Making Sense with Sam Harris - #121 — White Power

Episode Date: March 25, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Christian Picciolini about his experience as a neo-Nazi skinhead. They discuss how Christian got out of the movement, the limits of shame and forgiveness, the cult-like dynamics of white supremacy, the alt-Right, Russian support for white supremacy in the US, “fake news”, the significance of Charlottesville, the SPLC, and many other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm presenting the audio from the event in Dallas I did with Christian Picciolini. Christian's written a wonderful book, White American Youth, which recounts his experience as a neo-Nazi and leader of the Hammerskin Nation. In this podcast, we talk about how he got out of the movement, and we talk about the cult-like dynamics of white supremacy,

and just the state of things on the extreme right in the U.S. and Europe at the moment. Many related issues, a very long Q&A with the audience. I thought it was a great event. So, without further delay, I give you Christian Picciolini.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I have never been to Dallas before, so it is an honor. Thank you. I can only say that once, so you won't hear me use that line again. Really, it's an honor to be here, and I'm so happy all of you came out. I really think this is going to be a good one. I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite some time.

My guest tonight became a white supremacist at the age of 14. And yes, well, he agrees with you. He became a leader in the Hammerskin Nation, which is one of the most violent hate groups in the world. And after leading that, he founded a group called Life After Hate, which was a non-profit dedicated to countering racism. He's given a TEDx talk. He's won an Emmy for his role as a director and executive producer

of an anti-hate video campaign. He's the author of a really wonderful book, White American Youth, My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement and How I Got Out. And he's been profiled on 60 Minutes. He is a guy you should hear more from. So please welcome Christian Picciolini. I would have booed myself too, I think. It's good to be back.

Really. Well, I've just spent an hour with Christian, and he is like the nicest guy in the world. And when you read his book, which you really must do, you will be astonished at how... I mean, you basically lived like a violent psychopath for many years. Let me pour you a long glass of water. Thank you.

I appreciate that. Honestly, like the level of violence described in this book is quite intense. I mean, so you're obviously not a psychopath. How do you explain that chapter of your life? Well, I was recruited in 1987 into America's first neo-Nazi skinhead group when I was 14 years old. And, you know, most people, I think, think that people who do that come from broken homes and deeply traumatic lives, and they do. But my life was pretty normal. My parents were Italian immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 60s from Europe, and they were the victims of prejudice when they came.

So it wasn't a way I was raised. prejudice when they came. So it wasn't, you know, the way I was raised. But because my parents were immigrants, they had to work seven days a week, 14 hours a day to run a small business, and I never saw them. And at that age, growing up, I wondered what I had done to push them away. So I felt very abandoned, and I was very bullied, and didn't have any friends. So I was searching very desperately for an identity, a community, and a purpose. And one day at 14, probably at my lowest point, a man drove his car in an alley when I was smoking a joint. And he got out of the car and he pulled the joint from my mouth and he looked me in the eyes and he said, that's what the communists and the Jews want you to do to keep you docile. I was 14. I didn't know what the hell a communist or a Jew or what the word docile meant. It's true. But it was the first time that I felt like somebody,

he was twice my age, and he, like somebody accepted me, like somebody was drawing me in because he would make me feel proud of who I was. and I certainly was proud, but I was angry. I was angry at my parents, and I was angry at the world. This is inadvertently the best pro-marijuana commercial ever. You should just have kept smoking that joint, none of this would have happened. Oh, my God. So, actually, this story even puts more of the onus on you because you were not from a broken home. No, I wasn't. So you're like a normal kid who just had one single conversation. One single conversation, but 14 years of feeling very

marginalized and very much on the fringes. But there's so many kids in that position. And the thing that one doesn't often think about when one has no connection to groups like this is this phenomenon of recruitment. And I thought, well, we'll talk about this because this is something that you're now trying to counter. And it's, it is, I mean, it's easy to picture if you take five minutes to think about it, but it's, these movements do function very much like religious cults. I mean, recruitment is a major feature of what's happening. And fear rhetoric, right? The idea that if you don't do something, you're doomed. And it was very much that.

It didn't start out that way. At first, when I was recruited, it started out with instilling the sense of European pride, that my ancestors were great warriors and artists and composers. And I grew up in an Italian bubble, so I was very proud of being Italian. But then it would kind of morph into something a little bit more sinister. It would morph into this idea that somebody now wanted to take that pride

away from me. And then it started to go into naming who those people were. And of course, in the white supremacist movement, they will blame Jews, African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, basically anybody who's not white, and they will even blame white people. So what did you actually believe, and how quickly did you ramp up into believing those things? Well, I literally went from trading baseball cards that week to shaving my head, getting a pair of boots, probably know, probably tattooing a swastika on me very quickly. You know, at first I faked it. I didn't know what the hell anybody was talking about. I was not political at 14 like young people are today. And I just kind of nodded my head and went along. It was a group of people to hang out with. But the way I got most of my indoctrination was through music.

