Preventing Extremism, Radicalization, and Gun Violence in America
How do we prevent young men from being radicalized into misogynistic, White supremacists, and xenophobic movements? How can this prevent gun violence? Brad speaks with Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). Her most recent book is "Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right."
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/counter-andrew-tates-growing-subculture-violent-toxic-masculinity-rcna69411
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus Podcast.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
And I'm joined today by someone who I'm just flattered joined me because they've had a really, really busy week and I've been talking to a lot of important people.
So that is Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idris.
So Cynthia, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me.
So you have spent the week on MSNBC.
You've been writing.
Yesterday, you testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security, the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability.
That included a lot of different representatives, including one Marjorie Taylor Greene.
So now that you've got the nerves out, you've been on TV, you've been in front of Congress, do you feel ready to do Straight White American Jesus?
This is like no problem.
Absolutely.
I am super excited to have this conversation.
Yeah, from Congress to the storage closet where I record this podcast.
So let me tell folks about you.
You are an award-winning author and scholar of extremism and radicalization, and that's what we're going to be talking about today.
The founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University in Washington, D.C., where you're also a professor in the School of Public Affairs.
You've just done so much in terms of advocating, testifying, and speaking in front of Congress, in front of the United Nations, many, many other places.
And your most recent book, which I've read and is wonderful, is Hate in the Homeland, The New Global Far Right, from Princeton University Press, and that's from October 2020.
Wanted to invite you on to talk about extremism and radicalization in the wake of the Allen Mall shooting in Texas just over a week ago.
I want to start here though, which, and this is going to sound like a very basic question, but I think it's one that might help folks listening.
You run a lab that studies polarization and extremism.
I've heard you talk about it.
You have various methods you use to study this online.
We're talking a lot about gun violence because we live in a gun violence hellscape in this country at the moment.
When people think of extremism, when people think of radicalization, what should they picture?
Because I think everyone sort of has a different idea of like a radical or an extremist.
And sometimes it helps to maybe have a more concrete vision.
So just wondering if we can start there.
Yeah, absolutely.
And actually, the field of extremism, if you will, doesn't even agree on a definition of extremism, much less various types of extremism.
So, you know, I will tell you that the definition we use, which is one of the more common definitions, but not the only one, is a definition in which extremism is the Radicalization is coming to believe a system in which us versus them exists and the other poses an existential threat to your self, your family, your future, your well-being, right?
And that existential threat typically has to be met with violence.
So extremism is a belief system that is an us versus them way of thinking in which the other is an existential threat.
And then radicalization is the process of coming to see the world in that way.
So other people will use the definition of extremism that is relies on the mainstream basically saying something is on the fringes.
We don't use that and increasingly it becomes more and more difficult because extremism has seeped into the mainstream in so many ways the Overton window has sort of shifted and so I think you can't really as easily distinguish between what's mainstream and what's fringe as you maybe could at one time.
And so it's easier to think about it as this us versus them, total good versus evil, binary way of thinking, but especially in which the other is an existential threat.
That's really that distinguishing feature.
I really appreciate this approach, because we work all the time on this show to talk about how, as you just said, it's really difficult to decipher the fringe from the mainstream, whether we're talking about white Christian nationalism, or we're talking about far-right politics, whatever it may be.
So I just really love that definition, and I think it's very helpful.
This leads me to what happened in Texas.
The Allen Mall shooter ended the lives of over half a dozen people, and here are some things we know about the Allen Mall shooter.
He shared extremist beliefs with rants against Jews, women, and racial minorities, posted some of this on the Russian social network platform OK.ru, including posts referring to
online forums 4chan reference people like Nick Fuentes and and others made disturbing comments about what makes a mass shooting quote-unquote important and praised a person who opened fire to private Christian school in Nashville Tennessee just a month ago
And also posted photos of a flak vest emblazoned with patches, one of them with the initials for Right Wing Death Squad, which is a popular meme among far-right extremist groups.
It comes from Pinochet and Chile, and just there's a vast history of that whole thing.
How does he fit into a pattern of young men who are radicalized online without seemingly having an official affiliation with far-right groups?
Not having to march with the Proud Boys, go to meetings in a secret basement or some bar with no windows.
I mean, we're talking about men who are radicalized without seemingly being part of a group and yet going out doing atrocious and disgusting things in the name of a certain group or a certain movement.
How does that happen?
Yeah, I think it's one of the most important questions to ask in part because we as a country focus so heavily on the groups and we're fascinated with the groups in part because I think we've had this 20-year trajectory post 9-11 of thinking about terrorism as group-based, as resting within an ideology that has groups around it that have a hierarchy, a chain of command, a leader where people pledge loyalty and there's clear manifesto.
