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 peopl