#121 — White Power
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
172.27205
Summary
Christian Picciolini became a white supremacist at the age of 14. He became a leader in the Hammerskin Nation, which is one of the most violent hate groups in the world. After leaving that group, he founded a group called Life After Hate, which was a non-profit dedicated to countering racism. He s given a TEDx talk, won an Emmy for his role as a director and executive producer of an anti-hate video campaign, and has been profiled on 60 Minutes. He is the author of a wonderful book, White American Youth: My Descent into America s Most Violent Hate Movement and How I Got Out, which recounts his experience as a neo-Nazi and leader of the Heckskin Nation. In this podcast, we talk about how he got out of the movement, and we discuss the cult-like dynamics of white supremacy, and the state of things on the extreme right in the U.S. and Europe at the moment. I thought it was a great event, and I m very happy to be back in Dallas for a Q&A with the audience in Dallas, Texas. Thank you so much for your support of the podcast, and thank you for listening to this episode of Making Sense. I hope you enjoy what we re doing here. -Sam Harris Please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here, and become a supporter by becoming a patron of the M.I.P. Podcast. . If you're not a patron, you'll need to subscribe to the podcast to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, where you'll get access to all sorts of great episodes of The Making Sense content. You won't want to miss it! and you'll be helping us spread the word about what we do here. We don't run ads on the podcast! - Sam Harris, the podcast is made possible entirely through the podcast by the podcast. Thank you, and he's made possible by the support of our subscribers. I really does make me feel like he's a good guy. I can t wait to help me make the world better, better than I can I do that, right? Thanks, he really does care about me, right he does that, does he really do that? - Thank you? He's a guy, he's good, right, he says so, really does he does me that I really do, he s a good thing?
Transcript
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Today I'm presenting the audio from the event in Dallas I did with Christian Picciolini.
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Christian's written a wonderful book, White American Youth, which recounts his experience
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as a neo-Nazi and leader of the Hammerskin Nation.
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In this podcast, we talk about how he got out of the movement, and we talk about the
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cult-like dynamics of white supremacy, and just the state of things on the extreme right
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Many related issues, a very long Q&A with the audience.
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So, without further delay, I give you Christian Picciolini.
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I've never been to Dallas before, so it's an honor.
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I can only say that once, so you won't hear me use that line again.
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Really, it's an honor to be here, and I'm so happy all of you came out.
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I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite some time.
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My guest tonight became a white supremacist at the age of 14.
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He became a leader in the Hammerskin Nation, which is one of the most violent hate groups
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And after leaving that, he founded a group called Life After Hate, which was a non-profit
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He's won an Emmy for his role as a director and executive producer of an anti-hate video
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He's the author of a really wonderful book, White American Youth, My Descent into America's
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Well, I've just spent an hour with Christian, and he is like the nicest guy in the world.
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And when you read his book, which you really must do, you will be astonished at how, I mean,
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you would basically live like a violent psychopath for many years.
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Honestly, like the level of violence described in this book is quite intense.
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How, I mean, so you're obviously not a psychopath.
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Well, I was recruited in 1987 into America's first neo-Nazi skinhead group when I was 14
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And, you know, most people, I think, think that people who do that come from broken homes
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and, you know, deeply traumatic lives, and they do.
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My parents were Italian immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 60s from Europe, and they
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But because my parents were immigrants, they had to work seven days a week, 14 hours a day
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And at that age, growing up, I wondered what I had done to push them away.
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So I felt very abandoned, and I was very bullied, and didn't have any friends.
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And so I was searching very desperately for an identity, a community, and a purpose.
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And one day, at 14, probably at my lowest point, a man drove his car in an alley when
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And he got out of the car, and he pulled the joint from my mouth, and he looked me in the
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eyes, and he said, that's what the communists and the Jews want you to do to keep you docile.
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I didn't know what the hell a communist or a Jew or what the word docile meant.
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But it was the first time that I felt like somebody, he was twice my age, and he, like
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somebody accepted me, like somebody was drawing me in, because he would make me feel proud
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I was angry at my parents, and I was angry at the world.
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This is inadvertently the best pro-marijuana commercial ever.
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You should just have kept smoking that joint, and none of this would have happened.
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So, actually, this story even puts more of the onus on you, because you were not from
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So you're like a normal kid who just had a single conversation.
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One single conversation, but 14 years of feeling very marginalized and very much on the fringes.
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But there's so many kids in that position, and the thing that one doesn't often think
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about when one has no connection to groups like this is this phenomenon of recruitment.
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And we'll talk about this, because this is something that you're now trying to counter,
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and it's easy to picture if you take five minutes to think about it, but these movements
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I mean, recruitment is a major feature of what's happening.
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The idea that if you don't do something, you're doomed.
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At first, when I was recruited, it started out with instilling the sense of European pride
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that my ancestors were, you know, great warriors and artists and composers.
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And, you know, I grew up in an Italian bubble, so I was very proud of being Italian.
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But then it would kind of morph into something a little bit more sinister.
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It would morph into this idea that somebody now wanted to take that pride away from me.
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And then it started to go into naming who those people were.
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You know, and of course, you know, in the white supremacist movement, they will blame Jews,
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African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, basically anybody who's not white.
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So what did you actually believe and how quickly did you ramp up into believing those things?
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Well, I literally went from trading baseball cards that week to, you know, shaving my head,
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getting a pair of boots, you know, probably tattooing a swastika on me very quickly.
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I didn't know what the hell anybody was talking about.
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I was not political at 14 like young people are today.
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And I just kind of nodded my head and went along.
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But the way I got my, most of my indoctrination was through music.
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There, there's a brand of music out there that, that at that time was very new to America.
