“This is much more complex than just an ideological movement,” Robert Futrell tells the Washington Post. Futrell ia a sociologist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and studies white-power movements.
“How many of these people are really reading books about neo-Nazism? Hardly any,” says Rita Katz. Executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, her group monitors online extremism.
What people are looking for much more than an ideology is community. Extremists supply one using pop culture as an entry point:
They approach young people on gaming platforms, luring them into private rooms with memes that start out as edgy humor and gradually grow overtly racist. They literally sell their ideas, commodifying their slogans and actions as live streams, T-shirts and coffee mugs. They insinuate themselves into chats, offering open ears and warm friendship to people who are talking online about being lonely, depressed or chronically ill.
“The far right has its own culture,” Katz adds. “They have their own world, their own language, their own music. Many of them are completely ideologically incompatible, but they use conspiracy theories and culture to try to create cohesion where it doesn’t exist.”
But that works for fundamentalists across the ideological spectrum, for the religious right and for the self-righteous left. An Us vs. Them culture binds them in a self-sustaining community. Feeling marginalized and beset on all sides, but together, whether as the religious elect or the politically “woke” creates dependency. Ask recovering evangelicals. Such communities can be hard to leave.
Julia Ebner is an Austrian researcher who studied extremist culture by going undercover, joining American and European racist groups. The extremists gave her full access to their plans and ideology only after she proved her interest by hanging out with them.
“A lot of them stay in the community for the fun,” she said. “I’d see them over and over saying, ‘I don’t want to do anything else on my weekends anymore.’ ”
To gain firsthand insight into extremists’ recruitment and radicalization tactics, Ebner had to win the trust of an anti-Jewish and anti-Black neo-Nazi group called Men Among the Ruins. The group required her to send a photo of her white wrist with her initials drawn on her skin. Then, she had to submit to genetic testing.
Once admitted, she said, she became privy to a parade of memes that advocated for turning the United States into a White ethno-state.
Using tactics adapted from Islamist terrorists — lurking on gaming sites, reaching out to apparently lonely marks with content about games, music or mixed martial arts — “the strategy is to socialize first,” Ebner said. “Then they add in statistics about demographic change in the U.S., then racist jokes and deeper into the ideology.”
About three-quarters of those arrested for the Jan. 6 insurrection did not belong to such organized groups. They fell down Internet rabbit holes and met people who were nice to them and listened. Once inside, racist and misogynist themes become more pronounced. Memes. Videos. Snark. Propaganda. And people who make money from merchandizing online hate.
Where once these groups recruited in person — Christian Picciolini first hooked up with Nazi skinheads in an alley on the South Side of Chicago — now the organizing is online. What built slowly via radio or television in the 1980s and 1990s took off with the advent of online forums.
Picciolini, 47, is a former extremist and founder of the Free Radicals Project which works to transition people out of hate groups. “Nobody’s born to hate,” he says. “People learn that. I learned to hate. What they’re searching for, like all of us, is identity, community and purpose.”
Churches once met that human need. But for the first time, church attendance in the U.S. fell below 50 percent, Gallup found in March, part of a decades-old trend.