JenniferR

Journey to the Extreme: How Ordinary people from around the world become extremists

Online extremism is an ugly symptom of the internet age. The internet has become the perfect environment for recruiting and indoctrinating new people into extreme and radical groups, and spreading their hateful rhetoric across the globe. Many terrorist attacks have been found to be fueled by radical content found online. Why and how do extremism and extremist groups work on the internet? I profiled three different movements and groups that have been functional online: ISIL, the White Supremacy/Alt-right movement, and Japanese online nationalists (netto-uyoku). I looked at their online behavior, their history, their demographics, and more to find connection and patterns within how they use the internet.

Click here for the web story

Click here for the whole paper (if you want more of a detailed understanding of each group)

Favorite Quotes

“Writing and rewriting, practicing, experimenting, I came to comprehend more fully the generative power of language. I discovered- with the help of some especially sensitive teachers-that through writing one can continually bring new selves into being, each with new responsibilities and difficulties, but also with new possibilities.”
Barbara Mellix, From Outside, In

“Throughout the past 4 weeks in this course, I have approached each piece we have read looking for an answer or a quick fix to these cultural differences. After listening to Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, I realized that there is not a single solution. As hard as one may try, we cannot completely knock down these walls that separate us. I think that this is a clear point that Obama’s speech highlights and, while obvious, we tend to overlook this.
Obama reminds us that we are not a perfect union, nor will we ever be perfect. However, if we don’t at least try to come together then division will persist. He affirms that our “racial wounds” are not an issue that can be solved “in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy”. This is something that America, as a whole, must work on together throughout time.”
Amanda Gen, Healing the Wounds, Sept 25th, 2019

“Watch Your White Sons”

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/opinion/sunday/white-supremacist-recruitment.html

Joanna Schroeder, a feminist writer and editor that focuses on issues surrounding raising boys, wrote, a few days ago, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times titled, “Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.” In this piece, she writes about her own experiences with her 11- and 14-year-old sons and their close interactions with online white supremacism.

She first details the time she heard her sons and their friends lightheartedly said the word “triggered” into response to a meme. She knew it was a word to mock people who are hurt or offended by racism as overly sensitive, and knew it was used in alt-right rhetoric. It’s a favorite tactic of this group who are known for “trolling” anyone who disagrees with them.

The alt-right can be explained as a decentralized movement that contained many different extremist ideals. This could be white supremacy, this could be anti-women/incel movements, this could be nationalist movements, this could be anti-semitism, or just aggressive conservativism. There are different movements within this umbrella that is the alt-right, but they all are linked together–as if they are a color wheel where each color fades into the other, like a gradient rather than a web of different motivations. The Anti-Defamation League defines them as “a segment of the white supremacist movement consisting of a loose network of racists and anti-Semites who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of politics that embrace implicit or explicit racism, anti-Semitism and white supremacy.”

The next red flag she witnessed was her son scrolling through Instagram, liking a meme that showed a man in modern clothing tipping off Hitler to the invasion of Normandy. Her son hadn’t really digested the image, not really reading it, assuming the time traveler was trying to kill Hitler and not help him. When she explained that the actual message was that it would have better if the Holocaust had continued, he was embarrassed and shocked. He defended himself saying he wasn’t “stupid enough to like a Hitler meme on purpose,” and said he thought his friend shared it to be ironic. But, he couldn’t explain how it could be ironic and so his mother started a dialogue on what the Holocaust was, the trauma and violence that Jewish people still experience. And of course, he knew all this, but Schroeder was scared he was forgetting, that he was being pulled into seeing a painful aspect of our history as a joke, or even possibly something to be celebrated.

The F.B.I reports a 17 percent rise in hate crime incidents from 2016 to 2017, which Schroeder uses as a reminder to prevent her sons from being indoctrinated by the ever-growing racist online movement that turn into offline violence.

She mentions many of the major attacks of the past few years such as the El Paso shooting, the attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego, and the New Zealand Mosque massacre. Both the San Diego and New Zealand gunmen posted online manifestoes that detailed their philosophies and motivations and included internet memes and Youtubers.

The main place these extremists found their motivations is online and so do most young men, and who better to know how vulnerable young white men are and how to manipulate them into radicalization than other young white men

The author of “The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help,” say it’s not the ideology behind these hate groups that appeals to young white men and boys, but they are attractive to being part of a “heroic struggle.” When participating in these online communities, there is a seductive feeling of being a part of a brotherhood and having their manhood validated. Participants in chat forums (such as 4chan, 8chan, and Discord) and Youtubers emasculate liberal or progressive white men, calling them “soy boys” or calling unaggressive right-wing white men “cucks.”