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So we were listening to bands from Britain and from Germany of racist music made by white
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And that's how I got most of my education early on until I took over leadership of that
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organization at 16 years old, because the man who recruited me, who was America's first
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neo-Nazi skinhead leader, went to prison for a series of violent crimes.
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So, yeah, and again, it's very difficult to exaggerate the level of violence you guys
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So it really is kind of a miracle that you didn't go to prison for what you were doing.
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Are we talking about dozens or hundreds of assaults?
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Well, I would say hundreds of altercations, fights.
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Some of those were, you know, our group against other groups that were protesting our group.
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Yeah, people who knew they wanted to get into a fight with you.
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I mean, we had our version of Antifa then, you know, they weren't called Antifa, which
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is, you know, who is typically protesting these white supremacist groups these days.
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We had gangs of anti-racist skinheads that we would fight quite often.
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In fact, we fought white people more than we fought anybody else.
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But there were absolutely, you know, dozens of violent attacks against people solely for
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the color of their skin or who they prayed to or who they loved.
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I never met a white supremacist with positive self-esteem.
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And also, I never met a white supremacist that didn't hate themselves and then used that
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self-loathing to project it onto other people so that they didn't have to deal with their
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They, if they could make somebody feel worse than they felt, that made them feel better,
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So now how much of this was analogous to just being in an ordinary gang and getting off on
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I would say, you know, for our, during the mid-80s and early 90s, it was very much like
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You know, there were, there was an identity, an outfit that we wore.
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We had our colors, you know, we wore patches to identify us.
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And we operated in different cities and we were very organized.
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But then as the years progressed, and I think we're seeing a lot of this now, is it became
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It's when it started to infect a little bit more of the mainstream with a more palatable
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That's, that's when I think it became much, much more dangerous.
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Is that, that's a component of getting out of this life, right?
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I am almost completely covered in tattoos, but I don't have any of my old tattoos remaining.
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I'm glad to notice that you're not one of those geniuses who got a swastika on his forehead
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I can't tell you how many geniuses I've had to help remove swastikas from their foreheads.
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That seems like a, that's, that's, you have to be especially certain of your ideology that
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to know that you want it on your forehead for the rest of your life.
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You know, if you have to tattoo a swastika on your forehead, you probably don't know very
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much about your ideology to begin with, I think.
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I know a very prominent scientist who has the Apple logo tattooed on his bicep and.
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I got, I got to think he's, he regrets that now, but someday I'll have him on the podcast.
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So, but you, you do downplay the role of ideology, at least in this context, right?
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It is a lot about male bonding and disaffection from the rest of the world and getting off
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on violence and not, but clearly belief plays a part because you wouldn't know who you hate
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if you didn't have certain beliefs about white supremacy or the significance of race or.
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The ideology is, is kind of the tie that binds them together.
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But I don't believe that ideology or dogma are what drive most people into hate movements
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I really do think it's a broken search for identity, community, and purpose.
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And those are three fundamental needs that every human being has.
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We all want to know who we are, where we belong, and what we're supposed to do with
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And I, I have this theory that I call the pothole theory.
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If in our lives we hit potholes in the road of life and we don't have the support or the
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guidance to navigate around them, like a family structure or friends.
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Sometimes we get stuck in those potholes or we get detoured down a really dark alley.
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And those potholes can be anything from trauma, could be unemployment, could be mental illness,
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it could be, you know, seeing your father commit suicide at six years old and never dealing
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If we step in enough potholes, our search for identity, community, and purpose becomes very
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So if we are broken people, we tend to attract other broken people.
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So from the time I was 14 until I was 22, I'm 44 now.
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It wasn't one, you know, magic moment where I, you know, I woke up, I went to sleep, you
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know, seek highly and then woke up saying, I love everybody.
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But ultimately what it boils down to is I began to receive compassion and empathy from
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the people that I least deserved it from when I least deserved it.
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People that I thought I hated, who I'd never in my life had a meaningful interaction with
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or a conversation with, began to, even though they knew who I was and what I had done, began
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And they began to listen rather than talk at me and tell me I was wrong.
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And over time, the demonization that I had in my head, the prejudice, started to become
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And I realized that we had connections that were more similar than they were different.
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And that culture and language and food from all over the world are things that add beauty.
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The differences are actually what, you know, make us who we are, but it doesn't mean it makes
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Do you remember a first moment when doubt about your worldview became conscious?
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There were a lot of those moments, but one of the more powerful moments for me, or the
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more compelling moments for me, was when I was, I believe, 19 or 20 years old.
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And it was after a night of drinking, there was always drinking involved, because we didn't
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really have the courage to do anything if we weren't drunk.
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But I was at a McDonald's late one night with some friends, it was after midnight, and
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there were some black teenagers standing in line when we walked in.
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And I remember walking into that McDonald's and screaming that it was my McDonald's and
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And of course, they were intimidated by us, so they ran out, and we chased them.
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And as the teenagers, black teenagers were walking across the street, or running across the street,
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one of them pulled out a pistol and started to shoot at us.
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When we caught that individual, we beat him almost to within an inch of his life.
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And I remember looking down at him when I was kicking him, and his eyes were swollen, and
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And I remember, in one instant, one of his eyes opened, and it connected with mine.
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I felt like this person, who I didn't even think was a human being, suddenly could be my
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brother, or my mother, or my father, and I thought that it wasn't just about this person
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It was about affecting so many people, what I was doing to this person.
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And I believe that that was the last time I was violent, even though I stayed in the movement
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And it was a moment where, you know, for years, I had kind of denied myself of empathy
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And for whatever reason, that moment, it came back to me.
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Did you subsequently meet any of your victims, or was there kind of a backlog of suffering
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And it happened years, about five years after I left the movement.
