Facebook and everything else. We just find, you just find different ways of doing that. And it becomes more difficult for our role as formers and people that are trying to counter violent extremism and prevent it to reach them when they're not there. It's sort of like the forbidden fruit. Like when I was a kid, I remember 15 years old, around 15 years old, and the rap acts, Two Live Crew had come out. And that's one that, Two Live Crew is the ones that started the whole Parents Against Music, PMRC, they were censoring things and stuff like that. Never in my life did I listen to rap music. At 15, I'm watching 2020, Nightline, these sort of things. I heard about, there was no rap stations in rural Minnesota where I grew up. You didn't even hear that kind of music. You didn't know what it was. So I'm watching Nightline and Luther Campbell comes on from Two Live Crew and he said, yeah, our music was banned in Florida and he was explaining it. What did I do? I drove to the nearest record store and I got that Two Live Crew tape. I had to find out what it was about. So it's like the forbidden fruit, not to give a biblical reference, but like Adam and Eve in the Garden, the forbidden fruit. If people say white nationalism and all these sort of things are something you shouldn't look at and you shouldn't be able to check into it, it's going to have that effect where there's some people that are gonna look into it and it kind of answers a little bit of a question you asked me earlier about how to get them out and what brings them there. Believe it or not, and this was something I learned from talking to Jesse since I've been out. I said, Jesse, I said, I think a lot of the people in the movement might be kind of closed-minded about certain things because on the racial issues and that, he goes, oh no, no, they're not closed-minded. They're very open-minded and I thought, hmm, I had to think about it for a minute. Yes, if I hadn't been more open-minded, I would have never gotten into it in the first place. So that is one of the key components, components to find the people in there is that some of them, yeah, they're just closed-minded bigots and that's what brought them in there and those people are, in maybe some cases, impossible to reach. But the people that came because they're open-minded and were looking at alternative forms of history and alternative forms of politics and they're tired of the Republicans and the Democrats, those people I think we can reach. Thank you. So before we get to audience Q&A and I hope you all have some questions prepared, I just wanna make sure that we can zoom out a little bit and talk about U.S. policy and bring in Mitch. So the U.S. has a Joint Terrorism Task Force that has teams in 104 cities across the country. Can they and should they prioritize domestic terrorists? They should. There are a couple of different complicating factors to date that have interfered with that. I think number one, just hasn't been a policy priority for the U.S. to look internally at the white supremacist threat. I think that obviously is changing in the wake of El Paso, Pittsburgh, Poway and other events. Then there gets to more logistic mechanistic issue in the sense that unlike al-Qaeda, unlike the Islamic State, which could be declared foreign terrorist organizations, giving the FBI particular investigative tools in which they could use to get leverage over individuals, threaten individuals, use intelligence tools to penetrate the organizations. For the most part, these groups have not been categorized the same way. Now some of these white supremacist groups are in fact transnational. And one could argue that, well they've got a, they're partnered with a group in Sweden, they're partnered with Russia, you could actually call them an FTO. And in fact, I think House Homeland Security Committee has come out in favor of declaring some of these transnational groups as FTOs, thereby enabling the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force to have those same tools to penetrate and investigate those organizations. When you get to strictly domestic U.S. organizations that don't have an international presence, then you get to one level more complicated because they won't fit into that FTO box. And then the question is, can the U.S. government declare it as a domestic, a DTO, a domestic terrorist organization? And to date, there has been resistance to do that, partially because the threat wasn't seen as high enough, but there's another countervening set of arguments because a domestic organization does that interfere with free speech. If I say that I am in favor of national socialist ideas and a pure Aryan state, and I don't violently act out on that, well that's sort of in the free speech category and therefore difficult for Joint Terrorism Task Forces and FBI to investigate. So there's been a lot of discussion on how do you get to those type of groups? How do you create the tools for law enforcement? It's an ongoing discussion that hasn't been resolved yet, but people in the Obama DOJ have talked about some potential guide rails that you use to allow greater investigation of those organizations. Okay, and in terms of, I guess the FTO designation is, do you feel like that could be a workaround, at least for now, to at least get people in on material support? I mean, are there any negatives to at least starting with that? I don't think so. I mean, if it's an organization that has a foreign presence or is allied with a foreign entity, it seems like it was a very effective tool for U.S. law enforcement domestically to combat homegrown violent extremists who aspired to be part of Islamic State or Al-Qaeda. So I absolutely think that that should be a tool that's in the toolkit for U.S. law enforcement. That seems to be the easiest first step. And I believe some people have called for a 9-11-style commission for combating domestic terrorism. Do you