How hate groups target vulnerable people. [inaudible conversations] welcome, everyone, to the Commonwealth Club california. Just a quick housekeeping, of course, if you have anything that mix noises cell phones, beepers, husbands, whatever if you could just put them on silent for the rest of the program. Of course, recording this for tv and podcast, so we appreciate the nonbeepingness. And now i would like to turn it over to our, my ecohost and the person whose name is on the show, michelle meow. [laughter] thanks so much, john. Thank you. Welcome to michelle meow show. If youre here for the first time, its your az covering the ag, l, m, n, o, p and everyone in between. [laughter] our special guest tonight is the finder of the free radicals prompt, a Global Network of former extremists who work on deradicallizing others trying to lee the movement leave the movement hes a proud father of two, a husband and an author, and here to talk about his new book, braching hate confronting the new culture of extremism, is christian picciolini. Welcome to the show. Thank you,my e chel. Yeah. [applause] so your, this book, and its your second book and, wow, i flew through the 200 plus pages so quick like a hungry child, you know, after school. And because i was just craving for some of this truth. But before we dive into all these truths, the book does share stories from other individuals that you encounter whether direct or indirect and through your work. Ire think we should start with telling your story and how the encounter with [inaudible] the chicago area skinheads and americas first organized neonazi group. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. Its a privilege to be here and anin honor, but its a privilege to be here because i know that oftentimeses people that dont look like me who have a darker skin color sometimes dont get the same Second Chances that i do. So i want to acknowledge that. You know, i was born on the south side of chicago to italian immigrant parents who worked very, very hard. And growing up i didnt see them very often. They were working seven days a week, 14 hours a day, so i grew up kind of isolated from them and was really searching for a sense of identity, community and purpose. I think like most of us do. And i foundnd it in an alley in 1987 while i was smoking a joint. Clark martell, the man who recruited me, walked up to me, joint from my mouth and said thats what the communists and the jews want you to do to keep you docile. I didnt know what a a communist was, i definitely didnt know what the word docile meant. [laughter] but it was the first time that i felt somebody really saw me. And really drew he in. Me in. I didnt know it at that time, but i had just been recruited at 14 years old to americas first neonazi skinhead group, and clark was the first skinhead leader. And although it didnt sit with me in i any my dna, i wasnt raised as a racist, my participants were immigrants in the 60s and they were often the victims of prejudice, so it wasnt part of how i was raised. So it was pretty foreign to me, but i was willing to swallow the things i didnt understand, didnt agree with was the reward i was getting was this kind of sense offing agency, this really this kind of brotherhood, this community that i had joined that i was lacking. It felt like it empowered me until i recognized how toxic it was. And i stayed in for eight years, until i was 23. I think every day that i was in i had questions about what i was involved in, but with it became increasingly hard to leave because i was afraid of going back to the nothingness that i had at 14. And i could say i had a coach, you know, a ballerina troupe, anybody else walked up to me in that alley at 14 years old, i would have gone with them your ballet career. Yeah, well [laughter] you dont want to see me dance, trust me. [laughter] well, and you, of course, did leave. Can you tell us what did it for you . Yeah. You know, i was in for eight years and, like i said, i dont think there was a day where i didnt question what i was involved in, at least very quietly. But i also met people along the way that challenged me. Not in an aggressive way, you know, not through debate or telling me i was wrong, but just through a loved experience and lived experience and getting the know them. I opened a record store in 1995 to sell racist music that i was making and um porting. But i also sold a small section of hiphop music and punk rock music and heavy metal music never expecting anybody to come in to buy those things. It was just me going in to city hall and saying i want to open a record store. I couldnt tell them i was going to sell nazi music. And people came in to shop for it. People of p color, you know, people from the Lgbtq Community and it was the first time i had a meaningful interaction with the people that id kept outside of my social circle. I recognized pretty quickly once that happened that i actually respected them more, liked them more and wanted to be around them more than i did the people i had surrounded myself with for eight years. Eventually, i became embarrassed to sell that musics i pulled it from the shelves, and it was 75 of my revenue to i i to close my had to close my store. That gave me an opportunity to really disengage. I should also say my wife and my children had left me by that point [inaudible] yeah, because i was involved. My wife, we got married at 18, had our first son at 19, our second son at 2 the 1. She never was supportive of what i was involved in, she hated it, and i failed to prioritize my if family. Although i had this purpose of being a father and a husband, i still didnt see it at the time. I want to jump in there, youre going over that kind of fast, but in your book youre point out icf, identity, community and purpose not the rap band from michigan. Talk a bit more about that, because i think it really gets to the heart of how someone was able to grab you and pull you into the movement and how you were able to reach other people. Yeah, i think its important, you know, when we think about extremists or white nationalists that we hear about in the world today, we assume that they were always like that. But nobody is born a heart. They find that a hater. They find that as almost a protective armor they put on to protect themselves from the pain they feel inside, then they project that pain outward onto other people. But every single one of us is searching for identity, community, purpose. Atin some point in our lives we have to find that. It develops our values. Its the community that were a part of, the family. So people who gravitate towards extremism, and i talk about this in depth in my book, do so because they are searching for identity, community and purpose not hate. The ideology is just the final component that they find that locks into place that allows them to then blame their pain on somebody else. But, of course, since we all search for identity, community and purpose and were not all extremists, maybe 2020 we kind of are, but thats a joke. [laughter] maybe not. But i think what the differentiator is, is that its search for out, community and purpose but identity, community and purpose but also a broken search where we hit what i call potholes in our lifes journey. Potholes are traumas, and that can be a million different things. It could be abuse, poverty, it could be the loss of a loved one, t grief, divorce. For me it was abandonment. I felt abandoned by my parents, but it could also be Mental Illness, it could be joblessness, poverty but even privilege could be a pothole. If keeps us if privilege keeps us so isolated from humanity, that can also detour us these extremist narratives live and are aplenty this. And an extremist narrative or an extremist behavior can be anything from being a neognatsty to flying to syria to join isis, to joining a gang, becoming a school shooter, even being a drug abuser. That