 Welcome to the MIT Communications Forum. We are a speaker series that's produced through the School of the Humanities here at MIT. We are free. We are open to the general public. We do about six events per year, and we are always extremely excited to see audiences come in. So let me give you guys kind of a rundown of how this event will work, how all of our events work. We're going to have an hour of moderated discussion focused on how to fight a Nazi. And then we'll have about an hour of audience question and answer. So think of some good questions while we're talking. We have these two mics set up for whenever you have questions, when it's open to audience Q&A, please come up, use one of our microphones. The event is being audio and video recorded, so be aware of that. If you would like to see more events like this in the future, please sign up for our mailing list. There's a sign up sheet right over there when the event is over. And otherwise, welcome. Thank you guys so much for being here. Let me introduce myself, as well as the speakers. My name is Christina Couch. I'm the coordinator for the MIT Communications Forum. I'm also a science journalist and a graduate of the MIT graduate program in science writing. I actually did my thesis work on the science of de-radicalization and a big part of that thesis, which was published in Nov next in 2015, focused on this guy right here. This is Christian Picciolini. He's a peace advocate and author of this book, White American Youth, My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement and How I Got Out. If you would like a copy of this book, it's actually on sale for 20% off at the MIT COOP. In 2009, Christian co-founded a nonprofit group called Life After Hate, which is dedicated to helping communities and organizations implement long-term solutions that counter racism and violent extremism. Christian currently leads a group called The Free Radicals Project, which is a global network of extremist preventionists who help people disengage from all sorts of hate movements, including white supremacy, as well as ISIS, potential school shootings, et cetera, et cetera. To just beyond is Lee Orr and Corey Kalinsky. Karlinsky, excuse me. He's a senior program officer for Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit research and consulting group that applies lessons from brain and behavioral sciences to address a range of racial justice and inclusion issues, conflict resolution reconciliation, and other challenges. Beyond Conflict's current work includes measuring psychological factors that drive racism, creating visual and geographic maps that showcase subconscious phenomena that drive conflict, and assessing conflict and division in at-risk communities, and building cognitive and behavioral science-based tools to decrease political polarization within the United States. That is mouthful. I love what that. Yeah. So that should give you an idea of who we are and what we're doing here. First of all, just to give everybody an idea of the context for the panel, I'd like to open it up. And would both of you mind talking a little bit about how you got into the work of de-radicalization, because it is such a specific and fascinating field and what you're doing right now? You want me to go first? Either one. Whoever feels comfortable. I've been doing the work of trying to understand and dismantle the white supremacist movement for 30 years. Eight of those years, I was actually a member. From 1987 to early 1996, at 14 years old, I was recruited into America's first neo-Nazi skin head group. From 14 to 22, I actually spent those eight years involved in the movement when it was starting out, at least the skin head part of it. I managed to get out at 22, and it took me several years after leaving to really understand how to move forward. I didn't know who I was. I had spent almost every one of my formative years, at least my teen years, in that movement. And before that, I certainly didn't know who I was. But eventually, because of the compassion of those that I thought I hated, they gave me the opportunity to really kind of see a different perspective rather than attacking me or anything that they really could have done that was negative. They chose to approach me and listen to me. And that was really the first time in my life I had a meaningful conversation with the people I thought I hated. And it really opened doors. It certainly wasn't just that one instance. I had doubts every day I was involved. But it was like a snowball. And when I left, I decided I wanted to help other people, other vulnerable young people who were being duped by the same movement that I helped build and try to educate them and offer them kind of a lifeline to get out if they wanted to. So I've been doing the work of de-radicalization for about 15 years. And so far, I've helped, I think, over 220 people disengage from hate groups and groups like ISIS and other extremist groups as well. Thank you. So I got into the field of de-radicalization or radicalization actually through conflict. So I grew up in Israel and grew up around terrorism in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada and grew up around the difficult dynamics that happened when large groups of people are mobilized to fight one another, including Amin. And when I came to the United States, what I wanted to learn and understand was how do large groups of people come to fight one another and how do individuals like myself and my family members get motivated to fight, which, again, very different contexts, an ocean away, but maybe we'll be able to find some interesting commonalities about what drives people to that fight. So while Christian's thinking about how do I get individuals out of this dynamic, I'm thinking about how do we get groups and movements and nations to, quote, unquote, de-radicalize? One of the things that really interested me about Beyond Conflict is you guys have a very unique angle in terms of what goes on at the Beyond Conflict Innovation Lab. Would you mind breaking down a little bit about what types of initiatives you guys run and the science component of what you do? Sure, definitely. So Beyond Conflict is a 26-year-old organization. We started working at the end of the Cold War right around the time I was born. But what we've done is worked in some of the most iconic conflicts of the last 20, 25 years. So at the end of apartheid in South Africa, we helped initiate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and its implementation, and most recently the US Cuba opening, working with Cuban Americans in Miami and also with the Obama administration and elements of the Cuban government. But the basis for all of that was this notion that there's a shared human experience. So what we did is we brought leaders who have successfully negotiated transition to share their experience about what could be done to move things forward. So we bring people like Christian who, let's say, had some kind of epiphany or understanding and would take them to meet people who were struggling with the same challenges. So very similar, actually, to what you're doing right now. And we would do that on a global scale. But what we found is that there's now a science behind this, right? There's a systematic understanding of how humans think and feel about themselves and about one another. And it would be irresponsible for our field, conflict resolution, reconciliation for ourselves and our colleagues to not try and apply that in thoughtful, concrete ways. And so five or six years ago, partly out of a series of conferences here at MIT with the political science department and the cognitive and brain science department, we created this initiative, which is now a formal innovation lab housed within Beyond Conflict. And we're focused on four psychological processes that we think are critical building blocks. So one is social belonging and identity, so how we come to understand ourselves and our groups and what does it mean to belong. The second is dehumanization and empathy. So how do we dehumanize other groups and how can we empathize with them? The third is the consequences of violence, so trauma, violence, and victimhood. And the fourth is how do you rebuild social trust. So those are the themes we have. And within that, we have a number of initiatives focused on racism and exclusion, polarization, and the migrant refugee crisis. And I'm going to have to talk more if you want. So one of the topics that came up when the three of us spoke is that radicalization. Many people have this idea that radicalization happens to very specific people, but that it actually can happen to kind of anyone. I'd like to unpack that a little bit, because I know when I see things like the Unite the Right rally and what goes on in Charlottesville, it is incredibly difficult for me to feel any sort of any degree of empathy for what's going on in those types of circumstances. Would you guys mind unpacking that a little bit and talking about what is the research show in this department? What are your experiences doing intervention show? I don't know what research shows, because I'm not a psychologist. I have my own research, and that's hundreds if not thousands of people. And I can tell you that, from my experience, ideology is not what's driving radicalization. It is, in my opinion, kind of overlapping with what you said just now. It's an individual search for identity, community, and purpose. Those are three basic foundational human needs that I think that everybody in their lives looks for. Who am I? Where do I belong? And what am I supposed to do with my life? If we hit what I call potholes in our life's journey, those things that could be trauma, could be poverty, it could be privilege, it could be mental illness, it could be anything really. If we don't have enough resources to navigate those potholes, or enough resilience to be able to navigate them, they detour us. And that can happen to anybody. It can happen to somebody who's been abused their whole lives and is the stereotypical person that you would think would go into these movements. Or it can happen to somebody like a Richard Spencer who has extreme privilege and an education and is bright and found his way there. So in my opinion, what I've seen is those potholes, that trauma that we experience, whether it's a lot of little ones or one really big one, tends to deviate our search for identity, community, and purpose. And when we get detoured, there are people waiting for us who understand those vulnerabilities in us. And they're very savvy at tailoring their pitch or their approach, as I was at one point in my life, to understand for every person what their potholes were so that I could promise them paradise. Essentially, create some imaginary enemy that would put their focus on them so that they can project their own self-hatred onto them. Because really, I do believe that hatred in itself is really self-hatred being projected. Leigh, could you talk a little bit about, what does research show about who gets radicalized and why are certain people attracted to radicalized extremist groups and others who have been through very similar backgrounds have absolutely no interest? That's a big question. So I think that probably the most decisive factor that everyone is kind of implicitly understood, but maybe worthwhile mentioning here is that the most likely category of people to be radicalized are young men. I think that sometimes doesn't get acknowledged, but generally we're talking about men. So young men in the audience, you're a risk group. All right, me too. The rest of you are not off the hook by the way. But don't think you're off the hook, yeah. So I think that a little bit of history, I think especially in the United States after 9-11, there's a lot of attention paid to terrorism and people were trying to find what were the kind of key ingredients that made people turn to this particular ideology, this particular kind of behavior and often focused on poverty or kind of interest-based approaches. So what is it that in their lives that led these people that they had to fight poverty or they didn't have enough jobs? So those were kind of the initial perspective. But then I think what Christian was saying is absolutely right in what the research shows that number one is need to belong. Need to belong to a community and a group that gives you meaning, power, some sense of power and some sense of agency. And I think that there are structural factors that sometimes impede that. So for instance in some of the work that we're doing in the Middle East, if people, young men, grow up in authoritarian environments where they don't have the capacity to make decisions that affect their own lives, then that increases the risk of turning to extremism or finding alternative sources of meaning in group identity. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen in the West and I think one group that sometimes is vulnerable to it are second-generation immigrants. And I know that- Yeah, that's interesting that you brought that up because 25% of Americans under 20 years old are either first-generation or second-generation Americans. That's a lot of identity crisis. One foot in your parents' world, one foot in the new world and trying to find a balance between both is tough. Just to maybe put it into perspective a little bit. When I was recruited, I was just that morning running to the corner store with change to buy baseball cards and lemon heads. I was 14 years old. I had no idea about politics. I didn't understand racism although I'm sure I was complicit in institutional privilege and everything, but I didn't learn it from my parents. My parents are Italian immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-60s. So they were often the victims of prejudice. It wasn't really something that was taught to me at home. So for all intent and purpose, I should not have gone down that route. What happened to me, one of my potholes or my main pothole was abandonment. My parents, because they were immigrants, had to work seven days a week, 15 hours a day. I never saw them. And while they were providing and they loved me and I had aunts and grandparents around me, I never knew how to be vulnerable enough to express my feelings. I always thought, what did I do to push them away? So you start to act out at a young age to try and get their attention. So when I said earlier, I kind of try to be that person that I wish would have been there for me. I try and see the child in everybody, whether they're six or 60, the broken child, instead of the monster, because looking at them as monsters makes them subhuman, which is exactly what they try and do to everybody else. And in fact, the only thing I've ever seen, quote unquote, break hate is compassion and empathy and not punching a Nazi. We're gonna talk about punching Nazis in a second. Don't worry. But do you feel that if you had grown up where in, if your parents are talking more about race and expressing, that not everybody has the same chances within the United States and having those early honest conversations, do you think that you would have been deterred? I think it certainly would have helped. I never had those kinds of conversations with my parents. I still haven't had the birds and the bees talk with them. I'm wondering like... We can talk after them. I'll explain the whole thing. Two kids are. I think more than telling me those things would be exposing me to those things. I have this silly idea that we should really take our kids from the day they're born to eat Indian food and Japanese food and African food because maybe if, because they're growing up eating chicken nuggets, maybe if they just aren't afraid of food that's different. They won't be afraid of people that they think are different. I don't know. It's little things like that that I think we need to travel more. We need to read more. We need to experience more and ask a lot more questions. It's okay to ask questions. None of us in this room should feel like we know everything about race because none of us do. And we're all, no matter how tolerant or how progressive we are, we step in it. And we do things that we don't even know are racist. So I think that it's a learning process and I think we just have to be open to learning. Sorry, did I cut you off? Would you mind speaking a little bit to sort of how it feels to be inside one of these groups? I mean, specifically when I was interviewing you kind of constantly throughout 2014 and 2015, I was really shocked at how these groups recruit and about once you're in the level of isolation and really the emphasis on love that happens within these groups was truly shocking to me. You know, I think like drugs, the first couple times you do it, it was amazing. It fills you with the sense of like, I'm not talking about drugs anymore, I'm talking about the movement, but it gave me like this sense of I am, I'm not worthless anymore. Now I feel self-worth, even though of course it was completely toxic. I didn't have a family or at least I felt like I didn't and now I did. And there was something to be said about the camaraderie. They really did deliver when it came to that family kind of dynamic or that feeling of, or that perception of power or respect. But that goes away really, really quickly because it's just there to pull you in. Once you're in, you've already abandoned everything that is outside of that movement. So they know you can't really go back. You've already stigmatized yourself, you've already left your family, your hobbies, your friends behind. It's like a cult. What do you go back to and oh, by the way, if you do decide to go back, not only do the people that you're leaving hate you and wanna kill you, your friends, sometimes the only people you've ever known. But the rest of the outside world still hates you because you still are what you were in their eyes. So you feel trapped and in a sense, you're being drawn into this group because you feel marginalized already and what joining these extremist groups does is marginalize you even more. So it is very much like bad medicine that you keep taking over and over and over again because it makes you feel good for a shorter amount of time every time you take it. But you know if you stop taking it, the alternative is even worse. So it feels very much like what I would think a drug addict would feel like where you know what you're doing is terrible, but you still need it to stay alive. Can I maybe jump on the in-group love component? I mean, one of the critical factors that we see in intractable conflicts is that groups, there's a psychological process called motive attribution asymmetry. And what that means is that we believe that our group acts out of love for our own group and protection and that them, they're acting out of hate. And we know that's not true because if we believe that we're acting out of love then we probably are. But it seems to me that that kind of gets distorted, that normal psychological process gets distorted in this context where threat is heightened. So your group is being attacked. And so out of love and empathy and compassion towards your own group, that's bounded. You're motivated to join in acting ways that are perceived as hateful. In fact, are, I'm not trying to excuse it. For eight years, I thought I was saving the world. I mean, maybe not all of those eight years because I had doubts for many of those years, but there were points where I thought I was doing the right thing and I couldn't understand why everybody else didn't understand. So I really, I understand that because when we were attacked I could not understand why we were the subject of that attack and everybody else, kind of like what's happening now. All Republicans are Nazis, all liberals are communists and both sides hate each other. And I don't think that that's the case necessarily. We really, really disagree with what either side is doing. But I think at the end of the day, 99% of the people we have an issue with, we would agree, our Americans are people that we wouldn't mind living in the same neighborhood with if things were a little bit different. And I think that I agree with what you said because it's really important to understand that the people in these movements really do believe they're doing the right thing. So trying to convince them that they're not is not really the best approach. It seems like this also dovetails with the political polarization work that you're doing as well. I mean, we are at a time period where it is very difficult for sides to talk to each other. At least for now I've realized that it has always been difficult and that there have always been factions, but for right now it seems like political polarization, at least it feels particularly high. First of all, is that the case in terms of how this works in terms of doubling down, it seems like that would dovetail with political polarization as well. Absolutely, yeah, and so to kind of take in reverse order. Political polarization is at a historic high in the United States, according to most indicators. The highest it's been since the end of reconstruction. Higher than Vietnam? Yes, by kind of traditional political science measures. One of the things we're doing is developing a polarization index to try and track the underlying cognitive factors that lead to this kind of increased polarization and specifically what we're focused on are things called meta-perceptions. So not what I think about you, but what I think you think about me, which is a very strong predictor of my perceptions of you, which ties very nicely to the love versus hate thing. It's that self-hatred thing, I think. Yeah, there we are. If you hate yourself, you expect other people will hate you, so you hate them first. And there's also a little bit of that where if you do something bad, you kind of anticipate that everyone else is also doing that bad thing. But anyways, the other metric that we use is one of blatant dehumanization and what we found is that current dehumanization, mutual dehumanization of Republicans and Democrats is very close to the mutual dehumanization of Israelis and Palestinians during the 2014 Gaza War. Now, there's no violence here, but. I think you could ask different communities and they would already do that point. I guess I would say there's no acute non. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate floor. Right, right, we're not along those group lines. But I take your point. So I think that, yes, polarization is very high. And I think trying to break through that, it's gonna be a real challenge. And I think that polarization actually fuels a lot of rise in extremism. I think we're not listening. I think nobody's listening. I think everybody's talking. We say both sides have to talk to each other. Well, really both sides have to listen to each other as well. That's also part of communication. And I don't know that we're listening to the finer points because we're all kind of up here. Which certainly there are instances where I would say, yeah, it's not something I want to listen to. But, no, I mean, but at the end of the day, we're all human beings who kind of at our core want the same things. We want to be healthy. We want our families to be healthy and fed and have jobs and be successful and happy. I feel like we're being forced to choose sides right now or at least maybe we're self separating for whatever reason. The truth is, we all kind of live in the middle. We don't live on the extremes. At least we didn't, maybe three years ago. I think to get to the middle, we have to start with those points that we have in common with each other. We'll go off track, but we'll have something to come back to. If we start with those points that we have, that are differing all the time, we'll never find that commonality to get back to. And maybe that's a really simplistic view, but I think it's also a really practical one. I mean, one thing that I do when I work with people is I don't debate them. I don't argue with them. I don't tell them that they're wrong. I want to, but I don't. Instead I listen because eventually, after I listen enough, I start to hear what they're really saying. And sometimes they don't even know exactly that they're saying it. But I'm able to filter out the noise. One, because I used to say it, so it kind of just goes right past me. It makes me think like, I used to say that when I'm 14, you shouldn't really be saying that at 30 or ever. But I'm able to kind of pinpoint those nuggets of the potholes. I'm able to understand what the potholes are by listening. And that tells me the whole story, not what's coming out of their mouth. I think to really hear what somebody's saying, it's not about listening to their words. It's about kind of paying attention to everything else. We're in a time right now where I feel like even having the conversation of, can we come to agreement on some common ground issues, even just having the conversation. But it's not about common ground. It's about listening to people. It's not about settling. It's not about appeasing them. It's not about endorsing their ideas. It has nothing to do with that. We're just seeing so many communities that are experiencing legitimate fear and violence right now and to see those communities having these, just fighting for their humanity is a difficult and horrifying thing to sort of watch happen day after day after day. And so that brings us to another question. This is one that's sort of been much debated over the past many months. Should you punch a Nazi? I have to admit, when I saw the video of Richard Spencer, who's a very well-known white nationalist, somebody punched him in the face. The video went viral. I found it satisfying to a degree that I don't even have words for. It would seem like, according to your research and work, maybe punching a Nazi is not the most effective means of breaking people from extremism. So would you mind walking me through what are the effective means? What's a better strategy? Well, it depends what you're hoping to achieve. If you're hoping to get emotional satisfaction, then it seems like that may be the right thing to do, but it may not be strategically wise. So one, when thinking about that question, I often think to my colleagues at the African National Congress, which is Nelson Mandela's movement and the current ruling party in South Africa, we often bring them around the world to speak with other opposition movements and they often say, be strategically wise and avoid the easy emotionally satisfying victories. So I think the question is, what are you hoping to achieve by doing the punching? And I think there is a real tension here between mobilizing your supporters and energizing them and trying to reach out and persuade the other side. So if you're trying to persuade someone to abandon their views, punching them generally is not going to be a very effective strategy. Sure. But if you're trying to mobilize your supporters and galvanize them, then maybe that is, although I personally would not recommend it. Gotta take a crack at it. Well, I don't know. I'm gonna tell you a secret. There are two things that Nazis or any extremists love. Silence and violence. If we're silent, if we ignore them, they grow. If we continue to pretend like we're living in a post-racial society and sweep it under the rug, if we continue to think that they're not a threat, they're just gonna grow because they'll find an ecosystem to grow in. If we're violent, we play right into their hands because that is what they want to accomplish when they go into always very liberal towns like Skokie, Illinois, which is a Jewish neighborhood in the 1970s in Illinois. That's why they went to Charlottesville. That's why they went to Berkeley. That's why they came to Boston. Although Boston, good job. I have to say, I wanna talk about that. But that's their goal because when we are violent against them, they use that against us. They become the victim. They now have ammunition to say, you see how we were attacked. You see how our free speech was squashed, how people are intolerant against us. They hate us. We're not the haters. It's a tactic. They go in knowing that there's going to be violence. They go in knowing that they're gonna say the most egregious things, carry the worst signs. They go there intending to be attacked because that helps them. So to that, I would say, Boston, good job because what happened in Charlottesville, where people were punching each other. And of course, a young woman lost her life at the end of the day at the hands of a white nationalist. But when they tried to do that here in Boston, you guys gave the best response that could ever be imagined. There were a couple of dozen neo-Nazis that gathered just a few weeks after Charlottesville. And I think it was reported that 20,000 people from Boston came out and surrounded them. There was not one arrest. There was not one fight that I'm aware of. There was no, it wasn't a mella, it wasn't any kind of a fight. I guarantee you they'll not come back here. They won't try that again, but they will try to go back to Charlottesville. They will try to go back to Berkeley because they know that it worked. So when it comes to, I don't know, any Nazi in the history of Earth that ever changed his views because he got punched. Richard Spencer is not less of a Nazi. And I agree with what Lior said. If you want personal satisfaction, if that makes you feel good, if that's what you wanna do, do it. But then look in the mirror and say, am I any different than that person that I just punched? When you do an intervention with somebody who is leaving an extremist group, whether it's a white supremacist group or otherwise, can you sort of walk me through what your basic steps are, what you're looking for, and what the actual work of doing an intervention looks like? I've learned to sum it up in seven words that start with L. Great, very concise. First you link with them. You have to establish rapport, right? Then you listen, and you're listening for those potholes, all right? Now I'm gonna screw them up. Lift, link, or sorry. The next one is leverage. So you leverage whatever resources you have to build that resilience. The next step for me is once I feel that they're in a place where they're back to reality, they're being vulnerable, the next one is lift, and I'll introduce them to the people that they think that they hate. I've spent hours with Holocaust deniers and Holocaust survivors, Islamophobes and Muslims or Imams and homophobes and LGBTQ community and vice versa, because it happened to me, I finally had the opportunity to have that meaningful dialogue, but it also happened to all the other people that I didn't help that got out. They finally met somebody that completely challenged the demonization that was happening in their head, and all of a sudden it turned into humanization. I can't hate that person anymore, because even though we're not exactly alike, we're more alike than I care to think about. So all of a sudden you can't demonize that person and it's like a healthy cognitive dissonance, right? So it starts to expand. And then the last two are love, so they need a new identity, a new community, a new purpose. You have to give them that aftercare. And then the last one is live. That's when they're kind of that free radical and they can take what they've learned and be human again. But it's a long process, right? It's different for everybody. As part of that leverage and lift part of the L's, it's about finding people who can help build resilience, job trainers, psychologists, tattoo removal, tattoo coverups. You name it, whatever it is, life coaches, that people need to become more resilient. It's pretty amazing what happens when you suddenly have the skills and the tools to be confident, the need to blame other people for taking something away from you, imaginary or real, it kind of goes away. Because now you have the tools that you need and you don't need to blame somebody else for what you think is being taken away. So that's kind of, so link, listen, leverage, lift, love, live. That's six, I'm missing one. It's in there somewhere. It rounds out, six rounds up to seven, it's fine. Lyra, can you walk us through a little bit about, what is the actual work of creating an effective peace-building strategy look like? What are the steps, what goes into it? Sure, yeah, well it depends on the context, obviously, but I think the, I'm trying to think what would be the best way to relate it to some of this work. But I guess the first thing is to identify the relevant identity groups, which I think is similar to what you were doing, right? So what are the key stakeholders? Where are the relevant, meaningful communities that you need to engage with? So in the context of the US Cuba opening, it was clear that the Cuban American community, because of their history with the island was a really important community to engage with. So where are the relevance stakeholders from a group perspective? And then you need to understand what values drive them, what narratives drive them, what ideologies and what kind of core human motivations like need to belong, need to survive, things like that. And then once you start engaging, what I love about the seven Ls is that, Six. Six and a staff. The contact part, right? Where you actually bring, often people think that conflict resolution is just bringing people together who hate each other. But actually, the pre-work is the critical part. Because like we talked about earlier, it's my understanding of who I am in my place in the group and my need to belong that really matters. And if you immediately jump into the contact, into the, as you call the love part, it could really backfire. And people are just not ready for it. So a lot of the work that an effective large-scale conflict resolution intervention does is actually not bringing groups together. It's preparing groups to be brought together. And that's, I think that's been borne out by some of the researchers. It's been a great recent for those of you who like this kind of stuff. Met analysis done by Betsy Levy-Palak about contact theory. That's the name of what I just described. So bringing different groups together. And the record is really, really mixed, especially when it comes to adults around issues of race, ethnicity or just like that. I call it immersion, but. One of the technology has certainly played this really critical role in both recruiting and providing a platform for people who are victims of extremist groups to have a larger voice than they might have otherwise. There's also been a lot of conversations within tech circles about the morality of deep platforming extremists. So that might be kicking somebody off of a social media platform like Twitter or a payment platform like PayPal or a podcasting platform. Can you speak a little bit to the sort of tech aspect of this one thing that when you and I were talking I was really interested in that there are white supremacist recruitment tools embedded in video games. And you had mentioned communities of people with autism are particularly targeted for this type of thing. First of all, would you mind speaking to the role that technology plays in getting people involved and whether you feel like deep platforming is a viable tool for getting the extremist out? Yeah, so back in my day it was very much kind of an in-person recruitment, right? You get a pamphlet, you get a book, you meet somebody, you go to a meeting. Nowadays the internet is that platform. And of course, there's so much information on the internet and it's such a great tool that it's also can be used as a bad tool and can have tons of disinformation. We've all heard the term fake news. I'm sure we're tired of hearing about it. I can tell you it exists and I can tell you there's a lot of it. I can also tell you a lot of it is coming from Russia just