have thoughts on that, or kind of reshaping what the NCTC looks like to incorporate domestic terrorism? Maybe, I mean, a 9-11 commission is, is a question, or is it called for, and also just, you know, is it more time for study than is necessary since we sort of know the nature of the problem? There are some potential near-term work around, yes, people have talked about adding a domestic terrorism analytic piece to the National Encounterterrorism Center. That seems like something that's viable and is an add-on, it's sort of a component that you can just snap in place like a Lego piece to NCTC. That seems like it's viable. I'm not sure, from my perspective, you really need to go through the whole process that would be involved, figuring out who's on the commission, doing the study, figuring out what the results are, you know, we'll lose 18 months just through that whole process. That's really helpful. Thank you. I think one last thing I want to cover is looking at Ukraine and what that means. So there have been a lot of people, this is one example, from the Rise Above Movement, if you're familiar with them, also known as RAM. Among others have been charged in the US in connection with violence at political rallies, including in Charlottesville, and they've traveled to Ukraine to meet with members of the Aesop Movement. So in your opinion, what's the draw for Americans? I think we slightly touched on that a little bit since it being a transnational concern. And then what's the lesson we need to learn is this something we're not paying enough attention to in the United States? So if anyone wants to jump in on that. Yeah, so I mean, I think it's interesting because I think we talked a little bit about the transnationalization of the message. And I think that we're going to see more of it. But I also think it's an indication that we should start to worry about the sustainability of the liberal order that we established post World War II. I think we really need to start to consider the fact that economically, politically, socially, culturally, we are fragmenting in ways that we're not recognizing and that are very much more grave and much more serious than we imagine. I think it's one of the reasons that when we sort of conceptualized the scope of our mission with regard to the messaging of the magazine, we had to widen it to include polarization because one can seriously see the consequences of a social fabric tearing apart where polarization is rampant. If polarization enhances and radicalization in turn certainly enhances, we can see that happening top down political approach and bottom up society-wise. Then what we knew as recruiters and radicalizers was that if a very low base rate of radicals go on to become violent extremists, then the only thing you have to do to increase violent extremist acts is increase the underlying pool of radicals. And so this is true across the globe. Now once you get a message that's coherent at a transnational level, which is formulating, what you get is you get more support for Tehran. So now the people that are promoting red-pilled from the alt-right, they're completely getting lambasted online by the far right because the new phrase is siege-pilled, which is a neo-Nazi book that calls for leaderless resistance and action immobilization. Whereas people like the, when the Tree of Life synagogue shooter went in and he said, screw your optics, I'm going in, he was talking to the alt-right's ability to sort of portray themselves as a mass movement, a peaceful mass movement. Now when he launched in GAB, they all ridiculed him as counterproductive, part of the problem. Now when you speak like that, like daily show-up, considers themselves radicalization preventers because they don't advocate this a podcast that promotes plays off of the word Jews use for huckuz, blah, blah, blah. Now when they say, hey, we're actually de-radicalizers because we don't support violence and we don't support Tehran. So listen to us, we're de-radicalizers. Now the entire chat group goes at them and calls them complete hypocrites and is migrating away from them because siege build is becoming more acceptable and that's because of the manifesto late in transnationalist ideology that's been coming, expanding and becoming more coherent. That's a byproduct of that. I think it's acceleration, I think that word, especially with the Azul battalion, that this type of thing involved with this Eastern Europe. This has always been a, at least from my perspective, when I was working on things online, guys were always talking about how do we get more European chapters? How do we get more, how do we go back there? That's our utopia, I think Jesse was talking about earlier and that's the utopian society that they wanna get back to. So that's the goal. So how do we get there? I guess in the group that I was in, it was all about taking that little micro and making it a macro thing so the internet was the first thing and then now of course they have these different groups that are just accelerating everything across all different aspects of the internet, which I think is the key word here is that's what they want. Anything is an accelerant. They wanna use Islam as an accelerant. They wanna use Sharia law as an accelerant. There's anything that they can find to use and then actually have guys going over to Europe. This is a sort of a new phenomenon today to go actually fight, but guys at least in our group, they were starting chapters all through Europe, Australia, UK and that was sort of the beginnings of how the internet sort of made it available so we could within these movements could share these ideas and move these movements much bigger than just in cities and towns across America, right? Okay. And I could say about the Ukraine too, big part of the reason why people are going over there is to get that training, to get that combat experience and they're not just