is the manifestation of an extremist behavior. And i think, ultimately, selfextremism could be suicide. Instead of taking your pain out on somebody else, its take it out on yourself. So i think if we start to look at why the motivations of why people engage in these extremist behaviors, we can learn how to fill those potholes so that we can bring people back. And, yeah, we do share all the stories tie back into why. And is so ill start with you in askinghy you, you answered it, e why, but at any time, you know, th few years that you were a part of didnt they call it c. A. S. H. . Yeah. Chicago area skinheads. Did you ever feel, did you ever feel horrible . Did compassion if ever overcome the ideologies that you started believing in or the hate that, you know, was poisoning your mind and your heart . Yeah. I dont know that a day passed where i didnt feel guilty about what i was doing, but it wasnt a safe place to show that. It wasnt a place to be vulnerable with my peers. So, you know, i suspect i wasnt the only one who stuffed those type it is of feelings down and embraced the o hatred even moreo because there wasd a reward in that from our peers. Youe know, being violent, sayig violet things was violent things was the price of admission. It was what kept us there. What feigned kind of this feeling of respect for each other even though there was no respect. We didnt even have selfrespect. Yeah, so i mean, i really think that its a tough thing to think that people can leave those movements. Ii know its hard to believe that, you know, maybe if were nice to, quoteunquote, the bad people that they might change, but i can tell you ive helped over 300 people disengage, and it really is the compassion that they receive when they least expect it from the people they least deserve it from sometimes, that is the most powerful thing that ive seen break hate. Well, lets begin with story number one in the book which i orthink speaks to a lot of the questions that at least i are as a i have as a 38 queer woman who grew up in poverty, those surrounding me in gang life and if now doing this program here at the Commonwealth Club trying to address some political challenges that were nation. The book opens up with the story of cassandra, a young girl from new jersey who gets deep into an internet relationship. Im going to let you tell the story because theres so much there, and i think you understand why it would capture someone at my age, if not everyone here in the room, but especially someone like myself. Yeah. Cassandra was a 17yearold girl when her parents contacted me, which iss often the case. A bystander will contact me for help. She was, she is a twin living in new jersey who struggled with social anxiety her whole life while her sister was very social is andia very active. There wasas a dynamic between tm that was really difficult for sandra to get beyond, but she, in 2016, early 2016, had been recruited by an online boyfriend, a man who, a 21yearold man who said he was from idaho, had blond hair and blue eyes and recruited her to be a mouthpiece for propaganda. So she was, at 17 years old, making Holocaust Denial videos, prowhite videos online and was getting a Senate Following of people significant following of people and was dating this guy. He kept kind of coercing her to do these things, and when her parents contacted me after about a month or so, my investigation i discovered that her boyfriend wasnt a 21yearold man from idaho with blonding hair, blue eyes, in fact, it was two people, oning being a russian man one being a russian man in st. Petersburg who was 31 and anotherst one being a Peruvian National living not far from here in union city, california, who were working together essentially to catfish her or pretend to be somebody else and fool her into being, you know, a girlfriend. And they were recruiting other girls, some as young as 14 years old by pretending to be their boyfriends. He would steal photos online and videos as if they were his. He would strip the audio off, record his own audio they both did. And she had never seen him. And when her parents contacted me, she was very deep in this, and i turned the what i also discovered as part of my investigation in october of 2016 before the president ial election was that they were tied to thousands of other internet accounts, social media accounts othat were, you know, neonazi, protrump, antihillary, but they were all these fake russian trolll accounts. An course, nobody knew that back then because we werent talking about that. So i i turned over 22 gigabytesa whole hard drive of information over to fbi. The first week of november, it was before the election, and i said im not exactly sure what i found, but i have these thousands of accounts that are all tied to russia, theyre all pronazi and, you know, protrump and antihillary, but theyre not americans doing this. Theyre involved with this girl, i think that weum have a problem here because i also was tracking these accounts and discovered that they were. Changing from these protrump, pronazi accounts to then black lives matter accounts. And then they would become feminist accounts, and then they became lgbt accounts and then they became something else. And the goal was they were just flooding the internet against all of these other accounts they were creating and pulling in real americans as part of this debate. You didnt realize at the time you literally had stumbled across not literally, but you had stumbled across, probably literally, what was the biggest story in the country. Yeah. Because about three months later the fbi and cua came out and said, hey, weve discovered russian influencing or meddling through social media finish. [applause] i wish the fbi would have done that because they never contacted me back after i turned over that information. I think they thought i was a little crazy, but it proved to be accurate. I also actually sent an email that week to Hillary Clinton campaign with that information. They asked for more information, i gave it to them, and they also didnt reply. I i assume they at least sent you a request for funds. [laughter] its what campaigns did. I wish i could tell you that was the f truth, but instead wht happened was around that time former Organization Nonprofit that i was leading and had cofounded under the Obama Administration id won a grant for 40,000 to focus on combating White Supremacy online. Patiently waited for the money, and then the administration changed,he and that 400,000 grt was rescinded. There were 33 groups that had won as part of this grant, we were the only group focused on White Supremacy. Everybody else was focused on what they w call radical islam, and we were the only group that was rescinded. We werent given a reason. What was the reason that they give you in pretty much canceling this grant that you thought you were going to get, a tweet . Well, no [laughter] well, the tweet is something else. What i had gotten was an administrator, somebody i didnt know who said, im sorry, but weve rereviewed all the grant winners, and weve deemed that your organization doesnt qualify. It was around the same time i had tweeted something to the president that was probably not great. I had showed my feelings about the situation, and it was actually the day the muslim ban, you know the muslim ban that he was going to put that in. I think i said fyou something. [laughter] and they tried afterwards katie gorka, who was the head of the nsc at the time, her emails had leaked. They went back and said, hey, lets find informationon on this group to justify taking this away, and they found that tweet after the fact. So, yeah. Was there something important to that in losing that grant, the work that you would have done which was, you know, had a lot to do with focusing on internet and a framework around protecting young people from getting sucked in to this kind of abuse right. The