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When I left in 95, I went through a pretty dark depression.
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Even though I had internally denounced my beliefs, I was running away from my past, and I was
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And even though I was treating other people with respect, I wasn't treating myself with
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And I remember in 1999, a friend of mine, a girl came to me, and she said, you know, I
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Because there were mornings where I would wake up wishing that I hadn't woken up, because I
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And she encouraged me to go apply for a job where she just started working.
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I got kicked out of all of them, one of them twice.
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Like, what the hell would IBM, you know, want to do with me?
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And she said, just go in there and tell them that you're good with people.
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Anyway, I went in and I had a couple of interviews with IBM and I miraculously got the job.
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And I was so, so thrilled because I was going to learn how to network computers and install
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computers at a large school district and until I found out where I would be going for my
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It was my old high school, the same one I got kicked out of twice.
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And suddenly I felt like a nervous first grader going to his first day of school because I
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But you had had violent altercations with teachers.
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And who walks by me within the first hour of me being there?
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But Mr. Johnny Holmes, the old black security guard who I got in a fist fight with that got
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me kicked out for the second time and let out in handcuffs.
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And he didn't recognize me when he walked by, but I recognized him.
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I was kind of, you know, skulking around dark corridors trying to avoid people and looking
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And I just knew that I had to do something at that moment.
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I didn't know what that was going to be, but I decided I was going to, you know, follow
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And when I saw him getting into his car, I tapped him on the shoulder and I said, I'm
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And he looked at me after taking a step back because he was afraid when he recognized who
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And, uh, he approached me with an extended hand and I finally found some more words to
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explain to him what I, you know, had done and how I felt and, you know, how sorry I was
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And, uh, and he hugged me and we cried and he made me promise that I would tell my story.
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Uh, but he was the first person to, to kind of pull the courage out of me to one confront
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my past because I started talking about it pretty immediately after that.
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Uh, and, um, he was the first person I think that recognized that this wasn't just a story
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of some messed up kid who joined a white supremacist group.
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It was the story of every young person who's searching for identity, community, and purpose
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that if we don't give them the right support, you know, and our young people are our most
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vulnerable, that they could, you know, be deviated down this path because there are people looking
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So how do you think about forgiveness in this case and, and redemption?
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I mean, both with respect to yourself and with respect to other people, the kinds of
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people who you're trying to, whose minds you're trying to change, um, I have to think there
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are people who are beyond the reach of empathy, right?
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There, there must be people who you encounter who don't have, I mean, that they don't have
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the handholds that you apparently had where, you know, the right look in the eye or the,
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or, or the extended hand can be the bridge to a new life.
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I mean, there are, there are people who are genuine psychopaths who are in these movements.
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So what, how are you, how do you think about that?
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It's a tough question because if I were to deny empathy for anybody else, that means I
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would have denied it for myself or that I would have denied somebody else showing me that empathy.
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Um, so, and I've also worked, I've, I've helped, uh, over a hundred people, uh, disengaged
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from neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups over the years.
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And, um, I've worked with some of the hardest, scariest looking, you know, people that nobody
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would give a chance to, you know, people who were born in the Klan families who, you know,
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I wasn't kidding about saying I've taken many people to have swastikas removed.
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Um, and these are people that, you know, the whole world has given up on, uh, and in many
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And I can tell you there's, these people are some of the best human beings that I know
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now they've committed their lives to helping other people not go down the same path that
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I mean, trust me, I sit, I sit across the table from neo-Nazis and white supremacists all
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And there are moments where I want to jump across the table and I want to, you know, shake
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But I know that I can't because that pushes them further away.
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That the reasons that they even gravitated towards a movement like that is because they
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Actually, that brings me to a related question here.
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Because I think I've heard you talk about this because it's natural to want to shame people
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If it's revealed that, you know, so-and-so is a closet Nazi on Twitter.
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Yeah, it seems like, it seems like the sane response is to penalize them for, I mean, just
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at minimum communicate how reprehensible that is and, and how the rest of the world sees
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And then there should be some consequences for having deviated from the norms of, of
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But you, you're very wary of you, of pulling the shame lever.
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Or I don't ever pull the shame lever, uh, but I do hold people accountable, uh, for their
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I make them, you know, go through a process of making amends.
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You know, when I work with people, um, they don't, they, they don't always want to work
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Uh, sometimes it's a referral that I get from a parent or a loved one that says, you know,
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How does that, I mean, are you just sitting in the living room when the kid comes home
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Uh, let me try and think if, no, it's, it's always voluntary.
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I'm not doing interventions in a traditional sense where I'm like, you know, surprising
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them in a room full of their family and saying, all right, we need to talk and we're going
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You know, I really, I try and build rapport, right?
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Um, the fact that I, I understand their language because I used to say it, uh, is helpful.
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Um, I may be a little desensitized more than the average person to some of the things that
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That doesn't mean it doesn't make me angry, but you know, I can sit and maybe listen just
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a little bit longer, but that's the key is I listen rather than tell them that they're
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wrong rather than debate them or argue with them, which never solves anything.
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Nobody's ever, you know, changed because of, you know, a shouting match.
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But, uh, I listen and I listen for those potholes and then I become a pothole filler.
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Uh, so when I hear, you know, chronic unemployment, I, I pair them up with a life coach or a job
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When I hear trauma or abuse, uh, it's, you know, mental health therapy or mental illness.
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It's mental health therapy and I'm trying to make people more resilient and it's fascinating
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when you start working with somebody and they feel, start to become more resilient and more,
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They have less of a reason to blame the other for something that they feel is taken away
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because now they might be a little bit better equipped to deal with life.
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But I don't stop there because I do challenge the ideology.
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Uh, but I do that in an, in a non-aggressive way.