fighting for Azov on the Ukrainian side. Half the guys are on the Russian separatist side. You've got national socialists on the Russian separatist side and you've got national socialists on the Azov side. They're going on both sides and getting training. It's just to be able to fight and train and things like that because the thought of the people in the movement is this is going to break into a civil war, race war or something like that and you want that training. That's why we were sending people into the military all the time for years and years and years. So I'd say there was a confidential FBI report that had come out about 10 years ago and they were talking about the numbers that they knew in the different organizations, how many were in the different groups and they were fairly accurate on the NSM in that study. Since then, about 50%, I'd say by the time I left, about 50% of the membership had military experience in the past, which was before that, we're talking like 10%, 15%, by the time I left, it was about 50%. Thank you. So now to you. So you could just raise your hand, please identify yourself and your affiliation for your question. Thank you. It will come on in the back. All right, I am Adam Badawi. I'm with the Muslim Public Affairs Council. I have a question for Jeff, but whoever has can't answer it. You'll hear liberals, progressives, use terms like whiteness, white supremacy as an explanation for membership and eventually moving to violence within the movement. But it seems given what you said today, that there's some, there's not a lot of utility in those terms, just in so far as there's internal disputes that seem beyond these abstract or broad labels or concepts. So I'm wondering what you think of those two terms as their explanatory power and then also internally, how white supremacists or again, it seems that there's a lot more complication, complexity, how they used those terms being used as explanations to their own advantage, right? Well, I guess it depends on the individual in the group because there's a really wide array of different ways of people look at it. For example, in the National Socialist Movement, and I use that as a reference point because that's where I spent most of my last 27 years, was we called ourselves a white civil rights organization. Most of the guys would tell you they were not white supremacists. We knew publicly speaking, we gave like a pep speech or something before a rally and told people no racial epithets, no cussing, anybody that's doing that on the microphone, somebody should, not always, but somebody would normally, that would be the end of that person's speech if they were doing that because we knew that those buzzwords were not going to go over well with the public. I don't think in as long as I can remember, I ever called myself a white supremacist over, this is a word that is used often by the media. There is people in the movement, it really depends on the group and the affiliation. It all depends on how that's looked upon as far as the terminology. And I guess the other part of your question was, how does the outside world view that? I guess I didn't. They seem to have missed the complexity, but in much the same way that you said, you guys could use how the media covers your movement to your advantage. I'm wondering if those reductive or those terms that don't have much experience or power, if you use the Hitler-Babe and think that all of us are focused on? Well, the whiteness thing, yes, because it was all about identity. It was the idea that you're fighting for your tribe. It was something that you would, if you were involved in the movement, you weren't like, I'm in this because I hate other people and I want to hold them down. You look at it from, even in some of my speeches, I'd say, we are like the men at the Alamo, we are on the ramparts, we are standing up, we are the last vanguard, the last line of the white race. These are the things that I would say up there to inspire people, to get them motivated in that. And so I think a lot of them see it as, like what Brad was saying about accelerationism, is they see it as an attack on whiteness as an attack on their solidarity, an attack on their people, rather than the countermeasure of, like let's hold down, I hear very few groups in the white nationalist movement talking about like, hey, we want to go hold these people down, like we want to bring back slavery. I mean, that's something like, you know, a bunch of drunken guys at a backyard barbecue might say something like that, but that's not the real concern. I mean, there's gonna be bigots and hateful people in everything, they see it from a more larger picture where it's like their race and their people, their tribe is under attack. So that's why it's more difficult to break. If it was just systematic racism, that would be easier to break, but because they see it as more of a worldview, that's what makes it more complex. And I just want to add one thing really quick. I worked with Jason Kessler, who started Unite the Right One, and I was trying to get him out of the movement and we had some breakthrough, we had definite rapport, but when NPR put him on the spot in an interview and set him up and accused him of being a white supremacist, he tried to defend himself with the biological race argument that we're not white supremacists because we just look at the data. It doesn't mean that we're superior, it just means that in certain aspects of culture and in intelligence in particular, on the aggregate, we outperform. It doesn't mean that, and so what it does is it provides a justification to actually have teaching classes. The problem is, if you go on YouTube or if you go on a communication platform that's preserved because they're taking down those types of videos and you listen to Jared Taylor, sounds rational, sounds reasonable, the problem is there's no counter against it. Jordan Peterson