because of people that I've worked with who it's a long story. But it has really created this place. So if we think about marginalized people, marginalized young people who are being drawn to these movements for that identity, community and purpose, oftentimes these marginalized people don't have very many friends in real life. So they live online and when they're online they can be whoever they want to be. They don't have to be worthless or weak online. They can be a hero and they've gravitated to these because of the disinformation of fake news that's kind of brought them there, they've gravitated to these websites that are white nationalist or ISIS or whatever. And while they're there, there are people who are kind of skimming the water and recruiting these people. More proactively what they're doing is they're going to places where they know marginalized people gather. So a large number of video gamers might live exclusively online and might be their world. So they're going to those places where they can anticipate that a good percentage doesn't have a social network outside of the internet. They're also going to video games and it's not so much the tools are embedded in the games but those headsets that you're doing online gaming, I get reports every day of young parents contacting me saying I had some neo-Nazi from Estonia trying to recruit my 12 year old or when my son was in this game, I was watching him playing and the other person's avatar was like a Nazi and his name was like Himmler SS or something like that. And then when I asked my son what he was saying, they were talking about the Holocaust. I mean it's just they're going to places where they know that vulnerable people are safe zones where they can expect to be safe but now they're not anymore. And that's one of the things that they're doing. But yeah, the internet really has kind of created this platform for information, whether it's real or not to spread and for us to not really be able to distinguish between the two. And that has really done a disservice and frankly, I mentioned Russia earlier but the truth is and I think most people don't know this but since the early 1900s, since 1903, Russia has been involved in this kind of disinformation war, this conspiracy theory war. One of the earliest and most influential pieces of conspiracy theory and fake news or disinformation is a book called The Learned Protocol or the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It is an anti-Semitic book that Russia published under the guise that it was a leaked document from like a secret Jewish meeting of world leaders who were planning on taking over the world. That book today, even 120 years later, is still the most influential book for neo-Nazis and for ISIS, who are both by the way very anti-Semitic, anti-vaccine stuff, flat earth stuff. If you've heard any of those conspiracy theories, they all came out of Russia between 1903 and today. And their goal is to just kind of give all this misinformation, disinformation, when we spread it, it's misinformation so that we have absolutely no grounding in reality and so we're fighting with each other. What I saw happen, it was a girl that I was working with. I noticed this was before the election in 2016 but tens of thousands of these kind of pro-Trump neo-Nazi Twitter accounts. And I started being attacked by them because I was working with a girl who was kind of part of their circle. And what I discovered and turned over to the FBI in October of 2016 before the election was that they were Russian trolls setting these accounts up and that they were doing something, and I didn't know what the hell it was, but they were doing something to influence the election. And I turned that over in October 2016 and I still have not gotten a call back. I sat with them, I handed over a hard drive of 32 gigs of information, of all the accounts of everything and it wasn't until four months later that we actually heard on the news, you know, we suspect that Russian meddling has happened in the election and it's like. Are you trying to tell me that this administration was not on the ball about that issue? I'm not sure, I believe that. Lior, could you speak a little bit to, when we talk about deep platform or essentially taking away these tools that extremist groups can use, is the platforming, in both of your opinions, an effective way of sort of curtailing some of these extremist issues or does it just send them underground and remove a tool that other people could use to keep track of these groups? So I like to kind of compare these two approaches to the latter is that sunshine is the best disinfectant theory of let's hear out the views and then we can counter them and the second is rooted in the belief that if you give these individuals a platform then it amplifies their message. I think the way I like to think about that is thinking about social norms and the impact that social norms have on human behavior and especially what's called descriptive norms. So what we see other members of our group doing. And I think that descriptive norms have a tremendous amount of power and platforming people provides them with a great amount of power. So if something is perceived as normal it can have a tremendous amount of influence in furthering recruitment. So I think that limiting that perception is the key. So if you don't make these kinds of measures appear normal then you can have a greater impact. So what that I think is the principle I would take the specific decision I think it really varies by institution and context. And so I don't have any particular set of guidelines on that that I have. I think that free speech does not apply in these cases because it doesn't apply. I mean free speech only really applies when it's between us and the government. It does not apply when we're talking about a public company who can do whatever they want and doesn't have to protect free speech. And I kind of look at it like an apartment building if you had one tenant out of the 20 apartments that was constantly starting fires letting their dog out of the apartment and letting it poop in the hallways, not paying the rent. I'd live next to that person. Yeah, well I'll see you when you know. Attacking the other tenants I think that company's responsibility that platform's responsibility to eliminate that person from the platform. However, you know, things have circumstances that we don't always anticipate. So what's happened now that we've started to de-platform people is they've gone and they've created their own technologies things like GAB and, you know, and Hatrion and... It's such a good pun for such a bad tool. Well, he just got arrested for, you know, child pornography. So you can tell the caliber of folks that are still around. You know, it doesn't stop them. It may put a little bit of a speed bump in the road for them. And I agree that it's, you know, if it benefits the full community they should probably not be there. But it doesn't, I mean, don't be under any kind of like, you know, illusion that it stops them, it doesn't. They just find ways to go underground and it goes back to that whole silence and violence. If we don't see them, have they gone away? Not really. I've only got one more question left. After that, we're gonna open it up to audience questions. Once again, these are the two microphones. Please come and use them so that we can have good audio for when we put it up on the web. And we're gonna go sort of back and forth. We'll start at this one and then we'll kind of alternate here or there. So be aware. That's how we're gonna do things. In your opinion, can you tell me a little bit about what needs to happen on either a governmental or societal level in order to really effectively reduce radicalism? And are there policies or programs in place that you two view as being either particularly effective or just completely ineffective? Well, I think one thing I think is Christian, what you're doing. So I think long-term accompaniment and engagement on an individual level from what I've seen has proven to be very effective, much more than many other things. I think on a systemic level, on a governmental level, you have to really think hard about what makes young people have meaning in their lives, particularly young men. And I think that, to me, that should be the critical focus of the government. So how do you create, or non-governmental actors who are relevant, right? So how do you create meaningful youth programs? How do you give people, young people, young men, agency in some sense of power of their own lives in a way that won't be distorted? To me that would be a critical thing and I don't see that happening in many places around the world. You know, I think without diminishing the role of young men, I think we're really failing everybody else, besides young men. And we've been doing that forever. And I think we're failing all of our young people. I don't think that adults know how to be vulnerable with young people and in turn, they will never be vulnerable with us. If we can't talk to our children or our students or our players about what is really going on with us, they'll never learn how to do that with us. They think we're superheroes. Kids growing up think my parents weren't around and I still, like I wanted them to be because I looked up to them. So I think that that's, not systemically speaking, but from a personal level, that's I think one thing that we need to do is we need to learn, I call it cautious vulnerability. It's not about just opening everything up. It's about really just being very intentional about it. From a systemic level and an institutional level, I think we need to fix the education system. I think we need to fix the prison system and we need to fix law enforcement because even though that doesn't affect the white community as much as it affects the African American community, it's a cycle. And until it really is an equal place for everybody and that institutional racism is gone, we can't expect interpersonal racism to go away. So it really kind of has to be an overhaul. We have to sit back and ask ourselves, what is America? It's not the same, we shouldn't have the same vision that our grandparents had or our forefathers. We need to sit down and really answer that question about what it is if we're gonna move forward because it seems like everything we're doing is looking backwards, make America great again. Let's go back to, we need to really think about what it is that we're doing going forward. Okay, that seems like a good place to start some audience questions. If you have any questions, please come to the microphones. I wanna thank both of you for lasting a full hour through my questions personally, but we'll start over here. Hello, hi, thank you, thank you for the great talk. So I have a question for Christian. I wonder if you can describe what your customer acquisition process looks like. Do you let people come through your door or do you kind of actively reach out to people? It's a very MIT-framed question. I really love it, inbound marketing. You know, I may be the only person on earth that cannot wait to be out of a job. You know, I've not, outside of a couple of people, like Richard Spencer, who I've sat and talked with for a couple of hours and other folks, I've never had to seek anybody out. The amount of people coming to me is overwhelming. So yeah, I don't really have a problem with that. I wish I did, to be honest, but I, you know, if I look at my phone now, there'll be somebody, and they always start, the emails always start out. I need your help. Is it people who are within radical groups coming to you directly, or do you also get contact from friends or family members who are worried about somebody? It's split, almost equally, in three ways. The first group is the person who's in an extremist group and wants help getting out or starting to have confusion. The second group is what I call the bystander, family