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I will introduce people to the people they think they hate.
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I've spent hours with Holocaust deniers and Holocaust survivors, Islamophobes and, you
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know, Muslim families just to, to allow them to humanize because nine and a half times out
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of 10, they've never ever in their lives met the people that they think that they hate.
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So the demonization becomes replaced with the humanization and, uh, and it works.
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It's, it's, it's somewhat ironic that it always seems to be the Jews and none of these people
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I mean, it's like there's 15 Jews in the world and it's, uh, I think they're all my friends.
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Um, so, so, so I want to talk about the status of, of this movement now in the U S and Europe.
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And so maybe let's start with the, the alt-right, which is a phrase that I don't know when it
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was coined, but you know, none of us knew it, but for a year ago.
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That phrase or, or the phrase white nationalism, because I know that those are phrases that
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they literally sat in a room and said, what can we call ourselves to make us seem a little
00:28:24.920
I mean, clearly I think there's, there's, there has to be a spectrum of belief and a spectrum
00:28:30.640
And there, there must be people who are happy to be a part of something, but they don't know
00:28:37.380
And you and I were talking backstage, it's kind of analogous to Scientology where you can
00:28:42.780
And I mean, it's not so true now after South Park and all of these outings of the actual
00:28:48.000
doctrines, but before South Park and before, uh, going clear and some of these other books
00:28:55.000
and movies, you could have been a Scientologist for a very long time without knowing just how
00:29:00.800
So there, there, there are analogous situations in the white nationalists or white power movement
00:29:06.720
where you just, you've been indoctrinated on into something that's like white identity
00:29:12.380
politics, for lack of a better word, just like just pride in your whiteness and not, not
00:29:19.500
And you, you might not even be self-consciously a racist.
00:29:23.520
And you were among these people who at a certain point had formed a conscious plan to be, to
00:29:31.700
So just to, well, at first it wasn't a conscious plan to go under the radar.
00:29:37.580
At first it was very much like a cult where you detach yourself from everything that was
00:29:43.860
You know, your friends, your family, your hobbies, and you go down a rabbit hole of
00:29:49.160
information, uh, misinformation, uh, and conspiracy theory that becomes your reality.
00:29:55.440
And I can tell you that 30 years ago, we recognized exactly what you're saying, that we,
00:30:01.100
you know, we were a small group that was too visible.
00:30:04.480
And we said, you know, these, these average American white racists who we want to recruit
00:30:09.680
are getting turned off by the fact that we have swastikas on our foreheads, right?
00:30:14.560
Or we have boots or shaved heads and we're talking, you know, very, um, you know, much
00:30:19.100
about foreign kind of politics and, you know, national socialism.
00:30:22.880
So we've made a very concerted effort, uh, 30 years ago to normalize.
00:30:28.340
We said, we're going to ditch the shaved heads and the Klan robes.
00:30:32.260
And that's still around, but for the most part, not.
00:30:34.940
Uh, and we're going to trade in our boots for suits.
00:30:37.240
We're going to go to college campuses to recruit where people, um, are away from their
00:30:42.720
families for the first time, are forming new opinions, may feel marginalized.
00:30:48.880
We're going to go to the military and get training and we're going to run for office.
00:30:51.940
And that's around the time that, you know, we see David Duke kind of get rid of the robe
00:30:56.800
And here we are 30 years later and it's, it's very much that is the representation of, of
00:31:02.480
the white supremacist movement that we're seeing today.
00:31:04.540
You know, the polos and the khakis and the hair, and the haircuts.
00:31:07.480
And, and we, we decided to even take the language and make it more palatable.
00:31:12.400
So instead of saying, you know, the global Jewish conspiracy that controls us all, we
00:31:19.720
Uh, and we started saying things like, you know, the liberal media instead of the Jewish
00:31:24.280
media terms that now some people are calling dog whistles.
00:31:29.700
I hear these things and, and in context, um, I know exactly what's being told when, you
00:31:34.880
know, they're showing a picture of George Soros's face, who was like enemy number one
00:31:40.420
Um, but it's, has seeped into mainstream society where I think a lot of people are identifying
00:31:46.800
with some of the same things that, that these white supremacists are, but don't know that
00:31:53.000
Because it is a ramping up process, uh, you know, a normalization and then bam, once you're
00:32:02.180
They know that you'll, that you will get the threats, that you will be outed.
00:32:12.500
So, so let's talk about the gradations of commitment here.
00:32:16.440
I mean, so what is the landscape of, of white supremacy look like in the U S now?
00:32:20.460
Um, it's hard to say because it's, it's hard to see.
00:32:24.120
Um, we have people like Richard Spencer who's been in the news and we have kind of the pseudo
00:32:28.700
intellectual, you know, Richard Spencer's and the Jared Taylor's of the world who, you
00:32:33.140
know, wear the Brooks brothers suits and look like professors and, and, uh, you still have
00:32:41.240
Uh, but in between there's like this whole, you know, I can't see the audience right now,
00:32:48.380
I mean, there are dentists, there are some of our police officers, they're certainly in
00:32:53.680
There was a recent study, uh, of active, uh, service, uh, members that were polled about
00:33:01.100
the instances of white supremacy that they saw.
00:33:03.500
Like I'm not just talking about racism, but like organized white nationalism, as we would
00:33:07.220
think one in four people in the military said that they see it on a regular basis.
00:33:13.380
Uh, I mean, there's so many people that I've worked with that were recruited in the military
00:33:19.840
Um, and I can't tell you how many people from my old organizations actually became police
00:33:26.480
officers and prison guards and things like that.
00:33:29.780
And, and did that not having reformed themselves?
00:33:34.140
They were just, they had the same beliefs and they were.