There's a brand of music out there that at that time was very new to America. So we were listening to bands from Britain and from Germany of racist music made by white supremacists. That was propaganda. It was education. supremacists that was propaganda it was education and that's how i got most of my education early on until i took over leadership of that organization at 16 years old because the man who recruited me who was america's first neo-nazi skinhead leader went to prison for a series of violent crimes so yeah and again it's very difficult to exaggerate the level of violence you guys were involved in. So it really is kind of a miracle that you didn't go to prison for what you were doing.

Are we talking about dozens or hundreds of assaults? I mean, how much? Well, I would say hundreds of altercations, fights. Some of those were, you know, our group against other groups that were protesting. Yeah, people who knew they wanted to get into a fight with you. Right. fights. Some of those were our group against other groups that were protesting our group. People who knew they wanted to get into a fight with you. Right. Yeah. I mean, we had our version of Antifa then. They weren't called Antifa, which is who is typically protesting these white supremacist groups these days. We had

gangs of anti-racist skinheads that we would fight quite often. In fact, we fought white people more than we fought anybody else. But there were absolutely dozens of violent attacks against people solely for the color of their skin or who they prayed to or who they loved. I mean, we were pretty brutal. But I can tell you something. I never met a white supremacist with positive self-esteem. And also, I never met a white supremacist that didn't hate themselves and then use that self-loathing to project it onto other people so that they didn't have to deal with their own pain. If they could make somebody feel worse than they felt, that made them feel better, more superior. So now, how much of this was analogous to just being in an ordinary gang

and getting off on the tribal component of power and violence? Quite a bit of it. I would say during the mid-'80s and early-'90s, it was very much like a gang. There was an identity, an outfit that we wore. We had our colors. We wore patches to identify us. And we operated in different cities, and we were very organized. But then, as the years progressed, and I think we're seeing a lot of this now, is it became much more organized. When it started to infect a little bit more of the mainstream with a more

palatable message, that's when I think it became much, much more dangerous. Now, have you gotten tattoos removed? That's a component of getting out of this life, right? I am almost completely covered in tattoos, but I don't have any of my old tattoos remaining. I've never gotten them removed. I've had them covered over. Right. I'm glad to notice that you're not one of those geniuses who got a swastika on his forehead or... I can't tell you how many geniuses I've had to help remove swastikas from their foreheads. That seems like a... You have to be especially certain of your ideology to know that you've won it on your forehead for the rest of your life. You know, if you have to tattoo a swastika on your forehead,

you probably don't know very much about your ideology to begin with, I think. I know a very prominent scientist who has the Apple logo tattooed on his bicep. Is that in case he forgets? Yeah, I got to think he regrets that now, but someday I'll have him on the podcast. But you do downplay the role of ideology, at least in this context, right? It is a lot about male bonding and disaffection

from the rest of the world and getting off on violence and not... Clearly, belief plays a part because you wouldn't know who you hate if you didn't have certain beliefs about white supremacy or the significance of race. The ideology is kind of the tie that binds them together. It's the license to be angry, to be violent.

It's the projection of purpose. But I don't believe that ideology or dogma are what drive most people into hate movements or extremist movements. I really do think it's a broken search for identity, community, and purpose. And those are three fundamental needs that every human being has. We all want to know who we are, where we belong, and what we're supposed to do with our lives. And I have this theory that I call the pothole theory. If in our lives we hit potholes in the road of life, and we don't have the support or the guidance to navigate around them, like a family structure or friends. Sometimes we get stuck in those potholes or we get detoured down a really dark alley. And those potholes can be anything from trauma,

could be unemployment, could be mental illness. It could be, you know, seeing your father commit suicide at six years old and never dealing with that trauma. If we step in enough potholes, If we step in enough potholes, our search for identity, community, and purpose becomes very broken. And we, you know, hurt people hurt people. So if we are broken people, we tend to attract other broken people. So how did you reform yourself? What was the path out of this? Well, I was involved for eight years. So from the time I was 14 until I was 22.

I'm 44 now, so I've been out for almost 23 years. And it wasn't one epiphany. It wasn't one, you know, magic moment where I, you know, I woke up. I went to sleep, you know, seek high laying and then woke up saying, I love everybody. It didn't work out that way. It was a process of many of those moments. But ultimately, what it boils down to is I began to receive compassion and empathy from the people that I least deserved it from when I least deserved it. People that I

thought I hated, who I'd never in my life had a meaningful interaction with or a conversation with, began to, even though they knew who I was and what I had done, began to approach me with compassion. And they began to listen rather than talk at me and tell me I was wrong. And over time, the demonization that I had in my head, the prejudice, started to become replaced with humanization. And I realized that we had connections that were more similar than they were different. And that culture and language and food from all over the world are things that add beauty. The differences are actually what, you know, make us who we are, but it doesn't mean it makes us different than each other. Do you remember a first moment when doubt about your worldview became conscious? There were a lot of

those moments, but one of the more powerful moments for me, or the more compelling moments for me, was when I was, I believe, 19 or 20 years old, and it was after a night of drinking. There was always drinking involved, because we didn't really have the courage to do anything if we weren't drunk. But I was at a McDonald's late one night with some friends. It was after midnight. And there were some black teenagers standing in line when we walked in. And I remember walking into that McDonald's and screaming that it was my McDonald's and that they had to leave. Of course, my language wasn't that kind.

