WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9
committing but which are very
likely to be true because they
were corroborated by at least sev-
en people.
Those conversations could
have been about pain and growth
and reconciliation, but we didn’t
have them.
Instead, we had Kavanaugh
improbably claiming “Beach
Week Ralph Club” did not refer to
a group of young men binge-
drinking at the shore but rather
to his sensitive stomach and deli-
cate constitution. Instead, we
heard him insist “Devil’s Trian-
gle” referred not to a fantasized
sexual exploit — the definition
commonly accepted by everyone
else — but instead to a three-cup
game similar to Quarters — a def-
inition used by nobody but Brett
Kavanaugh.
Instead of allowing for the pos-
sibility that he was a complicated
person, one who had grown and
matured with age, he insisted on
the unlikely narrative that he was
perfect and always had been.
Instead of grappling with cred-
ible accusations, and his ensuing
doubt and self-reckoning, he
used his platform on national
television to shout, and bluster
and blame the Clintons.
They’re all liars, was his mes-
sage. I’m the real victim here.
He slammed the door on
thoughtfulness. He repelled nu-
ance. He placed his own nicked
pride above everything else, in-
cluding truth. Including justice.
What a missed opportunity.
What a waste. What a lingering
wound, for the entire country.
A year has passed, and there
are still so many important con-
versations we didn’t have.
[email protected]Monica Hesse is a columnist writing
about gender and its impact on
society. For more visit wapo.st/hesse.Pogrebin and Kelly write: “Our
reporting suggests that it was.”
They found seven corrobora-
tors to Ramirez’s story, all of
whom had heard about the al-
leged penis-waggling long before
Kavanaugh was nominated, two
of them within days of the party
at which it allegedly happened.
It’s important to remember
that Kavanaugh’s defense all
along was never, “I was young
and dumb and drunk.” His de-
fense was “It never happened. Ev-
eryone else is lying.”
His defense was about black
and white, but we all could have
had a lot to discuss in the gray of
it; we could have waded into
some truly thorny conversations.
His defense, as it turned out,
worked well for him. But it knee-
capped the rest of us.
I would have liked for Ka-
vanaugh to inspire a national
conversation about young people
and alcohol, about young people
and toxic pack mentality, about
young people and the alcohol-in-
fused toxic pack mentality that
might cause a blackout-drunk
Yale undergrad to, say, thrust his
genitals into the face of a morti-
fied classmate as friends around
him laughed.
I would have liked for him to
encourage a conversation about
the ways a few men behaved back
in high school and college, and
how they account for that now.
We could have talked about what
it means, as a 50-something, to
realize you might have done
some terrible things when you
were young, things you would
now never do and can barely rec-
ognize.
We could have talked about
how a person wrestles with that:
how you find a way to atone for
sins that you have no memory of
HESSE FROM C1
manipulated: Justice according
to whom?”
Volunteering in the communi-
ty, engaging with a new hobby,
joining a mission-driven club or
campaign — these might be ways
to redirect a young person, LoCi-
cero says.
“One of the things that re-
search has shown is that these
kids who get recruited, they de-
scribe the need to have an im-
pact,” she says. “A ll kids need
positive mentoring, and if we fail
on that, then there are people out
there who are only too happy to
mentor them into violence.”I
n her Twitter thread,
Schroeder offered advice for
other parents, urging them to
talk about these issues with
kids in a way that avoids shame or
defensiveness — emotions that
might drive children away from
their parents and toward extrem-
ist influences online. She de-
scribed how she sat down with
her kids so they could look
through Instagram together and
talk about what they saw: “It’s
such a good tool for parents,
because there’s no blame there,”
she says. “It gives you a peek into
what your kids are seeing online
and what the people they follow
are sharing, but it doesn’t come
from a place of, ‘Oh, you did this
thing wrong.’ ”
No teenager wants to feel like
they’re being manipulated,
Schroeder says. So she talked to
her boys about the power of
propaganda.
“What I said that connected
with them really well was, ‘These
people are trying to pull the wool
over your eyes — they’re trying to
trick you,’ ” she says. “I told them,
‘They’re trying to get you to be-
lieve something that, if you think
about it, you really don’t b elieve.’ ”
Noam, the Harvard psycholo-
gist, agrees that this sort of ap-
proach — an open conversation,
where the child feels valued and
taken seriously — is the best way
for parents to navigate this deli-
cate territory.