00:33:35.940
They were, they're still the same people, just much older.
00:33:41.800
So how does Europe, there's, there's a, there's a kind of marriage between these movements
00:33:47.920
in Europe and it's a kind of a global phenomenon.
00:33:52.740
I mean, it's certainly, uh, Europe has a longer history with this.
00:33:57.080
Uh, obviously, you know, after World War II, you know, there were many years of kind of
00:34:02.660
resurgence of nationalism and then kind of the tamping down of it.
00:34:06.980
But now we're seeing a massive resurgence in populism and nationalism, uh, that, you know,
00:34:12.300
is using the refugee crisis and immigration as, as kind of the crux of, of their message.
00:34:17.480
And, and they know that it's an easy message to spread, to spread, uh, because the minute,
00:34:23.240
you know, a brown skinned person does something horrible, it's terrorism.
00:34:27.820
And we scream about it and every news is covering it for, you know, days on end.
00:34:32.080
Uh, but how often have we ever heard, you know, white supremacist, uh, killings being
00:34:40.520
I'm not aware of any time where white extremism, maybe except for the Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma
00:34:45.220
city bombing where white extremism has been called terrorism.
00:34:48.920
And most people don't know, but Timothy McVeigh was very much a white supremacist.
00:34:53.300
He hung around at Aryan nations and, and, uh, was found with a copy of the Turner diaries
00:34:57.700
and one of the vehicles, which is a Bible for white supremacist revolutionaries.
00:35:02.920
Um, but we just don't call it out as that we call it, you know, mental illness, which many
00:35:08.160
Uh, but we don't call it terrorism, uh, even though it's ideologically based, it's, it's meant
00:35:12.820
to incite terror, uh, and, uh, has all the same hallmarks of, of, of ISIS.
00:35:17.820
In fact, there's really no difference between ISIS and, and American neo-Nazis, except for
00:35:23.200
the fact that white supremacists in America kill three times more people than any kind
00:35:30.860
of foreign or domestic terrorist group does on American soil.
00:35:33.560
74% of all extremist killings in America since 9-11 have been, uh, committed by white supremacists.
00:35:40.520
So, how is Oklahoma City viewed in the white supremacist community?
00:35:48.160
I mean, is that, is that just a unambiguously good thing to have happened or is that going
00:35:54.740
They celebrate it and they've tried to copycat it many times and have been stopped.
00:35:58.940
Uh, coincidentally, it was on April 20th, uh, April 19th, actually the day before Hitler's
00:36:04.540
birthday, which is a very, uh, special day for white supremacists.
00:36:09.160
Uh, a lot of school shootings happen on April 20th.
00:36:12.540
I believe Columbine happened on, on April 20th.
00:36:14.780
Uh, it's a, it's, it is a, those types of stories are what a lot of people who've been
00:36:20.640
moved further down into the movement, who've lost a lot, kind of aspire to do.
00:36:25.520
Uh, you know, we were trained and we were training people to become these race war revolutionaries.
00:36:34.100
We were going into training camps to, to get paramilitary training.
00:36:37.860
Uh, you know, there was even at one point, um, uh, where, uh, a group from Tripoli, from
00:36:45.560
Libya had come to contact me or so I thought to, uh, to set up a meeting between me and
00:36:51.680
Muammar Gaddafi because he wanted to funnel money to American groups who were fighting Jews
00:36:56.320
Uh, so it's just a matter of time and I've been predicting this for years.
00:37:00.480
I believe it's just a matter of time before we see white supremacist groups, uh, from Europe
00:37:04.820
and the U S starting to work with, uh, with extremists from the Middle East.
00:37:09.920
Because if you think about it, while it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you'd think they'd
00:37:13.560
Um, they have a common enemy that is greater than their hate for each other.
00:37:18.680
It just gets better and better for the Jews, doesn't it?
00:37:24.960
We're going to have to turn up the pressure on that Zionist banking conspiracy.
00:37:36.880
So, yeah, so what's the, what is the connection to Russia?
00:37:40.560
This is, you know, half of what you say here or, or all of what you say may sound like a
00:37:45.480
conspiracy theory to anyone who's on the right wing here.
00:37:49.900
But what, what was, what has your, what's been your experience looking for a connection
00:37:58.200
So I, I believe I have, I may have been the first kook screaming about Russian collusion
00:38:03.840
way back before the words Russia and collusion were put together.
00:38:08.040
Um, I was, uh, I was working with a 17 year old girl.
00:38:12.840
The parents had contacted me because they were concerned about this girl who was making their
00:38:17.260
daughter who was making, um, you know, white supremacist propaganda videos, recruitment videos,
00:38:24.220
Uh, so they called me in and they said, you know, we're, we're really worried.
00:38:28.840
And we, we know that she's being influenced by this 23 year old boy who lives in Idaho.
00:38:35.700
And, uh, you know, supposedly he was a German American, uh, boy who, you know, was a devout
00:38:43.100
neo-Nazi and had recruited her and was her boyfriend and had started to get compromising
00:38:52.180
And, uh, he was not, I could tell you after many hours and days of research, not a 23 year
00:39:00.480
old German American living in Eagle, Idaho, he was a 35 year old Russian man living in
00:39:06.900
Uh, and he was not only befriending this girl as her boyfriend, but he was doing it to at
00:39:14.040
least a dozen other young girls as young as 14 years old trading, you know, getting photos
00:39:19.880
from them that were inappropriate, uh, and then using it to blackmail them.
00:39:24.280
Uh, so I started to get really seriously into this because there was a crime being committed
00:39:28.260
and, and this is 2016 or this, this was October, I'm sorry, this was August of 2016.