Antidefamation League cited around a 3035 increase of extremist violence or extreme theistrelated violation. The Southern Poverty Law Center alsoth cited around the same percentage of increase in the year 20172018. And so theres something to be said about the rise of extremistrelated murders and violence. Especially during, you know, this administration. I hate to correlate it all and point fingers, but id love for you, you know, to kind of talk about your thoughts on the internets impact on the rise of extremist activities and white supremacist propaganda. Sure. I grew up when i was involved in the movement before the internet, so i literally was standing in the alley, somebody approached me, handed me a flier, asked me to a meeting, something of that nature. Unfortunately, now we have millions of alienated young people who live online where their only reality is virtual reality. Their only connections to other people are, you know, people in forums and chat rooms and things like that. And we have these millions of kind of alienated young people who are being drawn to these narratives but, of course, its also being aided by propaganda thats cominge in from the unid states, from outside the united states, foreign actors. And they are finding their sense of identity, community and purpose online. And frankly, they can be whoever they want on the internet. Doesnt have to jibe with their reality, they can be whatever per see that they want. Persona they want. And unfortunately though, it is spilling out into the real world. People are i dying at a clip lel like ive never seen before attributed to this movement. But theres also a whole transnational component of this movement that i think most people arent a aware of. We think, oh, this is an american problem and, certainly, it existed long before, you know, the president that we have in office. Although, you know, i have to say that never in my lifetime, never did i think in my lifetime that what i said 30 years ago would be coming out of the twitter feed or the mouth of the highest office. That, to me, is very scary because it really does embolden these people. They do feel like somebody has their back. And i should say that grant that we lost was completely focused on online deradicalization. We were ready to launch an online deradicalization network because thats where most people are being radicalized, on the internet, and the grant was pulled about four weeks before charlottesville happened. So we could are ramped up, we could have been there, potentially, to help some of the people that went to that rally. You know, and kind of getting back to the story of cassandra and with that story, throughout the book you keep going back to it as youre sharing other stories as well. But the thought that came to me was, and i was talking about michelle before the program, i was reminded of the things youd read about the 1970s with cults. And there was quite a number of years there where people didnt really buy the idea that there , that you could do mind control with people, that you could i mean, nowadayses, of course, weve all heard about a lot of it, maybe we know people who have been through it. And were all familiar with the idea of deprogramming. But it was a lot of the same thing where finding something to catch a vulnerable person, often a young person, disaffected, alienated, alone, hurting in some way and providing a community and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I guess kind of the big issue of all the stuff that youve been involved in, all the people youve helped and the people you maybe couldnt help, are you optimistic well get over this, or is this thet tide still rising . I think the tide is still rising. I think we need to be very careful. Were still having a debate in our country about whether we have a problem with White Nationalism. There are certain people who think its a hoax, this is a fringe thing and that its being blowno out of proportion. I get requests every day, sometimes multiple requests a today from parents of people who are involved in these movements. Never in my life have i gotten a request about 10yearold kids who are denying the hold to cost. Im getting that now the holocaust. Weve seen a rise in violation. Weve seen a rise in propaganda distribution on college campuses. They know where o to go to find people who are searching. I call them marginalized seekers. They know where to go the find them and they know which narratives of loss to pitch. And theyre being, frankly, very effective while were still debating if theres a problem. But theres a whole transnational s component. You know, those that network has been forged for decades. People like david duke in the early 90s, you know, got rid of his klan robe, put on a threepiece suit as a politician, got elected. He actually lived in moscow from 19992003 or 2004, most people dont know that. And after he left, he subletted his apartment to another american white supremist. Theyve been building these alliances for a long time. And now small terror cells and a group called the base which is they call themselves the base, and thats a literal translation for alqaeda. Theres this whole white jihad component where theyre starting to take the tactics that they see from other terrorist groups and starting to mimic them here in terms of how they kill. They drive their cars, small groups. You know, the propaganda, the videos, paramilitary training, its very similar. And i think we need to be very careful of that. Theres this narrative especially in the Mainstream Media after a violent incident in which Mental Illness is cited for the reasons why. You know, in your book you tell stories cassandra, even ben. Cassandra suffers from autistic spectrum disorder, and ben, who suffers from ptsd after serving two tours to afghanistan, and i think that, you know, theres i think its a little dangerous to have you kind of point fingers to mentallal illness. Sure. Id love to hear your thoughts on the dangers of that. Yeah. Mental illness is not making people racist, lets just make that clear. It is circumstances that surround Mental Illness, often the alienation, the disconnect, you know, from society whether its social anxiety, the bullying, inability to establish really intimate relationships with friends and things like that. That pushes people to the fringes where those narratives exist. Id say about 75 of the people that i work with are dealing with some sort of an emotional disorder, you know . Everything if depression to autism, to bipolar, to skits9 friend ya in some schizophrenia in somee cases. And there are lots of people who suffer from Mental Illness who donton become extremists, so i think we need to break that equivalence because its not true. Same thing goes for video games. A lot of recruitmentment is happening from Multiplayer Online video games. Its the recruiters who are talking to our kids over headsets from who knows where in the world who are kind of taking them from a call of duty scenario where theyre playing with 15 people saying Something Like the nword, gauging how people respond to that. Some people will push back, some people wont say anything, some people will giggle, and sometimes that giggle is from a nervous 9yearold who doesnt know what else to do when the nword is said, and they invite those people who respond positively to a smaller group, and it kind of ramps up from there. Soing you know, i think what we need to understand is we are failing young people right now. We have a human infrastructure problem in our country. Our bridges and roads are falling apart, but i think we are letting down our people as well,fi especially young people. And i think some of the best things we can do to counter extremism is to offer Early Adolescent Health care, general education, things like that to make sure people are set up with opportunities. But we also have to become epothole fillers. And as adults, we have to learn to be vulnerable with our children because they see us, whether theyll admit it or not, they see us as perfect, superheros that they have to somehow impress, live up to. And if were not vulnerable with theming they will never learn to be vulnerable with us and explain what they might be struggling with. I think we need to really build that. We see a lot of news stories and, again, to do with that technological angle, talk about how young people are increasingly communicating mostly through social media and that they are feeling more lonely than any other generation and are spending more time alone than any other generation. Not out of desire to be alone are, but because that human infrastructure is just not there. Right. Maybe this is almost a repeat of my optimist or pessimist. Its like how the individual work youre doing with 300 people is great, but what needs to be done to reach these millions and millions of kids who are i mean yeah. We can do it. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what i do is not rocket science. Im a guide. Im a flagger on that road with all the potholes on that search for identity, community and purpose. And if all im doing is guiding peopling to a mores positive identity, community and purpose and ways to fix their potholes. We can all do that. You know, in my book i actually list the seven steps of what it takes to [inaudible] somebody and none of them require any expertise about the ideology. I dont even tell people that theyre wrong. It starts out with listen. I listen for their potholes. And times they dont even know theyre telling me, sometimes words cant even saw it, and i have to just infer it. But ultimately, its about figuring out what the motivations are that led somebody there and trying to repair that. And offering, you know, a positive sense of identity, community and purpose, something that we all search for one thing you bring up in the book, you talk about what White Nationalism looks like today and its changed over the years since youve left it. And you touched a little kind of about where its at today, in the internet, and we hear these words like altleft, altright, id love to hear your thoughts on what altright means to you, and is that a part of the movement . Yeah. Nowadays its wrapped in different buzz words like being patriotic wo exactly. Right . Or were exercising freedom of speech. We dont, we dont hate anyone, were just prowhite. Yeah. [laughter] were you reading my mind at 15 years to old . Those were the things i was saying then. It hasnt changed, actually. I dont like to use the terms White Nationalism because i know those are their marketing terms. They actually sat in a room and said, okay, what can we call ourselves to seem less nazi. Its true, i mean, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, we were White Supremacists. We wanted to scorch the earth. Butto we marketed ourselves as a white pride group because we knew we had to do that to attract people. If we werewe too extreme, too edgy, we would alienate the average White American racist who we wanted to recruit because they were patriotic in some cases, you know, waving the america flag while we were waving swastika flags. The two didnt really mix. So in the 80s Movement Leaders decided to really encourage a whole concept of leaderless reare sis dance which is, essentially, the lone wolf concept. Dont join a group, dont get tattoos, dont shea your head, dont look shave your head, dont look like a white supremacist. We each stopped saying the evil jews and started saying the globalists in some cases because it was a way for us to communicate through dog whistles. And then people picked up on it, you know . Sometimes the average american picked up on it. But the whole idea was we didnt want to alienate our potential recruiting pool, so we needed to look like them. So when i say boots to suits and david duke kind of getting rid of the klan robe and getting elected to the house of representatives in louisiana, that really was t the beginningf this normalization of, you know, of what i used to be which people recognize as extreme. The point was to be extreme, to make people afraid. But now its to fool people. Okay. I really want to take it up with the person who came up with the modern look, the tiki torch, the polos and the khakis. Who came up with that. Vladimir putin. [laughter] im not joking. I dont know if it was him specifically, but if we look back even to 2012, we see the exact same tiki torches in places like ukraine during the orange revolution, the same imagery in other parts of eastern europe. This was a transplanted plan and, in fact, many of the people not many, but some of the people who are instrumental in the violation in charlottesville had actually trained in paramilitary camps in ukraine with a battalion that started off as a neonazi militia, a very small militia, that then got folded into the National Guard of ukraine and was a very important part of the fight in crimea. And ukraine has such an geography for the world and for europe because it is, if anybodys seen the movie 700, the 300, the spartans held off, ukraine is very much like that for europe. Russia really wants to destroy kind of democracy in the west, so so that would be their entree in. Its an interesting thing because we have these very open neonazis fighting for ukraines freedom, but theyre also being funded and kind of promoted by russian propaganda, things like that. Its a really dangerous thing. Here in the in fact, your book you start off with a brief history of racism in america. Talking about going from thehe institution of slavery, that was abolished, then you kind of recreated jim crow, that was a legal system that could be attacked legally. But in both cases, the people who were supporting, enforcing andd brutalizing were doing it with the goal of having control over someone else. Absolutely. Wetr were talking in the back about how this younger generation, its almost like the violence itself was just a role. Talk about them. What do they want . You know, its chaos, i think, is the goal. Extremism really flourisheses in times of uncertainty. And right now america is kind of a tinderbox of actually, the world is kind of a tinder box of uncertainty where i think the fires of extremism are primed to ignite. And, you know, youve got millions of uncertain young people about their future, about politics, about, you know, jobs, things like that. The middle class is disappearing, like thats a big deal, right in thats a lot of people feeling lost that theyre interpreting as pressure. Women are finally being heard, lgbtq folksks are finally being heard. Well, the people who held that power even though things are just equalizing and theyre not losing anything, they feel like its oppressive to them. So you hear about they will not replace us or the jews will not replace it. Its that whole idea of them thinking that theyre losing power, and, you know, were a time when if were not very careful right now about young people and just about ourselves in general and how we react to losing truth right now, which i think once we lose it were going to have a hard time recognizing it again to get it back, so we need to be very careful with that. We are in a moment right now that is very dangerous not just for the united states, but for the whole world that is facing this dire uncertainty. I want to go back to cassandras story again, and it just i mean, gosh, if anything, go out there, grab a book and then, you know, skim through and just to hear, like, how hard it was and how challenging it was for you to take the situation and be supportive of cassandras parents who, you know, really felt like there was nothing that they could do, and they really wanted to help their child, of course. But you with went as far as you went as c far as tracking ts guy down. You were here in union city, actually