And of course, they were intimidated by us, so they ran out, and we chased them. And as the teenagers, black teenagers, were walking across the street, or running across the street, one of them pulled out a pistol and started to shoot at us. And on the second round, the gun jammed. When we caught that individual, we beat him almost to within an inch of his life. And I remember looking down at him when I was kicking him, and his eyes were swollen, and his face was covered in blood. And I remember in one instant,

one of his eyes opened, and it connected with mine. And I felt empathy. I felt like this person who I didn't even think was a human being suddenly could be my brother or my mother or my father. And I thought that it wasn't just about this person or this thing. It was about affecting so many people, what I was doing to this person. And I believe that that was the last time I was violent, even though I stayed in the movement after that. But that moment stuck with me. And it was a moment where, you know, for years I had kind of denied myself of empathy and compassion. And for whatever reason,

that moment, it came back to me. And it had a very profound effect on me. And I wish I knew who that person was. I don't. Did you subsequently meet any of your victims? Or was there a kind of a backlog of suffering that came to clear its account with you? Yes and it happened years, about five years after I left the movement and it was

pretty serendipitous when I left in 95 I went through a pretty dark depression even though I had internally denounced my beliefs, I was running away from my past, and I was miserable. And even though I was treating other people with respect, I wasn't treating myself with very much respect. And I remember in 1999, a friend of mine, a girl,

came to me and she said, you know, I don't want to see you die, because there were mornings where I would wake up wishing that I hadn't woken up, because I didn't know who I was anymore. And she encouraged me to go apply for a job where she just started working, small company called IBM, may never have heard of them. And I told her she was, you know, crazy. I said, you know, I'm covered in Nazi tattoos. She knew. And I said, I'm a former, you know, Nazi. I went to six different high schools. I got kicked out of all of them, one of them twice. I didn't go to college. I didn't even have a computer. Like, what the hell would IBM, you know, want to do with me? And she said, just go in there and tell them that you're good with people. And I was like, okay, sure. You got it. It's not the first quality that comes to

mind. No. Granted, it was five years after I left. I was a better person, but I didn't believe I was a good person. Anyway, I went in and I had a couple of interviews with IBM and I miraculously got the job. And I was so, so thrilled because I was going to learn how to network computers and install computers at a large school district until I found out where I would be going for my first day of work. It was my old high school, the same one I got kicked out of twice. IBM had no idea, no idea about my past. IBM had no idea. No idea about my past. And suddenly I felt like a nervous first grader going to his first day of school because I thought, I'm going to walk in, somebody's surely

going to recognize me. I mean, I had held protests. I had tried to form white student unions. I had tried to do, you know, a disrupted life. But you had had violent altercations with teachers. You had had violent altercations with teachers. Oh, yeah. Security guards, teachers, everybody. I mean, I was a terror at that school. And who walks by me within the first hour of me being there? But Mr. Johnny Holmes, the old black security guard,

who I got in a fistfight with that got me kicked out for the second time and let out in handcuffs. And he didn't recognize me when he walked by, but I recognized him. I was kind of, you know, skulking around dark corridors trying to avoid people and looking out. And I just knew that I had to do something at that moment. There was something inside me. I didn't know what that was going to be, but I decided I was going to, you know, follow him to the parking lot. Probably not a smart idea. And when I saw him getting into his car, I tapped him on the shoulder and I said, I'm sorry. It's all I could think to say. It's like all I could muster. And he looked at me after taking a step back because he was afraid when he recognized who I

was. And he approached me with an extended hand and I finally found some more words to explain to him what I, you know, had done and how I felt and, you know, how sorry I was for the terror that I caused him. And he hugged me and we cried and he made me promise that I would tell my story. And that was in 1999. That's when I started writing my book. It just came out. It took me a long time to write that book. But he was the first person to kind of pull the courage out of me to, one, confront my past, because I started talking about it pretty immediately after that. I've been doing it for now almost 17 years. And he was the first

person, I think, that recognized that this wasn't just a story of some messed up kid who joined a white supremacist group. It was the story of every young person who's searching for identity, community, and purpose. That if we don't give them the right support, you know, and young people are most vulnerable, that they could, you know, be deviated down this path because there are people looking for vulnerable people like I was. So how do you think about forgiveness in this case and redemption, both with respect to yourself and with respect to other people, the kinds of people whose minds you're trying to change? I have to think there are people who are beyond

the reach of empathy, right? There must be people who you encounter who don't have, I mean, they don't have the handholds that you apparently had where, you know, the right look in the eye or the extended hand can be the bridge to a new life. I mean, there are people who are genuine psychopaths who are in these movements. So how do you think about that? It's a tough question, because if I were to deny empathy for anybody else, that means I would have denied it for myself, or that I would have denied somebody else showing me that empathy. And I've also worked, I've helped over 100 people disengage from neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups over the years. And I've worked with some of the hardest, scariest looking people that nobody would give a chance to.