member, friend, girlfriend, boyfriend, teacher, whatever. And then the third is the former, the person who got out on their own, could be five years ago, could be 15 years ago, but in many cases, they've never in their lives been able to speak it out loud. And that's traumatic. To be able to, you know, to have to hold, you know, even though you're a better person, you've found your way out and you've been living a good life, there are people whose wives don't know or whose friends don't know and are not able to talk about that. And it's a very important part of the process to be able to talk about it. So for them, we really provide kind of like a support network. It's a virtual network, you know, with a hundred people who are formers who kind of have like, you know, this very cool group dynamic. Thank you for your question. There was a lot of controversy over the statements you made about James DeMore on the Waking Up podcast a little while ago that I'm sure you don't wanna trudge into again. Would you mind telling everybody who James DeMore is in case they're not familiar with that particular case? Should I say it or do you wanna say it? It's fine. He is the guy who came out with the Google Memo back in July of 2017 or August of 2017 regarding gender differences and the difference between whether it was an institutional cause that's causing the gender gap in tech or whether it's biological. And it was, it's highly, I know you had a lot of flack because of how debatable it was as to whether he did have allegiances to these other more than hateful ideologies. So in light of your whole idea of compassion, what is the best way to firmly call people out if it's not entirely obvious that they're there? That's a good question. So just to give you a little bit more background, I was on a podcast with an individual named Sam Harris and this came up and when James DeMore's name came up it was pretty recently after that happened. The first several podcasts, the first three podcasts that he did after he was let go by Google were alt-right podcasts. Since I made that statement I've actually had a chance to talk to James DeMore and my opinion has changed a little bit. I think that he genuinely did not know that he was going on alt-right podcasts. However, I still disagree with what he said in his memo. I think that his claim is based on kind of flawed logic. As far as compassion goes, I mean I have compassion for everybody. I mean I sit across from guys with swastikas on their faces most of the time and I'm not reaching across and yanking them out of their chair and I listen to them. I never claim that I'm 100% right because I know I've not been 100% right in my life but when it comes to the statement I did get a lot of flack over that but I also think people didn't understand the nuance of what he was doing like I did. When I saw him going on these kind of very borderline alt-right podcasts, to me, people talk about dog whistle, it wasn't a dog whistle to me, it was like a bullhorn. To me they're very blatantly white supremacist podcasts or not borderline alt-right podcasts. How would you approach somebody that you think, ask them instead of attacking them? If they say yes then yeah. If they say no then they're probably, and you think that they are, it could be because they're ashamed of being a part of it and that gives you an end to talk to them. Of course, we're happy to repeat the question. So what you had said made me think about the question of when they make these podcasts, when they talk with people to say, recruit, what's their basic message that they use to get people to join, what is it, the theme, or you know what I'm saying, what's that basic message no matter what they say? They make equalization of rights feel like oppression. It's not about things equalizing, it's about something being taken away from me. It's that whole notion of privilege and you say to some people you're like, white privilege and you're like, I don't have it. My parents worked hard. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is you don't have to worry about your life every time you walk out the door. It's really about taking these vile ideas and sanitizing them. It's not about saying white power, it's about saying white pride. It's not about saying we must secure the existence of our people in a future for white children. It's about saying it's okay to be white. And it's really about taking these messages that are very recognizable and very offensive and taking them into a gray area where you can say, okay, well that's free speech. He's not really saying he denies the Holocaust. He's saying he questions it or he's skeptical. It's like, they've learned how to massage their words and make them more palatable. When I heard blood and soil, we all heard that a million times from the Charlottesville Rally. Well, that translated to me as race and nation because that's the same slogan that we used to say 30 years ago. They took the word race out of it and they just made it blood and soil. And it's just that like polishing of it that makes it less offensive on the surface. But when you really think about it, I mean, obviously what they're talking about is white power and white homeland. So, just be very sensitive to the fact that they're not gonna hit you with the most blatant message. We recognized that 30 years ago. There's this whole concept that we did called boots to suits. We knew that the boots and the tattoos and the shaved heads and the swastikas were turning away even the average American white racist. It's true. Even, you know, grandpa Stan who, you know, who hates everybody would see a Nazi walking down the street and hate that Nazi. Well, the minute we took off the Nazi uniforms and we became just like grandpa Stan and started to use words that he used, well, then it wasn't so hard for him to bite. We encouraged people to not shave their heads, not get tattoos. We encouraged them to go into law enforcement to go into the military. If they had a clean record to run for office, to be teachers, to really kind of infect from within. I'm getting the sense from what I know elsewhere as well from what you're saying, that there are a lot of people who have been left out, so to speak, in one word or another. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's the job they have, maybe the treatment by the people. And the basic message is we're going to put you on top and you'll have to say what happens to you. Is that any part of that? You know, I think in most cases it's more personal than that. It's less about not having a job and it's more about, you know, what somebody did to you when you were three. You know, there are lots of people who have a lot of a job and they don't become Nazis. But there are lots of people who've been abused in their lives and suffered trauma who ended up becoming drug addicts or who joined a cult or who are strong enough to go find help and get it because maybe they have access to it, but not everybody does. And, you know, honestly, if we need to fix something, healthcare is the big one because there are 75% of the people I deal with are suffering from a mental disorder. Whether it's autism or schizophrenia or bipolar or chronic depression. And a lot of that comes from the trauma. So, you know, I think that healthcare, we need to focus on young people. And, you know, we really need to amplify people's passions at the earliest age possible because it's hopelessness, I think, and uncertainty that really pushes people to these movements. So if any of those things that you said would cause uncertainty, then certainly that person would be, you know, ripe for some sort of radicalization, whether it's, you know, promiscuity or drugs or a Nazi or Isis or whatever. I mean... Someone who solved their emotional problems for them by... Yeah, because they're providing everything that's missing in their life because it's the recruiter's job to find out what that is. Oh, you feel abandoned? We're your family. That guy abused you? Well, we're against that. And we're gonna make sure that doesn't happen to you again. It's really, you know, it's all these kind of empty promises that never come to fruition. The way I look at it is there are three stages. There's the pre-radicalization stage, and we're all susceptible to this, the radicalization stage and then the de-radicalization stage. And then even after that, there's aftercare. But we start to become pre-radicalized the day we're born and it has nothing to do with ideology. The ideology just presents itself and it becomes the permission slip for you to be angry. That's what allowed somebody like me at 14 years old to say, yeah, Hitler, good guy. I hadn't even studied it in school. I didn't even know. It's the license. Somebody's finally saying, you know what? You're angry, go have fun because those are all the people that have held you down your whole life. It's just about so. And the leaders, you know, it's all about manipulation for them. It's like a game. It's half of them are sociopaths, the other half are narcissists and if there were a third half, they'd all be megalomaniacs or something. But it really is about them using people who are vulnerable. So when I look at those people in Charlottesville and I hear at first when I heard very fine people on both sides, I was like, oh my God. No, but then I thought I have to believe there are very fine people on both sides. Otherwise I'd be denying myself my own change. I have to believe that there are good people there. Oh, that's such a bitter pill. It's a bitter, hard pill to swallow. Lior, I want to tag into you for a minute. These recruitment strategies that Christian's talking about, how does that compare to the groups that Beyond Conflict works with? I think it's very consistent. So the leadership sets a strategy and they probably have a set of numbers they're trying to hit. We need to have X more people in this unit or that unit. There were incentives. It's not unlike any other kind of pyramid scam marketing company that you get hired for eight bucks an hour or something like that. Other incentives and then the recruiters are really adept at preying on people's vulnerabilities. And the specific ones that Christian mentioned, I think are spot on. I think in the case of the one that cuts across is need for belonging, right? Need to belong, need to belong to a group. And they give that and they're very effective and they tap into social networks whether online or in person. I mean, who doesn't want to belong? Every single person on earth wants to be loved or accepted or respected. It's pretty easy to identify the people that don't belong. And it's pretty easy to promise them things that make them feel better about themselves. I kind of feel like I'm still a recruiter. Like I'm still looking for vulnerable people except I'm kind of offering them something better now. I'm still looking for those broken individuals. Don't lead with that. Sorry. Let someone get to know you first. Hi, thank you so much for sharing your story and shedding insight and for your vulnerability. I'm actually a journalist and I've talked to a lot of young earth creationists who've come to embrace evolutionary science. Obviously a bit different, but I'm always really curious about kind of their first moment when they had that confusion you were talking about. So my question is the opposite of the past question about how people are persuaded to join. I was wondering in your experience, what are some of those moments or experiences that get people to that cognitive dissonance that make them come to you? I'll tell you a very specific story about an individual that I worked with. His name was Darryl, he's from Buffalo. He's 31 and when he contacted me, he was a wounded military veteran that never actually made it to the battlefield. He got wounded in training before he shipped out. And he was very angry. Now this is a guy who when I asked him like, if I were to ask him what his potholes were, he wouldn't know what to say. But when I