Schroeder, as a mother, sees that these groups prey upon the “natural awkwardness of adolescence.” Many kids during this period of their life feel out of place, frustrated and misunderstood, and these extremist groups provide scapegoats for their discontent. It makes them feel better when they can blame someone for their frustration, either it be women, LGBTQ members, black people, or liberals.

For the rest of the article, Schroeder tries to provide ways parents can prevent this. She provides different tactics such as YouTube’s ads that play before or during every video. Or they are recommended a video and then lead down a path of finding 4chan or googling something that leads them to white nationalist outlets. It’s not about preventing young white men or boys from seeing this content because they will always, somehow, come across it. The best way to prevent young white men and boys from being radicalized is, as suggested by Dr. Katz, “To counteract the seductiveness of that appeal from the right, we need to offer them a better definition of strength: that true strength resides in respecting and lifting up others, not seeking to dominate them.”

For my paper, I want to talk about extremist groups and the language/tactics these groups use to radicalize and keep members into their group. This article demonstrates how small and close these efforts are to us, that even our sons or brothers or cousins or nephews could be indoctrinated and you may not even notice it happening. I remember when I was younger, I watched a few Sandy Hook conspiracy videos where it broke down how it was all staged and it was the democrats trying to get gun control policies passed. And I believed it was the same type of fun conspiracy theory where Britney Spears is actually a clone or Paul Rudd is an immortal vampire, but those videos were pushing alt-right messages, disrespecting the families who had their children murdered, and I hadn’t realized it. Luckily I didn’t truly believe it when I was twelve or whatever, but there are many kids that would have and did believe in those videos. And it’s not just young men, but my fifty year old uncle believes that all the mass shooting of the last ten years were staged which makes my Facebook and thanksgiving dinners at Grandma’s unbearable.

This article helped me find some small tactics and language used by these groups use to indoctrinate. It details how small and unconscious these changes are such as just saying the word, “triggered” or liking a Hitler meme on Instagram. I liked that Schroeder focused on the small, localized effects these groups have because usually a lot of the examples are shooters with grand plans, those who have been on the news, and not just a kid sitting on his phone quietly. It’s a nice contrast between the big examples and smaller examples—showing how a young man can just start watching a YouTube video and then in a few years he could be on the news for shooting up a mosque because that’s how all these mass shooters start. It’s important to understand that evolution and be cautious to what children are consuming, but also be aware of how they digest what they consume.

Scared Safe

Safe spaces are an interesting concept that is a place or environment where a person or category of people can feel confident that they won’t be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any emotional or physical harm. Many people are drawn to a safe space because the spaces that should be safe for them—such as home, school, community—are not safe for them and they want to be around people are in a similar situation as them. There is also making a publicly occupied space such as a school campus, a recreational center, and such areas a safe space—as a well to reassure the occupants that they will be safe during their time there. The basic structure of a safe space is positive, but only when it occupies a space and isn’t occupying someone’s whole life.

Although, I know I should focus on the article by Heller, I found his piece to offer too many viewpoints and opinions and different facts of similar problems where I found myself unable to coherently focus on a topic. I decided the only way I could write without feeling overwhelmed was finding someone speaking about the same issue, but a little bit narrower.

A few years ago, Van Jones, a CNN political contributor, spoke at David Axelrod’s institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. During this 80 minute discussion, that included S. E. Cupp, Axelrod brought up that he had hosted President Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, the week before that discussion. Students protested the event, saying having him on campus normalized the Trump Administration. Axelrod, who disagreed with the students’ outcry, asked for Jones’ opinion on the protest.

Van Jones proposes two idea about safe spaces—a positive and a negative one. There’s the idea that a campus should be a safe space that is free from sexual harassment or physical abuse, or any kind of hate speech that’s targeted—this is the normal definition of a safe space and is in no way harmful and should be adopted. Then there’s the idea that these student are being “safe ideologically” and think they need to feel good all the time—almost putting a blanket over their eyes to anything they disagree with. Jones’ explains that he doesn’t like the second idea as it assumes that we don’t care about people’s emotional safety and wellbeing. Instead of criticizing those who want safety, we should be pushing people to be stronger. Passionately, he says, “I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. You can’t live on a campus where people say stuff you don’t like?!”