But actually, in the far right world, especially the white supremacist world, none of the attackers going all the way back to Oklahoma City, in any recent memory, none of these mass shooters have ever had an official affiliation or tied to a group.
So even the Oklahoma City bomber tried to, but wasn't rejected.
So some of them is not for lack of trying, but they all share a radicalization Through some especially over the past from from Charleston to Pittsburgh to Poe to El Paso Buffalo.
I mean just again and again and again you can name these mass shooter attacks all the way up to the recent one in Texas where they were radicalized Either to a very clear belief system and an ideology like the Great Replacement.
So you see that kind of, you know, serious conspiracy theory about Jews and about a Great Replacement of demographic change being orchestrated in order for one group to secure power.
It's false and dangerous conspiracy theory.
I always try to say that.
Sometimes you just say the conspiracy theory, people start to believe it a little bit.
So false and dangerous conspiracy theory, sometimes you see that type of radicalization happen.
And that was like the Buffalo is a really clear, clear case of that.
But in other cases, what you really have is this toxic mix of mass shooter fandom, along with deep exposure to a real toxic mix of Deep misogyny, racism, and sort of anti-Semitism.
Those three things tend to be there very consistently.
And white supremacism, not just racism, but a real belief in a hierarchy and superiority and inferiority in which others then eventually pose an existential threat.
And so but what happens is this happened in Uvalde.
It's happened in the past case.
It happened in Highland Park last summer, where people are embedded in those types of toxic things.
They're making vile posts.
They're expressing extreme misogyny, extreme white supremacy or racism or anti-Semitism online.
But they don't leave a manifesto.
And so because of that, there won't be an official motive.
And so, you know, we don't know that for sure yet in this case.
It could still turn up somewhere, but it doesn't appear to be the case that there is a manifesto, meaning that it's a technicality, really, in a way.
But if the authorities can't link the motive for this particular shooting, I'm doing this shooting because I believe X, Y and Z, then they don't really have a way to label it as a terrorist And so you end up, that's why we now have this category of like targeted violence, basically, which is the way DHS refers to, you know, mass shooting attacks that are, you know, have some sort of ideological roots, but you can't quite pin it down because there's not a manifesto.
You can't pin down a motive.
And that's what we're facing here.
There's so much there that really touches on what seems to be something across the cross section of American society, which is we no longer have the institutions where we can track the paper trails, the membership cards, whether that is in a far right neo-Nazi group, whether that's in the Proud Boys, or even if that's in a Christian denomination.
More and more, we have this radicalization online.
We have the coming to believe in extreme things via an online cosmos.
But as you say, the categorization, the attribution of motives is difficult.
And in many ways, our methods are outdated when it comes to doing so.
The radicalization process, though, is often not what we think.
It's easy to imagine neo-Nazi groomers who are just on street corners or talking to kids after high school saying, hey, come over here and join our group.
We have motorcycles and we do seemingly cool hyper-masculine things.
Your work is so important in the sense that it shows us how individuals are brought into this cosmos, usually through humor and satire, which may sort of surprise people.
But can you just explain that?
Because I think it's so illuminating and so important to understand.
Yeah, I think, you know, the way I describe it is, if you used to have, and to be clear, there still are groups, right?
We've seen that, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, right?
The neo-Nazi groups that got taken down in Charlottesville.
I mean, there are groups in a lot of our strategies for disrupting plots still do still rely on groups and being able to either prove a conspiracy to commit violence, Or to approve, to disrupt and interrupt those plots through infiltration.
And so that does still happen.
We see that with the militia groups, et cetera.
But the vast majority of violence, in part because of what slips through, is often really hard to predict or to notice that an individual is becoming radicalized in the same ways as maybe an FBI infiltrator joins a group and is able to interrupt that plot that way.
So the groups just still exist.
If you used to have an ecosystem where in order to join an extremist group, you had to seek out the the the hate.
Basically, you were brought along by an individual.
One person recruited you and took you to some backwoods, you know, and you signed a pledge and had some initiation rights and joined up.
Right.
And then became ideologically radicalized.
Now, I think it's much more likely.
I just assume that hate is coming to you wherever you are online.
And it will find you in an online gaming space.
It'll find you in a comment thread.
It'll find you in basically in any space, right?
Because that's the way online spaces work.
And most of us, thankfully, see it, reject it, walk away from it, sometimes step away from those spaces because they're so toxic, right?
Tragically, we hear a lot of kids of color say they will use a different avatar or a different name or not put on the voice chat if they have an accent while they're gaming because they can face that hate if they hide their identity.