People who were born in the Klan families who have that swastika tattooed on their forehead. I wasn't kidding about saying I've taken many people to have swastikas removed. And these are people that, you know, the whole world has given up on. And in many cases, they've given up on themselves. And I can tell you, these people are some of the best human beings that I know now. They've committed their lives to helping other people not go down the same path that they've gone. It's a hard question. I mean, trust me, I sit across the table from neo-Nazis and white supremacists all the time. And there are moments where I want to jump across the table and I want to shake them and grab them and smack them. But I know that I can't because that pushes them further away, that the reasons

that they even gravitated towards a movement like that is because they already felt marginalized. Actually, that brings me to a related question here. So what is the role of shame versus empathy? Because I think I've heard you talk about this, because it's natural to want to shame people who are in these movements. If it's revealed that so-and-so is a closet Nazi on Twitter... Everybody tries to get them fired. Yeah, it seems like the sane response is to penalize them for...

At minimum, communicate how reprehensible that is and how the rest of the world sees it for good reason. And then there should be some consequences for having deviated from the rest of the world sees it for good reason. And then there should be some consequences for having deviated from the norms of tolerance that fully. But you're very wary of pulling the shame lever. I don't ever pull the shame lever, but I do hold people accountable for their actions, for their words. I make, go through a process of making amends. You know, when I work with people, they don't always want to work with me, right? Sometimes it's a referral that I get from a parent or a loved one that says, you know, my son or daughter is really into this.

Will you talk to them? So just what are the logistics there? How does that, I mean, are you just sitting in the living room when the kid comes home from school? Let me try and think. No, it's always voluntary. So I'm not deprogramming. I'm not doing interventions in a traditional sense where I'm like, you know, surprising them in a room full of their family and saying, all right, we need to talk and we're going off to treatment after this. It's not like that. You know, I really, I try and build rapport, right? I try and build trust. The fact that I understand their language because I used to say it is helpful. I may be a little desensitized more than the average person to some of the things that they say. That doesn't mean it doesn't make me angry, but, you know, I can sit and maybe listen just a little bit longer. But that's the key is I listen. Rather than tell them that they're wrong, rather than debate them

or argue with them, which never solves anything. Nobody's ever, you know, changed because of, you know, a shouting match. But I listen and I listen for those potholes, and then I become a pothole filler. So when I hear chronic unemployment, I pair them up with a life coach or a job trainer. When I hear trauma or abuse, it's mental health therapy, or mental illness, it's mental health therapy. And I'm trying to make people more resilient, and it's fascinating when you start working with somebody and they start to become more resilient. And it's fascinating when you start working with somebody and they start to become more resilient and have more self-esteem, they have less of a reason to blame the other for something that they feel is taken away. Because now they might be a little

bit better equipped to deal with life. But I don't stop there because I do challenge the ideology. But I do that in a non-aggressive way. I will introduce people to the people they think they hate. I've spent hours with Holocaust deniers and Holocaust survivors, Islamophobes and Muslim families just to allow them to humanize because nine and a half times out of ten, they've never ever in their lives met the people that they think that they hate. So the demonization becomes replaced with the humanization. And it works. It's the only thing that works. Yeah. It's somewhat ironic that it always seems to be the Jews and none of these people have ever met Jews. I mean, it's like there's 15 Jews in the world.

None of these people have ever met Jews. I mean, it's like there's 15 Jews in the world. I think they're all my friends now. Yeah, and half of them are Buddhists now. So I want to talk about the status of this movement now in the U.S. and Europe. And so maybe let's start with the alt-right, which is a phrase that I don't know when it was coined, but none of us knew it. Yeah, I'm not a fan of that phrase or the phrase white nationalism, because I know that those are phrases that they literally sat in a room and said, what can we call ourselves to make us seem a little less hateful? And this is good

to nail down. Clearly, I think there has to be a spectrum of belief and a spectrum of ideological commitment, and there must be people who are happy to be a part of something, but they don't know what they're a part of. You and I were talking backstage, it's kind of analogous to Scientology, where you can become a Scientologist, and it's not so true now after South Park and all these outings of the actual doctrines, but before South Park and before Going Clear and some

of these other books and movies, you could have been a Scientologist for a very long time without knowing just how crazy the doctrine was. So there are analogous situations in the white nationalists or white power movement where you just, you've been indoctrinated into something that's like white identity politics, for lack of a better word, just like just pride in your whiteness and not liking affirmative action, say. And you might not even be self-consciously a racist. And you were among these people who, at a certain point, formed a conscious plan to go under the radar, right? So tell us a little bit about that. At first, it wasn't a conscious plan to go under the radar.

At first, it was very much like a cult where you detach yourself from everything that was important in your life, your friends, your family, your hobbies, and you go down a rabbit hole of information, misinformation, and conspiracy theory that becomes your reality. And I can tell you that 30 years ago, we recognized exactly what you're saying, that we were a small group that was too visible.