videos do not espouse intelligence and race, but they have millions of views and the people that are associated with that algorithm do espouse race and intelligence and you're armed with information that insists like white supremacist is a label that's being utilized to categorize me in an evil manner. So everybody with a MAGA hat on becomes a white supremacist and all white supremacists are in danger of becoming neo-Nazis and I won't elaborate, but it's very akin to this similar mistake in narrative and approach to dealing with the threat that was posed by jihadism and it only made it metastasized and more so. The department's counterterrorism bureau, a lot of what you've discussed has really resonated with me. I applaud the effort, especially looking at it from a sort of an ecosystems complex systems approach and you've really offered a lot of essential insight that helps us understand these phenomenon whether whatever them will you as sort of competitive political social movements. I think that's the right way to think about them. There are two things in particular that are a dilemma for all of us in trying to confront these types of phenomenon that you've discussed. I just wanna articulate them a little bit more concretely. One is that these ideas of hate and acting and defense of perceived existential threat, those are not new. They always existed, they will always exist. What's different is context that makes those ideas relevant and so if you're combating these networks, you're combating them in context and the context is pretty depressing right now regardless of where you are looking on the planet. So what is your strategy in terms of dealing with the context particularly at a, you're talking trying to almost hit progressively many different areas of the world, many different types of militant groups and the context of the local level is I think very important in really having a chance at reducing the prominence of any one group. And relatedly, and that's very difficult I think in a context where polarization is up where a lot of these groups' essential perspectives have become mainstreamed as you've articulated and it leads to the situation where the society's increasingly views everything in black and white terms and there you are. The related issue that you've touched on is the dilemma that governments and other aspects of communities have in confronting these groups in that the risk of shining additional light on them actually increasing their prominence right. So like SLPC made an argument in one of the recent publications that with some of these alt-right groups or far-right groups that once you shine more light on their activities and their behaviors they actually cower right and they reduce in terms of relevance and vibrance and whatnot. But what you've posited is that well-organized groups at least that are seeking to gain greater recognition by virtue of their behavior whether it be violent or nonviolent. They are looking for that mainstream media coverage as a critical measure of success and a building block to further their objectives. So as governments, as members of civil society, as the press, how do you, what's the right medium in coverage so that you're not actually doing the work for them? So I'll answer briefly and I think Mitch might have something important to say based upon some meetings we had this morning as well. Oh, sorry. So I think that you used a very important term that like so we're constantly looking at the academic work that goes on in the field of radicalization studies. Everybody that was a jihadist expert is now a far-right wing expert. The interns that are on the ground studying this stuff know it 10 times better than they do and quite frankly a lot of the stuff that's published in the room, jihadism is still so far into the thing, into our experience. But the thing that's always missing is context. And if I wanna shape behavior, I can't shape the individual if I don't shape the environment and make it conducive to being able to affect the behavior I'm trying to impact. This is just something that's never discussed. And so 2020 for us is crisis management. We are not trying to create a paradigm shift in getting polarized people to talk to each other. We are trying to predict what might happen, right? The overwhelming point of the allocated attention on white supremacy is an issue but the way that it's been covered, particularly by groups like SPLC, unfortunately I have to say that, right? The way that it's been covered is only amplifying the grievance. They have induced a democratic party that has made white supremacy the key narrative of the election. And so now what we have is proud boys strategically crafting a manipulation of that in conjunction with other organizations that pretend to be nonviolent in the same way that Jeff's organization's rules were don't hit back unless you're hit. Drawing like magnets, Antifa to come, shooting everything that Antifa does that's violent and saying, why is Chris Cuomo support Antifa and CNN? Cause Chris Cuomo's never been on the ground at a rally, right? So what we have to understand about the context and understand the responsibilities of the media is if you're gonna report on something, at least get to know the subject. Don't stay in the green zone and bag that and call yourself a work correspondent. That's the easiest way that I can describe that. Thank you. And down in front. Erin Goldzimmer, I'm a donor advisor. I'm just curious about the connection between or the demarcation between right wing media, mainstream media and the kind of extremism that you're talking about. I mean, because a lot of what's on Fox News every night or talk radio seems pretty hateful. And so are these clearly different things or are they feeding each other to what extent? And if they are feeding each other, if the kind of polarized right wing media is a major source of preparing the ground