He goes on to speak about his parents and other older black Americans who dealt with far worse adversities such as beatings and dogs, but nowadays people cannot deal with a mean tweet. Which is true, there is still adversity today, but it not as nearly bad as it was fifty or sixty years ago. All these students grew up with President Obama as their first president they knew and grew up believing times have changes. So any instances where that shiny optimism cracks, like Tamir Rice or the transgender military ban, it’s really disappointing. But, then again these students have grown up dealing with a mass shooting every week in their schools, their churches, their concerts, or their supermarkets. And with that we have tried to harden ourselves because it hasn’t stopped and we’ve learned to get used to it—which makes us furious. So are these students still lacking adversity and hardship?

Continuing on with more passion Jones says, “You are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous. I want you to be offended every single day on this campus. I want you to be deeply aggrieved and offended and upset, and then to learn how to speak back. Because that is what we need from you in these communities.”

I do agree that students need to hear and absorb and deal with ideas that aren’t similar to their own. It’s one of the ways to truly gain intelligence. How can you learn if you stay in a bubble of what you believe if you can’t understand the things you don’t believe? But, I also agree that the students, who pay insurmountable funds to attend college, should have some sort of say in what their campus does. And if they fight back on certain things that they don’t like, does that truly mean they are weak and ignorant—closing their eyes and ears to all things scary?

The students were protesting that the school was normalizing the Trump administration—an administration that unarguably promotes hatred and negative messages—and as a student, I don’t know if I would want my school to give a platform and allow someone that took part in that hatred. It would have been different if a professor played a video of someone from Trump’s white house to spark discussion or if a student-run republican group invited him to speak at one of their events. I feel like it’s even different than bringing a member of Bush’s cabinet because I don’t think it’s an issue of disagreeing with political ideologies, but more about possible the inflammation or spreading of a negative rhetoric. But, then again, if we don’t listen to such negative rhetoric, how would we ever understand to combat it? It’s an interesting balancing game that is going to take a while to truly understand.

Van Jones’ talk: Van Jones’ Excellent Metaphors About the Dangers of Ideology Safety, Jon Haidt, https://heterodoxacademy.org/van-jones-excellent-metaphors/

Smart Cookie: Scholarship Boys and Discourse Translation

The “scholarship boy”—lets translate it to “scholarship student” since this isn’t the 1970s anymore—is a student that becomes obsessive over academic success and becomes changed by this education obsession. They separate themselves from all distractions—mainly their family and the things they once loved. Richard Rodriguez illustrates his time as a scholarship student and how he found himself isolating himself in book, finding that he was distancing himself from his parents in favor of studying. He was distancing himself from his primary discourse—from his home and family and first learned behavior, in favor for a non-dominant secondary discourse.

The scholarship student is driven by success, the approval of superiors, and the knowledge they gain—social goods. However, because it is a secondary discourse, it’s hard to insert themselves into this space—they have to develop the body language, the values, and language associated to this new space. But, because it’s not their primary identity and discourse then it’s not going to be easy for them to conform. Rodriguez was forcing himself to read books he didn’t like because it was on some smart-sounding list and felt he would further understand the space he had sat himself in. He idolized his teachers and found himself trying to speak like them, mimicking them. It was all imitation and through that imitation he nurtured a secondary discourse that seemed to have overtook his primary one. He became so immersed into his secondary discourse that he forgot how to perform in his primary discourse. But, was his primary language truly replaced or was he just adding new behavior to his primary discourse?

In trying to support this thought, I stumbled upon a whole long paper written by Taylor Weeks, Understanding Discourse Transition. I only read a little bit of it because its 47 pages long and I’m not that crazy, but the gist of what Weeks is trying to propose in his paper is basically figuring out what Rodriguez and other scholarship students go through with their discourses. He questions “if a discourse can be changed slightly over time, is it the same discourse that person first learned as a child?” And he also asks, “if we do indeed change any small parts of our discourse over time, then can we replace the initial discourse we learned as children with a completely new discourse or has it become a strong dominant secondary discourse?” He decides to explore these questions by looking at military veterans and how their time in the military had affected them over time and how they interact once they are placed back into civilian life—specifically looking at how they adjust to college.

Throughout boot camp, a recruit’s initial discourse language begins to be replaced by a military discourse language. This military language is about sameness, about being indistinguishable from their peers appearance-wise, body language-wise, speech-wise, and so on. Once dropped into a different situation, a civilian situation, like a classroom, there is a difficulty to act within this discourse full of uniqueness. They don’t understand their place in this “new” world. This is like how education—a space that’s organized and quiet and full of logical—and then going home to a space full of disorganization, loudness, and more emotional. Even if the home space is what they grew up with, someone so enraptured by education has made their initial discourse language foreign to themselves. They can no longer function in that space the same way they did before. Weeks equates this process to baking cookies. “Depending on the recipe, you can make different cookies. Like a person’s discourse, we all learn at least one way to make cookies when we are children. As we develop our social language, we sometimes add things to our primary discourse. As with baking cookies, if we add any new element to our cookie recipe, we have changed our cookie recipe. No matter what we added to our cookie recipe, we will not make the same type of cookie that we learned how to make when we were children.”