And so there are strategies that people use to avoid it or to reject it or to walk away from it.
But it means that a lot of people are encountering it in ordinary spaces.
And then the way I think about it is like just these access points.
It opens up pathways because there'll be a URL or a click or some other way to go further down a rabbit hole.
And so you run a search like that Charleston church shooter searched for something about About black on white crime was taken to misinformation, disinformation, propaganda on the website as the first hit.
And that opened up a rabbit hole for him to radicalize him further into propaganda and conspiracy theory.
So it's just there's so many ways.
And the humor and the satire is part of it.
Right.
And so a lot of it is jokes that are under the cloak of plausible deniability, but also are designed to provoke And to use satire and humor and irony as a way of weaponizing youth culture so that you end up with, you know, the far right, especially white supremacist youth declaring themselves kind of as the counterculture against a boring, triggered mainstream who just can't take the joke, you know, and they become the edgy ones.
They become the ones who are pushing the envelope.
And that's that can be fun.
For kids, right?
To feel like they want to provoke mainstream.
They're angry.
They want to provoke their parents.
They want to toe the line.
They're getting around bans.
You know, Facebook shuts down a group called Boogaloo, which became a code for civil war.
And all of a sudden they start calling themselves Blue Igloo or Big Igloo or Big Luau, right?
And then they start wearing Hawaiian shirts because there's Hawaiian shirts at a luau, right?
And so then all of a sudden you have these armed guys With, you know, machine guns and Hawaiian shirts showing up at state capitol protests, and everyone's like, what the heck, right, is that?
But that's what it is.
It's because of this kind of game-playing coding.
So there's many different layers to it, but I think understanding it as part of this amorphous youth culture and that part of that use of humor and satire is positioning themselves as edgy counterculture is a way to understand what's been happening.
It's really scary.
The way you put it, I think, is so insightful and so helpful.
It used to be that you had to seek out hate, and now you just assume hate is coming for you.
And I think of talking to a family member who has a child who's just about to become a teenager, and he was telling me, like, I don't have access to the world my kid lives in.
The older they get, like the older they get, they inhabit spaces that I'm not in and I can't really get in even if I try.
And as soon as I do get in, everyone runs because like some of the parents came home and they're having a party.
And so he was expressing this fear of like, how do I do this?
I want to come back to like method and ways that we can combat this, but In some of your work, you make a point that I think is really worth talking about here, that misogyny, racism, and reproductive rights are all linked in terms of the culture you're talking about.
We often think of the end of Roe as a victory for the religious right.
I've certainly talked about that for hours and hours and hours on this show.
But you point out it was also a victory for white supremacist men.
And I'm wondering if you could just help us understand that.
What is limiting reproductive rights and bodily autonomy for women have to do with being a white supremacist, a misogynist in the vein of Andrew Tate or someone else?
How does that work?
Yeah, there's two aspects to it.
And so on the one hand, white supremacists are obsessed with the idea of demographic change, and they're obsessed with this idea that there's, especially through the Great Replacement, the false and dangerous Great Replacement conspiracy theory, they are obsessed with the idea that there's an intentional effort to eradicate, they call it white genocide, basically, to eradicate the white civilization and culture, and that they're dying and they're existentially a threat.
And so of course reproduction and the reproduction of white babies becomes essential to this story.
They want to restrict the ability of white women in particular to abort white babies because that abortion is It's part of, they think, this white genocide plot.
And so it's in their interests to have white women in particular not have abortion rights.
So some white supremacists actually advocate for differential abortion rights for racial groups for this exact racist reason, that what they really want is to make sure those white women are forced to have babies, but women of other ethnic groups could be allowed to have abortions.
And so not every, that's just some of the, of the, of the, you know, the pledge.
And then there's even worse.
I mean, it's hard to say even worse.
There's equally or worse disgusting things like neo-Nazi groups that advocate for rape of white, mass rape of white women.
You see this kind of, in order to force reproduction, basically to, to force white women to reproduce babies, to counteract this white genocide plot that they believe is underway.
So that's part of it.
And then, of course, the misogynistic part of it is baked in as well.
It's about total control of women's bodies for the benefit of the white race.
And women play into this as well.
I mean, there are women influencers out there online who One who issued a white baby challenge to have as many white babies as she.
I mean, they also are contributing to this by advocating for having as many white babies as you can and trying to sort of do your part to reproduce the white race.
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It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
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This has so many overlaps with so much of the conservative white Christian culture that I study and talk about so often on this show, and it really shows why there's just natural allyships across these cultures, and it's sometimes hard to tell them apart because of everything you just said.