for the kind of extremism that you're dealing with, then how do you ever do anything about that? So I'm just curious your thoughts and just wanna say one sentence, a lot of what's on MSNBC and what is espoused by Rachel Maddow seems incredibly hateful to those that are conservative too. And when we start to point that out and think in those terms of I guess, but not just also. I think that's one of the biggest things about the misunderstandings of what's going on, especially when the far right right now is like, why are we only talking about the Alec? I don't wanna say anyone's names here, but like the Info Wars and the things like that. I just don't think they're worth talking about. And the media spends a lot of time, mainstream media spends a lot of time talking about Bret Bart in Info Wars. From a person who was there, I would be sitting there going, whoa, more negative attention, great. My name's in the, right in the new, this is awesome. I'm gonna recruit a whole bunch of people today. And that's, I just think we're wasting time talking about these, who would just be a backyard conspiracy theorist, a crazy uncle if we just don't give them a platform, right? I mean, it's a way to de-platform them in the way that we're just like, okay, yes, some of this stuff is very weird and it's kind of like it draws people in and we wanna talk about it. But I think just as much on the far right as on the far left and even some of the real sort of centrist liberal stuff that I'm seeing in Canada, it becomes problematic because the focus is all going on one area. So I think we wanna try to be careful with who we're giving a broad platform to. Thank you. I'm Margo Williams from the Intercept. And my question is about the interventions that you guys do and that you've experienced and what is your relationship with law enforcement in regards to seeking out people to intervene with? FBI Director Ray has given different numbers as sometimes as many as 1,000 open investigations into domestic terrorism. Do you bump across the FBI targeting people and how do you assure the folks you're trying to intervene with that you're maintaining their privacy and their own security while you deal with them? Unfortunately, there is no mechanism for law enforcement to have an alternative to investigation and interdiction right now. And that's largely because of people that report arrests, that utilize informants, as if every single case of them is a case of entrapment. And so when you report like that and you base it off a statement of facts that never goes to trial, you don't realize that a statement of facts is only enough evidence to charge a person. It has nothing to do with the underlying investigation. And so what happens is you get sensationalist reporters that hate the government, want to blame the government for using CVE as a mechanism, but then oppose CVE where it could provide a practical alternative to sending in that informant so that they can later get acclaimed of entrapment. So they hinder the very solution to the problem they espouse. We have no contact with government, but if government saw somebody that they couldn't open up an investigation on and they could refer them to us, I tell you society would be a hell of a lot better place, but we have anti-CVE protesters everywhere that we try to achieve the work that we're trying to do. We need government involvement in the intervention space. Unfortunately, there is none. Do you say government money? No. Are you seeking to have grants from government agencies? If they altered the ability and they had an ability to provide access where there would be legal mechanisms for us to conduct interventions on people that we're encounter messaging, probably not. But in the intervention space where there's a serious risk for violence and they go see an Omar Mateen and they investigate him, there's not enough evidence to continue surveillance and he becomes the next pulse night cub attacker. I bet you if me or Jeff talked to that individual or even Brad, the outcome could have been different. We need that mechanism. I think I can add one thing to this, the intervention space of looking at government involvement in that. Like, the early UK prevent stuff tells us some different stories that were not successful in this space. However, we need to look at, I know in Canada they've started a referral process that goes through people who are in a certain space of it's this prevention continuum. When should law enforcement get involved in the top 10% maybe? Who knows? But we're at least starting to talk about where things become a public safety risk and where things are actually just like meant for us to be going and talking to these people. Like community organizations, whether it be people from like Life After Hate's been doing this for a while. Like it's having the mechanisms of the pre-criminal space. Not every guy who has some radical thoughts or might be part of some white supremacist group is gonna go do an attack. So if we can go and intervene with them and have these conversations and begin this dialogue and begin the process well before those things, we're trying to, and law enforcement might be doing some work on something and say, oh, this guy's probably, it's a very low risk scenario. Let's like give it to some NGOs. Let's give it to these people to work on because it makes more sense, right? Also there's community groups that work in religious communities, things like that, that come into play. And that's, I mean, that's dependent on different standpoints, viewpoints, whatever the extremist narrative is that they're trying to present in those groups. But I think we need to be cognizant that these things are multi-layered. And yes, government should be there at the table, for sure. But I think a lot of the percentage lies on us as community members and doing more of this learning from what we can do to move forward with