00:39:37.400
And as I started to dig into this guy, uh, I discovered that he was part of a ring of people
00:39:44.900
And I found connections dating back to like 2010 that proved this, uh, that had created
00:39:50.340
tens of thousands of fake social media profiles.
00:39:53.620
And, uh, you know, they were all very neo-Nazi and pro-Trump and I started to really just track
00:40:01.260
them and I'm like, what the hell is this phenomenon?
00:40:03.420
Why are all these like Trump voters, like all of a sudden, like, you know, having make America
00:40:07.280
great again hats with a swastika on it and, you know, having avatar or names like Himmler.
00:40:12.720
And so I started to track them and I started to see this group form.
00:40:17.020
And then I started to notice that their screen names and pictures were changing from white
00:40:27.120
And then some of them would change to Black Lives Matter accounts.
00:40:30.320
And then some of them would change to feminist accounts with, and I started to see that the
00:40:35.040
intention was just to put as much hateful information against these other groups out there to create
00:40:45.960
He made a mistake in 2009 where he made a post using a screen name that he was still using,
00:40:54.060
This was before apparently he went to go work for the FSB in Russia, where he graduated in
00:41:02.880
So I went to the FBI in October of 2016 and I said, you know, there's something weird going on.
00:41:08.360
I'm not quite sure what the hell is going on, but everything was pointing to Russia because
00:41:12.700
at that time I had presented this information to the parents and to the girl.
00:41:16.360
And I said, first of all, this guy is not who you think he is.
00:41:21.380
His name's Mikhail, you know, whatever his last name was.
00:41:27.220
So she leaked the information to her boyfriend.
00:41:29.900
Within three hours of me leaving that house, 75 domain names that I own, that I run for
00:41:37.220
my, you know, nonprofit, for myself, my parents and, you know, their restaurant were all hacked
00:41:46.640
And I went to the service providers and I said, you know, what is going on?
00:41:50.740
And they said, we've never seen an attack like this.
00:41:53.420
Um, so at that point I went to the FBI, this again, still October, 2016.
00:41:58.380
And I said, you know, I've got 33 gigs of screenshots, videos, chat conversations, you
00:42:05.460
know, phone calls, because now it was starting to antagonize these people to try and get more
00:42:10.040
And I handed it over to them and they said, thank you very much.
00:42:18.940
And then, you know, I said, really, you should really look at this before election day.
00:42:22.760
Cause I think there's something going on here and, uh, I still haven't heard from them.
00:42:27.660
But now it's starting to come out that all that information that I found is actually,
00:42:41.760
So what is this connection with Russia and Putin?
00:42:44.420
So, you know, the white nationalist or alt-right movement that we see today has a very strong
00:42:53.660
You know, uh, they see him as, as like this ethno-nationalist, uh, dictator.
00:43:00.660
Um, and in fact, many neo-Nazis from Europe are going to train in paramilitary style in Russia
00:43:09.380
Um, funny enough, and this, you know, I don't, I can't substantiate it, but coincidentally,
00:43:14.620
so many of the propagandists for the American white supremacist movement are really beautiful
00:43:21.520
Russian girls who speak perfect English, who, um, are now starting to be found out.
00:43:28.460
There were, there was an article published today.
00:43:29.860
There was another one yesterday about a teacher, uh, teaching grade school who was teaching
00:43:37.220
Uh, and then she had a double identity where she was bragging about the fact that in school
00:43:43.740
She was found out to be, have a third identity, which was Russian.
00:43:49.940
I don't know if it's so much that Russia is supporting this ideology or if they're just
00:43:55.940
trying to create this movement of discord that they know is our weak spot.
00:44:02.360
Frankly, racism in America is something that we've never really dealt with.
00:44:06.740
Every, every society that's faced a genocide, let's say, like slaves or African-Americans
00:44:11.700
did during slave times have somehow dealt with it, right?
00:44:15.480
They've acknowledged it and they've worked through it.
00:44:17.620
But we've never, I don't believe, really acknowledged that we have, have had that problem in our
00:44:25.740
I mean, I think we, you know, you go to the South like here and tell me if I'm wrong, but
00:44:30.100
I think we learn about, uh, the civil war a little bit differently than we did in Chicago,
00:44:35.300
In Chicago, in the North, y'all were the bad guys, right?
00:44:41.420
And to you down here, it was Northern aggression, right?
00:44:46.460
So even in our own country, we're like propagandizing our history.
00:44:51.120
So I don't know that we've ever fully dealt with the issues that our country's had.
00:44:56.740
What do you think the solution is at the level of our public conversation at this point?
00:45:01.100
And we take like social media and the fake news problem and the, and the way in which
00:45:06.160
this phrase fake news has been weaponized against real news.
00:45:10.160
So that you can say fake news about anything that you don't like.
00:45:13.000
And it seems to be an adequate retort to whatever's being expressed.
00:45:20.860
It exists, but I hate even calling it what it is because of that.
00:45:24.400
You know, I think the biggest thing under attack right now is truth.
00:45:30.000
And once we lose it, it's gone because what do we, what's our, our benchmark?
00:45:34.940
And I'm terrified of that because, you know, the truth has to exist.
00:45:44.440
There has to be something that we can hold on to.
00:45:47.560
But, you know, what's happening in America today?
00:45:49.840
What I would suggest is, you know, we're at a point where we're screaming from the extremes
00:45:54.460
We're, we're being made to choose a side really.
00:45:56.660
And screaming to try and get to the middle doesn't work.
00:46:02.300
I think we need to start in the middle and acknowledge the things that we have in common.
00:46:06.380
The fact that we're Americans, the fact that we love our children and want them to be healthy
00:46:10.240
and have a good education, that we want, you know, fellow Americans to have jobs and we
00:46:18.480
Pretty much anywhere in the world where you go and you ask them what's the most important
00:46:24.500
I want my kids to be happy, but you could, you could actually even start a conversation
00:46:29.400
with a current white supremacist and get agreement on those values.
