SPLC's Intelligence Report | Page 68

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