Christian Picciolini spent his teens and early 20s handing out hate literature at punk-rock concerts, chanting the American neo-Nazi creed at rallies, and beating up black kids in his suburban Chicago neighborhood.
He was a “white power” skinhead who devoured the racism of The Turner Diaries and toured the United States — and Germany — with a band he founded called Final Solution.
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Jose M. Osorio, TNS Via Zuma
Christian Picciolini spent his teens and early 20s handing out hate literature at punk-rock concerts, chanting the American neo-Nazi creed at rallies, and beating up black kids in his suburban Chicago neighborhood.
He was a “white power” skinhead who devoured the racism of The Turner Diaries and toured the United States — and Germany — with a band he founded called Final Solution.
Picciolini, 44, leads a very different life today. A co-founder of the peace-advocacy group Life After Hate and author of a memoir called White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement — and How I Got Out (Hachette, 2017), he now uses his story to explain what attracts people to extremist groups and what can be done to dim their allure. He said he found the strength to leave the movement from his own maturation, the kindness he received from the eclectic customer base at his music shop, and his desire to live a more honorable life for his children and wife.
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He doesn’t debate ideology. It’s better, he says, to find the “potholes” that cause extremists to deviate toward hate, and then fill those with job training, therapy, life coaching, or “whatever it is that that person needs to become more resilient.”
Picciolini spoke recently with The Chronicle on the reasons racist extremists now seem so interested in colleges, and ways institutions might respond.
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You say that ideology is not what radicalizes people. What does?
A broken search for identity, community, and purpose does. I don’t think ideology or dogma are what initially radicalizes people. They’ve hit a wall, they felt marginalized. They’ve had a grievance, whether it’s real or perceived. They feel bullied. They feel like something’s been taken away from them and then they go and search for what they are unable to find anywhere else, which are identity, community, and purpose, which everybody is looking for. And if they don’t have enough support, or if they hit enough potholes or enough walls, eventually some group will find them. And through that, ideology will give them an identity, a community, and a purpose.
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What’s the antidote to that? Community and purpose?
Yeah. We need to stop failing our youth. We just have to give them more opportunities. We need to make college more affordable. We need job opportunities in our most vulnerable and marginalized communities. We need to start listening to them rather than prescribing solutions. After the tragedy in Parkland, Fla., we can see the impact of young people, how motivated and dedicated and intelligent they are. We can be guides, and we can be more empathetic and compassionate and look for those young people the same way recruiters do for the most vulnerable people, and make sure that they don’t feel excluded. If we don’t help them, they will eventually be found by somebody who will accept them for their brokenness and manipulate them because of it.
What’s the perception of colleges among extremists?
There are two perceptions. One is it’s a liberal kind of breeding ground. So they don’t trust universities very much. But it’s also become a really good recruiting ground for them because it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. There are young people who are developing new communities. They’re figuring out who they are. They’re developing new views on life. It’s the first time away from home. There are a lot of marginalized kids on college campuses looking for something to believe in. Extremists see it as a place to be, where people are developing new ideas, and they want to be the first ones to seed those ideas.
Your book suggests that colleges weren’t on your radar during your skinhead days. What changed?
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We were thugs looking for more soldiers, whereas today it’s become a pseudo-intellectual movement. When skinheads walked onto a college campus, the campus police were called. So we didn’t go there. We stood out in front of punk-rock concerts and skate parks and Nascar-type of things where we knew there were going to be friendly people who were receptive to the message.
Christian Picciolini, center, with his skinhead band Final Solution in Weimar, Germany, in 1992.Courtesy of Christian Picciolini
But nowadays, because they’ve grafted on the faux science of white genetics and mass migration, it’s gotten political and more academic, and they’re able to get away with it on college campuses. One, they don’t look like we used to. Two, the language they use is more acceptable and can be considered a debate instead of just hate speech. So they’ve gotten good at toeing the line but not going over it. That’s publicly. In private, they’re using words like “Jew” and the N-word and calling people faggots.
Is this part of a strategy? Trading skinhead boots for suits to become more acceptable?
We started to roll that boulder down the hill many years ago, and it’s gone through a lot of transformations. But what we’re seeing now is kind of a cleaned-up, better-marketed version of what we were. Ideologically it’s the same. The words they use are different. They look different. They’ve made it more palatable because they understand the division that the country has been going through in the last several years. They know how use language to appeal to that. They know how to use fear rhetoric the same way we did. The words they choose are different. But the meaning is the same. It’s still isolationist. It’s still racist, still exclusionary. It’s still xenophobic. All the things that we were. But it looks like America now. It doesn’t look like some odd subculture, like we used to.
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What’s the best way for colleges to respond when these groups appear on campus? Block the marches? Stage alternative events to extremist speakers?
There are two things that extremists love: violence and silence. If we ignore them, that allows them to do whatever they want without any repercussions or accountability, and they’re going to continue to flourish. If we’re violent towards them, like we sometimes have been, that pushes them further away and emboldens them. They came in looking for violence, and that allows them to use that as a victim narrative for themselves and say, “You see, we were out here just marching for free speech,” which is what they always claim because it’s hard to argue with that. They use that intentionally, because they know people are so angry at them that they will attack.
There’s a middle ground — kind of what happened in Boston a week after Charlottesville. The counterprotesters surrounded a couple of dozen neo-Nazis who were marching and said: “You know we see you. And we want you to see us. We hold you accountable for what for what you do. We don’t agree with that, but we’re also not going to attack you and adopt the same tactics that you use.”
We need to be visible. We need to be vocal. But we cannot be violent. Compassion is hard, and it’s certainly not the victims’ responsibility to be compassionate towards the people that hate them. I’ve also seen that that’s the only thing that works.
Should college students be trained for this the way the nonviolent resisters were trained during the civil-rights era?
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I don’t know if “trained” is the right word. They should be aware of the tactics that work and the tactics that don’t, and make their own decisions. I always talk about how not to play into their hands, but also how to hold them accountable is important.
When I was at rallies in the ’80s and ’90s, it didn’t make me want to not be a Nazi if somebody were to punch me. It would have made me an angrier, more violent Nazi. But what did affect me were the people that were there to protest, who were saying: “We understand. You’re a person. We acknowledge you. We just want you to know that we don’t agree with you.”
That always stuck with me. And that was always really powerful and frustrating for me at the same time. We need to start having these rational discussions about what works in countering this.
You write about being a child of immigrants. I am, too, although we came of age at different times and in different cultures. My parents came to America as Jewish immigrants who survived Nazi concentration camps in Poland. Can I share with you how hard it was to read about young Americans like you who so romanticize Nazis and genocide and hate?
When I wrote the book, it was really important for me to write it in the voice of who I was at that moment, so over time you can see how the language changes, how I change and hopefully mature. But I wanted to make it as genuine as possible, because I wanted people to understand what is warping all these young minds — exactly with what you said: the romanticized version of this adventure, this way that they are “saving the world” or think that they’re saving the world, because that’s exactly how it happened to me and to so many other people.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.
The veteran reporter Goldie Blumenstyk writes a weekly newsletter, The Edge, about the people, ideas, and trends changing higher education. Find her on Twitter @GoldieStandard. She is also the author of the bestselling book American Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know.