listened to him, the things he said were like, I discovered my dad committed suicide at nine and I was the one who walked in on him and I got hooked on drugs at 12. And at 14, I lived down the streets and it's like, yeah, you wanna tell me more potholes? And he was like, what, huh, what? It didn't even face him. Like he didn't even know that that's what broke him. So he came back and of course in the military, he was recruited because there are a lot of people recruiting in the military, neo-nazis anyway. And of course the military training itself also taught him to hate that person over there with the brown skin because that's the war they were in. So he came back really angry, he couldn't go kill Muslims. And somebody gave him a copy of my book and he contacted me and he was really angry at me. He didn't like the way the book ended because I got out, you know? And I talked to him for a couple of weeks and one day, he was a really funny guy but one day he was just talking to me. He was like, I was in the park and I was pushing my daughter in a stroller and I was walking the dog and I saw a Muslim man praying in the park and all I wanted to do was like kick him. The first thing I asked him was, are you sure it wasn't somebody doing yoga because it was very possible because he was far away. And the second thing I said is, what are you doing tomorrow because I'm flying to Buffalo, we need to sit down and talk. And I did, I flew out to Buffalo and one of the first questions I asked him was, Darrell, have you ever met a Muslim before? And he said, no, why would I want to? They're evil, they wanna kill me, blah, blah, you know. And I said, okay, and I normally don't do this but I usually have some setup. But what I did was I excused myself, I went to the bathroom and I got out my phone and I Googled the local mosque. And very quietly I talked to the Imam and I said, Imam, I have a man here, he's Christian but he really would love to learn more about your religion. Do you mind if we stop by? I don't normally do it that way but I felt comfortable enough that it wasn't gonna be a bad experience. So I told him, I told Darrell we were going to lunch and halfway to where we were going for lunch, I told him we had to make a pit stop and I told him where we were going and I've never seen anybody turn white so fast. And normally for somebody like him that probably would have been a compliment but literally like he went blank and he got sick and he started sweating and he wanted to vomit and I pulled over and we talked back and forth and it took us like 30 minutes to just calm him down to the point where he can say a sentence. And after a while I said Darrell, you don't have to go if you don't want to but I came out here for you. I said, just walk through the doors with me and if you don't wanna stay after you do that, I'll walk out with you, it's fine. And eventually we got there and knocked on the door of the mosque and the Imam answered and he said, you're late. I've only got 15 minutes. We had an hour scheduled and he's like, I have to prepare for a prayer service but come on in, 15 minutes, that's all you got. Two and a half hours later after sitting around a conference table, talking, understanding, oh, Jesus is in the Quran. Oh, you never knew that. I mean, it's like ignorance and isolation completely like cut him off. And before you know it, they're like hugging and crying and bonding over Chuck Norris for some strange reason. I don't know why but they both love Chuck Norris. I did not plan that. You can do anything. But now Darryl goes there and he volunteers and he sets up chairs. He's still a Christian. I mean, like he goes there with his wife and his kid and there's not like a Friday, you can drive past her block and not see him eating falafel together. And it was really just like that connection. I always say that hatred is born of ignorance. Fear is its father and isolation is its mother. He was afraid of what he didn't understand and he'd been isolated from it his whole life. When I was six, a garter snake ran over my foot. I have been terrified of snakes since then. That's kind of what happened to him. Like he had, he developed this phobia almost. And until he was actually able to hold the snake and see it wasn't gonna bite him, that's what really made him realize that, oh, okay, and of course there's a lot more to it but that was like one experience of that. That was healthy, you know. That's great, thank you. We're gonna take one more question over here. You've been waiting a good bit. If you make it quick, maybe we'll squeeze too. Yeah, we're gonna get to you. We're coming over to that side immediately. I'll try to make this quick. Thank you all. And actually speaking of the, it's okay to be white posters. I just think it's like, if I may just use this as an example, it seemed to not be quite the poster that radicalized young white men. It's like the reaction and that was by design. Like in many instances, people lost their marbles and called this hate speech and called this, and that very benign statement became like, what young manhood was like, it's not okay to be white or if you think it's okay to be white, you're a Nazi. It's a trap. And things like this, like the Russian IRA planting on both sides of the political divide, planting the most extreme statement so that each side can think the other side is much more extreme than it really is. Trust me, I saw it in 2016. Yeah, I mean, what's happening is, well, first of all, the far right or the Nazis are coming with the, it's okay to be white science because like I said, they know it's a gray area. Of course, what are you gonna tell somebody? No, it's not okay to be white. Of course, it's okay to be white. It's okay to be anything that you're born as. But what that does is it starts that conversation. It's a trap because now it's the same thing with white lives matter, right? Try telling somebody that white lives don't matter and you will have an argument with them. But if you understand that the reason that started was intentionally to have that very awkward conversation that was a trap, then you know. So, So like how can, sorry, how can so like college administrations or whoever respond to these, call them out as the dog with those they are or the tooling attempts that they are without sending that message. It's hard. You know, I think, I get asked this question a lot. You know, what do we do on college campuses when this happens? And I really don't know the answer. The only thing I can say is I used to have a different opinion on hate speech, right? First of all, there's no such thing as hate speech. It's not a law. There's free speech and that's it. And I started to think to myself like, you know, we need to start controlling what these people say because it's hurting people. It's, you know, online hate crimes are the same as real hate crimes. But then I started to think, you know, really free speech and that power is all about the interpretation of who is in power. What happens when somebody doesn't like what Black Lives Matter says or what Antifa says or what women say? Can they then use that same limitation of speech to oppress them? You know what I'm saying? We have to be careful because things have unintended consequences just because we don't like what somebody else says and we have the power to change that doesn't mean we will always hold the power and sometimes we may be the victims of that. So I've really changed my opinion on that and I really do think that we need more speech. We need education. We need experience, not less of it. So that was kind of a revelation that I had fairly recently actually. With the groups that your team deals with, do you see the strategy of a message that on very superficial value seems like it's okay? Do you see this type of dog whistle messaging as well? Yes, everywhere. And I think the one element that I actually wanted to ask Christian about, if that's okay, is about humor. You guys can cross talk, it's really okay. It's about humor and recruiting because that's one thing you definitely see internationally but I think particularly here it's really important, right? So the ambiguous humor, the ambiguous gist. The satire is a gray area, right? Yeah. Is it satire or is it somebody really being offensive? It's those gray areas they like to hide behind. So I guess what I wanted to ask you and I think it relates to this question is how do you take those ambiguous messages and what would be a good strategy to, because I think it relates to the de-platforming question as well, right? What would be in general a good strategy? With one idea is to just did what you just did which is to explain to people this is what it's meant to do. This is the exact strategy and kind of lay that out for people to understand. So what do you think about that? Well, I mean, it's a thing. There's a thing called memetic warfare which is the use of memes to get ideas into society, right? So it's effective, it works. They do use, I mean, the alt-right does it all the time, peppy the frog and they use satire to hide behind their racism kind of the same way that a lot of far-right political people hide behind patriotism to hide their racism. Education is important. We need to educate people because just saying, hey, you can't put that up does not change the problem. It just puts a band-aid on it. But I also, I think we need to think about it in a little bit more of a granular way and I've been starting to think about this because 75% of the people that I work with have mental health disorders. One of the things that is said about people who are on the autism spectrum or who have what was called Asperger's is unidimensional thinking, kind of black and white thinking, hyper-focus. And I don't know if I agree with this or not because it's disputed but a lack of empathy and not being able to tell like non-verbal, like to tell when somebody's telling a joke. So a lot of those memes that are meant to be jokes may not actually be jokes to some people. They may not understand that it's offensive. They may not understand that what they're spreading. I mean, they even call it weaponized autism. I am not making this up. They're very proud of this. It's a badge of honor for them. So it would not surprise me. And I certainly don't want to generalize because I don't know enough about it but it would not surprise me if that played into it some while. If the use of these kind of satirical memes really didn't have the full effect on the people that we're actually spreading on. Interesting. I wanted to jump in here and clarify. It's my understanding that in autism research that the lack of empathy is a very terrifying stereotype that is often not backed by research. But that is certainly the stereotype and it's certainly like a horrifying one at that. Thank you so much for waiting. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Thank you for the conversation. Christian, it sounds like being a part of this group filled some need in your life, gave your life some sort of meaning. So what personally did you fill that gap with once you left at 22? And what do you think we can fill that gap with for other individuals? Is it a social structure we need or is it just better friendships and relationships? Good question. I struggled for many years after I left because initially I tried to run as fast as I could away from my past. I was afraid to admit it. So I moved. I wore long sleeves. I tried to make new friends. I basically tried to cover it up. Even though I wasn't that person anymore, I was not brave enough to confront it. And there wasn't something like free radicals project to say, hey, let us be. You're kind of guiding light to get out of them. There was nobody. I think all the things you said are important. A family, friends. But it really is about replacing that identity, community and purpose. For me, I was lucky that at 19 years old I got married. I had a kid at 21. I had another kid. And by the time I left before I was 23, I was very intent on being a good father. Even though I would wake up every morning wishing I hadn't woken up for like five years afterwards. And then at the end of that five years, and Christina knows this because I'm sure we talked about it. 100 times probably. But I met a man who I had this black security guard at my high school. I'll just tell the whole story because it won't make sense without it. At the end of that five years when I was depressed, it was like 99, one of my friends came up to me and she said, I don't want to see you die, right? Go apply for a job at the company that she had just started working at. Small company called IBM. And I was like, you're crazy. Like I got kicked out of six high schools. I never went to college. I didn't even own a computer. Like it was ridiculous. But I went and I ended up getting this kind of entry level job setting up computers. And my first job, my first day for IBM, my old high school, the same one I got kicked out of twice to install their computers. And I was terrified. Like it was eight years since I'd been there but people knew me there, trust me. Like I had started a white student union. I had pickets. There were lots of brawls and fights and things like that. And I was terrified and who walks by me, the first person that walks by me, Mr. Holmes, the black security guard I'd gotten in the fist fight with that got me kicked out the second time. And I thought, it's over. I'm gonna lose like the one thing in my life. I was thinking about me, right? I wasn't even thinking about him, but I was like, I'm gonna lose the one thing in my life that has finally brought me something. And he didn't recognize me when he walked by, but I recognized him and I followed him to the parking lot and I tapped him on the shoulder and he recognized me and he jumped back because he was afraid. But then he listened and I said I was sorry and he said, that's not enough. He said, I accept your apology, but you're saying sorry because that makes you feel better, right? That's meant for you. That's not meant for me. What I need you to do is make amends and I've been doing it ever since. He saved my life and he was the one who, this is a man I physically assaulted, this is a man whose life I made hell at the school. This was a man who said, I believe you and I have faith in you, but you have to learn how to fix this. And that gave me eventually the courage to go out there and talk about it. This panel has focused largely on extremist groups. It seems like in a lot of ways, a larger problem is sort of this lowercase R racism, implicit bias and problems that permeate everywhere from academia to healthcare to the legal system, et cetera. Given your experiences within, with extremist groups, in your opinion, what can we do to sort of combat these more normalized forms of racism? Well, I think the number one thing for me is actually to change institutions. I think it has to happen within each institution because a lot of the, you know this, but a lot of the science around implicit bias and implicit racism is interesting, but it's very mixed, right? It's very, very hard to know how to change that. The evidence is extremely mixed. A, in B, we actually don't know that having implicit bias leads to behaviors that are negative. And so I think looking at institutional levels is gonna be the really important thing. So how can you make institutions more equitable, more diverse, more inclusive, I think is gonna be the critical challenge. I kinda go back to my whole, you know, treat them like kids thing. You know, I wouldn't shame my children. I wouldn't beat my children. I wouldn't disown them or, you know, throw them out on the street. I think my first approach is, would I treat that human being in the same way I treat my children. And that would be my first approach, obviously some people don't respond to being compassionate. But it's always really worked for me, to be honest. It disarms them because they expect me to be aggressive. They expect me to wanna tear their head off. The minute they see me, they're like, oh, you know, like this guy's gonna be trouble. And they're really surprised when I'm just like, hey, how's it going, you know? And I sit there and I listen to them. And after a while they know that what they're saying is not getting to me, so they stop saying it. And, you know, I'm not suggesting, you know, we all go out and start hugging Nazis or anything like that. But to be honest with you, it really, if we can understand that the ideology is just there to allow them to do what they're doing and it isn't the reason why they're doing what they're doing, that was like the most important thing for me to realize is they weren't born Nazis. They didn't come out of the womb with an armband. They, you know, they learned it at some point. And if they learned it, they can unlearn it. And, you know, I mean, even somebody like, and I hate to say this, but even somebody like a Dylan Roof didn't, wasn't born a murderer. He, six months, maybe eight months before that was probably, you know, watching the Brady Bunch. I mean, like, you know what I mean? Like, we have to stop thinking of people as much, they do monstrous things, but they're not monsters. They do them for a reason and that's usually because of what they've experienced in their lives. It sounds like it's a very difficult thing to create solutions for people that are guided into extremism. Solutions that do not rely on communities of color doing backbreaking and dehumanizing work as a result. Is that, is there, how do you feel about that? Meaning, so meaning they have to, so placing the burden on people who are oppressed to explain and persuade, is that the question? Right, there is a very long history of people of color doing the work of trying to end racism without having a large backing by white people in general. And so to create solutions for it, in terms of these extremist contexts, without placing that on the back of people who are already oppressed, I mean, how do you do that, I guess, is my question. Well, I think one is empowering more people like Christian, who can do that work without burdening people who are suffering from that kind of ideology. And then, so I think some of that is just creating more Christians, not in a religious sense, but more people like you, right? So who can you train, and for us as kind of researchers, is what can we take the essential components of what you do and give it to you, Christina, and say you go talk to white radicals and see what happens? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I am just one small piece of the puzzle. It really does take a team of psychologists and researchers and lay people who do job training. I mean, it really, it has to be a village. Anybody can do what I do because it's not ideological. I don't go in there and, I have psychologists all the time that I refer people to who are like, I cannot take your patient. I don't understand the ideology. I'm like, good. I don't want you to even talk about it. This is not, I'm not, it's not a debate session. This is about you understanding why that human being is broken and not about what they're saying. So this is really something everybody can do. Now, I may have an extra superpower because I used to be one of them and I have credibility and their words maybe don't affect me as much as they do you because I used to say them and they certainly have a very strong power and I'm not diminishing them, but I've been able to sit through these things and that is what, is that the only thing that gives me any, I don't even want to call it an edge because I'd lack in so many other places, right? Anybody can do this. It really is about human connection. You had a question? Is the other and they are worthless and they are a great society even though also, for example, you're going to be in a good direction. So, and I think about things like this because I know what you're having to do. And I think that ties in with what you're saying that you can reach out to certain people and you can actually bring them back into the kind of people who are in addition to society. So I would reinforce that and maybe after this session exchange contact with Trenton. And I just want to say too, it's not just about the intervention part about pulling people out. I really, we need to start to use an analogy. We have to treat it like polio, right? We have to treat those who are sick, which is what I do, but we also have to inoculate the population from getting sick. Otherwise it's going to be like pulling sand out of a hole in the beach. Just going to keep filling out. Prevention is very important, which is why I keep stressing the fact that it really, we have to train the future generations to kind of weed this out of our system. We really have to stop failing our young people. We have to give them jobs. We have to make school affordable. We have to make it not life-threatening to not have a job without health insurance. We have to, there are lots of things that we need to do. We need to make sure that young black men aren't being killed in the streets. All of these things kind of affect each other, right? If there aren't any other questions. If you have another question, please head to a microphone. There was one more thing I wanted to ask. A while back you said, when you're talking about just public discourse, you said that once we lose the truth, it's not coming back. And that was about back in March. And it really struck me when you said that because I thought things were really bad back then, but do you, what's your progress report now since then? Do you think things have gotten worse or better since? So I think my quote was, truth is the most important thing at stake right now because once we lose it, we're not going to remember what it looks like to be able to go back to it. I wish I had a better report for you. I think we're more in tune to looking for the truth. I just don't know that it's readily available. Truth is one of those funny things. I mean, for some people, if I had a brother and we went to different schools growing up and they taught him a two and two plus equals five and the school I went to for my whole life, they taught me two and two equals four, we would argue all the time because each one is our reality, each one is our truth, right? So truth, what is absolute truth? Is there, there's not a gray area. We need to find out what truth is again and hang onto it because we're losing it. There's so much information coming at us right now intentionally that we're being lost in the satire, the fake news, the real news, you guys don't have to raise your hand, like it's cool. It is a school. It's just open, it's just us, it's not a problem. Thank you so much, I'm curious. We're saying earlier that a lot of these people who get recruited in, they are young men who are vulnerable. Have you worked with any women? And what are the unique challenges of working with women as opposed to the young men? Well, I'm not a woman. I mean, it's true, there are certain things that I just will never know about a woman. Likewise, they won't ever know about me. I do work with women. There definitely is, there's a lot more men in these groups than there are women, but the number of women is rising because what they've figured out is that, it's not rocket science, young women bring in young guys, right? So they've started to use women as the propagandists. They're starting to use them to make the videos, the recruitment videos because it's not indifferent in that they're still searching for identity. They're still searching for community and purpose. There are still potholes. But I think that the churn rate for women is a lot higher because while all extremist groups do this, women are our future, they birth our warriors, they're amazing, we couldn't do it without them. Once they get in, they treat them worse than their enemies. I mean, it really is the most misogynistic, intolerant towards women, I really mean that. It's terrible. So I think women figure it out faster that they need to leave but they're also less empowered to be able to leave because they're conditioned to trust these men. And when they get in, it's anything but trustful. Leora, for the groups you work with, are there differences in terms of peace building strategies that vary by gender? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the best trends in the peace building world recently has been to make sure that women are involved in peace processes. So one of, we know from research that women led peace processes succeeded at a much higher rate, which is great and probably for a lot of the reasons, the reverse reasons of why we talked about. And so now there's a real push in our field to center women in peace processes and make sure they're involved. So I know in the Syrian peace process, the UN has set up a women's advisory board, specifically to advise the special envoy. I know in Israel-Palestine there's now a really exciting grassroots movement called Women Wage Peace. That's working very hard and so I think that the more that that can be done, whether it's in the de-radicalization space or elsewhere, I think that's- I think women, sorry to interrupt, I think women are doing some of the most important work in the space. There's a group from Mali, I forget their name, but they're stopping young teens from going into the Civil War there for joining Boko Haram. It's very important for women to be a part of this because they're already very misogynistic in these groups. And that's also part of the immersion is to understand that women aren't what they're being taught. It's this whole kind of culture of toxic masculinity that happens in these movements that they really need that immersion with women to understand they're not what I'm being taught there because they really are filling their heads with. A lot of these men's rights activists cross over with the alt-rights, so many of other groups that don't seem like they're racist groups cross over ideologically with them and the extremists have figured that out so they're now starting to pull from these groups. Thank you for your question. I'm struggling for a good way to articulate this but on the one hand, I resonate with your core question for a way of intervening strategically for not articulating sort of your position of being on a moral high ground in a way that aggravates. And then sort of tying that back to Christina's point about the burden that often people who are in positions of oppressed, the burden that they bear in terms of being this constant voice for being sort of like deflecting, but taking this time to internalize rather than react to speech that's meant to be, to incite hate. And so I think what I'm trying to get at with this is just there seems sometimes to be, at least for me in my own work, a struggle between doing what feels morally or high groundly right versus taking them to sort of be strategic and sitting with a problem and not calling it out. And so my question then sort of becomes like, sometimes the time period can get uncomfortable. Like sort of the question of like how long do I sit with a person before I can call out a particular behavior if I really want things to change? Like does that make sense? The kind of question I'm asking. What is, how long do I sit with this? So I think this is exactly why movements are critical and why you need to have allies and groups of people working together. Because it's not in the formulation, I think the thing that I often try and tell people and people we work with is you don't have to do it all alone. You don't have to play all the roles, right? And so figuring out a way to share that burden and use people who may not be particularly vulnerable to doing the work of persuasion is really important. So I think as a social movement, you wanna think about building power and capacity, which is excellent and exciting. You wanna think about persuasion of your opponents. And that's a particular group of people. I think Christian and I are among them, excel at that and want to do that and we feel natural in that role. And then others need to apply pressure maybe and do it in ways that supplement it. But what you have to do is think about the sequencing without making it uncomfortable. Does that answer your question to some degree? To some degree. And then I also have a follow-up question simply because, so because privilege and power are so sort of intersectional, there might be moments at which I feel, okay, I'm not the person who's sort of in a position of power at this moment, but there might also be moments where I have extreme privilege. And how do you balance being an agent or sort of like an amplifying agent with sometimes unintentionally or unconsciously taking the stage too often? Does just sort of like, when you end up being the sole person who can speak and then you sort of unconsciously be the only person who does speak? Well, I make a very conscious effort to try not to speak. I have to stop myself sometimes because I want to say something that I know is important or that I think would be important, but I forget that what they're telling me is actually more important. I don't recommend not being honest with people. I don't know that there is a period of time. I think sincerity is part of building that trust. So it's about maybe how you communicate it, not when you communicate it. I also want to make very clear, I'm not implying that it is the job of people of color to do this. White people created it, we need to fix it. However, it's hard not to utilize people of color for what I do because that exposure is so important. And I don't ask them, they ask me. At one point I had this idea like, okay, who's a captive audience? Prisoners, where does a lot of radicalization happen? Prison, how about a pen pal program from people on the outside who are not racist, writing to these racists who can't turn down their mail? And I said that to people, I said, hey, who wants to write to some Nazis in prison? And I put it out on social media. It wasn't on my personal page. I had like 100 people sign up in a matter of like five hours and 90% of them were people of color. I think the misconception is, and historically I think this has been the case, we have put the burden on people of color to do the heavy lifting. But in this case, I'm not, I mean, I go in, right? I spend seven years, they're people I've been working with for years. So talk about waiting for that conversation. Like I've been waiting a long time with some people, right? It really is about people saying they want to do it because they want to understand. It's edifying for them too, right? How many times you get to sit down and talk to a Nazi or an former ISIS person. And certainly it's, again, don't go hugging Nazis or ISIS people, but also, what are we gonna do? Are we gonna just kill them all? Are we gonna throw them all in jail? Are we gonna ship them off to an ISIS? That's all the stuff they want to do to us. So we really have to think how we're approaching this. And it's not so much about taking the high road, even though it is, I mean, we want to do the right thing, but it's about holding people accountable. I mean, I always hold people accountable. That's the first thing I tell them. Like I will work with you and you may not say yes right now, but I am going to hold you accountable and you're gonna do it. You're gonna take responsibility for what you've done in the past. And right away may not be the right time, a year later might be, or even a year after that. So it's really about every individual person. And I think just be honest. It's hard to argue. We're talking about truth, just be truthful, be truthful. Thank you so much. This is gonna be our last question and then we're going to wrap it up. Thank you. So what actually defines a Nazi? What are the criteria? Because there's a lot of controversy nowadays about people being like Ancaps or Libertarians. That's the only express views, but they get called Nazis. I'm just wondering how do you, what are the criteria that you, qualifications? Chances are good. Even if you did call a Nazi and that person was a real Nazi, they probably wouldn't even know how to explain what they were, okay? That's the truth. That's a hard question to understand because obviously there's nuance between what a white nationalist is, what an alt-right person is, what a national socialist or a Nazi is, or what a Libertarian who has anti-government views, who now also adopts parts of all of these different strategies. I tend to not like to use the terms that they come up with, right? I know that they sat in a room and said, what are we gonna call ourselves that makes us not sound like we're Nazis? Alt-right, great. White nationalist, eh, pretty good, right? We did the same thing. We didn't call ourselves white supremacists, right? Pedophiles don't like to call themselves pedophiles. I mean, it's just, there's really not that much different. I kind of put them all under an umbrella of white supremacists, right? If you are intolerant, if you think that, if you have a bias against somebody else because of who they are, that kind of puts you under that umbrella in my eyes. There's some nuance and certainly when I'm dealing with individuals, I have to understand that nuance. But again, it's not about ideology. I think you guys need to throw that out the window. It's really about why is that person, why was that person led there? That's why they're doing it. 90% of the people that are in these movements don't wanna be there, but they're stuck and they adopt these things and they're addicted to them and they can't stop doing them because it's the only lifeline that they have to that identity, community and purpose. So when we talk about like, do I wanna go sit and talk to somebody? Chances are good. That person, although they may not admit it at first, is really struggling with their ideology. Think about it. What is there to hold on to, right? It doesn't make sense. It's broken. It's based on lies. There's no love. I mean, what could you possibly like about it? Do you think happy people, like behead people in the desert? No. Do you think happy people drive their car into, and I'm oversimplifying the term happy, but it takes a lot of brokenness to be able to do that stuff, to go into the street and beat somebody down because of who you think that they are because of the color of their skin. And we have to recognize that. They're accountable for what they do, but they were also led there by some other force. And it's not absolving them of what they're doing, but I think to understand how we combat this, we have to go deeper. This is not up here, well, it could be, but it's not about the ideology. Thank you. Okay. That seems like a good place to end on. Thank you both so much for spending your time to be here. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Once again, Christian's book, White American Youth is for sale at the MIT Coop for 20% off. If you would like to see events like this in the future, we would love for you to come see events like this in the future. The MIT Communications Forum, we produce six events per year. If you'd like to hear about them, please sign up on our mailing list over here. We have for the rest of the semester, on October 18th, we're welcoming documentary producer Sarah Taxler. She works for The Daily Show. She has a documentary called Tickling Giants that will profile Dr. Basim Yousef, who is, Bill is the Egyptian John Stewart. On November 8th, we have a panel with Eric Lander from the Broad Institute and Maria Zuber, who is vice president of research. That panel is going to focus on federal funding of basic research. So please come join us, bring your friends, bring people you don't like. We don't care, we just wanted to let the seat. Otherwise, hey, thank you all so much for spending an evening with us. We were always very appreciative. Have an 11 night.