And we said, you know, these average American white racists who we want to recruit are getting turned off by the fact that we have swastikas on our foreheads, right? Or we have boots or shaved heads and we're talking very much about foreign kind of politics and national socialism. So we made a very concerted effort 30 years ago to normalize. We said we're going to ditch the shaved heads and the Klan robes, and that's still

around, but for the most part not. And we're going to trade in our boots for suits. We're going to go to college campuses to recruit where people are away from their families for the first time, are forming new opinions, may feel marginalized. We're going to get jobs in law enforcement. We're going to go to the military and get training, and we're going to run for office. And that's around a time that, you know, we see David Duke kind of get rid of the robe and wear the suit. And here we are 30 years later, and it's very much that is the representation of the white supremacist movement that we're seeing today. You know, the polos and the khakis and the haircuts. And we decided to even take the

language and make it more palatable, right? So instead of saying, you know, the global Jewish conspiracy that controls us all, we just started calling it globalization. And we started saying things like, you know, the liberal media instead of the Jewish media, terms that now some people are calling dog whistles. To me, they're a bullhorn. I hear these things, and in context, I know exactly what's being told when, you know, they're showing a picture of George Soros' face, who is like enemy number one to the far right. But it has seeped into mainstream society, where I think a lot of people are identifying with some of the same things that these white supremacists are, but don't know that they're being led down that path. Because it is a ramping up process, a normalization.

And then, bam, once you're in, you've already got the stigma. They know you can't leave. They know that you will get the threats, that you will be outed. So what do you have to go back to? It's like drugs. It's like a drug dealer. So let's talk about the gradations of commitment here. So what does the landscape of white supremacy

look like in the U.S. now? It's hard to say because it's hard to see. We have people like Richard Spencer who have been in the news. We have kind of the pseudo-intellectual, you know, Richard Spencers and the Jared Taylors of the world who, you know, wear the Brooks Brothers suits and look like professors. And you still have skinheads, you know, like I used to be. But in between there's like this whole, you know, I can't see the audience right now, but they probably look a whole lot like you. I mean, there are dentists,

there are some of our police officers, there are certainly in our military, there was a recent study of active service members that were polled about the instances of white supremacy that they saw. Like, I'm not just talking about racism, but organized white nationalism, as we would think. One in four people in the military said that they see it on a regular basis. It's 25%. I mean, there's so many people that I've worked with that were recruited in the military by people like me.

And I can't tell you how many people from my old organizations actually became police officers and prison guards and things like that. And did that not having reformed themselves? That wasn't their way out? They had the same beliefs and they were... They're still the same people, just much older. Huh. So how does Europe...

There's a kind of marriage between these movements in Europe and there's a kind of a global phenomenon. What's happening there? It's very similar. I mean, it's certainly... Europe has a longer history with this. Obviously, you know, after World War II, you know, there were many years of kind of resurgence of nationalism

and then kind of the tamping down of it but now we're seeing a massive resurgence in populism and nationalism uh that you know is using the refugee crisis and immigration as as kind of the crux of of their message and and they know that it's an easy message to spread to spread uh because the minute you know a brown-skinned person does something horrible, it's terrorism. And we scream about it, and every news is covering it for days on end. But how often have we ever heard white supremacist killings being called terrorism? Never, right? I'm not aware of any time where white extremism, maybe except for the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing, where white extremism has been called terrorism. And most people don't know, but Timothy McVeigh was very much a white supremacist.

He hung around at Aryan Nations and was found with a copy of the Turner Diaries and one of the vehicles, which is a Bible for white supremacist revolutionaries. But we just don't call it out as that. We call it mental illness,. We call it, you know, mental illness, which many times it is. But we don't call it terrorism. Even though it's ideologically based, it's meant to incite terror. And it has all the same hallmarks of ISIS. In fact, there's really no difference between ISIS and American neo-Nazis, except for the fact that white supremacists in America kill three times more people than any kind of foreign or domestic terrorist group does on American soil. 74% of all extremist killings in America since 9-11 have been committed by white supremacists.

So how is Oklahoma City viewed in the white supremacist community? I mean, is that just an unambiguously good thing to have happened, or is that going too far? No, they celebrate it. They celebrate it, and they've tried to copycat it many times and have been stopped. Coincidentally, it was on April 20th, April 19th, actually, the day before Hitler's birthday, which is a very special day for white supremacists. A lot of school shootings happen on April 20th. I believe Columbine happened

on April 20th. It is a... Those types of stories are what a lot of people who've been moved further down into the movement, who've lost a lot, kind of aspire to do. You know, we were trained and we were training people to become these race war revolutionaries. We were stockpiling weapons. We were going into training camps to get paramilitary training.

You know, there was even at one point where a group from Tripoli, from Libya, had come to contact me, or so I thought, to set up a meeting between me and Muammar Gaddafi because he wanted to funnel money to American groups who were fighting Jews in America. So it's just a matter of time, and I've been predicting this for years, I believe it's just a matter of time before we see white supremacist groups from Europe and the U.S. starting to work with extremists from the Middle East. Because if you think about it, while it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you'd think they'd hate each other, they have a common enemy that is greater than their hate for each other. It just gets better and better for the Jews, doesn't it? I'm going to have to call some of my friends. We're going to have to turn up the

pressure on that Zionist banking conspiracy. You know that doesn't exist, right? Check your bank accounts, people. So what is the connection to Russia? Half of what you say here or or all of what you say may sound like a conspiracy theory to anyone who's on the right wing here but what was what has your what's been your experience looking for a connection between white supremacy and russia in the u.s so i i believe i i may have been the first kook screaming about Russian collusion way back before the words Russia and collusion were put together. I was working with a 17-year-old girl. The parents had contacted me because they were concerned about this girl, their daughter, who was making white supremacist propaganda videos, recruitment videos, and she was becoming quite popular online.

