10 Things I Hate About You Free Watch Online

[Norine Wiltshire]

EmbraceRace: We want to start with just a basic question - how did you get into this work? We know some of that from your bios, that you weren't always on the same side, fighting white nationalism, the way you are now. But if you could each take a turn at telling us those stories.

Christian Picciolini: I was going to say, Nora you've been doing this much longer than me. You should start it. But I would be happy to go first. I just want to acknowledge it's a huge privilege to be here, knowing that there are a lot of people who are not getting the same second chance that I got that don't look like me. So it's always a privilege to be able to speak to people about my story. But to try and raise their voices while I do that as well.

I was 14 years old in 1987 when I was recruited into America's first neo-Nazi skinhead group. I spent 8 years in that movement. I became a leader of it until I got out at 23 years old. But my story is a typical story but it's also the story that most people don't think of. I came from a pretty normal home. And that is pretty standard with people who join these types of movements. My parents are Italian immigrants who came to the U.S. in the mid 1960's and they were the victims of prejudice.

I've been, for the last 20 years, I've been out for 23 [years]. But for the last 20 [years] I've been doing work of helping people disengage from hate groups and from extremist movements. Everything from neo-Nazis to white nationalists to former ISIS members and I also teach my process of disengagement. All different levels, from high school to college to military and law enforcement as well.

White American Youth is stunning look inside the world of violent hate groups by aonetime white-supremacist leader who, shaken by a personal tragedy, realizedthe error of his ways and abandoned his destructive life to become an anti-hateactivist.

Nora Flanagan: So this can be where I come in. Where to start? So if you read Christian's book (White American Youth: My descent into America's most violent hate movement - and how I got out), and you should, he talks about how he immediately started recruiting more people and tried to be as visible as possible. And what probably most people watching don't know is that Christian and I grew up about a mile, a mile and a half away from each other on the South Side of Chicago.

So when Christian was out recruiting and tagging and you know getting as many people on his team as possible, I was seeing it as like a 13, 14-year-old kid wondering what the hell was going on in my neighborhood. And it was really upsetting because I was not only not raised to be racist, I was raised to stand up to bullies and all of a sudden there was like a very bullying climate in my neighborhood.

So I kind of grouped up with the other punks who were really worried about this. And that's how I became part of the anti-racist movement. And Christian and I didn't meet. When did we meet, friend? Like 10, 12 years ago. I mean, he had been out for years and years. And he actually approached me when he was getting ready to publish his book. I mean he had written a draft and he wanted help from somebody who would know the story. And also it doesn't hurt that I'm an English teacher and I know about commas and stuff. *laughs* So he asked for my help. And if anybody watching right now is like, "Why does he get a second chance? Why? You don't get to be the hero of the story if you were a Nazi." That's exactly what I thought when he asked for my help and I was incredibly resistant to work with him, to even meet him, to speak to him. But the fact that we've been working together and collaborating and genuinely friends for the past more than a decade, sometimes it's worth it to give somebody a second chance because we've been able to do some great work together. So that's how I started. Friend, I appreciate you.

Throughout my career since I knew about this stuff, I was kind of informally the teacher on the faculty that could spot when a kid was going that way and would really awkwardly approach my administrators and be like, "Hey guys, we got to talk to this kid." And they'd be like, "How do you know?" And I'd be like, "I don't know." It was a really awkward conversation with my boss, but I would try to stay quiet about it and just kind of play it low that I knew this stuff. And then over the last few years, it's hard not to be quiet anymore so I've been doing more visible work and publishing. So I hope that covers it in a few minutes or less.

So I'm talking about "white supremacist groups," "white power groups," "white nationalist groups." Not to mention neo-Nazi and more recently alt-right. So can you give us just a quick primer on what do we need to understand about distinctions, of any, among these terms and what they refer to?

Christian Picciolini: You know, I think like anything else in the world, it's complicated. There is no simple answer and there is no black and white solution for it. You know, I think ultimately if I were to classify it, because terms like "white nationalist" and "alt-right" are relatively new terms. I would say that there is a large white supremacist umbrella, that there are many different nuanced subcultures that fall under that. That in some way are aligned with kind of that umbrella term. You know certainly if you're a neo-Nazi, that's a little bit different than being somebody who's in the alt-right.

But ultimately they're kind of looking for the same goal, whether it's you know trying to fight for a white race that they believe is being replaced or is dying. Or to save a homeland that they believe is being taken away. And I think all of those groups ultimately will agree to that at some point. But they're nuanced. You know, certainly Nazis believe something different than the Klan versus a fundamentalist Christian militant group or things like that. But that's a common thread in my opinion.

Christian Picciolini: In many cases, too, I would say that terms like "white nationalist" and "alt-right," they're marketing terms. If you can imagine them sitting in a boardroom trying to come up with names to make them seem less racist in order to attract more people. That would be an example of alt-right, which is a manufactured term. So Nora is absolutely correct. It moves really, really quickly. They have to because none of their ideologies make much logical sense so they have to keep moving. They have to keep shapeshifting and metastasizing. And now unfortunately they're really, with the Internet, able to reach our young people much easier than, for instance, when I was 14 years old.

EmbraceRace: Right. Christian, I want to understand a little bit more, because I think a lot people don't think that their kids are vulnerable. And I imagine your parents didn't imagine it. You say you were looking for family but you had a family. So what do you mean exactly?

Christian Picciolini: Yeah. So in my situation, my parents are Italian immigrants who came over in the mid 1960's and they had to work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day to survive. They were trying to run a small business. So I didn't see them very often. They were good parents. They loved me, they were kind. They didn't have vices. They didn't raise me to be a racist but they weren't there.

And as a young person, I often asked myself, "What did I do to push them away?" without knowing how to really communicate my confusion or anything like that. So I became really detached, and I think certainly having the benefit of looking back now and having my own children, I think I was really trying to get their attention because I really felt invisible. Not just with my family that wasn't there but also in the community that I lived in.

My parents moved into a community on the Southwest Side of Chicago with other families from the same villages in Italy that they came from. So it was like this insulated community where everybody kept together. So I felt like an outsider in America growing up. You know, people made fun of my name. My parents took me to a suburb to take me to a private Catholic school where I was suddenly the outsider and I didn't fit in.

So I think part of you know people ask all the time like, "What do we look for?" Well one, it's not always the very evident warning signs of shaving your head and getting tattoos. It's the same things that we would look for drugs or for gangs, you know.

Are they feeling isolated and detached? Are they not building connection with people in the real world? Are they depressed? Are they saying things that are out of character? I mean all the things that we're taught as parents and teachers to look for are the same things that I would say look for that in your children because these are signs that they're vulnerable to being intercepted.

I call them potholes you know, the things that appear in our journey of life that detour us. That if we aren't careful, if we don't have good navigation or a support system or tow trucks to come pick us up when we're in trouble, sometimes we get detoured to the fringes and there are people waiting with a narrative that will empower you falsely. It doesn't matter today if you're 10 [years old] or 70 [years old]. The internet changed things. I had to be standing in an alley. Somebody had to approach me, hand me a flyer, invite me to a meeting.

If you're feeling disaffected today, you're probably living your world online or in video games and things like that. So unfortunately, they've gotten smart. Recruiters have gotten smart to look in those places.

Places like multiplayer online games our kids are playing with headsets. Had a mother just last week sent me 800 accounts that she looked up in the game Roblox which is a children's kind of a game, Lego kind of building game, that were white nationalist accounts that were on there just creating profiles to recruit people. So that unfortunately is the new reality now that we opened this frontier.

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