When we think about the radicalization and the adherence to extremism you're discussing, Is this a uniquely American phenomenon?
We get told all the time, mental health is the problem with our country.
That's why there's gun violence.
It's not the guns, it's mental health.
So is this uniquely American?
Is this happening across the globe?
What does it look like from your perspective?
It is happening across the globe.
And I would say the way that I started talking about American issues related to the far right at all is because I had first been studying it for 20 years in Germany, where Germany had had a surge of post-unification Anti-Semitism and right-wing extremist violence and terrorism.
And so schools, I was studying working class schools, construction trade schools and others as part of my dissertation, looking at kind of civic identity at the time.
This is some 23, 24 years ago.
And there was this massive surge at the time.
And so teachers just started spending all their time trying to figure out what they could do and getting training.
And so I was an ethnographer just for 18 months embedded in that effort and then ended up doing two books over a decade.
about those schools and about what these school-based responses to resurgent hate were doing and what broader federal initiatives were trying to do as well.
And then the second of those books also tracks this transformation in coding and game playing and the scenes and the modernization of the far-right scene, which happened in Germany before it happened here.
And it was called the Extreme Gone Mainstream.
And then two months later, Charlottesville happened.
And I suddenly went from being an area studies scholar who had never talked to really anybody, a journalist or anyone in the public domain.
I was just a regular old academic.
And suddenly I was like testifying before Congress.
So that was a real, very strange moment for me.
But because of those 20 years that I spent really studying that, it was very quickly, once I was in American spaces, especially in the policy world, it became very clear that we were approaching this in some very wrong ways and that they weren't, that most people didn't understand at all what was happening that most people didn't understand at all what was happening in spaces online and really had a security based counterterrorism framework that had been created.
People forget like the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9-11.
So that's our entire counterterrorism, counter extremism infrastructure was built up around the post 9-11 moment.
And everything that's been created around that has really been oriented to that.
So it's taken the U.S., years to just get their heads wrapped around the fact that not only are we not just pivoting to a different type of threat, it's a totally different type of radicalization and a much broader ideology than just one type of ideology.
It's a cluster of ideologies that all feed off each other, which is really what we saw in Allen, Texas.
So if we take the cluster of ideologies you just talked about and couple that with what you've said in terms of people being radicalized, not necessarily needing to be part of a group on the ground, that they don't need to go participate and carry the card and all that.
It seems as if we need to talk about different strategies to combat this.
And so I know you talked about this with Congress yesterday before the committee.
There's civic levels and there's interpersonal levels.
In terms of policy, in terms of laws, in terms of the ways that a department like DHS approaches these things, what might be effective here?
Well, the first thing that we advocate for in the lab is shifting the way we think about prevention to a public health approach rather than a security one.
And so we've already done that for gun violence in this country, and we're arguing the same thing should be true for all kinds of mass shootings and ideologically motivated violence, including extremist violence.
And that means when you think about public, when we started adopting a public health approach to physical health, which meant you don't just wait until diabetes and cardiac disease emerges.
You also try to equip communities with better tools on how to make healthier choices themselves, behavioral choices.
But you also look at the underlying conditions in communities, like are there food deserts or are there, you know, what is preventing people from making healthier choices?
And so the same thing is here, you know, you don't just wait until something dangerous is about to happen and then try to intervene by creating bystander intervention programs or creating crisis mitigation programs.
I think instead we are advocating you have to invest much earlier in things like digital and media literacy, but also civic education to sort of reduce the fertile ground in which this stuff thrives.
And what I was saying yesterday in the hearing is like, you know, either you accept a world in which we're going to have censorship and banning and surveillance and monitoring of our lives, which I don't think anybody across the whole, nobody on the left wants it, nobody on the right wants it, right?
Nobody wants a world in which we have a total censorship or monitoring or surveillance regime.
But if you're not going to do that, given the amount of garbage that's circulating, you have to invest in ways to get people to recognize and reject it.
And so what we find is that people really don't like to find out they're being manipulated.
And if you can just actually point out the tactics of online manipulation as part of kind of civic and digital media literacy, people get stupid.
Like they really figure out pretty quickly, oh, scapegoating is a tactic.
So if I see somebody using that, I should think twice, right?
If I see somebody fear mongering, like you can recognize tactics, you can recognize things like rhetorical strategies like us, like the brave truth teller, like there's always a great risk to myself, I'm going to tell you the truth about this thing and then ply people with disinformation.
That is a rhetorical strategy that is used across all kinds of propaganda.
And so that's one of the ways.
