Posted on October 15, 2019

Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.

Joanna Schroeder, New York Times, October 12, 2019

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{snip} What I didn’t predict was that my sons’ adolescence would include being drawn to the kind of online content that right-wing extremists use to recruit so many young men.

The first sign was a seemingly innocuous word, used lightheartedly: “triggered.”

As my 11- and 14-year-old sons and their friends talked and bantered — phones in hand, as always — in the back seat of the car, one of them shouted it in response to a meme, and they all laughed uproariously.

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The next red flag: I watched my son scroll through Instagram and double-click on an image, lighting up a heart that signifies a “like.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said, snatching his phone. “Was that Hitler?”

The meme showed a man in contemporary clothing tipping off the Nazi leader to the invasion of Normandy. My son said he hadn’t even read it, he’d just assumed the time traveler was trying to kill Hitler, not help him. He was shocked and embarrassed when I pointed out the actual message: that it would have been better if the Holocaust had continued.

“I’m not stupid enough to like a Hitler meme on purpose, Mom,” he said. “And anyway, I’m sure my friend shared it to be ironic.”

{snip} I worried that he was being pulled toward a worldview that would see this painful history as fodder for jokes, or worse, as something to celebrate.

At a time when the F.B.I. reports a 17 percent rise in hate crime incidents from 2016 to 2017, the most recent year for which there is data, white parents like me have had recent, terrifying reminders that we must prevent our sons from becoming indoctrinated by a growing racist movement that thrives online and causes real-life devastation.

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But of course, it’s not just that we want to prevent our sons from becoming perpetrators of mass shootings. We want to raise them to be the kind of men who would never march with the neo-Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville before one of them killed a counterprotester, Heather Heyer. Beyond that, we want to keep them from becoming supporters of the racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and gender- or sexuality-based hatred that is on the rise.

Unfortunately, extremists know how to find new recruits in the very place our sons spend so much of their time: online. And too often, they’re more aware than we are of how vulnerable young white men are to radicalization.

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Participating in the alt-right community online “offers the seductive feeling of being part of a brotherhood, which in turn validates their manhood,” Dr. Katz says. YouTubers and participants in chat forums like 4chan, the defunct 8chan and Discord “regularly denigrate liberal or progressive white men as soft, emasculated ‘soy boys’ and insufficiently aggressive or right-wing white men as ‘cucks.’”

It also seems to me, as a mom, that these groups prey upon the natural awkwardness of adolescence. Many kids feel out of place, frustrated and misunderstood, and are vulnerable to the idea that someone else is responsible for their discontent. When they’re white and male, they’re spoon-fed a list of scapegoats: people of color, feminists, immigrants, L.G.B.T.Q. people. If they really embrace this, it’s not hard to convince them that there’s a “white genocide” happening and that these people — and the “leftists” who represent their interests — are to blame.

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A favorite activity for many boys is to watch gamers playing video games on YouTube. According to John Duffy, author of “Parenting the New Teen in the Age of Anxiety,” the problems come with advertisements that may appear during the videos. Kids can be exposed to dozens of ads in a sitting. {snip}

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They may also find videos by more mainstream figures, including members of the so-called intellectual dark web like Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, whose conservative perspectives on feminism and gender are very popular among young men and often are a path to more extreme content and ideologies.

In an interview with the actor Alan Alda for the podcast “Clear+Vivid,” Christian Picciolini, a former Nazi, explains that modern white supremacists create friendships and build trust in online spaces such as autism chat rooms and gaming-related forums. They “go to these places and they promise them paradise,” he says.

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What really hooks many white teenagers is the alt-right’s insistence that white men are under attack in America, the true victims of oppression. If your child has already been punished for his opinions, this message is especially resonant. They find a home for their rage, a brotherhood of guys like them, and that oh-so-alluring heroic struggle — and that’s how an extremist is born.

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Parents also need to encourage our sons how to think critically about the things they’re hearing online. One term I’ve debunked in this way for my kids is “snowflake.” An insult embraced by moderate conservatives and the alt-right alike, it’s used to dismiss people who complain about racism, sexism or homophobia as laughably delicate.

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Perhaps the best tool is prevention. Kids need to understand — before they encounter their first alt-right memes — what white supremacy looks like. It’s not just a person in a K.K.K. hood but also the smooth-talking YouTuber in the suit or the seemingly friendly voice in the video game forum.

If we avoid talking about our values about race and the experiences of marginalized people, strangers on the internet will be happy to share theirs.

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Parents of white kids need to talk about race and racism and how they’ve played out in this country — a lot. That history includes horrors and tragedies, but as Dr. Tochluk says, it also “includes the fact that there have always been groups of white people in the United States who have fought for freedom and liberty for all.”

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Dr. Katz suggested, “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.”

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