found the guys house. You know, going through all this detective work. [laughter] i think, i think i dont, we dont all have that kind of time [laughter] and also that kind of talent that you have to address these situations if any of our children are involved in these types of scandal which i dont think is slowing down. I think its, were in another election year, and im afraid that these practices online, the meddling in the election, the lying, the other person on the other side with a different motive especially to divide us here in this country, its here. Its happening right now as we speak. Yeah. Well, cassandra was abducted by the man from union city. And i was the only one that knew where he lived even though i had passed that information to the fbi before she was abducted and warned them that it was going to happen because he was threatening her. He eventually didding abduct her the week she turned the 18 years old and went off to college. And i had to come to union city and find her and bring her home. And it was, of course, with the help of local police and her family and everything like that. But i couldnt even describe it to the local police because a they wouldnt have believed me in a million years had i told them that. Im not a detective. You know, i had to teach myself how to find information, and i would encourage if you have children and youre a parent if, be involved. Know how to look for things. Know how to look for signs. People is can me all the time what should we look for . My kid is becoming an extremist. The same thing you would look for if your kid is getting into drugs or becoming a delinquent. Are they depressed, have they changed their habits. Have they abandoned the things they love for something completely new. All the things weve been taught to look for if our kids has been getting in trouble for decades and decades and decades. Its the same thing. The ideology is just the final component. So we dont, i dont battle it through an ideological process, i battle it through really a Public Health approach. Im trying to empower and build resilience in people to bring them back. And i think to prevent this from happening, we need to do that proact uly. We proif actively. We need to make sure our young people are resilient. Were also suffering too. Its not just young people, its adults too. We really, we need to and somebody brought up something really interesting to me yesterday. You know, they were talking about their parents and they werent aging gracefully, and they said, you know, its just like your book, its like theyve lost their sense of identity, community and purpose as theyve gotten older. Their friends have died, theyve moved into a new neighborhood, a retirement neighborhood, and theyre not active. I said, well, thats kind of the same thing that a young person goes through. So, you know, maybe if we want to age gracefully, we need to always be vigilant about making sure we have positive identity, community and purpose. The second followup to that is 2016, i mean, you were so desperate to get Law Enforcement to help, and they kind of did but each when there was the standoff when you were at the guys house and you were trying to ask him to get out of the car, by this point cassandras at the airport with her mom, but e steve herre to things, youre telling them hes a criminal, hes involved in this big thing, and there wasnt much that they could do if he wasnt going to get out of the but i just want to stress that there was only so much that Law Enforcement was willing to do. Yeah. You even wrote to a clinton staffer, and they didnt respond. You went to the fbi, they havent responded to you to this day. That was 2016, were now in 2020 the, another election year. I bring this up because if you were to submit another case similar cassandras today, do you think that the fbi or Law Enforcement or any political candidate would listen to you . I think it is different now c yeah. I actually had the real privilege to testify before the house of representatives and talk about this very specific problem that were having. I have develop a better relationship with the fbi. Theyre still not willing to look at that case for whatever reason, but there are other things that ive worked with themth on. You know, people see me as a conduit in some cases. Even people im not helping disengage theyll say, hey, you know, i found this person online, it sounds like theyre going to be violet, theyve threatened violence, and i will contact the fbi as my duty as an american to protect other people x. They have responded. So i, you know, im, i think im okay saying that there have been a at least a dozen potential Mass Shootings that because of the information that was sent to me i got to Law Enforcement and, you know, forwarded. So for anyone listening or watching who, frankly, might be interested in contacting you, do you have a contact you could share that youd feel okay sharing . Im easy to find. Just google exskinhead christian, you know, chicago. I usually come up towards the top. Yeah, its very easy to contact me. Im on social media if you just google my name, should come up pretty easily. Were going to open it up to the audience for questions for christian in just a little bit. Im going to ask this question l before youe do, but prepared with your questions. Johns going to walk around with a roving mic and, again, its being recorded, so speak into the mic. There was the an incident, dylan, who walked into an africanamerican church and killed nine individuals. Its still very, very hard, you know, incident to talk about. But whats heartbreaking to add to that is that you later find the out that music that influenced dylan roof included music you created over 25 years ago when you were in the movement. And i, i have a lot of, a lot of empathy for you and at the same time confused and then add to that what led us here today is just why, hike, why are we doing this, why are people so angry, why are people so hateful. The question is, you know, how to you reconcile that and continue moving forward and then, you know, part of johns question is, is this a hoax . Yeah. Thatrd was, you know, not only devastate dog that community and certain def astronauting to that community, but it was a moment that ill never forget. It really was kind of the tide shifting i think at least in our understanding of where this was moving. And i think it was maybe last year when i first found out, but i was doing an interview with a journalist, and she showed me a printout, a posting dylann roof had made on a white supremacist message board. And in that posting heed had just watched a documentary about skinheads, and he had heard some music and seen a band perform in that documentary, and he had posted the lyrics to this web site. Andd journalist show me this printout. I dont think she kneww what she was showing me at the time. But i had to read it three times because they were very familiar, and the third time i recognized they were my lyrics that i had written 30 years before. Anded had influenced him, you know, just a few months before he walked into the Mother Emmanuel Church and murdered nine people. And to think that i, that, you know, i said something 30 or years ago that would have influenced somebody to do that made me physically ill. It was several days before i didnt feel physically ill. And this is music that ive tried to remove that i still cannot scrub from the internet for whatever reason. And i have a responsibility for that, for the ideas that i put out into the world, the music that is still out there and how thats influencing people. And thats part of what drives me to continue to do this work for the last 24 years. But also every day im driven by the fact that i must repair the damage that ivey caused. I dont know what that even means, but im driven by that idea. And sometimes i i do that by informing people, sometimes i do that