So they called me in and they said, you know, we're really worried. We just discovered this and we know that she's being influenced by this 23-year-old boy who lives in Idaho. She was in Florida and he was in Idaho. And, you know, supposedly he was a German-American boy who, you know, was a devout neo-Nazi and had recruited her and was her boyfriend and had started to get compromising photos from her. And he was not, I could tell you after many hours and days of research, not a 23-year-old German-American living in Eagle, Idaho. He was a 35 year old Russian man living in St. Petersburg. And he was not only befriending this girl as her boyfriend, but he was doing it to at least a dozen other young girls as young as 14 years old, trading, you know, getting photos from

them that were inappropriate and then using it to blackmail them. So I started to get really seriously into this because there was a crime being committed. And this is 2016? This was October. I'm sorry. This was August of 2016. So before the election. And as I started to dig into this guy, I discovered that he was part of a ring of people that were very connected.

I discovered that he was part of a ring of people that were very connected, and I found connections dating back to like 2010 that proved this, that had created tens of thousands of fake social media profiles. And, you know, they were all very neo-Nazi and pro-Trump, and I started to really just track them, and I'm like, what the hell is this phenomenon? Why are all these like Trump voters like all of a sudden like, you know, having Make America Great Again hats with a swastika on it? And having names like Himmler. So I started to track them. And I started to see this group form. And then I started to notice that their screen names and pictures were changing from white supremacist accounts to ISIS accounts. And then

some of them would change to Black Lives Matter accounts. And then some of them would change to feminist accounts. And I started to see that the intention was just to put as much hateful information against these other groups out there to create this discord. And I started to pinpoint people. I actually found who the Russian guy was. He made a mistake in 2009 where he made a post using a screen name that he was still using, but it was attached to his real name. This was before apparently he went to go work for the FSB in Russia, where he graduated in linguistics from the University of Moscow. So I went to the FBI in October of 2016,

and I said, you know, there's something weird going on. I'm not quite sure what the hell is going on, but everything was pointing to Russia because at that time I had presented this information to the parents and to the girl, and I said, first of all, this guy is not who you think he is. He's a bad guy, and he's this guy. His name's Mikhail, you know, whatever his last name was.

And she didn't believe me, so she leaked the information to her boyfriend. Within three hours of me leaving that house, 75 domain names that I own, that I run for my, you know, nonprofit for myself, my parents and, you know, their restaurant were all hacked by Russian malware within three hours, 75 domain names. And I went to the service providers and I said, what is going on? And they said, we've never seen an attack like this. So at that point, I went to the FBI. This, again, still October 2016.

And I said, I've got 33 gigs of screenshots, videos, chat conversations, phone calls, because now it was starting to antagonize these people to try and get more information. And I handed it over to them, and they said, thank you very much, we're busy reading Hillary's emails right now, we'll get to it. We'll get to it when we get to it.

And then I said, you should really look at this before election day, because I think there's something going on here. And I still haven't heard from them, so who knows. But now it's starting to come out that all that information that I found is actually, you know, being validated. They love Russia. I don't know why. What is this connection with Russia and Putin? So, you know, the white nationalist or alt-right movement that we see today has a very strong connection to Russia. They revere Putin. He's a strong man, you know.

They see him as like this ethno-nationalist dictator. And in fact, many neo-Nazis from Europe are going to train in paramilitary style in Russia and then going to fight on the Ukraine border. Funny enough, and I can't substantiate it, but coincidentally, so many of the propagandists for the American white supremacist movement are really beautiful Russian girls who speak perfect English, who are now starting to be found out. There was an article published today, there was another one yesterday about a teacher teaching grade school who was teaching kids about white supremacy, and then she had a double identity where she was bragging about the fact that in school she was teaching kids. She was found out to have a third identity,

which was Russian. But yeah, I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's so much that Russia is supporting this ideology or if they're just trying to create this movement of discord that they know is our weak spot. Frankly, racism in America

is something that we've never really dealt with. Every society that's faced a genocide weak spot. Frankly, racism in America is something that we've never really dealt with. Every society that's faced a genocide, let's say, like slaves or African Americans did during slave times, have somehow dealt with it, right? They've acknowledged it and they've worked through it. We've never, I don't believe, really acknowledged that we have had that problem in our country, at least not from the top. I mean, I think we, you know, you go to the South, like here, and tell me if I'm wrong, but I think we learn about the Civil War a little bit differently than we did in Chicago, right? In Chicago, in the North, y'all were the bad guys, right? And to you down here, it was Northern aggression, right?

