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.
E367: Writing and Diversity 