“Engaging in a dialogue in a
way that is not lecturing and that
doesn’t make the parent’s anxiety
the main focus, that’s the way to
go,” he says.
And don’t immediately envi-
sion a catastrophic outcome,
Noam adds: It’s possible to turn
these patterns around if the un-
derlying need is understood and
met.
“I don’t k now any kid who says:
‘I can’t wait to grow up and be-
come a Nazi. I can’t wait to grow
up and hate somebody else,’ ” Pic-
ciolini says. “These are manifesta-
tions of despair. It’s a last-ditch
thing. We have to understand our
children and what engages them
at the youngest age possible, so
that they have access to opportu-
nities that will get them involved
in something positive.”
[email protected]child and adolescent develop-
ment.
“In this stage, the issue is not so
much ‘Who am I?’ but rather,
‘Where do I belong?’ ” he says.
“ ‘Who includes me? Who treats
me well?’ ”
Extremist recruiters under-
stand, Noam says, that a child at
this age is more likely to respond
to the pull of community and a
sense of purpose, even if they
don’t readily identify with a
group’s c ore message. For parents
who struggle to understand how
extremist indoctrination can
happen to “good” k ids, he says, it’s
helpful to keep this developmen-
tal vulnerability in mind.
And this isn’t unique to young
white boys in America in 2019:
“Even with the Hitler Youth,”
Noam says, referring to recruit-
ment within the youth wing of the
Nazi Party in Germany, “what
they really understood was the
power of belonging.”
Alice LoCicero, a clinical psy-
chologist and co-founder of the
Society for Te rrorism Research,
saw similar patterns of behavior
when she studied the recruitment
of child soldiers by the militant
Liberation Tigers of Ta mil Eelam
in Sri Lanka.
“A bout age 13, kids have a big
developmental shift, cognitively,”
she says. “There’s a sense of ideal-
ism and altruism and wanting to
make a difference in the world.
It’s a n age where a sense of justice
becomes really important, and
that can be misconstrued andyou docile,” t he man said. And the
power of that moment, Picciolini
recalls, didn’t lie in the words the
recruiter spoke but in how he
made Picciolini feel: like he mat-
tered.
“The politics, the ideology
wasn’t attractive to me at all,”
Picciolini says. “I didn’t even un-
derstand it, at 14 years old. But
what was attractive was the sense
of the identity, community and
purpose that the movement pro-
vided.”
The dark alleys, the punk
shows, the skate parks where Pic-
ciolini and his fellow neo-Nazis
used to look for new targets have
been replaced by vast digital
hunting grounds. But the psy-
chology behind their recruitment
tactics is the same as it’s ever
been, he says.
In the wake of the Washingto-
nian article, many discussions fo-
cused on a particular quote —
what the boy said about why he
felt drawn to the extremist indi-
viduals he met online: “I liked
them because they were adults
and they thought I was an adult. I
was one of them,” he had told his
mother. “They took me seriously.... They t reated me like a rational
human being, and they never
laughed at me.”
For kids between ages 11 and 15,
especially, this sense of inclusion
is an incredibly powerful lure,
says Gil Noam, an associate pro-
fessor of psychology at Harvard
Medical School and McLean Hos-
pital whose research focuses on
vated, and they’re not afraid to be
vocal. So if you can fool them into
a certain narrative that seems to
speak to them, then that’s the
growth of your movement,” he
says. “A nd I’ve never seen an
extremist movement grow as fast
as I have in the last 10 years.”
Most o f the people who contact
Picciolini looking for help — any-
where from 10 to 30 per week, he
says — are “bystanders,” people
who are scared that someone they
know or love is a white suprema-
cist. And most of those bystand-
ers are parents of teens and young
adults.
He’s noticed that he hears from
them most often after a high-pro-
file act of violence, such as the
2012 shooting at a Sikh temple in
Wisconsin that left six people
dead (“before that was the last
time I had a day off,” he says). Or
the 2018 mass shooting at Tree of
Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Or
the massacre of 22 shoppers at a
Walmart in El Paso just last
month.