by going into the communities that ive hurt. Sometimes that mean if making amends with the actual individuals that i hurt in some way. And its something that i dont think ill ever be done doing, nor do i want to be done. I mean, i certainly hope that this problem goes away. I want to be out of work, trust me. I dont want to help people disengage. But i also know personally my mission is to always repair the harm that ive causessed and to encourage other people to do that as well. Does religion play a role in your life . You know, i went to Catholic Schools my whole life, and i think two of the six high schools all of them i got kicked out of once, one of them twice, were so i grew up in a very roman catholic, italian family. I wouldld consider myself an agnostic now, but heres my take on god. I think we are all like cells in gods body, and when were sick and cant communicate with each other, the whole bodys sick. So we need to learn to understand we are all part of that same body, and we need to be better towards each other because if were toxic, the body dies. And when that means its god or society or whatever, we must do a better job at that. So thats my take. And nowie its your turn. Again, please speak into the microphone, and were going to probably have a lot of questions, so if you could just keep it concise. This may not be the most profound question, but ever since i first came across you, which i think was in an npr interview, i bought your book, romantic violation. [laughter] but i have to say, i mean, i never thought an Italian American would be white enough to be recruited by White Supremacists. Were whitish, kind of like you [laughter] i love when they came out with black itch because i always felt whitish. So what is White Supremacy today . If who else that we dont expect to be thats a good question, and i think speaking from their perspective if what they believe, they really believe in kind of european heritage. So if you of european heritage, they would consider that white. But exactly, what is white, right . I it changes. And once people folded into the power structure, all of a sudden its their turn to cuckoo the people what come behind them, right . White supremacy is this false notionon that white people are superior to everybodye else, ad thats what they believe. Ii can tell you from experience that the White Supremacists ive met are not superior over anybody. [laughter] thats not to say theyre not smart, thats not to say, you know, there are people who have had educations from prestigious universities. But i have to be honest when i hear somebody like Richard Spencer speak who has those rest degrees prestigious degrees, he sounds dumber than i did at 14, to be quite honest. [laughter] we shouldnt think that theyre stupid because they are, in some cases smart. But, yeah, i mean, what is white, right . So what i would say to them is they really need to examine themselves because maybe at one point they werent part of this power structure and were folded in [inaudible] sure. [inaudible] yeah. And then once a few years back about jewish and irish and [inaudible] people werent always white. They had to become white, so im like how has it changed . Yeah, i mean, people who are in power, essentially, you know, they want to keep that power. But, or yeah, no, its a false notion. And, frankly, whats so important is about in listening to people harmed along the way, and i wanted to athat earlier, we must enlist the people harmed along the way to fix our nations potholes so that they can help us develop what the future is, right . Societies, nations can also have potholes and a struggle for identity, community and purpose, and let me tell you we have some historic potholes that we have never focused on. And we must. S okay. Overed here. So you talked about russian trolls wanting to destabilize america by creating all these different groups that fight against each other and, okay, yeah, i can see how that breeds chaos. But, like, what is to be accomplished by, like, playing video games with little jimmy whos years old 9 years old who has no money, cant vote and might not have access to a gun. Is it playing a really long game that hopefully he turns 15 and has access to a gun . Yes. Okay. Guns are pretty easy to get in our country for a a 15yearold even. Thats they understand that, right . And i think what they want to do is create more of that uncertainty because they know that in times of uncertainty, chaos, extremism flourisheses, and a small percentage of those people will find a gun, walk into theirag school, walk boo a store and murder people walk into a store and murder people. The goal really is to disrupt. We talk about influence, i dont think that theyre changing votes at least that im aware of. But what they are doing is influencing us. They are meddling with our opinions, right . In some cases its about fake news and giving us opinions that they want us to have that dont really exist in reality. But in most cases, they know what americas open wounds are are; racism, right . The fact that we have a lot of guns and people die all the time because of them. And their goal so we talk about just very briefly, this terrorist group in the truest sense of the world that is american White Supremacists killing people. Ive worked with people from adam [inaudible] division, ive helped them disengage, and theyve told me i get sent guns piece by piece from somebody in ukraine, the person if i talked to on the video game whose name was igor, you know, something and i didnt want typed that out until after he told me his name was john smith. There are lots of elements at play here, and it is really just about creating so much disruption in our country that we cant even decide what to do amongst ourselves which, im sorry, is the case right now. We cant get anything done because of this. Back here. Hey, christian. Im a retired police officer, and i was just wondering have you had a any success thinking about reaching out to Law Enforcement community with this message other than, you know, were kept abreast of whos active, but educating these young officers is a different thing. Have you thought about that . Absolutely. And i do a lot of that work with. I i have a wonderful relationship with Law Enforcement. I do try and educate them on this world becauseip i think theyre, you know, listen, their job is hard. They dont understand in certain cases the nuances of some of these groups or whats happening overseas and how its influencing here. So i i think its very, very important that they understand. I think more than, you know, anybody else Law Enforcement, teachers, psychologists, anybody dealing with young people really needs to understand whats happening. Is so, yes, absolutely, i do a lot of speaking. Actually, at one point i even helped the fbi, the contractor develop kind of an intervention program, but they never ended up using it. They were the wrong entity to do kind of touchy feely intervention work, i think, at the time. But, listen, this is something that is not just im not just about beating, you know, an exit for white nationalists. We need to do this for all young people in our country. Make sure that each the most marginalized commitments of color and things like that have access to opportunity, are empowered and that we help them around their potholes. Because i i think this isnt just a solution to defeat extremism, i think its a solution to fix our crumbing human infrastructure. Crumbling. Hi. My name is anne. Thank youra for coming tonight. Its been really interesting. Thank you. Im curious about how you extricated yourself from the group and the work that youre doing now. It seems like itd be almost dangerous, and im wondering if youve ever had to deal with threats on your life or on your family, and i guess im just curious what extricating yourself was like and what your life is like now. What youre doing now, i