We learn about it differently. So even in our own country, we're like propagandizing our history. So I don't know that we've ever fully dealt with the issues that our countries had. What do you think the solution is at the level of our public conversation at this point? And we take like social media and the fake news problem and the way in which this phrase fake news has been weaponized against real news, so that you can say fake news about anything that you don't like, and it seems to be an inadequate retort to whatever's being expressed. I even hate using it, even though it's true, it exists, but I hate even calling it what it is because of that. You know, I think the biggest thing under attack right now is truth. And once we lose it,

it's gone. Because what are we, what's our benchmark? And I'm terrified of that because, you know, the truth has to exist. There has to be something that we can hold on to. But what's happening in America today? What I would suggest is we're at a point where we're screaming from the extremes right now. We're being made to choose a side, really. And screaming to try and get to the middle doesn't work. I think we need to start in the middle

and acknowledge the things that we have in common. The fact that we're Americans, the fact that we love our children and want them to be healthy and have a good education, that we want, you know, fellow Americans to have jobs and we want to have a good economy. Those are all things that we can agree on. Pretty much anywhere in the world where you go and you ask them what's the most important thing to you, that's what they'll say. I want a job. I want my health. I want my kids to be happy. But you could actually even start a conversation with a current white supremacist and get agreement on those values. Oh, sure. Absolutely. And if we start there, eventually we'll go off track, but we will have established that humanization that

we can always go back to. If we start from the extremes and try to get to the middle, we never get there. We have to find a way to get to the middle, we never get there. We have to find a way to start in the middle again. Let's acknowledge what we have in common, what we want America to be, and then let's work from there. Let's listen to each other more than anything else. Well, I'm increasingly worried that the left is fully capable of making a catastrophe of this. Oh, yeah. Because the swing into identity politics... APPLAUSE ..in many cases seems to be all the justification

a white supremacist would need to indulge his or her own white identity politics. Oh, absolutely. When, you know, somebody on the left attacks, first of all, can we just stop calling Republicans Nazis? Because they're not Nazis. That word has a very powerful meaning. Ben Shapiro gets called a Nazi. Ben Shapiro's an Orthodox Jew, and he gets called a Nazi.

That said, I can't tell you how many parents email me and say, we're Jewish, but my son is involved in this, and I'm worried he's going to be the next Dylann Roof. I'm seeing signs of this and that. It's a social movement, folks. That's why I don't believe it's about ideology. It's about this identity, community, and purpose. And let's face it, our young people right now, we're failing them. You know, they can't afford college if they're lucky enough to even be able to attempt to go. There's no guarantee of a job after graduation. Our whole country is in a state of, you know, division and turmoil right now where, you know, people who used to get along can't even look at each other, and I'm talking about relatives even in some cases, what is there to look forward to for them?

And I'm confused. As an adult, I can't imagine what a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old is going through. So I think we are failing our youngest people, and because they feel lost, many of them are gravitating to some of these very ideological movements because they're idealistic, they're passionate, but they may have marginalization issues and they may, you know, hear something that resonates to them. And it's a scary time because I am seeing a lot of young people who

normally wouldn't be attracted to these types of, you know, extremist ideologies start to go there. And I'm talking about, you know, a young white girl from middle America who flies to Syria to join ISIS, and also the young, you know, white boy who decides to walk into a church and murder, you know, nine innocent people because of the color of their skin. Well, what was the significance of Charlottesville? Has that been amplified just because of our current political obsession, or was it as significant as people who are worried about it seem to think? You know, I spent a week in Charlottesville just recently, and I spoke to really all the players that were

involved, from community members to Heather Heyer's mother, the young woman who was killed, to the white supremacists in town, to the law enforcement. I spoke to everybody. And very much what you said earlier, and I don't think we touched on it, where the left is maybe enabling some of this. Right now, the fear from the community, even though it's a progressive community, is of the protesters and not the white supremacists. I don't know that that's very grounded in reality, but, you know, the left shoots themselves in the foot when they adopt the same tactics that of the people that they're protesting against. So when we see violence come from the left, or when we see attacks of hate come from the left, or, you know, their only mission is

to destroy white supremacists' lives, that's not helping the situation. You know, I tend to want to draw them in closer because they went that way because they felt pushed away to begin with. Pushing them away is not going to make them any happier. It's going to actually entrench them more into this ideology and this fear of having lost something. And they use that as a narrative. They spin it. So when they're attacked, they become the victims and they use that. We were just there for a free speech rally. We were just there for a unite the right rally. See these really innocuous terms that they like to put on rallies. It was not about free speech. It was not about Confederate monuments. It was about going into a progressive place

intentionally to elicit a violent response because they knew the tension was there and they got it. And the minute that they were attacked, they became the victims. You see how our rights are being taken away? You see how white people are being treated in this country. That's their intention. They go to progressive places on purpose. That's why we heard about the Berkeley rally. That's why we heard about Charlottesville. That's why they go to college campuses. That's why they went to Skokie and marched in a Jewish neighborhood in the 1970s, you know, the American Nazi party. They do that to provoke violence. Two things that they love, silence and violence. When we're silent, sweep it under the rug, they grow. When we're violent, they use it as a narrative.

Yeah, there's another even more insidious aspect to this, which is something that Steve Pinker pointed out recently. Actually, this is an amazingly kind of compounding irony because his pointing this out, so he was on a panel somewhere and he made the point that I'm about to make, but then that got chopped up by some leftist imbecile to make him sound like he was endorsing the alt-right.