“Those moments sometimes
push parents to reach out,” he
says, “to say, ‘Okay, I can’t ignore
this anymore.’ ”
Picciolini was a lonely kid in
1987 — the son of Italian immi-
grants who were loving but often
absent, working long hours —
when he first met his neo-Nazi
recruiter. The man strolled up to
Picciolini as he smoked in an alley
and plucked the joint from his
lips: “The communists and the
Jews want you to do that, to keepdeniability,” Schubiner says, “and
it works very well as a recruit-
ment strategy for young people.”
Schroeder saw this firsthand
when she sat down with her kids
to look at their Instagram ac-
counts together.
“I saw the memes that came
across my kids’ timelines, and
once I started clicking on those
and seeking this material out,
then it became clear what was
really happening,” she says. With
each tap of a finger, the memes
grew darker: Sexist and racist
jokes (for instance, a looping vid-
eo clip of a white boy demonstrat-
ing how to “get away with saying
the n-word,” or memes referring
to teen girls as “thots,” an acro-
nym for “that ho over there”) led
to more racist and dehumanizing
propaganda, such as infographics
falsely asserting that black people
are inherently violent.
“The more I clicked, the more I
started to see memes about white
supremacy,” Schroeder says, “and
that’s what was really scary.”T
hat pattern of escalation
is familiar to Christian
Picciolini, an author and
former neo-Nazi who left
the movement in 1996 and now
runs the Free Radicals Project,
which supports others who want
to leave extremist movements.
“Youth have always been criti-
cal to the growth of extremist
movements, since the beginning
of time. Young people are idealis-
tic, they’re driven, they are moti-er’s inbox filled with messages
from other parents who were
deeply concerned about what
their own kids were seeing and
sharing online.
“It just exploded, it hit a nerve,”
she says of her message. “I real-
ized, okay, there are other people
who are also seeing this.”
Over recent years, white-su-
premacist and alt-right groups
have steadily emerged from the
shadows — marching with torch-
es through the streets Charlottes-
ville, clashing with counterpro-
testers in Portland, Ore., papering
school campuses with racist fli-
ers. In June, the Anti-Defamation
League reported that white-su-
premacist recruitment efforts on
college campuses had increased
for the third straight year, with
more than 313 cases of white-su-
premacist propaganda recorded
between September 2018 and
May 2019. This marked a 7 per-
cent increase over the previous
academic year, which saw 292
incidents of extremist propa-
ganda, according to the ADL.
As extremist groups have
grown increasingly visible in the
physical world, their influence
over malleable young minds in
the digital realm has become a
particularly urgent concern for
parents. A barrage of recent re-
ports has revealed how online
platforms popular with kids (You-
Tube, iFunny, Instagram, Reddit
and multiplayer video games,
among others) are used as tools
for extremists looking to recruit.
Earlier this year, a viral essay in
Washingtonian magazine — writ-
ten by an anonymous mother who
chronicled a harrowing, year-
lo ng struggle to reclaim her teen-
age son from the grips of alt-right
extremists who had befriended
him online — sparked a flurry of
passionate discussions and de-
bates among parents across social
media.
Parents wanted to know: What
was happening to their kids? Why
was it happening, and how could
it be stopped?
For extremist groups, the goal
is hardly a secret; the founder and
editor of the neo-Nazi website
Daily Stormer has openly de-
clared that the site targets chil-
dren as young as 11.
“This is a specific strategy of
white nationalists and alt-right
groups,” says Lindsay Schubiner,
program director at the Western
States Center, a nonprofit focused
on social, economic, racial and
environmental justice. Schubiner
co-authored a tool kit published
by the center this year that offers
guidance to school officials and
parents who are facing white-na-
tionalist threats in their commu-
nities.
“White-nationalist and alt-
right groups use jokes and memes
as a way to normalize bigotry
while still maintaining plausible
RECRUITMENT FROM C1
‘I was one of them’: Extremists prey on youths’ sense of belonging, experts say
MONICA HESSE
We could have had a very different, very important conversation last year
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, seen on Capitol Hill during his confirmation hearings last year. When accused of acting
inappropriately decades ago, Kavanaugh flatly denied that anything had occurred.ISTOCK
Extremist groups are using jokes and memes online to normalize their content. The founder and editor of the neo-Nazi website Daily
Stormer has said that the site targets children as young as 11.