This story appears in VICE Magazine's Burnout and Escapism Issue. Click HERE to subscribe.
I.
I went to Omaha to find out if the internet had ruined my brain. After arriving at a lab at the University of Nebraska, I was ushered into a room with a desktop computer and hooked up to a galvanic skin response monitor—those finger clips perhaps most commonly associated with lie detectors. Then I looked at a slideshow of images while a webcam traced the movements of my eyes and picked up on small facial cues. The devices were meant to gauge my unconscious reactions, or micro-emotions, using five metrics: joy, anger, surprise, fear, and contentment. Had years of scouring Reddit and 4Chan desensitized me or made me susceptible to alt-right messages? I was afraid of what the answer might be.
It wasn’t supposed to be me in that chair. I originally wanted to send the father of a man named Dave to the Midwest. I’d met Dave on an Ask Me Anything Reddit thread, where he was probing a former Klansman for advice about how to get through to his own blood. The 20-something had been trying to extricate his dad from the Klan since he was 14. As he told it, his old man first got sucked into some racist prayer groups after growing convinced that affirmative action cost him a job in middle age. His dad later became a bona fide white supremacist recruiter known as a “Kleagle,” only leaving the KKK when he disagreed with some of the anti-Semitic messages his buddies started spouting during Donald Trump’s campaign. But Dave (who would not give me his real name when describing his upbringing) had recently heard through the grapevine that his dad had been hanging out with the old crew again—a revelation that left him feeling as if his family might never reconcile.
The way he told it, a certain kind of back-and-forth with his dad had been the dominant drama of Dave’s young life. After high school, he attended a Jesuit university to study how racists use scripture and books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or even Mein Kampf to justify their beliefs. His goal was to understand the deeply flawed man who had brought him to cross burnings but never let him join along in heiling Hitler. “Not that I wanted to, but it is one of the little things that stuck with me,” Dave recalled. “I thought that maybe it was a sign that there was still good in him.” Though he’d dropped out of college, he still wrestled with the question of how the “sweet” man who gave him his first beer could also have forbidden him to hang out with his mixed-race cousin.
“I would like to help him,” he told me. “But at the same time, I don’t want to waste my energy on what seems to be a completely lost cause.”
I’d originally contacted Dave in May to write an article about his life and his struggles to extricate his father from a hate group. He asked me to verify that I was a journalist, and then we started chatting at length. But even though, at one point, he expressed how excited he was to finally share his story with someone who might use it to help others, Dave eventually stopped responding to my messages. Though it’s possible he lost interest in our conversation, it seemed to me that he got spooked by the idea that his grandparents—who he claimed may not have any idea about any of this and are well known in their small town—would somehow find out his dad’s dark secret. (He also didn’t respond to a fact-checker.)
Ultimately, I wouldn’t be able to achieve my original goal of telling Dave’s story in full. But I couldn’t stop thinking about certain aspects of it; namely, the idea of a father figure who was empathetic, but not apologetic. Dave hated what his dad believed, but at the end of the day, this was still his family. All he wanted was an explanation for why the primary male role model in his life turned out the way he did. Was his dad intrinsically racist, or did he simply not have anyone else to socialize with besides the KKK members who had embraced him? Or if he hadn’t started out racist, had he become so over the course of his associations? Was there a functional difference?
“There’s a serious debate in me whether or not the man I want to save even exists anymore,” Dave told me. “I feel like I wasted a lot of my time, and in all honesty at this point I’ve just been crossing my fingers and hoping someone else can do what I apparently couldn’t.”
Now Ligon has turned to how propaganda works, and while it might not be obvious that a business school would be the place for research into radicalization, it does make a sort of sense. After all, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is technically selling something, whether it’s the promise of a life imbued with meaning or merely a sense of belonging.
What the two academics found in formers was a true cognitive dissonance: Although these people publicly disavowed white-supremacist ideology, they still exhibited spikes in “joy” after being shown a picture of a Nazi rally. The implication was that extremism was something you could never truly shake, no matter how much you might want to.
While the test I took did not suggest I had ruined my brain by trudging through racist forums and threads for work, it did give me a better insight into how “terror brands” can still affect a person outside the extremist fold. My joy response spiked when I saw a refugee family, a neo-Nazi family, and a group of kids going down a waterslide as part of some ISIS propaganda. My personality was apparently extremely susceptible to these kinds of family-oriented images.
But science like this only goes so far in offering hope to bridge divides like the one that opened up between Dave and his father. During our conversations, the 20-something said he eventually started to distance himself from his own family—including the man he’d hoped to save. “I want to be clear right now that I am not a racism apologist or defending my dad in any way,” he told me. “He has become a disgusting, evil person, even with his own apprehensions about the group he runs with. But I understand how he got there, and I feel like people are quick to demonize racists without really [knowing] how they got that way. No one is born racist, but millions of men and women just like my dad turn to that way of thinking, and based on what I saw and heard, they all arrive there through the same, or similar enough, experiences.”
People might rightly demonize racists, like Dave said, but we still haven’t agreed, at least on official levels, that their condition is a mental one that at some point goes beyond their control. And Simi says he would need to know much more about the neuropsychological architecture of the issue to ever be able to suggest any treatment or intervention possibilities.
“But in terms of cognitive behavioral therapy, it does give us a much better understanding of what we’re dealing with here in terms of how deeply entrenched some of this may be,” he told me. “So at the most basic level this tells us that, once you leave a group, that’s not the end of the story. I think that has pretty substantial implications.”
In other words, the latest evidence suggests that embracing hateful ideology can rewire you. That means once you’re in it, how you got there may not really matter.
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