And when people become more resilient, more confident, it's amazing how quickly the ideology falls away because now there's nobody else to blame.

Welcome to the Art of Charm. I'm Jordan Harbinger and I'm here with producer Jason de Philipo.

On this episode we'll be talking with Christian Piccolini of Life After Hate. He's an Emmy award-winning television producer, a prolific public speaker, and a reformed skinhead and white power extremist author of Romantic Violence, memoirs of an American skinhead. His work and life purpose are born of a profound need to atone for a grisly past. We'll hear more about that here. This Jason was like the true version of American History Acts or something for me. Absolutely. And I know these guys from back in the day since this

whole episode took place in Chicago. I used to see these guys at shows all the time. So I'm sure I've seen Chris around at a show, which is insane. Yeah, that kind of blew me away. On this episode we'll uncover how identity, community, and purpose drive extremism, not ideology. We'll also learn why skinhead groups, right-wing extremism and race identity is more popular with youth now, more than ever before. And we'll explore what we can do if you or someone you know has joined is thinking about joining or is under the influence

of one of these groups. This is a heavy topic with a really interesting and well-spoken guest, Christian Piccolini. See you on the other side.

We'll talk about the same tattoos and encourage the people that we were recruiting to, you know, wear suits and not boots and go to college and get jobs and law enforcement and run for office.

And here we are 30 years later after that process started and what do we see? We see kind of a massaged message with the same rhetoric behind it, the same fear rhetoric about the other and the wearing suits.

And they run for office and maybe even hold some of the highest offices in our country. And while the massaged message is slightly different because it's more palatable to some people, it's the exact same thing.

It's just an evolution of marketing is what happened. They've learned to become normal. They've learned to blend in. And we used to call it leaderless resistance where we told people don't join groups.

Be a lone wolf, so to speak. It's harder for law enforcement to take down an organization if there is no organization. It's easier for you to convince people about the ideology and appeal to their fears and ignorance if you speak their language.

And you know, come election day 2016 and a bucket of gasoline was kicked over, you know, and ignited all those sparks that already existed all across America. And perhaps even created a little bit more credence to what they've got going on.

You know, who else says be a lone wolf don't join an organization, et cetera, is ISIS. We had Graham Wood who wrote the way of the strangers book about ISIS and recruiting and he's, you know, visited those folks to explore their ideology and figure out what they're about. And they, of course, I mean, we hear that on the news state, you know, attack in place.

Things like that.

The parallels are striking between how a group like ISIS or al-Qaeda recruits and how, you know, the far right recruits all over the world and even to some degree inner city gangs. I mean, it's all really about placing the blame on somebody else through fear rhetoric because people don't join these groups because of ideology.

People join these groups because they're searching for an identity, a community, and a sense of purpose and there's some grievance, some underlying trauma or abuse or brokenness underneath all that could be mental illness, could be lack of employment or lack of an education, it could be trauma, it could be the whole sort of things.

And that's why they become vulnerable to the messages and the narratives of these extremist groups because they are looking for somebody to blame for the problems that they have and they're not equipped to deal with them.

So it's very easy for somebody to come across a savvy and say, oh, you know, it's the Jews or it's the Muslims or, you know, whatever.

Then you're narrative changes and because you have now developed this identity, maybe you're not this awkward, bullied, marginalized person anymore, you're now this warrior and your community, you know, you may not have fit in because you were socially awkward or you didn't agree with people. Now you have this built in community and they give you this sense of purpose. They say, you know, be proud of who you are. That's where it starts pretty benignly. Then it turns into know your enemy and then from know your enemy, it turns into kill your enemy.

That is the common theme, no matter what type of extremist group you're talking about left, right, fundamentalist, religious, sovereign citizens, militia groups, you know, you name it. That is the common theme that I think we need to understand.

Take us through the early days when you were going through that same thought process, right, you're a kid and were you bullied or something, how do people start off going, you know what, I should join essentially go a race identity group because that's a good idea. I mean, where does that, how does that begin?

Well, let me set a basis for it first. So my parents were immigrants from Italy who came to the US in 1966 and when they came here, you know, they were off in the victims of prejudice and they had to work very, very hard to make it in a country that was pretty foreign to them, but they were able to do that by assimilating and adopting some of the cultures while not abandoning their own, but that kept them away from home seven days a week, 14 hours a day. So while I had a lot of love, my parents are great. I was raised by a

lot of other people most of the time. So I felt very abandoned as a young kid. So I didn't come from a broken home. There wasn't addiction or wasn't abuse, which is often the case too with people who join extremist groups because there's another underlying pothole, so to speak. And mine was a bandendment. I felt abandoned by my parents. I wanted to get the attention of my parents. And then I became very resentful of the fact that they themselves were immigrants, even though they were European immigrants.

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