Taylor Weeks’ Understanding Discourse Transition: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=4000&context=etd

Language and Assimilation

Assimilation is the concept of homogenizing a minority group or culture with the dominant culture. An Immigrant is supposed to, over time, become like those in the society they move to. This could also extend to those who are born into a society and are pressured to stay within the perimeters of the culture that is most rewarded in that society. Assimilation can be debated as a something unifying and natural, or as something culturally genocidal and forced—a means to erase differences and multiculturalism. These arguments can be seen within the use of language as a means of assimilating.

On one hand, language can be unifying—a means for communication and understanding. Language is what connects us to each other—verbal or nonverbal. People who live millions of miles apart can still connect with each other through a shared language. However, a dominant language can be used to weed out minority languages as a means of acculturation. Language and how someone speaks that language is highly tied to someone’s culture and background. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the Canadian government forcibly assimilated the indigenous people that lived in the country. Alongside measures to stop traditional marriage practices and spiritual ceremonies, the government also enacted an extensive residential school system to target indigenous children. They were abused, forced into arranged marriages after graduation, and prohibited from speaking their native language. Once a language is targeted and erased, the minority culture can no longer communicate with each other the way they used to and thus cannot relate to their past culture the way they used to.

Today in the United States, there aren’t horror stories of such proportions—hopefully—anymore, but there is an effort and pressure for efficacy in speaking the dominant language—English. This pressure is not directed or dictated formally, but as a means of advancement and “fitting in.” Think of it like joining a new friend group and having to learn what type of humor they have or how they all talk to each other—except on a more communal or national scale. The U.S. doesn’t have an official language, but the dominant language is English and without learning and proficiently speaking or writing can keep many from advancing within the society—either socially, economically, or academically. In Barbara Mellix’s From Outside, In, she spoke about her experience of growing up in a Southern black community and how her family and neighbors spoke “black English”, but when moving out of this community or encountering white Americans—even if they spoke similar to her—steered her away from the vernacular she grew up speaking. She moved to Pittsburgh and had to conform to how that community spoke because she felt she would have been ostracized or possibly punished for her “improper English.” She also makes a points within her piece about how “proper English” is pushed in education.

In America’s education system, the main language that is being taught in classrooms is English—“proper English.” There are Language Immersion programs where children can learn another language aside from English, but the learning revolves around English. Usually math is the secondary language while English is reading and writing. Because of this tie to English and education, there is a subconscious link to believing more proficiency in English, knowing large words and understanding grammatical rules, means someone is more intelligent and educated. Of course, knowing many of languages, being bilingual, could also provide a sense of intelligence and education, but these extra languages are not “useful” in the sense of a dominant culture.

Thinking about education and language led to thinking about the language that dominates Academia and many academic papers. Can language assimilation happen within this sphere as well? Can this concept be applied to this community? Academia is not a dominant culture, but say someone is trying to write a research paper and have it published in a prestigious journal. This person has never written a research paper before on such a level. What would they have to change about their language to be accepted into this culture? Would even a paper written in a language similar to or in “black English” be accepted or taken as seriously as a paper that was bloated with three syllable vocabulary and convoluted grammatical techniques—even if one was more understandable than the more traditional and accepted language? Would you have taken this essay seriously if I wrote in “improper English?”

In Response to Asymmetry and the Power of Threes

I have always noticed the pattern of threes in my life and how it’s perfectly concise and perfectly contained. When listing something off, two seems too little and four seems to far, but three is just right. When I was younger, I saw odd numbers as a group of couples and one lonely number, but now I see them as something not as wasteful. Not everything has to be whole and even, or you can create your own sense of wholeness— As Lambeth says, “A kind of wholeness through asymmetry and time, the tension between impermanence and ongoingness.”

Since the beginning of high school, I have had a friend group composed of three core members that have never shifted or wavered or left since that year. However, we have had more joined a by one other friend—they have always shifted. They seem to leave every few years—changing or leaving. But, we three never leave. We are balanced and ongoing–no matter who decides to join us and who decides to leave us.