CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI
ANTONY McALEER
LIFE AFTER HATE, CO-FOUNDER AND BOARD CHAIR
Tell us about the beginnings of Life
After Hate.
Life After Hate initially started as a
literary magazine for us to basically
publish short stories about our lives.
It was a blog, essentially. We quickly
started to realize that people from all
around the country and all around the
world had similar stories they wanted
to share about the mindset of someone who goes from a relatively normal
kid to somebody who is politicized
and brought into this violent extremism subculture.
In the ti me you’ve spent helping people
leave the movement, are there some
overarching truths you’ve been able
to discern?
Happy people don’t plant bombs, and
happy people don’t behead people,
and happy people don’t paint swastikas on synagogues. It’s just not the case.
Disenfranchised, lonely, self-loathing
people do that. There is something missing from their life, something that they
didn’t get, whether it was as a child or
maybe they were abused or maybe they
came from a broken home or something
was missing. Even for me, who came
from a relatively normal household,
there was something missing.
LIFE AFTER HATE, PRESIDENT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
How does understanding that reality
lead to a successful “intervention” to get
someone out of an extremist movement?
It’s about changing their perspective
just a little bit. Because often when you
change their perspective just a little bit,
it allows them to see the cracks in the
foundation of the ideology that they
believe in. I don’t force it. I let them
come to the conclusion on their own. At
least that’s the goal.
I approach every one of these cases
differently. I do my homework. I try
to build a rapport and I try to listen,
mostly, and I offer opportunities and
solutions that will take them out of the
lifestyle into a better place, because you
talk to just about anybody in the movement and they’re miserable. They’re
miserable with their status, they’re
miserable with everything, and they
can never figure out why. It’s because
of their ideologies, it’s because it can
never get better.
INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED BY RYAN LENZ // ILLUSTRATION BY BRETT AFFRUNTI
As a former racist, please describe the
process of leaving the movement.
It breaks down into two components of
the journey. And that is disengagement
and deradicalization. What the research
shows is that the number one issue for
someone entering an extremist group is
childhood trauma. That information is
useless from a preventative standpoint,
but from an understanding of why people get into those movements, I think
it’s crucial.
How so?
From my own personal journey, I grew
up in a middle-class family. I was a bright,
sensitive kid in a house where it wasn’t
safe to be sensitive, where emotions were
treated as weakness and shamed and ridiculed. I was beaten at Catholic school
and shut down even further. I came into
this world as a very bright, curious kid
and became a very angry kid with what
was happening to me.
I never dealt with the stuff that made
me angry and it made the choice to join
the movement make sense. I went from
the skinhead scene to the polar opposite,
the rave scene. But I never dealt with
the stuff that got me there. I disengaged
from the movement, but I was still an
angry person.
spring 2016 65