would assume, is kind of scary at times. Yeah. Thank you for that question. You know, i wish i could tell you that when i left in 1996 that i told them off and, you know, i was waving my fists at them. No, i ranch i ran away and i tried i ran away and tried to hide past. And that happened for almost five years because i was afraid to tell people. I was better. I didnt have the same beliefs and i was inclusive and doing all the same things, but i had run away. I tried to outrun past by making new friends, finding a new job. It was still killing me because i had that cancer in me. And it wasnt until i actually started telling people that i noticed my life was getting better. I was being honest. I was holding myself accountable for the first time, which is something i do for everybody i work with. Nobody getsor a free pass with. Ive held myself accountable for 24 years, and i do believe that people do need to repower the damage that theyve caused repair. They need to work not only with the victims, but their communities and everybody else to really selfreflect and understand why they did what they did and also to fix what they did. I get Death Threats almost every day. Most of them are online. I do hundreds of these events, always publicize them. Nobodys ever disrupted anything, nobodys ever, as far as i know, attended. And, yeah, heres the thing, it was i would have been dead or in jail if i would have stayed. That was more dangerous for me. Doing the right thing now i dont consider dangerous. Its my duty can. Im one of the few people on earth who knows things most people dont know about how these groups work, how they recruit, what happens, what their strategies are, what their plans are, and i see it as my responsibility to dismantle that. Christian, first, thank you the very much for what you do. We all appreciate it. Thank you. Question is, so obviously groups like adam which you mentioned before or ram, rise above movement, are very obviously neonazi movements. Can you tell us what you feel about the, quoteup quote, altright kind of like the proud boys . Yeah, i mean, so if we look at White Supremacists as, like, the umbrella term, there are all different kinds urn there, right . Under there, right . There are some who will say were just altright, there are some who are no holds barred, they want to scorch the evident, and theyre very the earth, and theyre very happy to tell you about that. Heres the common thread, theyre all White Supremacists, right . They can name themselves what they want, they can dress differently, they can speakth differently but, ultimately, their goal is to marginalize and harm ore people, right . Other people, right . So while groups are actually killing people, theyve been responsible for at least five deaths in the last two years and probably more but so many other plots have been thwarted, somebody like the altright is just saying things in some cases and not, you know, murdering people although they are too, theyre driving their car through charlottesville rally and things like that. But their words are harmful. Their ideas that theyre putting into the world are harmful and do end up influencing people to killar people. So altright or, you know, altextreme or whatever we want to call them, theyre all still feeding this problem. So i dont really, you know, generally speaking, i dont differentiate between them. Theyre all guilty ors as far as im concerned for what theyre doing. So, you know, i approach them differently because, you know, you dont i wouldnt approach somebody wearing a suit like i would a skinhead whos maybe hiding in rise above movement or Something Like l that, so i recognize the differences. But at the same time, i also holdif them equally accountable. So maybe i dont know enough or havent read enough, but im wondering whosou ultimately controlling these different organizations, and whos behind all of this . I mean, there must be somebody whos keeping each of the organizations going. S it is much less about organization than it is about individual action. Think of it as a Movement Without leaders. Where individuals feed off of each other, they end courage each over encourage each other. In some cases they may come from different camps like the gentleman just mentioned, but the internet really changed everything, you know . Its kind of like a 24hour all you can eat hate buffet if youre hungry. [laughter] people are feeding off of each other. Weve seen manifestos from people in, you know, norway from Anders Breivik to the Christ Church shooter to el paso are referencing each other in their manifestos. Its aea game. Its become kind of like i need to beat the high score game. And if what i would warn is that theyre kind of, what theyre aiming for is oklahoma city. You know, where 168 people were killed including children. Timothy mcveigh, most people dont know, was a white supremacist. He was seen at places like aryan nation, he was influenced by other, youke know, fundamentalit religious groups like the covenant, the sword and the arm of the lord which was a terrorist militia. And they really aspired to create more damage than hes done. Not trying to do is accelerate things through violence to the point there is mass chaos in the whole world is scorched and they can start over because they believe they are the ones who will survive it. It is not about leaders. There are figureheads and ideologues but it is not about the group structure. It is a small group, maybe 100, 200 members, loanable terrorists but it is not about reporting through a hierarchy. Law enforcement did an amazing job infiltrating these groups and they started to take down the leadership when they did that. Leaders said no more groups, we will promote the idea of being a lone wolf, this leaderless resistance. We will indoctrinate you and we will all indoctrinate each other but you will not be a cardcarrying member, you will not have a director overseeing you. It is your responsibility, your job to recruit people and send them off, it is like appear amid scheme almost. There are influencers. Foreign adversaries like russia are promoting these ideas, in some cases eating these ideas. The original website where they started this, it is a dangerous group that has killed people. The website where they started to recruit americans was founded by a russian man. The name he uses was alastair mc schwab. Hes based in moscow. On that website he was recruiting people, passing by making plans, encouraging violence and race war, things ideologues in our country are talking about but also fanning the flames. Speaking of people who belong to marginalized groups, interested in your thoughts on stephen miller. This is a person in an official position who has control of funds and policies and yet he is a jewish man, son of immigrants. I find it baffling of scary and i wonder where his apostles are. I dont know but if we can step away from it and think of it as an ideological movement. The glue is the ideology and we think of it as a search for identity and purpose i can tell you i have worked with black neonazis and latino neonazis born in a mexican city who are here. I have worked with jewish mothers whose sons are denying the holocaust. They found these movements because they were accepted into them and in other cases were not accepted into society and that was a lottery ticket. People Pay Attention and are getting a reward and have forgotten who they are and what their history has done because the reward of feeling accepted is greater then the pain. To answer your question my opinion on stephen miller, he is doing some bad stuff and has the power to do those bad things but there are other people, there have been outright white nationalists that have been fired from the state department once they were discovered having a podcast. Im not trying to paint an epidemic that they are everywhere, they are our neighbors, doctors, lawyers, teachers, military, Police