00:46:34.060
And if we start there, eventually we'll go off track, but we will have established that
00:46:40.960
If we start from the extremes and try to get to the middle, we never get there.
00:46:45.360
We have to find a way to start in the middle again.
00:46:47.760
Let's acknowledge what we have in common, what we want America to be, and then let's work,
00:46:54.960
Let's listen to each other more than anything else.
00:47:02.440
Well, I'm increasingly worried that the left is fully capable of making a catastrophe of
00:47:09.160
Because the swing into identity politics in many cases seems to be all the justification
00:47:16.500
a white supremacist would need to indulge his or her own white identity politics.
00:47:24.080
When, you know, somebody on the left attacks, first of all, you know, can we just stop calling
00:47:39.200
Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew and he gets called a Nazi.
00:47:43.580
That said, I can't tell you how many parents email me and say, we're Jewish, but my son
00:47:51.220
is involved in this and I'm worried he's going to be the next Dylann Roof.
00:47:58.820
That's why I don't believe it's about ideology.
00:48:01.060
It's about this identity, community, and purpose.
00:48:03.480
And let's face it, our young people right now, we're failing them.
00:48:06.240
You know, they can't afford college if they're lucky enough to even be able to attempt to
00:48:12.800
There's no guarantee of a job after graduation.
00:48:15.780
Our whole country is in a state of, you know, division and turmoil right now where, you know,
00:48:20.640
people who used to get along can't even look at each other.
00:48:22.800
And I'm talking about relatives even in some cases.
00:48:30.100
As an adult, I can't imagine what a 14, 15, 16 year old is going through.
00:48:34.220
Um, so I think we are failing our youngest people and because they feel lost, many of
00:48:39.720
them are gravitating to some of these very ideological movements because they're idealistic.
00:48:45.180
They're passionate, but they may have marginalization issues and they may, you know, hear something
00:48:53.040
Um, and it's a scary time because I am seeing a lot of young people who normally wouldn't be
00:48:59.140
attracted to these types of, of, you know, extremist ideologies, uh, start to go there and,
00:49:04.060
and I'm talking about, you know, a young white girl from middle America who flies to Syria
00:49:08.180
to join ISIS and also the young, you know, white boy who decides to walk into a church
00:49:13.780
and, and murder, you know, nine innocent people because of the color of their skin.
00:49:18.100
Um, well, what was the significance of Charlottesville?
00:49:21.580
Has that been amplified just because of our current political obsession or was it as significant
00:49:28.020
as people who are worried about it seem to think?
00:49:30.900
I, you know, I spent a week in Charlottesville just recently and I, and I spoke to really
00:49:35.720
all the players that were involved from community members to, uh, Heather Heyer's mother, the
00:49:41.020
young woman who was killed, uh, to, uh, the white supremacists in town, to the law enforcement,
00:49:46.940
to, I spoke to everybody and, you know, very much what you said earlier, and I don't think
00:49:51.180
we touched on it, where the left is maybe enabling some of this, uh, right now the fear
00:49:56.800
from the community, even though it's a progressive community is, you know, of the protesters and
00:50:03.620
Uh, I don't know that that's very grounded in reality.
00:50:07.300
Uh, but, you know, the left shoots themselves in the foot when they adopt the same tactics
00:50:15.320
that of the people that they're, that they're protesting against.
00:50:18.180
So when we see violence come from the left, or when we see attacks of hate come from the
00:50:24.440
left, or, you know, their only mission is to destroy white supremacists' lives, that's
00:50:32.140
You know, I, I tend to want to draw them in closer because they went that way because they
00:50:38.600
Pushing them away is not going to, is not going to make them any happier.
00:50:41.560
It's going to make, actually entrench them more into this ideology and this, and this
00:50:51.160
So when they're attacked, they become the victims and they use that.
00:50:55.160
You know, we were just there for a free speech rally.
00:50:58.260
We were just there for a unite the right rally.
00:51:00.660
See these really innocuous terms that they like to put on rallies.
00:51:06.580
It was about going into a progressive place intentionally to elicit a violent response.
00:51:13.740
Because they knew the tension was there and they got it.
00:51:16.160
And the minute that they were attacked, they became the victims.
00:51:21.900
You see how white people are being treated in this country.
00:51:33.600
That's why they went to Skokie and marched in a Jewish neighborhood in the 1970s.
00:51:46.060
When we're silent, sweep it under the rug, they grow.
00:51:50.080
When we're violent, they use it as a narrative.
00:51:52.440
Yeah, there's another even more insidious aspect to this, which is something that Steve Pinker pointed out recently.
00:52:00.420
Actually, this is an amazingly compounding irony because his pointing this out, so he was on a panel somewhere and he made the point that I'm about to make.
00:52:10.540
But then that got chopped up by some leftist imbecile to make him sound like he was endorsing the alt-right.
00:52:17.880
And, you know, I mean, it's this sort of compunctionalist vilification of people that is the real virus here.
00:52:24.640
But so Steve's point was that the problem with silencing free speech on the left, which is why, you know,
00:52:33.380
if you hear that there was some demonstration at a college campus tomorrow that forced some invited speaker to not give his or her speech
00:52:42.520
and that people were spit on and that the event couldn't happen, it's like 99% a leftist phenomenon now.
00:52:49.160
I mean, this is what the left is doing on college campuses.