The main thing is it's sort of like a different imagination is needed, a different way of thinking that is not just about banning or arresting our way out of it, but is thinking about how can you build more resilience within communities.
So we need a civic structure, civic engagement, civic education, and public health rather than just more security.
How did the folks on the committee feel about that?
Well, it's really interesting.
I was a minority witness.
Right.
So this is a Republican led committee.
And so there's three majority witnesses who are all, you know, on the Republican there as representing that perspective.
And and but there's a lot of agreement, a process.
And I thought that was really interesting.
Like, none of us want censorship.
We all respect freedom of speech.
Right.
We all agree that there's rampant disinformation circulating.
Right, and so we may not agree on how to define it or what that disinformation is, right?
And not everyone in the room agreed, right?
There's some people who are purveyors of that disinformation as well.
So, but I think there was some broad consensus, but then the hearing was really just Heavily focused on censorship, but then I was there really to make the argument that if you don't want censorship, which we don't want either, you have to invest in something else.
And here's some things that work.
So we did it as an opportunity because in the lab, we've been running projects for three years now, all of which have produced statistically significant evidence that is also cross-partisan divides.
Republicans and Democrats both learned.
We do a lot of work with insurance.
With caregivers, grandparents, coaches, mental health counselors, faith leaders.
We work with the evangelical community in particular who asked us for help.
We have a lot of different work that we do with communities who ask us for help to counter or prevent people in their own lives from going down these rabbit holes.
And I think that's the other thing I really tried to point out yesterday is, you know, we feel a constant stream of calls for help, right?
From religious communities, from government offices, from Small businesses who are like, what's going on with our employees, from teachers, from parents, grandparents, a grandfather emailed me, he's a veteran, you know, his grandson had joined a militia, wants to know what to do.
And once that's already going on, there's very little you can do, actually.
De-radicalization is very tricky.
There's very thin evidence about it, and there's no evidence that can be done at scale.
But prevention, that's actually, there's great evidence.
It's really not that hard.
It takes 7 to 12 minutes of reading one of our intervention guides, 30 seconds in one of our videos pointing out tactics to get statistically significant differences in how people respond to manipulation and recognize warning signs.
You know, I don't think it's that hard to do.
It's just it's just when you're looking at like after January 6th.
$2 billion going into just securing the Capitol better, right?
Which I'm not saying doesn't need to happen.
I'm sure there are new security needs, and no new increases in prevention funding across the country.
That's really sad.
And it sort of tells you how much of our taxpayer dollars are gonna continue to go into locking down our cities every time there's an inauguration, securing our Capitals every time there's an election.
And I just don't think people want to live like that.
I don't want to live like that, I will tell you.
And I will tell you that I'm thinking about, this is a different issue, but it's related to me.
We're going to have a debt ceiling fight here on Capitol Hill in a minute, and we need to cut spending.
We need to do this.
But, you know, none of the people calling for cutting spending are cutting for any spending on military security.
And there's just a kind of analogy there of our go-to in this country is always, you know, more security, more police, more guns, more missiles, more tanks.
And we rarely think about any of the strategies you just talked about.
You need to go.
You have important things to do, so I'm not going to keep you any longer, but I will tell you, friends, that Dr. Miller-Idriss has written a great piece about how this works in interpersonal relationships, and I'll put that in the show notes.
If you have someone in your life that you want to talk to individually, she has some great advice there as well, so I'll make sure that that's in the show notes.
Before you go, where can people link up with you going forward?
That's great.
We're about to finally launch a new website, so stay tuned for a couple of weeks away from that, which is itself an intervention website where people can enter.
There'll be places to click in if you're a parent or a faith leader.
Uh, local government official, and then you can go through and find the tools that we've created and tested, which are all free and accessible and downloadable to the public.
I mean, we don't chart.
We, we raise the money to do stuff and then we make it and test it, um, and create an empirical base for others.
So you can read all of our impact studies.
So that's all at www.perilresearch.com.
P-E-R-I-L research.com.
You can also go to my personal website for all of my essays and some clips from media stuff, and that's CynthiaMillerEdress.com.
So those are two places to start.
Just be patient with the construction of the Peril website.
It should be another week or two away.
I just saw the screenshots of it.
It's coming together.
Well, what a wonderful resource, and I definitely will just direct people there, so thank you for sharing that.
Right.
As always, friends, thanks for listening.
We appreciate your support.
Can always use your help.
This is an indie show, so Venmo, PayPal, Patreon, it's all in our link tree.
Other than that, we'll be back later this week with It's In The Code and the weekly roundup, but for now, we'll say thanks for listening.