Officers in some cases. Just because the jobs are respectable doesnt mean they are respectable people doing them in all cases. In the 80s we encouraged people as we encouraged them to disassociate from groups that were very visible, become a cop, be a teacher, go where the people we want to recruit our and that is what happened. I was wondering what is the best public response to situations like charlottesville. We have had a lot of white supremacist activity. Is it ignore them . Have a peaceful protest . What do you see as the best response . The things that extremists love our silence and violence. If we are silent and ignore them and let them do their thing they will keep doing it and we will continue to think we are living in a postracial society when we are not and anyone who think that has never spoken to a person of color about the reality of society and they love violence which is why they go to progressive neighborhoods like charlottesville, a predominantly jewish neighborhood to march through there. The american nazi party. Is to elicit a response from us that then will allow them to attack because they love to paint themselves as a victim which is why they hide behind free speech, the constitution is patriotism because those things are hard to attack. Even a good argument, how do you knock somebodys patriotism. They are the least patriotic people, they want to destroy american democracy, they are antiLaw Enforcement, they are antiour values. It is easy to spot that when they waive an American Flag and say we are protecting the confederate monument, they are going there because it will elicit a response and they can identify people who are not white nationalists that are supporting what they are doing to recruit. They want to be the victims and they like to antagonize and sometimes we fall into that trap. We need to be vocal and visible and vigilant. We cannot the best example of what i saw after charlottesville was what happened in boston, 10 or 20,000 people from boston came out, no fights, no arrests, they will never come back to boston but they will go back to charlottesville, berkeley, and other places because they got the responses they want. Time for one last question. I wonder if you could share some insight into your experience when you were in the gangs what was going on in your head in your heart because most of us are here because it is hard to comprehend that people feel this way but a big component of making a change is understanding. You mentioned icp components but i am wondering you personally, did you at the time you were in those gangs did it feel true for you that this was important to do or was there part of you that thought it because morally you thought it wasnt right . Was there conflict or did you feel brainwashed . Im curious some insight because we dont understand, we cant comprehend what you experienced . It was confusing. I didnt understand it but i knew the price of admission was to be violent and to buy in so i did and the more i did that the more i started to believe it, the more i was committed. I stopped having doubts. I always felt guilt, i always had doubts but there were degrees of it. It would lessen the more i got respect, and power, girls started to like me, the more i started to grow my influence from local to regional to national to international. Those rewards started to mount up so that the guilt even though it was still there affected me less because i was getting something and i had forgotten what it meant to be human after a wild. It was a curve like that. I got to the point i was getting the reward but after a wild like a drug a lot like drug addiction it makes you feel good. It comforts you, makes you forget your problems but you know it is killing you and everyone around you but it is hard to stop but after a while i started to feel very guilty but i also knew that it was much harder for me to disengage and repair the damage i had caused so it was difficult to leave. The last two years i wasnt believing in the ideology but i had to go along with the program because i wasnt brave enough to walk away and start over but it was dangerous to do that so to answer your question at first i didnt believe it, didnt understand it but then i did, vehemently was all in and then when i started to recognize it wasnt something that was good for anybody it was increasingly hard to leave because the outside world didnt want me back and i knew that even though i had changed i was changing. At that point i had to do a lot of work to gain Peoples Trust again and it took years to do that but it is not always an easy situation for somebody who had nothing before they went in and they have gone in and suddenly stuck for the first time in their lives, receiving a sense of empowerment sometimes for the first time. A very addictive thing. Christian is available after the program, he will be signing books, his book is available tonight, make sure you get a copy of breaking hate confronting the new culture of extremism. I want to thank you for being here and christian, all the work you do and continue to do. [applause] is the coronavirus continues to impact the country heres a look at what the Publishing Industry is doing to address the ongoing pandemic. Michelle obama has announced a weekly childrens storytime that will stream every monday at 12 00 pm eastern until may 20th it is available to watch online, pbs kids Youtube Channel or random house facebook page, north americas largest book expo has canceled this years show scheduled to take place in new york city, the conference was originally set for this spring and moved back to july before it was canceled. The american booksellers associations independent bookstore day has been rescheduled for august 20 ninth and the aba has announced a Virtual Bookstore Party to be held from april 19th to the 20 fifth and will include Online Events and promotions with participating stores. Also in the news and bd books and reports book sales were up 2. 9 for early april from the year prior led by holiday, educational and kids books but adult nonfiction sales decline of 28 from the same time in 2019. Book festivals and conferences continue to be canceled or rescheduled. The American Library association canceled their conference this summer in chicago while the printers relit just for scheduled for june will take place in september. The Los Angeles Times festival of books has decided to push back the 20 fifth annual festival to october. Booktv will continue to bring new programs and publishing news. You can also watch all our archived programs anytime on booktv. Org. The president s from Public Affairs available now in paperback and ebook. Presents biographies of every present organized by their ranking by noted historians from best to worst. And features perspectives into the lives of our nations chief executives and leadership style, visit our website, cspan. Org thepresident s to learn more about each president and historian featured and order your copy today wherever books and ebooks are sold. You are watching booktv on cspan2. Here are some programs to watch out for this weekend. Condoleezza rice, former secretary of state in the george w. Bush administration talks about the National Security threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Michael arsonoh details his economic struggles with student loan debt. Journalist Katherine Stewart argues religious nationalists are waiting political war on american democracy and institutions which we take a look at recent other programs about technology and on our Author Interview program afterwords, former fbi Deputy Director andrew mccabe, thats just a few of the programs you will see this weekend. Check your Program Guide for more information or visit booktv. Org. Glenn hutchins here, hope it will be a fascinating and insightful session with ben bernanke. When the financial crisis hit