this. Hey, this is a question for Jeff. So Jeff, just within the movement, you know the idea of the white civil rights movement. Traditionally when I think of civil rights movements from the past, I think of a certain objective that they had, like desegregation, for example. Within the NSM, what was the objective in terms of what did they want, ultimately? The way we viewed it is that the white race was under attack and that, looking at it from the outside, looking in, you could say, well, of course black people, of course all these other minority groups need their civil rights movements and especially back when we go back to the 1960s and when voting rights for, even before that, for women, for blacks and all that, were not the same. Now it's almost like in the movement we flip that. We said, okay, now they have hiring quotas that give, in some cases, a less qualified person a job, whereas a more qualified white person doesn't get the job. These were all the things that we were trying to overturn, hate crimes charges, that was something that I know, when I was in the movement I hammered on that. It's like, okay, if you get into a crime and you hit somebody or you do something that's illegal or wrong, you're gonna do the time for it, but now you have where a white guy with maybe no criminal record, and I've met with people's families and things like that that have been in this case, I could think of one, I'm not gonna name him because I don't do that, I don't drop names, but I could think of a young man that was like 19, 20 years old. This kid didn't even have a speeding ticket, nothing. He gets into a fight and it was caught on tape and he took it too far. He's doing seven, eight years in prison for a fight. Now he didn't kill the other guy, because hate crimes charges were added onto that, so those are the things like, these were all designed to help other people, to help the other races and try to give everybody equal footing, but in the movement, we would turn that around and say, look, these are things that are used to oppress white people, so of course the white race needs white civil rights advocates, they need the movement to save them. That was our narrative, so if we take away those talking points, if we take away the things that the movement is using and make it a flat, fair type of thing, you take those things away. We have time for one more question. Thank you. Hi, I'm Cynthia Miller Idris, American University. Just thank you very much, first of all. And my question is about generational differences within the movements or within any of these movements. So we talk a lot about, I hear a lot about fragmentation across different groups within the movements, but I wonder if you have experience with kind of generational conflicts or in other words, I'm thinking, when you're working on interventions, how do you ensure that you're staying current and you're able to continue to reach these young guys in the movement who often won't trust any adults, period, as speaking as a parent of kids at that age? Well, we're looking to get the right ammunition and the right funding to make sure that some of the interventions that we have on staff are young. And we work with a lot of volunteers online. We have collective Twitter groups, Facebook monitoring groups that are full of people that are from 18 to 22. And I tell you what they find stuff online I would never find on my own. They save me hours every day. They scroll down and I know everything that happened in Discord that afternoon. And so we have to recruit the young and mobilize them to do this work. Generational, if you don't attack and think of countering violent extremism, a generational problem, you'll have a metastasis that is significant to the point where radicalized and recruiters like me laid a seed for the idea of the caliphate in the English language so that when the caliphate was pronounced, many more people traveled there. And if you look at the data on it, those people that traveled there were heavily influenced by the organizations that I established, but ISIS is in very many ways exactly what happens. Fission Waffen is a young, they insult boomers right now. So Adam Waffen is for them boomers that are idiots. And they mock the boomers. They're like boomers don't know how to meme. Fission Waffen knows how to make videos that look just like ISIS, let's rock, right? So there's that metastasization. And I think that if we think about it generationally, it brings up more questions and does answers, but something we need to consider. I was recently at a youth symposium on CVE and some of the greatest ideas came from these 15 year old kids. So they're like, what do you know about Facebook? And I'm like, well how many, I wanted to know how many of them are actually used. They don't, many of them don't use that at all. So like we're behind, we have to understand that we're behind in the game. So the way that they were sort of framing their discussions was we need to teach the adults. We need to teach them how to use Instagram. We need to teach them how to use Twitter. We need to say, and their activities, when they go on to these things, like what are they engaging in? What kind of conversations are there? What are things are they willing to share? So I think that's from a research perspective, that's what we need to be looking at in youth, not just talking about violent extremism in general. We need to be looking at what are their routines online? What are they, what kind of content makes them go? Is it memes? What is it? So I think, yeah, we can learn a lot from them. And I think that sort of shapes some of the things that we should be doing in this space when we're thinking about doing interventions, especially with youth or vulnerable populations, right? Excellent. Well, thank you all for coming, and please take a moment to thank our panelists for joining us today. Thank you, yeah, thanks so much.