00:52:51.260
And Steve's point was that the problem with not letting conservative and even right-wing views get expressed on college campuses
00:53:02.240
is that you don't, and any taboo view, whether it's, you know, intelligence and race and, you know, the gender differences,
00:53:12.440
I mean, whatever is considered a third rail in intellectual life now,
00:53:16.100
the problem with not letting these views get discussed honestly and at length is that people, first of all,
00:53:23.060
certain truths are being concealed and certain conversations are being deemed off-limits
00:53:29.780
and people aren't developing intellectual antibodies to the bad ideas that get accreted around these topics.
00:53:38.300
And so if for the first time in your life you're hearing what seems like perfectly honest talk,
00:53:46.100
about IQ, say, but it's coming from someone like Jared Taylor, right?
00:53:51.460
Well, then you're on this grease slide into being indoctrinated into this kind of racist worldview.
00:53:57.580
And so it's, the primacy of free speech has to be such an obvious value for the left.
00:54:03.080
And the fact that we're losing sight of it is really the most worrisome thing here.
00:54:08.300
It's disturbing to me that in many cases the left is adopted, and when I say the left, I mean, that's a pretty vague term, right?
00:54:21.120
We're talking about like radical left for the most part.
00:54:25.620
When they adopt the same tactics of their enemies, do they really become any different than those people?
00:54:33.780
In many cases, what you're seeing is the door on the left is closed to anyone who makes any kind of sense on taboo topics.
00:54:48.380
I mean, the classic case is, and this, you know, perhaps we should spend a moment on this,
00:54:55.000
because this is a sign, a very troubling sign of the moral confusion that the left is capable of.
00:55:01.380
So you take a group like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which used to be, I'm sure they imagine they still are,
00:55:08.860
this flagship organization, which is like the last bulwark against the white nationalism and Christian identity
00:55:15.080
and all of this craziness we've been talking about.
00:55:18.140
You know, they're the people who sue the KKKs and destroy these chapters of their organization.
00:55:24.180
But now they have put people like Majid Nawaz, who you know, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on lists of anti-Muslim extremists.
00:55:34.860
And they just put Christina Hoff Summers, this slightly right-of-center academic philosopher, on some list of bigotry.
00:55:46.880
And when you challenge them, I mean, you know, Majid is suing them, but prior to announcing anything about a lawsuit,
00:55:53.960
I mean, suing them first, we should acknowledge, because it's dangerous to put Muslim reformers and ex-Muslims on lists of any kind,
00:56:01.160
but a list of anti-Muslim extremists, you know, it's putting a target on their backs.
00:56:08.260
And it's just incredibly pernicious, because journalists use the SPLC as a resource.
00:56:14.340
I mean, like, they're just trying to figure out who's who.
00:56:16.620
You know, is Richard Spencer really a Nazi or not?
00:56:22.860
So this is not only objectionable, it is dangerous behavior.
00:56:33.480
It's like, the person who did this at the SPLC has been contacted endlessly.
00:56:39.840
I mean, I tweeted this, and Majid tweeted this, and Ayaan tweeted this, and it continues.
00:56:47.520
I mean, you have to spend five minutes on Majid before you realize this is not an anti-Muslim extremist.
00:56:59.600
And we have the luxury of both knowing him personally, and didn't know that until tonight.
00:57:08.020
I mean, Majid is a, his story is a lot like mine.
00:57:14.900
Not only a former, not only not an anti-Muslim extremist, he was a former Muslim extremist.
00:57:20.320
You know, he has a long way to go before he becomes an anti-Muslim extremist.
00:57:25.360
You know, I think part of the problem, you know, let me just preface this.
00:57:32.920
You know, I've respected the SPLC's work, because I do trust their work.
00:57:38.700
But I think that the kind of the arena has gotten so blurred now that it's easier to call somebody, you know, a member of a hate group,
00:57:47.420
or to call, you know, an organization a hate group, if they're talking about something that maybe is uncomfortable to talk about.
00:57:58.560
I know he's not, you know, running a hate group.
00:58:01.340
And it's unfortunate that he was added to that list.
00:58:03.500
I really, you know, I was very surprised, and I even communicated to him when it happened that, you know, it was, like, astonishing to me that that could happen.
00:58:12.480
And, you know, I don't know what to say about that other than it's a mistake that they made.
00:58:19.160
He should be added to the list of extreme dressers.
00:58:24.440
Whoever wears a pocket square should be on some list.
00:58:28.480
It's that British colonialism, I think, that rubbed off on him.
00:58:38.940
The Anti-Defamation League, I think, you know, is a pretty trusted source for monitoring hate groups.
00:58:46.180
I mean, they came out when the attack in Parkland happened at first with Nicholas Cruz.
00:58:52.400
And they were essentially fooled by far-right trolls into believing that he was a neo-Nazi.
00:58:59.300
And then it came out that he really was a neo-Nazi, that, you know, there was a swastika carved on the cartridge of the magazine.
00:59:05.380
And, you know, there were posts in Instagram chats that were.
00:59:08.920
So, in that case, they made a mistake that ended up being correct.
00:59:13.240
But, you know, it's hard to say, you know, what went into that decision or what goes into decisions.
00:59:19.780
All I can look at is history of what they've done.
00:59:22.840
You know, they've managed to bankrupt white supremacist organizations like the white Aryan resistance.
00:59:28.620
And, you know, they've done amazing work to try and dismantle white supremacy in the country.
00:59:32.940
But, you know, it's clear that they're also fallible.
00:59:39.240
Well, on that note, I want to open it up to questions from all of you.
00:59:42.560
Because, in my view, the reason to do these events is to make it a proper conversation.
00:59:55.620
And, um, sorry to anybody who had a hangover and just had bright lights up.
01:00:03.740
And I should say, so before we start, uh, I, uh, would encourage you to make your question actually a question.
01:00:11.580
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01:00:19.120
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01:00:25.760
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