It's this sort of compunctionalist vilification of people that is the real virus here. Steve's point was that the problem with silencing free speech on the left, which is why if you hear that there was some demonstration at a college campus tomorrow that forced some invited speaker to not give his or her speech and that people were spit on and that the event couldn't happen it's like 99 a leftist phenomenon now i mean this is what the left is doing on college campuses and steve's point was that the problem with not letting conservative and even right-wing views get expressed in on college campuses is that you don't,

and any taboo view, whether it's intelligence and race and gender differences, whatever is considered a third rail in intellectual life now, the problem with not letting these views get discussed honestly and at length is that people, first of all, certain truths are being concealed and certain conversations are being deemed off-limits, and people aren't developing intellectual antibodies to the bad ideas that get accreted around these topics.

And so if for the first time in your life you're hearing what seems like perfectly honest talk about IQ, say, but it's coming from someone like Jared Taylor, right, well then you're on this grease slide into being indoctrinated into this kind of racist worldview. The primacy of free speech has to be such an obvious value for the left, and the fact that we're losing sight of it is really the most worrisome thing here. It's disturbing to me that in many cases, the left is adopting, and when I say the left, I mean, that's a pretty vague term, right? We're talking about like radical left for the most part. When they adopt

the same tactics of their enemies, do they really become any different than those people? In many cases, what you're seeing is the door on the left is closed to anyone who makes any kind of sense on taboo topics. I mean, the classic case is, and this is perhaps we should spend a moment on this because this is a sign, a very troubling sign of the moral confusion that the left is capable of. So you take a group like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which used to be, I'm sure they imagine they still are, this flagship organization, which is like the last bulwark against the white nationalism and Christian identity and all of this craziness we've been talking about. You know, they're the people who sue the KKKs and destroy these

chapters of their organization. But now they have put people like Majid Nawaz, who you know, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali on lists of anti-Muslim extremists. And they just put Christina Hoff Summers, this slightly right of center academic philosopher, on some list of bigotry. This is completely confused, and when you challenge them, I mean, you know, Majid is suing them, but prior to announcing anything about a lawsuit, I mean, suing them first, we should acknowledge, because it's dangerous to put Muslim reformers

and ex-Muslims on lists of any kind, but a list of anti-Muslim extremists, you know, it's putting a target on their backs. And it's just incredibly pernicious because journalists use the SPLC as a resource. I mean, like they're just trying to figure out who's who, you know, is this, is Richard Spencer really a Nazi or not? The first call goes to a group like that. So this is not only objectionable, it is dangerous behavior. And the problem is no one admits errors here. It's like the person who did this at the SPLC has been contacted endlessly.

I mean, I tweeted this, and Maja tweeted this, and Ayan tweeted this, and it continues. And people just double down. People do not admit. I mean, you have to spend five minutes on Majid before you realize this is not an anti-Muslim extremist. First of all, he's a Muslim. He's not even an ex-Muslim. And we have the luxury of both knowing him personally and didn't know that until tonight. But, yeah, no, I would agree with that.

I mean, Majid, his story is a lot like mine. I mean, he's a former, you know, extremist. Not only not an anti-Muslim extremist, he was a former Muslim extremist. Right. You know, he has a long way to go before he becomes an anti-Muslim extremist. Sorry.

You know, I think part of the problem, you know, let me just preface this. You know, I've respected the SPLC's work because I do trust their work. But I think that kind of the arena has gotten so blurred now that it's easier to call somebody a member of a hate group or to call an organization a hate group if they're talking about something that maybe is uncomfortable to talk about. I know Majid. I know he doesn't hate anybody. I know he's not running a hate group. And it's unfortunate that he was added to that list. I really, you know, I was very surprised and I even communicated to him when it happened that, you know, it was like astonishing to me that that could happen. You know, I don't know what to say about that other than it's a mistake that they made. He should be added to the list of extreme dressers.

He is a great dresser, isn't he? Whoever wears a pocket square should be on some list. It's that British colonialism, I think, that rubbed off on him. He's a sharp dresser. But, yeah, no, it's tough. I mean, there are a lot of groups out there. The Anti-Defamation League, I think,

is a pretty trusted source for monitoring hate groups. And, you know, they make mistakes, too. I mean, they came out when the pretty trusted source for monitoring hate groups. And, you know, they make mistakes too. I mean, they came out when the attack in Parkland happened at first with Nicholas Cruz, and they were essentially fooled by far-right trolls into believing that he was a neo-Nazi. And then it came out that he really was a neo-Nazi, that, you know, there was a swastika carved on the cartridge of the magazine, and that there were posts in Instagram chats that were. So in that case, they made a mistake that ended up being correct. But it's hard to say what went into that decision

or what goes into decisions. All I can look is history of what they've done. They've managed to bankrupt white supremacist organizations like the White Aryan Resistance, what they've done. They've managed to bankrupt white supremacist organizations like the White Aryan Resistance, and they've done amazing work to try and dismantle white supremacy in the country, but it's clear that they're also fallible. Yeah. Well, on that note, I want to open it up to questions from all of you, because from my view, the reason to do these events is to make it a proper conversation. There you are. Oh, yeah.

Awesome. Nice to see you all. There's people up there, too. So there are two mics. There should be two mics, left and right. And sorry to anybody who had a hangover and just had bright lights set. and just had bright lights. And I should say, so before we start,

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